English Poet Martin Booth 1944 - 2004

Martin Booth (7 September, 1944 – 12 February, 2004) was a prolific British novelist and poet. He also worked as a teacher and screenwriter, and was the founder of the Sceptre Press.

Booth was born in Lancashire, but was brought up mainly in Hong Kong, where he attended King George V School, and left in 1964.

Career

He made his name as a poet and as a publisher, producing elegant volumes by British and American poets, including slim volumes of work by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. His own books of verse include The Knotting Sequence (1977), named for the village in which Booth was living at the time. The book features a series of lyrics in which he seeks links between the present and the Saxon past, and the man called Knot who gave his name to the village. Booth also accumulated a library of contemporary verse, which allowed him to produce anthologies and lectures.

In the late 1970s Booth turned mainly to writing fiction. His first successful novel, Hiroshima Joe, was published in 1985. The book is based on what he heard from a man he met as a boy in Hong Kong and contains passages set in that city during the Second World War.

Booth was a veteran traveller who retained an enthusiasm for flying, also expressed in his poems, such as "Kent Says" and In Killing the Moscs. His interest in observing and studying wildlife resulted in a book about Jim Corbett, a big-game hunter and expert on man-eating tigers.

Many of Booth's works were linked to the British imperial past in China, Hong Kong and Central Asia. Booth was also fond of the United States, where he had many poet friends, and of Italy, which features in many of his later poems and in his novel A Very Private Gentleman (1990). These interests form a thread through his later novels, travel books and biographies.

Booth's novel Industry Of Souls was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize.

Booth died of cancer in Devon in 2004, shortly after completing Gweilo, a memoir of his Hong Kong childhood written for his own children.

The 2010 film The American, starring George Clooney, was based on his novel A Very Private Gentleman.

Works

• Paper Pennies and Other Poems (1967)
• Supplication to the Himalayas. A Poem and Sketch (1968)
• In the Yenan Caves (1969)
• A Winnowing of Silence (1971) (poems)
• Pilgrims and Petitions (1971)
• The Crying Embers (1971) (poems)
• On the Death of Archdeacon Broix (1971)
• James Elroy Flecker, Unpublished Poems and Drafts (1971) (editor)
• White (1971)
• In Her Hands (1973) (poem)
• Teller: Four Poems (1973)
• Brevities (1974) (poems)
• Hands Twining Grasses (1974) (poems)
• Spawning The Os (1974)
• Yogh (1974) (poems)
• Snath (1975)
• Two Boys and a Girl, Playing in a Churchyard (1975) (poem)
• Stalks of Jade: Renderings of early Chinese erotic verse (1976)
• Horse and Rider, a poem (1976)
• The Book of Cats (1977) (editor with George MacBeth)
• Extending Upon the Kingdom (1977)
• Folio/Work in Progress. Poems (1977) (broadside anthology, editor with John Stathatos)
• The Knotting Sequence (1977)
• The Dying (1978)
• The Earth Man Dreams of a Turned Sod (1978)
• Winter's Night: Knotting (1979)
• Decadal: Ten Years of Sceptre Press (1979)
• Calling with Owls (1979) (poems)
• The Bad Track (1980) (novel)
• Devil's Wine (1980) (poems)
• Bismarck (1980)
• British Writing Today (1981) (editor)
• The Cnot Dialogues (1981)
• Meeting the Snowy North Again (1982) (poems)
• Looking for the Rainbow Sign: Poems of America (1983)
• Tenfold: Poems for Frances Horovitz (1983) (editor)
• Travelling Through the Senses: A Study of the Poetry of George MacBeth (1983)
• Contemporary British And North American Verse (1984) (editor)
• British Poetry 1964 to 1984: Driving through the barricades (1985)
• Hiroshima Joe (1985) (novel)
• Killing the Moscs (1985)
• Under the Sea (Impressions) (1985)
• Aleister Crowley: Selected Poems (1986)
• Carpet Sahib, A Life of Jim Corbett (1986) (biography of a shikari)
• The Jade Pavilion (1987) (novel)
• Black Chameleon (1988) (novel)
• Dreaming of Samrkand (1989) (novel)
• A Very Private Gentleman (1990) (novel), adapted as the 2010 film The American
• American Dreams. A Poem (1992) (broadside)
• Rhino Road: The Black and White Rhinos of Africa (1992)
• The Humble Disciple (1992) (novel)
• The Iron Tree (1993) (novel)
• Toys of Glass (1995) (novel)
• Adrift In The Oceans Of Mercy (1996)
• War Dog (1996) (novel)
• Opium: A History (1996)
• Doctor and the Detective - a Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1997)
• Music on the Bamboo Radio (1997) (novel)
• The Industry of Souls (1998) (novel)
• Magick Life: A Biography of Aleister Crowley (2000)
• The Dragon Syndicates: The Global Phenomenon of the Triads (2000)
• PoW (2000)
• Panther (2001)
• Islands Of Silence (2002) (novel)
• The Alchemist's Son: Doctor Illuminatus (2003) (fantasy fiction)
• Cannabis: A History (2003)
• Gweilo: Memoirs of a Hong Kong childhood (2004) [US ed., 2005, published as Golden Boy]
• Midnight Saboteur (2004)
• The Alchemist's Son: Soul Stealer (2004)
  

