GENIUS IN A WIMPLE

There are three writing Sitwells: Edith, Sacheverell and Osbert; and the best of them is Edith. She is a poet (she hates to be called a poetess) and a good one, possibly a great one. Three English universities have dubbed her Doctor, her sovereign has made her a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire, her poetry readings in the U.S. are well attended, and Hollywood has hired her to write the film script for her own book on Queen Elizabeth I. Now published for the first time in the U.S. are her Collected Poems (Vanguard; $6.50). They make an impressive and haunting volume. To Dame Edith, her success is gratifying, especially when she recalls her father's pleasantry on reading her first poems: "Edith will commit suicide when she finds out she cannot write poetry."

Edith Sitwell dresses like a child's vision of a poet. At 67, she still wears the richly brocaded gowns that billow and sweep about her, the quartets of enormous rings, the turbans and the wimples that give her the look of a fictional heroine lately escaped from a 16th century castle. She likes to dwell on the resemblance between her thin, aristocratic features and those of Elizabeth I. Before Edith's portrait in London's Tate Gallery, an American exclaimed: "Lord, she's Gothic, Gothic enough to hang bells in!"

When Dame Edith half sings her short, glittering lines, intones her long, prayer-like ones, many a listener feels the shivers induced by the delivery of the great actresses. Now that Dylan Thomas is gone, hers is the" most startling sight-and-sound presence in English or U.S. poetry.

Edith & the Peacock. Great poets and happy childhoods rarely go together. Edith Sitwell's parents would have preferred a boy. Her father, Sir George, was offended by Edith's aquiline nose and got a doctor to try to change it "by iron and manacles." The attempt failed. Sir George also was cross when his daughter showed a distaste for lawn tennis, made her practice the cello, although she liked the piano. "I used to practice with tears pouring down my cheeks because the P:string hurt my little finger so frightfully, and also because I was making such a horrible noise."

Even the servants disapproved of the lonely, awkward girl. Once when Edith was reading the Bible at family services, she happened to glance at the butler's solemn face and burst out giggling. "The butler rose and looked around at the maidservants, who all got to their feet and silently trooped out."

Edith was only five when she attempted to run away from home, but returned because she couldn't lace her boots. At Renishaw, the Sitwell country house in Derbyshire, the child's first friend was a peacock which used to wait for her each morning. "I would go to the garden and we would walk, you might say, arm in arm. When asked why I loved him so, I answered, 'Because he's beautiful, and be cause he wears a crown!' " That idyll ended when father Sitwell bought the peacock a wife. "From that moment the peacock neglected me. It was my first insight into the fickleness of living creatures."

Through her teens Edith memorized vast stretches of poetry, until she was able to recite poem after poem all the way from England to the Sitwell villa near Florence without repeating herself once. When she discovered the heavy-breathing love poems of Algernon Swinburne, her family's friends were shocked. Her answer was to make the rough crossing to the Isle of Wight, where Swinburne is buried. There, over the furious objections of the sexton, she poured a jug of milk over the grave and placed on it a honeycomb, a wreath of bay leaves and a sheaf of roses.

Buns & Barrel Organs. With her beloved governess, Helen Rootham Edith went to Berlin to study music. Not until she was 27 did she get away from home for good. Says she: "I became a human being when I was 27." In her London flat, Edith Sitwell gave Saturday teas at which she served halfpenny buns, evening parties with coffee and iced cherries. The talk was rich and gay, the guests were talented: T. S. Eliot, Jacob Epstein, E. M. Forster, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf.

Edith worked hard. "I used to practice writing poetry as a pianist practices," she recalls. "I would take a waltz or a polka, some gay music-hall song or perhaps the song of the barrel organ beneath my window and translate it into words."

When Edith first read the spanking rhythms of Facade publicly through a horn and hidden from the audience by a curtain, she was hissed, and one paper wrote: "Surely it is time this sort of thing were stopped." Brother Osbert remembers that even friends avoided the Sitwell eyes; Edith and Osbert were made to feel "as if we had committed a murder."

Dame Edith insists that the early poems were apprenticeship: "I wasn't such a fool as to use any fire that I had until I had the vehicle for the fire." In 1929 the vehicle left on its maiden journey in the poem Gold Coast Customs. Skillful, almost savage, it describes African murder rites and equates them with the miseries of London slums and the lives of the fashionable rich. William Butler Yeats wrote: "Something absent from all literature was back again . . . passion ennobled by intensity, by endurance, by wisdom . . ."

But no sooner had Poet Sitwell arrived than she came to a dead stop. For ten full years she wrote almost no poetry, spent most of her time nursing Helen Rootham through her final illness. Her friend died in 1939, and the war ended Edith's silence, because she was "in such a passion of despair and rage and pity." Her wartime poetry stands up today as enormously inventive and touched with a compassion that astonished her early admirers. Through the war and since, she has moved majestically toward God and the brotherhood of man, never doubting the presence of one and the possibility of the other:

The Sun kisses the loveless.

The mouth of the condemned by Man, the dog-mouth and the lion-fang

Deep in the heart . . . Then why should we lie loveless?

He will clothe us again in gold and a little love.

Martinis & Murder. Today Dame Edith faces the world in a composite armor of shyness, imperiousness and friendliness. She likes her solitude, and she likes her martinis. At Renishaw, she stays in bed till noon reading and writing as a huge wood fire blazes away. Much as she likes elegance, she is addicted to occasional forays into London's East End, where she often chats with prostitutes and barrow boys. On these excursions, her friends say, she creates for herself an underworld dream life. She also follows murder cases avidly, recently dragged brother Osbert to the scene of the grisly Christie murders and kept him there for hours. The critics now pay her court, but she is still bitter about them. Once she sent a stuffed owl to a critic she thought was too stuffy.

Now in the U.S. for readings and Hollywood chores. Dame Edith sometimes shows her age, often her temper, and always her talent. If her trappings and her manner seem theatrical and deliberate, they also have the genuineness that only a true eccentric can give them. And if her readings, electrifying as they are, often seem stagy, a look at the printed poems will restore the balance in favor of respect for the lady who can write:

I am a walking fire. I am all leaves--

I will cry to the Spring to give me the birds' and the serpents' speech

That I may weep for those who die of the cold--

The ultimate cold within the heart of Man.

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