It’s 102 years to the day since the deeply eccentric Edith Sitwell sat behind a curtain at London’s Aeolian Hall, reciting bizarre poetry through what looked like a traffic cone, prompting Noel Coward to take the piss, which started a highly entertaining multi-decade literary feud...🧵 - ThreadSky

oddthisday.bsky.social • 13 days ago

It’s 102 years to the day since the deeply eccentric Edith Sitwell sat behind a curtain at London’s Aeolian Hall, reciting bizarre poetry through what looked like a traffic cone, prompting Noel Coward to take the piss, which started a highly entertaining multi-decade literary feud...🧵

Comments

thelhc.bsky.social•13 days ago

It's taken me a long time to realise she hasn't got a very hairy chest in that picture.

oddthisday.bsky.social•13 days ago

This was the first public performance of ‘Façade – An Entertainment’, in which Sitwell’s modernist poems were recited, with a musical accompaniment composed and conducted by William Walton, from behind a decorated cloth, so the reader’s personality wouldn’t “invade” the poems

oddthisday.bsky.social•13 days ago

Alternatively, they might have got the idea of the curtain from Jean Cocteau, or they might have taken one look at the ‘sengerphone’ and decided that if the audience saw it, there might be more hilarity from the performance than was intended

oddthisday.bsky.social•13 days ago

Because people were supposed to be entertained. They just weren’t supposed to laugh *at* the performance. Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing she was intoning

terryleopard.bsky.social•13 days ago

Filth.

heidi-colthup.bsky.social•13 days ago

It is, isn't it?
The tide 'braying free' - that's just about farting!
'And the beavers building Babel
Beneath each tree’s thin beard'
Erm... beavers and a beard....
'their houses of white lace'
Ladies knickers!

oddthisday.bsky.social•13 days ago

Admittedly this, from a poem called The Drum, has a certain Under Milk Wood quality to it…

oddthisday.bsky.social•13 days ago

…but ‘Trio for Two Cats and a Trombone’ is frankly a bit silly

oddthisday.bsky.social•13 days ago

You can get a sense of what the first audience might have encountered from a later recording

eggsbened.bsky.social•13 days ago

To be fair, the entire point of the poems was their sound - assonance, rhymes, rhythms etc and not their meaning. To print them to be read and, crucially, minus Walton’s striking music, is missing their point.
And yet…

deadlyvices.bsky.social•13 days ago

"The Pointy Birds
So pointy, pointy.
Anoint my head
Anointy, nointy."

atillamcnamee.bsky.social•13 days ago

So this is where Tony Hancock found his inspiration hic hoc haec

thomholbrook.bsky.social•13 days ago

Awful lot of ass going on

nicholasbannan.bsky.social•13 days ago

Actually Walton did not include this in the original 21 poems of Façade, selected to match the structure of Schoenberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ that preceded it as a work for speaker and ensemble.

jacquep.bsky.social•13 days ago

Sorry
https://youtu.be/6Qr-W19STWI?si=Ep8v9e4LLCkVrXLK

lucyfishwife.bsky.social•13 days ago

I absolutely adored parts of Facade as a small child (it was mad and oompah and messed with words), and I think I loved Nabokov for the same wordplay reasons when I got older. But it is, inarguably, absolutely batshit

anothercinna.bsky.social•13 days ago

It has the same quality as English Folk Songs sung by Peter Pears. Except substituting them with Milligan's Silly Verse for Kids. But rewritten by AI.

lucyfishwife.bsky.social•13 days ago

“Edith Sitwell’s language use as 1920s AI: a disquisition”

heidi-colthup.bsky.social•13 days ago

*Takes note, sends off conference proposal*

anothercinna.bsky.social•13 days ago

*Would go*

levparikian.bsky.social•13 days ago

I have a soft spot for it – it was the first piece I conducted – but yes, batshit

oddthisday.bsky.social•13 days ago

Ooh, intriguing detail. I see what people mean about how it's supposed to be read out, not read, and that it's all about the sounds (although I have ignored the reply which began 'actually...'), but I do want to take Edith aside and ask her as a friend if she's sure about doing this

lucyfishwife.bsky.social•13 days ago

I never knew about the traffic cone, though

kirkdalebooks.bsky.social•13 days ago

I seem to remember a children's TV programme about maths which used a jaunty bit of this as the theme tune

jonathanpinnock.com•13 days ago

Also Face the Music - used to love it but on reflection it was possibly the smuggest programme ever committed to television.

cheeseford.bsky.social•13 days ago

Not a children's show, but the theme to Ripping Yarns was a fragment of Facade.

I have a LOVELY LP of it by John Dankworth, Cleo Laine and Annie Ross.

doktorfuttocks.bsky.social•13 days ago

We put on a performance of it once. We'd borrowed a PA system from a local brass band that started picking up AM radio during rehearsals, adding an extra oddness to proceedings until we fixed it.

nnscott.com•13 days ago

Lovely. We had the record and as a kid I memorized two of the poems from “Facade”. Can still recite them from memory to this day. Glorious nonsense

fmd17.bsky.social•13 days ago

You know, I have to say the recording comes across much better than just reading the verses. I can see being entranced with this as a kid. I also think it’s wonderful that your family HAD THE RECORD! How??? Was it popular?

nnscott.com•13 days ago

I agree! Alas, how we came to have it is lost in the mist of time. My best guess is that dad picked it up during the years when he was, as they say, “living in Manhattan”, lol

osteoconnor.bsky.social•13 days ago

Asked, decades later, how he now felt about Facade, Walton smiled and said 'It keeps me.'

oddthisday.bsky.social•13 days ago

Oh, nice detail, thank you

1630revello.bsky.social•13 days ago

The most disturbing thing about this photo is that it seems as though Dame Edith had an incredibly hairy chest.

oddthisday.bsky.social•13 days ago

You are not alone in thinking this!

geoffbrock.bsky.social•13 days ago

Entertaining and informative thread. Thanks.

chrisworthing.bsky.social•13 days ago

Seconded

oddthisday.bsky.social•13 days ago

Thank you!

oddthisday.bsky.social•13 days ago

Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it

eggsbened.bsky.social•13 days ago

That Jane Bown* portrait is so magnificent. It completely captures Elizabeth Bowen’s description of her as trembling “a high altar on the move.”

*I worked with Jane for a year. She was pretty magnificent too, albeit without a scintilla of the grandeur.

oddthisday.bsky.social•13 days ago

I love her stuff. I've got the 'Lifetime of Looking' book that came out a few years ago

(And, yes, your other point about the poems: very true!)

eggsbened.bsky.social•13 days ago

Can’t remember why but I went to an exhibition of her work having never been to a photography exhibition before. I was about 21 at the time. To get to spend a year commissioning her years later was such an unexpected thrill. And when she agreed to take my byline photo I nearly fainted.

oddthisday.bsky.social•13 days ago

Blimey, yes. I can imagine

eggsbened.bsky.social•13 days ago

Not trembling (!), resembling.

nicholasbannan.bsky.social•13 days ago

The true survivor and hero of the event being William Walton

rogerjva.bsky.social•13 days ago

Can we see an adaptation of this feud with Fiona Shaw and maybe Clive Owen as the principals?

oddthisday.bsky.social•13 days ago

Good call

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