The poems in Façade are abstract poems – that is, they are patterns in sound. They are, too, in many cases, virtuoso exercises in technique of an extreme difficulty, in the same sense as that in which certain studies by Liszt are studies in transcendental technique in music.
EDITH SITWELL: ‘Some Notes on My Own Poetry’, in Collected Poems (1957)
Not blessed with conventional good looks, and with no interest in fashionable frivolities, Edith Sitwell spent a largely unhappy childhood at Renishaw Hall. Her two younger brothers, Osbert (1892–1969) and Sacheverell (1897–1988), were both celebrated literary figures, and she often collaborated with them. Her relationship with her parents, on the other hand, was distant, partly because her father compelled her to undergo a ‘cure’ for her alleged spinal deformation. Her loneliness is reflected in her long poem The Sleeping Beauty, which describes the neglect she endured, except from well-disposed servants. Her governess, Helen Rootham (they later lived together in Bayswater and Paris), was a translator of Rimbaud, and she aroused Sitwell’s interest in the poetry of the French Symbolists. She was especially taken with the idea of synaesthesia – and would have almost certainly known the celebrated Rimbaud sonnet ‘Voyelles’ (‘A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu […]’). She never disguised her scorn for much of the verse written by the so-called Georgian poets, represented in The Penguin Book of English Song by Rupert Brooke, W. H. Davies, Ledwidge, Masefield, Gibson and de la Mare. Like Rimbaud, who despised the Parnassian poetry of his immediate predecessors, Sitwell attempted to break away from convention. From 1916 to 1921 she edited the anti-Georgian magazine Wheels, which first published Wilfred Owen; and in her own volumes of poetry, such as The Mother and Other Poems (1915), Façade (1922) and Gold Coast Customs (1929), she experimented with rhythm and rhyme in a way that disconcerted ‘those custodians of the purity of our language’, as she called them in her account of the premiere of Façade.
During the Second World War she published Street Songs (1942), Green Song (1944) and Song of the Cold (1945), all of which express her horror at the inhumanity of modern warfare, her love of nature and, ultimately, her belief in God. Her prose works include English Eccentrics (1933) and her only novel, I Live under a Black Sun (1937), which was poorly received. Her study of Alexander Pope (1930) helped to rehabilitate the great poet who had been virtually ignored by academe during her lifetime. Sitwell herself became a revered celebrity, who dressed in a highly theatrical manner; and after her father’s death in 1943 she undertook triumphant lecture tours in America, together with her brothers. She made two recordings of Façade, the first with Constant Lambert as co-narrator, the second with Peter Pears. After the end of the war, she returned to Renishaw Hall, where she lived with Osbert and his lover, David Horner. Her last years were spent in a wheelchair, and she died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 9 December 1964, aged seventy-seven.
She was painted many times. Sargent’s group portrait, with the three children presided over by Sir George and Lady Ida, gives some idea of the strained family atmosphere; Roger Fry painted her (1918) in gentle and reflective mood; Alvaro Guevara’s portrait (1916) shows her in her apartment at 22 Pembridge Mansions, where she lived with Helen Rootham; and there is a touching, albeit austere, portrait by Pavel Tchelitchew, the Russian painter whom she so admired. Topolski painted her in 1959, but she loathed the picture, describing it as ‘unspeakable caricature’.
Façade has a complicated compositional history. Walton originally set sixteen poems, providing them with an Overture and Interlude. The work was scored for flute, piccolo, clarinet, bass clarinet, trumpet, cello and percussion, and the performance took place in the first-floor drawing room of the Sitwell home at 2 Carlyle Square on 24 January 1922. Influenced by the Satie/Cocteau/Diaghilev Parade, for which Picasso designed a front drop, it was decided that the performer should be concealed behind a curtain, through which a Sengerphone protruded, because, according to Edith, ‘it was obviously impossible for the speaker’s voice, unaided, to be heard above the sounds of the instruments’; she also stated that the Sengerphone would ‘deprive the work of any personal quality (apart from the personality inherent in the poems and music)’. The Sengerphone had been invented by Herr Senger to amplify the voice of Fafner in Wagner’s Siegfried. Although not published till nearly thirty years later (1951), this Façade Entertainment, as it came to be called, met with such success that composer and poet decided to expand and revise the work: four numbers were discarded and a further sixteen added, and this new version – with the addition of an alto saxophone – was performed at the Aeolian Hall on 12 June 1923. The next performance took place three years later at the New Chenil Galleries on 27 April 1926, when seven new numbers were heard, and another three at the repeat performance on 29 June. Another two numbers (the final two) were first heard at the ISCM Festival in Siena in 1928.
