Dame Edith Sitwell Is 75 Today

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29921, 7 September 1962, Page 2

Dame Edith Sitwell Is 75 Today

“You’d be surprised at the number of people who ring me up to say they have found the secret of the universe—that it’s love that makes the world go round. Of course they are wrong—hatred does.” The speaker, in characteristic form, is Dame Edith Sitwell, poet, essayist, critic, and historian, a stately figure in Tudor-style hat with gold tracings, velvet gown with full skirt and voluminous sleeves, a giant ring and two large bracelets. She will probably have a lot of calls today, for it is her seventy-fifth birthday. Her eccentricity has a very gracious air about it. She was the only daughter of an affluent and scholarly baronet, and adored by two brilliant brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell. She was brought up with beauty, moving daily beside the loveliest of mothers through the splendour of Georgian salons. But she claims her girlhood was a misery.

Her first book of poems came out in 1915 and since then there has been a steady stream of them, earning praise, winning awards, some-

times causing disputes. Her public readings of some of her more advanced poems caused something of a stir before the war. “My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life,” she says.

Dame Edith Sitwell was an early supporter of Dylan Thomas. “He was one of the most endearing people I have ever known." sh e says. She knew Roy Campbell, the poet who supported Franco in the Spanish war (“He was never a Fascist, but he was a Christian and loyal to his Sovereign”), and many others, like D. H. Lawrence (“the only man I ever really hated”). ’

She does all her writing in bed. In fact, she spends a large part of her life in bed reading, perhaps, or knitting bed jackets to wear while she is writing. When she visited Hollywood some years back, she spent most of her time there in bed, too. Next to writing she enjoys silence. Children who play too long and too noisily outside the windows of her house in Hampstead, London, have had occasional encounters with Dame Edith Sitwell

"Eventually I’m reduced to swearing at them in English, French and Italian,” she says. She likes Siamese cats and has just acquired a new one called Shadow. She does not particularly like being 75. although she is looking forward to reading some of her poetry at a London recital in her honour on October 9. For that occasion she has chosen a red velvet dress, a black and gold turban hat and a gold necklace which is reputed to have come from an Inca tomb.

“It is really too late now to stop abandoning my style of dress,” she says.