Reading Note:
The Sound of the Onycha
16 June 2015

Well, that did it.

In her really quite good book, The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me, Sofka Zinovieff (as English as you please, despite the Slavic monicker) writes of the poems in Edith Sitwell’s Façade that they are made of “experimental, nonsensical words” (149). My blood it did boil.

[“Oh, the nursery-maid Meg
With a leg like a peg
Chased the feathered dreams like hens, and when they laid an egg
In the sheepskin
Meadows
Where
The serene King James would steer
Horse and hounds, then he
From the shade of a tree
Picked it up as spoil to boil for nursery tea,” said the mourners. (“Fox Trot”)]

This is no more experimental or nonsensical than the Alice books. When my blood calmed down, I read the first passage that came to mind.

And Charlottine,
Adeline,
Round rose-bubbling Victorine
And the other fish
Express a wish
For mastic mantles and gowns with a swish; (“Popular Song”)

Cloaks made out of fragrant gum might be just the thing for fish; otherwise, this is simply a Victorian fantasy, working, as Alice does, as an inverted surrealism, by domesticating what ought to be odd images. (One can almost make out the dreadful fountain in the middle of the ornamental lake.) I know that Façade was thought, and even meant, to be teddibly modern when it was new, in 1922 or 1923 (pick your première), and Sitwell herself says, right here in her memoir, Taken Care Of, that “experiments were made” (142). She even compares her poems to Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes, quoting as an example the tongue-twister in “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside” (“Thetis wrote a treatise…”). But before saying too much of this kind of thing, she acknowledges that Façade is meant to be fun. And it is fun.

I don’t know how old I was when a recording arrived in the mail from one of those record clubs. Thirteen? It was a reissue of the 1948 performance at MoMA, sadly unavailable today. I could not have been a better target. That it was supposed to be “modern” went completely over my head, or maybe the other way. I took it to be an album of nursery rhymes for grown-ups — even if I couldn’t find a single grown-up (dear old Bronxville) who could stand to listen to them. I caught the immense nostalgia for Victoriana, coupled with an equally strong repulsion. I saw that Sitwell was making fun of John Bull, but that she was toasting him, too. The best thing was that she was indulging that most un-English of activities, having a blast.

Fun poetry! What a concept!

I am not going to make claims for Façade‘s place in the canon of English verse. It’s still too peculiar to bracket. You have to know the rhythms, and the rhythms have to be learned, either from the score or from recordings. I’ve had them by heart for most of my life. In college, I would read them at coffee houses (such as there were there and then), using an LP of Constant Lambert’s ballet version as backup. Last night, I made the surprising discovery that it can be very agreeable to read the poems without any music at all. (Plus, I can take my time with the tra-la-las in “Polka.”) Not that Walton’s score isn’t dazzling. He was about ten years old when he wrote it (all right, nineteen), and no doubt the mannerisms of ragtime and jazz simply percolated in his bloodstream. But just reading a poem like “En Famille” aloud in a quiet room is charming. (I talked a lot about the Sitwells, and quoted the end of this poem, in early April of this year.)

I’m making another attempt at William Empson’s book, 7 Types of Ambiguity (1930 et seq). This is a Very Important Book, and I have been trying to read it for years, but a good deal of it resists my intelligence. There’s a sentence of page 6 that defeats me. The preceding sentence makes the interesting, slightly dubious but altogether comprehensible claim that, even if we know what ingredients have been put into the stewpot, we don’t know how those ingredients contribute to the “juice” — which I take, perhaps mistakenly, to mean the delicious gravy that results from commingled cooking, and, by extension (metaphor), the magic of finished poetry. All very well. Then, this:

One must feel the respect due to a profound lack of understanding for the notion of a potential, and for the poet’s sense of the nature of language.

Something about the sequence of prepositions seems wrong. It can’t be, though, can it? I’d like to be able to complete the phrase, one must … in order to What, Exactly? (I tried googling the sentence, but nothing came up.) Anyway, Empson mentions Sitwell soon afterward, quoting her “synaesthetic” line, “The light is braying like an ass” (from “Trio For Two Cats and a Trombone”). He seems to approve — although I wouldn’t be too sure. But I thought of Sitwell when I read the following paragraph from Empson’s discussion of the “Atmospheric” response to poetry (according to which actual meaning is unimportant):

This belief may in part explain the badness of much nineteenth-century poetry, and how it came to be written by critically sensitive people. They admired the poetry of previous generations, very rightly, for the taste it left in the head, and, failing to realise that the process of putting such a taste into a reader’s head involves a great deal of work which does not feel like a taste in the head while it is being done, attempting, therefore, to conceive a taste in the head and put it straight on to their paper, they produced tastes in the head which were in fact blurred, complacent, and unpleasing.

It seems clear to me that Sitwell worked very hard to avoid this pitfall. I’m not entirely sure that she actually had a “taste in the head” in mind when she scribbled her poems, but surely she set out to refresh, if only for the sake of harmless merriment, the oozing upholstery of a Victorian child’s exposure to vernacular entertainments as well as to Classical Authors (busts included). It’s hard to believe now that anyone ever thought that Façade was strange or “difficult.” Sitwell’s poems are not at all meaningless — not even this (also from the “Trio”):

He called across the battlements as she
Heard our voices thin and shrill
As the steely grasses’ thrill,
Or the sound of the onycha
When the phoca has the pica
In the palace of the Queen Chinee!

Nonsense, perhaps, but meaningless, not at all. Especially after one has learned how to read this line from recordings. The last three lines are to be recited as a kind of rote, in a mumbled whisper that accentuates every other beat. It is all a child’s secret game, and worse luck if you don’t know these special words. It is the perfect ending to a parody of flamenco that flaunts adult passions (“our Paphian vocation”) before eyes that are not yet prepared to understand. Indeed, “Trio for Two Cats and a Trombone” is another way of telling What Maisie Knew.

Just don’t tell Henry James I said that.