English Poet Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell 1887 - 1964

Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE (7 September 1887 – 9 December 1964) was a British poet and critic.

Edith Sitwell was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, the oldest child and only daughter of Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet, of Renishaw Hall;she was an expert on genealogy and landscaping. Her mother was the former Lady Ida Emily Augusta Denison, a daughter of the Earl of Londesborough and a granddaughter of Henry Somerset, 7th Duke of Beaufort. She claimed a descent through female lines from the Plantagenets.

Sitwell had two younger brothers, Osbert (1892–1969) and Sacheverell Sitwell (1897–1988) both distinguished authors, well-known literary figures in their own right, and long-term collaborators. Sacheverell married a Canadian woman, Georgia Doble, in 1925 and moved to Weston Hall in Northamptonshire.

Her relationship with her parents was stormy at best, not least because her father made her undertake a "cure" for her supposed spinal deformation—involving locking her into an iron frame. In her later autobiography, she said that her parents had always been strangers to her.

In 1914, 25-year-old Sitwell moved to a small, shabby fourth-floor flat in Pembridge Mansions, Bayswater, which she shared with Helen Rootham (1875–1938), her governess since 1903.

Portrait of Edith Sitwell, by Roger Fry, 1918

Edith never married. However, it is claimed that in 1927 she fell in love with the homosexual Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew. The relationship with Tchelitchew lasted until 1928; the same year when Helen Rootham underwent operations for cancer, eventually becoming an invalid. In 1932, Rootham and Sitwell moved to Paris, where they lived with Rootham’s younger sister, Evelyn Wiel. Rootham died of spinal cancer in 1938.

Sitwell's mother died in 1937. Sitwell did not attend the funeral because of her displeasure with her parents during her childhood.

During World War II, Sitwell returned from France and retired to Renishaw with her brother Osbert and his lover, David Horner. She wrote under the light of oil lamps when the lights of England were out of service. She knitted clothes for their friends who served in the army. One of the beneficiaries was young Alec Guinness, who received a pair of seaboot stockings.

The poems she wrote during the war brought her back before a public. They include Street Songs (1942), The Song of the Cold (1945) and The Shadow of Cain (1947), all of which were much praised. Still Falls the Rain, about the London blitz, remains perhaps her best-known poem (it was set to music by Benjamin Britten as Canticle III: Still Falls the Rain).

Her poem The Bee-Keeper was set to music by Priaulx Rainier, as The Bee Oracles (1970), a setting for tenor, flute, oboe, violin, cello and harpsichord. It was premiered by Peter Pears in 1970.

In 1943, her father died in Switzerland, his wealth depleted. In 1948, a reunion with Tchelitchew, whom she had not seen since before the war, went badly.

In 1948 Sitwell toured the United States with her brothers, reciting her poetry and, notoriously, giving a reading of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene. Her poetry recitals were always occasions; she made recordings of her poems, including two recordings of Façade, the first with Constant Lambert as co-narrator, and the second with Peter Pears.