Osbert Sitwell, writing in Laughter in the Next Room (1949), stated:
I must emphasise that [Façade’s] primary objects were to exalt the speaking voice to the level of the instruments supporting it, to obtain an absolute balance between the volume of the music and the volume of the sound of the words – neither music nor words were to be treated or taken as a separate entity –, and thus to be able to reach for once that unattainable land which, in the finest songs, always lies looming mysteriously beyond, a land full of meanings and of nuances, analogies and images, hitherto only fragmentarily glimpsed, and wherein parallel sound and sense, which here never meet, can be seen, even from this distance, to merge and run into one broad line on the horizon. Another chief, equally difficult, aim to achieve was the elimination of the personality of the reciter, and also – though this is of lesser consequence – of the musicians, and the abolition, as a result, of the constricting self-consciousness engendered by it and sufficient to prevent any traveller from reaching the lunar landscapes I have sought to indicate above. Toward our purpose, the instrumentalists were seated behind a painted curtain.
Madame Mouse trots,
Grey in the black night!
Madame Mouse trots:
Furred is the light.
Trumpet from the sea …
Grey in the black night
The mouse trots free.
Hoarse as a dog’s bark
The heavy leaves are furled …
The cat’s in his cradle,
All’s well with the world!
Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again;
Comb your cockscomb-ragged hair,
Jane, Jane, come down the stair.
Each dull blunt wooden stalactite
Of rain creaks, hardened by the light,
Sounding like an overtone
From some lonely world unknown.
But the creaking empty light
Will never harden into sight,
Will never penetrate your brain
With overtones like the blunt rain.
The light would show (if it could harden)
Eternities of kitchen garden,
In the kitchen you must light
Flames as staring, red and white,
As carrots or as turnips, shining
Where the cold dawn light lies whining.
Cockscomb hair on the cold wind
Hangs limp, turns the milk’s weak mind …
Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again!
When
Sir
Beelzebub called for his syllabub in the hotel in Hell
Where Proserpine first fell,
Blue as the gendarmerie were the waves of the sea,
(Rocking and shocking the barmaid).
Nobody comes to give him his rum but the
Rim of the sky hippopotamus-glum
Enhances the chances to bless with a benison
Alfred Lord Tennyson crossing the bar1 laid
With cold vegetation from pale deputations
Of temperance workers (all signed In Memoriam)
Hoping with glory to trip up the Laureate’s feet,
(Moving in classical metres) …
Like Balaclava2, the lava came down from the
Roof, and the sea’s blue wooden gendarmerie
Took them in charge while Beelzebub roared for his rum.
… None of them come!
Across the flat and pastel snow
Two people go … ‘And do you remember
When last we wandered this shore?’ … ‘Ah no!
For it is cold-hearted December.’
‘Dead, the leaves that like asses’ ears hung on the trees
When last we wandered and squandered joy here;
Now Midas your husband will listen for these
Whispers – these tears for joy’s bier.’
And as they walk, they seem tall pagodas;
And all the ropes let down from the cloud
Ring the hard cold bell-buds upon the trees – codas
Of overtones, ecstasies, grown for love’s shroud.
‘Do not take a bath in Jordan,
Gordon,
On the holy Sabbath, on the peaceful day!’
Said the huntsman, playing on his old bagpipe,
Boring to death the pheasant and the snipe –
Boring the ptarmigan and grouse for fun –
Boring them worse than a nine-bore gun.
Till the flaxen leaves where the prunes are ripe
Heard the tartan wind a-droning in the pipe,
And they heard MacPherson say:
‘Where do the waves go? What hotels
Hide their bustles and their gay ombrelles?
And would there be room? – Would there be room?
Would there be room for me?’
There is a hotel at Ostend
Cold as the wind, without an end,
Haunted by ghostly poor relations
Of Bostonian conversations
(Bagpipes rotting through the walls).
And there the pearl-ropes fall like shawls
With a noise like marine waterfalls.
And ‘Another little drink wouldn’t do us any harm’
Pierces through the Sabbatical calm.
And that is the place for me!
So do not take a bath in Jordan,
Gordon,
Only on the holy Sabbath, on the peaceful day –
Or you’ll never go to heaven, Gordon MacPherson,
And speaking purely as a private person
That is the place – that is the place – that is the place for me!
For Constant Lambert
Lily O’Grady,
Silly and shady,
Longing to be
A lazy lady,
Walked by the cupolas, gables in the
Lake’s Georgian stables,
In a fairy tale like the heat intense,
And the mist in the woods when across the fence
The children gathering strawberries
Are changed by the heat into Negresses,
Though their fair hair
Shines there
Like gold-haired planets, Calliope, Io,
Pomona, Antiope, Echo, and Clio.1
Then Lily O’Grady,
Sauntered along like a
Lazy lady:
Beside the waves’ haycocks her gown with tucks
Was of satin the colour of shining green ducks,
And her fol-de-rol
Parasol
Was a great gold sun o’er the haycocks shining,
But she was a Negress black as the shade
That time on the brightest lady laid.
Then a satyr, dog-haired as trunks of trees,
Began to flatter, began to tease,
And she ran like the nymphs with golden foot
That trampled the strawberry, buttercup root,
In the thick gold dew as bright as the mesh
Of dead Panope’s2 golden flesh,
Made from the music whence were born
Memphis and Thebes in the first hot morn,
– And ran, to wake
In the lake,
Where the water-ripples seem hay to rake.
