Publicity and Controversy
Sitwell had angular features resembling Queen Elizabeth I (they also shared the same birthday) and stood 6' (183 cm) tall, but often dressed in an unusual manner with gowns of brocade or velvet with gold turbans and a plethora of rings - her jewellery may be seen in the jewellery galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her unusual appearance provoked critics almost as much as her verse, and throughout her life she was the subject of more or less virulent personal attacks from Geoffrey Grigson, F. R. Leavis and others, which she returned with vigour. As she lay dying, the critic Julian Symons published the last of these attacks in The London Magazine of November 1964, accusing her of 'wearing other people's bleeding hearts on her own safe sleeve.' Her 'enemies' were treated with scorn; after Noël Coward wrote a skit on Sitwell and her two brothers as "The Swiss Family Whittlebot" for his 1923 revue London Calling! she refused to speak to him until they were reconciled after her triumphant 70th birthday party at London's Royal Festival Hall. To her friends she showed great sweetness and invariable kindness.
Sitwell was most interested by the distinction between poetry and music, a matter explored in Façade (1922), which was set to music by William Walton, a series of abstract poems the rhythms of which counterparted those of music. Façade was performed behind a curtain with a hole in the mouth of a painted face (the painting was by John Piper) and the words were recited through the hole with the aid of a Sengerphone. The public received the first performance with bemusement, but there were many positive reactions.
Read more about this topic: Edith Sitwell
Famous quotes containing the words publicity and/or controversy:
“I saw the best minds of my generation
Reading their poems to Vassar girls,
Being interviewed by Mademoiselle.
Having their publicity handled by professionals.
When can I go into an editorial office
And have my stuff published because I’m weird?
I could go on writing like this forever . . .”
—Louis Simpson (b. 1923)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)