viz.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

In 1952, Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) announced intentions to translate her own novel Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) into a Hollywood script. British and American newspapers ran a common story detailing her extravagant costume and monstrous physiognomy at the event: “The statuesque Miss Sitwell appeared in a black gilded cowl (‘I resemble Henry VII strongly—he was an ugly old man’) and a black bombazine floor-length dress, and sported long gilt fingernails. She also wore a topaz ring some two inches square, and her wrists were two huge gold bangles” (TD 49). Click ‘Read More’ to follow the thread of my post on how irony, affect, and materialism provide possible lenses for interpreting the above photograph, which features an icon of English eccentricity and literary modernity across from Marilyn Monroe. 

On November 15, 1952, the Times Daily advertised that the “Acid-tongued poet-historian-lecturer Dr. Edith Sitwell” was making a try at the movies: “She did not say she was a bit worried about Hollywood because George Bernard Shaw once warned her that film people are the greatest wolves. . . . ‘My first scene,’ she wants Hollywood and Columbia pictures to know, ‘will be most appallingly morbid” (TD 49). As much as her theatrical costumes and demeanor may suggest, Edith Sitwell was not cut out for Hollywood. Over the winter of 1952–53, she wrote letters to T.S. Eliot about her discomforts on Sunset Boulevard: “I looked forward immensely to being in Hollywood, but everyone I have met has done their best to terrify me. I was told yesterday that people of my height are frequently drowned walking along the street, by a sudden downpour of rain.” Sitwell was not only tall, but she suffered from a spinal deformation. She was famed to have spent long bouts at home in bed, writing and reading. When she went in public, she almost always wore decadent and extreme costumes. She described her initial struggles with the Hollywood media to Eliot: “My principal entrancements here are the columns of the lady gossip writers, which I read with avidity. . . . Unable to get at me—because I won’t see them—one wrote ‘A little old lady’ (my italics) ‘has come to Hollywood: Edith Sitwell.’ A man reporter asked me on the telephone: ‘Is it true you are 78?’ I replied, ‘No. Eighty-two.’ But I read last week that you are 78.’ Yes, but that was last week. This week I’m 82” (SL 183). She was 66 at the time. Her script would never be completed as a film, and she slighted industry collaborators as being too artistically naïve and (falsely) “naturalistic” for her tastes. Sitwell’s greatest fame in America (a historical irony and disappointment) likely derived from the above image from Life Magazine.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

After the appearance of the Life Magazine photograph (taken during one 30-minute meeting with Marilyn Monroe in February 1954), Sitwell lamented that the image had made her life an “absolute hell. . . . Some tiresome people will not even let me have any peace. They send letters addressed to her. Newspapers all over the world commented about our meeting. An Egyptian paper went so far as to say I was instructing her in philosophy” (VS 62). A year later, she wrote to her friend, Geoffrey Singleton, on a “Coronation Ode” falsely attributed to her: “It is probably part of my famous friendship with Marilyn Monroe—whom I met once . . . and have not seen since” (SL 200). Despite Sitwell’s disparagement of the staged photo-op and contrived connection to Marilyn Monroe, the photograph itself offers more than just a lively caricature. The flow of gazes and postures in the foreground incorporates a vibrant atmospheric background—a continuity of objects, auras, and things (from Sitwell’s open handbag to the table lamp behind Monroe’s head, from the reflection off of the portrait’s glass plate to the inverted sinking of the couch). The surreal image captures the strangeness of Edith Sitwell's arrival in Hollywood.

Source: npgprints.org

The part of the Life Magazine photograph that compels my interest is the open handbag, which is obscured by the LIFE logo in the magazine’s website archive. This handbag makes the scene more touching, human, and potentially ironic (as in the “Egyptian paper,” which suggested Edith was teaching Marilyn philosophy). I wonder, what was in that bag? Sitwell herself was fascinated by the role of the material objects and curiosity in personal biography. In her novel, English Eccentrics: A Gallery of Weird and Wonderful Men and Women, she cherishes and enshrines what she describes as an “eccentricity [that] exists particularly in the English. . . . [It] takes many forms. . . . [and may] indeed be the Ordinary carried to a high degree of pictorial perfection” (EE 16). Her scholarship shares characteristics with her self-presentation, for Sitwell raises obscure objects and traditions to aesthetic, psychological, and cultural significance. From her morbid chapter on a lock of Milton’s hair (“On the Benefits of Posthumous Fame”) to that on Beau Brummel (“Some Amateurs of Fashion”)—a dandy upon whose coat “Lord Byron is said to have remarked, ‘You might almost say the body thought” (EE 15).

Source: npg.org.uk

If we discount Marilyn Monroe, few individuals of the twentieth century have been more accomplished in the realm of “pictorial eccentricity” than Edith Sitwell. Outside of the costume, makeup, and drama so central to her photographic archive, the Tate Collections also hold two intensely private portraits, by Pavel Tchelitchew (below) and Percy Wyndham Lewis (above). Instead of the handbag, it is Sitwell’s hands that are unique in the portraits. Her hands remained unfinished at the center of Lewis’s painting, for she ceased to sit for him after he intimidated her. In the painting of her close friend, two floating right hands sign on a board behind Sitwell. This painting surprised William Carlos Williams so much that Tchelitchew had to assure him, “She is like that . . . A very beautiful woman. She is alone. She is very positive and emotional. She takes herself very seriously and seems as cold as ice. She is not so” (ES 89). Sitwell’s pictorial legacy has lived on in the sympathetic adoption and branding of artists such as Morrissey, however, she is underappreciated in our contemporary culture of images and ideas.

Source: 2.bp.blogstpot.com

Roland Barthes distinguishes the affective tug of photographs as a “punctum” (point, puncture) that disturbs the “studium” of a photographic appeal to “average effect” and the “rational intermediary of an ethical and political culture” (CL 26). In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Barthes outlines the “punctum”: “A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points” (CL 26–27). It is my opinion that a visual analysis of the photograph from Life Magazine ought to move beyond the aesthetic contrasts of the “studium” to consider the “punctum” of the handbag. Those readers curious of Edith Sitwell’s fascinating collection of letters, notebooks, images, drafts, and novels (I’ve been looking at some of these recently) can find them at the Harry Ransom Center, where her archive is held.

Source: 29.media.tumblr.com

Works Cited:

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strouss, and Giroux, 1981)

Lehman, John and Derek Parker, eds., Edith Sitwell: Selected Letters, 1919–1964 (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1970).

Elizabeth Salter, Edith Sitwell (London: Oresko Books, 1979).

Edith Sitwell, English Eccentrics: A gallery of weird and wonderful men and women (New York: Penguin, 1958).

Times Daily “Watch Out Hollywood, Dr. Edith Sitwell is coming from England,” Nov.15, 1952.

The Vancouver Sun “Harried Dame Edith Insists She’s NOT Marilyn’s Friend” June 29, 1955.