And Adeline,
Charlottine,
Round rose-bubbling Victorine,
And the other fish
Express a wish
For mastic mantles and gowns with a swish;
And bright and slight as the posies
Of buttercups and of roses,
And buds of the wild wood-lilies
They chase her, as frisky as fillies.
The red retriever-haired satyr
Can whine and tease and flatter,
But Lily O’Grady,
Silly and shady,
In the deep shade is a lazy lady;
Now Pompey’s dead, Homer’s read,
Heliogabalus3 lost his head,
And shade is on the brightest wing,
And dust forbids the bird to sing.
Composed originally as Bucolic Comedies (1924) for orchestra, but revised as Three Songs (1932) and dedicated to Dora and Hubert Foss. The monotone of the original Façade songs is replaced by a true vocal line, and a more orthodox accompaniment was fashioned out of the original sextet. Hubert Foss was head of the music department at OUP and Dora a professional singer. The first song to be finished was ‘Through gilded trellises’; a month later Walton sent them ‘Old Sir Faulk’ with a note saying: ‘I am not sure you will approve of this one […] It ought to evoke a touch of lunacy in any programme.’ ‘Daphne’, the last to be composed, was sent to the dedicatees, accompanied by a postcard with the lapidary statement: ‘It is not fit to be seen.’ ‘Daphne’ and ‘Through gilded trellises’ originally formed part of Sitwell’s The Sleeping Beauty (1924), an extended poem in twenty-six cantos dedicated to Osbert Sitwell. ‘Old Sir Faulk’ originally appeared in Façade (1922).
The Soldan1 (sings)
When green as a river was the barley,
Green as a river the rye,
I waded deep and began to parley
With a youth whom I heard sigh.
‘I seek’, said he, ‘a lovely lady,
A nymph as bright as a queen,
Like a tree that drips with pearls her shady
Locks of hair were seen;
And all the rivers became her flocks
Though their wool you cannot shear,
Because of the love of her flowing locks.
The kingly sun like a swain
Came strong, unheeding of her scorn,
Wading in deeps where she has lain,
Sleeping upon her river lawn
And chasing her starry satyr train.
She fled, and changed into a tree, –
That lovely fair-haired lady …
And now I see through the sere summer
Where no trees are shady!’
[Now from the silk pavilions of the seas
The nymphs sing, gold and cold as orange-trees.]
Through gilded trellises
Of the heat, Dolores,
Inez, Manuccia,
Isabel, Lucia,
Mock Time that flies.
‘Lovely bird, will you stay and sing,
Flirting your sheenèd wing, –
Peck with your beak, and cling
To our balconies?’
They flirt their fans, flaunting –
‘O silence, enchanting
As music!’ then slanting
Their eyes
Like gilded or emerald grapes,
They take mantillas, capes,
Sighs
Each lady, ‘Our spadille1
Is done’ … ‘Dance the quadrille
From Hell’s towers to Seville;
Surprise
Their Siesta,’ Dolores
Said. Through gilded trellises
Of the heat, spangles
Pelt down through the tangles
Of bell-flowers; each dangles
Her castanets, shutters
Fall while the heat mutters,
With sounds like a mandoline
Or tinkled tambourine …
Ladies, Time dies!
[And petals of the foam, like perfumed orange-blossom,
Pelt the nymphs singing in their bowers – cold as their bosom.]
Old
Sir
Faulk,
Tall as a stork,
Before the honeyed fruits of dawn were ripe, would walk,
And stalk with a gun
The reynard-coloured sun,
Among the pheasant-feathered corn the unicorn has torn, forlorn the
Smock-faced sheep
Sit
And
Sleep,
Periwigged as William and Mary, weep …
‘Sally, Mary, Mattie, what’s the matter, why cry?’
The huntsman and the reynard-coloured sun and I sigh;
‘Oh, the nursery-maid Meg
With a leg like a peg
Chased the feathered dreams like hens, and when they laid an egg
In the sheepskin
Meadows
Where
The serene King James would steer
Horse and hounds, then he
From the shade of a tree
Picked it up as spoil to boil for nursery tea,’ said the mourners. In the
Corn, towers strain,
Feathered tall as a crane,
And whistling down the feathered rain, old Noah goes again –
An old dull mome
With a head like a pome,
Seeing the world as a bare egg,
Laid by the feathered air; Meg
Would beg three of these
For the nursery teas
Of Japhet, Shem, and Ham;1 she gave it
Underneath the trees,
Where the boiling
Water
Hissed
Like the goose-king’s feathered daughter – kissed
Pot and pan and copper kettle
Put upon their proper mettle,
Lest the Flood – the Flood – the Flood begin again through these!
The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn.
Still falls the Rain –
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss –
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.
Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat
In the Potter’s Field2, and the sound of the impious feet
On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.
Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us –
On Dives and on Lazarus3:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man’s wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds, – those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart4, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear, –
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh … the tears of the hunted hare.5
Still falls the Rain –
Then – O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune –6
See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree
Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world, – dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar’s laurel crown.
Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain –
‘Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee.’