12 June, so it must be 100 years to the day since Edith Sitwell sat behind a curtain at London’s Aeolian Hall, reciting bizarre poetry through what looked like a traffic cone, prompting Noel Coward to take the piss, which started a four-decade feud between them.
This was the first public performance of Façade — An Entertainment, in which Sitwell’s modernist poems were recited with a musical accompaniment composed and conducted by William Walton, from behind a decorated cloth, so the reader’s personality wouldn’t “invade” the poems.
Alternatively, they might have got the idea of the curtain from Jean Cocteau, or they might have taken one look at the ‘sengerphone’ and decided that if the audience saw it, there might be more hilarity from the performance than was intended.
Because people were supposed to be entertained. They just weren’t supposed to laugh at the performance. Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing she was intoning:
Ass-Face
Ass-Face drank
The asses’ milk of the stars
The milky spirals as they sank
From heaven’s saloons and golden bars,
Made a gown
For Columbine,
Spirting down
On sands divine
By the asses’ hide of the sea
(With each tide braying free).
And the beavers building Babel
Beneath each tree’s thin beard,
Said, ‘Is it Cain and Abel
Fighting again we heard?’
It is Ass-Face, Ass-Face,
Drunk on the milk of the stars,
Who will spoil their houses of white lace–
Expelled from the golden bars!
Admittedly this, from a poem called The Drum, has a certain Under Milk Wood quality to it…
…but Trio for Two Cats and a Trombone is frankly a bit silly.
You can get a sense of what that audience might have encountered from a later recording:
…and the reviews (extracted from Victoria Glendinning’s Edith Sitwell — A Unicorn among Lions) were not kind:
The Daily Graphic’s critic Hannen Swaffer, as “Mr. London,” under the heading “Drivel They Paid to Hear,” reported that:
a friend of mine who was there tells me that, when he laughed, as Edith Sitwell recited drivel through a megaphone, a woman turned round and said, “How can I study a new art if you laugh?” That sums up the whole performance. If three had laughed, the Sitwells wouldn’t dare to do it again…. Surely it is time this sort of thing were stopped…. Grant Richards wore a white carnation specially for the occasion; his son wore another carnation. But otherwise it was all dreary and hopeless.
The Evening Standard attempted a parody:
In the afternoon at the Aeolian Hall,
Through a megaphone we heard Edith bawl….
It was Osbert who invited Noel Coward to the fateful first performance, saying to the up-and-coming writer, “I hear you’re doing a revue. What fun!” and then invited him to Façade because “it might give you some ideas”. Well, it did…
His revue, London Calling!, opened in the West End that September, and featured a sketch, The Swiss Family Whittlebot, in which Hernia Whittlebot, aided by her brothers, Gob and Sago, recited terrible poetry over awful music.
The Sitwells had been hoping to cause a stir, and London Calling! was a resounding hit, so they did find themselves on the cultural map in a way they hadn’t been before. Just not in the way they wanted. Edith wrote to her friend Harold Acton about it.
Edith wasn’t humourless. The poems were meant to be funny, and she told a later interviewer that
I can’t wear fashionable clothes… I’m a throwback to remote ancestors … if I wore coats and skirts … people would doubt the existence of the Almighty
But London Calling! upset them. When ‘Hernia’ recites a poem called The Lower Classes — “Melody semi-spheroidal / In all its innate rotundity / Rhubarb for purposes unknown”, the family is pushed off stage, and the orchestra given a signal to start the next number.
Edith also became convinced — not on the basis of a great deal of evidence, it must be said — that the sketch was “of the utmost indecency — really filthy”, and implied that she was a lesbian. Osbert wrote Coward a magnificently angry letter:
…and the feud was still simmering in 1947 when Queen Elizabeth — who was friends with both men — invited them to the same reception with a view to stilling the tempest. It was a limited success. Osbert wrote to a friend:
Coward had written to Edith in 1926 to apologise, and received a response which read, in full:
Dear Mr. Coward,
I accept your apology.
Yours sincerely,
Edith Sitwell.
But finally, in 1962, reconciliation was brought about by the unlikely figure of George Cukor. Two years before he directed My Fair Lady, Cukor was the dedicatee of Edith’s last volume of poems, which Coward enjoyed, but “was afraid to write to Edith about it”.
Cukor [according to Victoria Glendinning] encouraged him to do so. She responded with a telegram (“Delighted stop friendship never too late….”), they exchanged letters, and finally he came to Greenhill, where she received her visitors from her wheelchair, in a hat and a short fur coat whatever the weather, and bedroom slippers. Coward, who had an eye infection, wore dark glasses. He apologized for his mockery of Façade all those years ago. He had been so young, he said; he had not understood. Then they gossiped, making up for forty lost years.
So, all was well that ended well, but I still think this is a bit silly
…and — each to their own and all that — but this?
Still, how much duller would the 20th century have been if it hadn’t had the Sitwells in it? I mean, who wouldn’t want to track down the 200th edition of This Is Your Life, in which one of the unlikeliest ever victims was surprised by Eamonn Andrews?
I know I bloody would.
All I’ve been able to find of it is this:
