At a time when publishers seem chary of commissioning literary biographies, the conditions for writing them have never been better. Major authors born in the 1890s and early 1900s were written about pretty comprehensively in the so-called golden age of biography, stretching from the last quarter of the past century into the first few years of the present one. Now they are up for reassessment. ‘It is time to look again at Edith Sitwell,’ as Richard Greene puts it.
The advantage for the new wave is that more material has become available. In the case of Edith Sitwell, biographies of her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell have filled some gaps. Letters that were stuffed in drawers at Renishaw are now put in order. The embargo has been lifted on her correspondence with the man she loved in vain, the artist Pavel Tchelitchew. The research notes of earlier biographers have found their way into university libraries.
The temptation, into which Greene sometimes falls, is to include new material simply because it is there — weak anecdotes, inconsequential reminiscences. There is too much information, though some of it is fun — like the irrelevant story of the plantsman Reginald Farrer, who loaded a shotgun with seeds gathered on his travels, and standing in a boat blasted them on to a cliff-face, so that Alpine flowers bloomed there. Such a good idea.
Though some of Edith’s brave love-notes to Tchelitchew are touching, their immense correspondence does not bear much quotation. Greene characterises Tchelitchew as ‘extravagant, visionary, superstitious, mad and selfish’. Like Sitwell herself, Greene has an invigorating lack of inhibition about passing judgment on those who failed to appreciate her. ‘Poisonous’ is a favourite adjective. Wyndham Lewis’s novel The Apes of God, which satirised the Sitwells, is ‘lumbering, rancid and self-congratulatory’.
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