Tchelitchew died in July 1957. Her brother Osbert died in 1969, of Parkinson's disease, diagnosed in 1950. Sitwell became a Dame Commander (DBE) in 1954. In August, 1955, Sitwell converted to Roman Catholicism and asked author Evelyn Waugh to serve as her godfather.

Sitwell wrote two books about Queen Elizabeth I of England, Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) and The Queens and the Hive (1962). She always claimed that she wrote prose simply for money and both these books were extremely successful, as were her English Eccentrics (1933) and Victoria of England (1936).

Around 1957 she began using a wheelchair after battling with Marfan syndrome throughout her life. Her last poetry reading was in 1962. She died of cerebral haemorrhage at St. Thomas’s Hospital on 9 December 1964 at the age of 77.

Sitwell's papers are held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Poetry

Sitwell published her first poem The Drowned Suns in the Daily Mirror in 1913 and, between 1916 and 1921, she edited Wheels, an annual poetic anthology compiled with her brothers—a literary collaboration generally called "the Sitwells".

In 1929 she published Gold Coast Customs, a poem about the artificiality of human behaviour and the barbarism that lies beneath the surface. The poem was written in the rhythms of the tom-tom and of jazz, and shows considerable technical skill. Her early work reflects the strong influence of the French symbolists.

She became a proponent and supporter of innovative trends in English poetry and opposed what she considered the conventionality of many contemporary backward-looking poets. Her flat became a meeting place for young writers whom she wished to befriend and help: these later included Dylan Thomas and Denton Welch. She also helped to publish the poetry of Wilfred Owen after his death.

Her only novel, I Live under a Black Sun, based on the life of Jonathan Swift, was published in 1937.

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 jewelry may be seen in the jewelry 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 Noel 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 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.

Poetry collections

• Clowns' Houses (1918)
• Rustic Elegies (1927)
• Gold Coast Customs (1929)

"Geen Song and Other Poems" (1946) - was published by View Editions in U.S.A. -

• The Song of the Cold (1948)
• Façade, and Other Poems 1920-1935 (1950)
• Gardeners and Astronomers (1953)
• Collected Poems (1957)
• The Outcasts (1962).

Other books

• Alexander Pope (1930)
• The English Eccentrics (1933)
• I Live under a Black Sun (1937)
• Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) (biography of Elizabeth I)
• The Queens and the Hive (1962) (biography of Elizabeth I)
• Taken Care Of (1964) autobiography
• Victoria of England (1936)
  

American Poet Elinor Wylie 1885 - 1928

Elinor Morton Wylie (September 7, 1885 – December 16, 1928) was an American poet and novelist popular in the 1920s and 1930s. "She was famous during her life almost as much for her ethereal beauty and personality as for her melodious, sensuous poetry."

Family and Childhood

Elinor Wylie was born Elinor Morton Hoyt in Somerville, New Jersey, into a socially prominent family. Her grandfather, Henry M. Hoyt, was a governor of Pennsylvania. Her aunt was Helen Hoyt, a minor poet. Her parents were Henry Martyn Hoyt, Jr., who would be United States Solicitor General from 1903 to 1909; and Anne Morton McMichael (born July 31, 1861 in Pa.). Their other children were:

• Henry Martyn Hoyt (May 8, 1887 in Pa. - 1920 in New York City) who married Alice Gordon Parker (January 27, 1885 in Newark, New Jersey - 1951)
• Constance A. Hoyt (May 20, 1889 in Pa. - 1923 in Bavaria, Germany) who married Ferdinand von Stumm-Halberg on March 30, 1910 in Washington, D.C.
• Morton McMichael Hoyt (born April 4, 1899 in Washington, D.C.), three times married and divorced Eugenia Bankhead, known as "Sister" and sister of Tallulah Bankhead
• Nancy McMichael Hoyt (born October 1, 1902 in Washington, D.C) romance novelist who wrote Elinor Wylie: The Portrait of an Unknown Woman (1935). She married Edward Davison Curtis, they divorced in 1932.

Elinor was educated at Miss Baldwin's School (1893 to 1897), Mrs. Flint's School (1897 to 1901), and finally Holton-Arms School (1901 to 1904). She was "trained for the life of a debutante and a society wife."

"As a girl she was already bookish—not in the languid or inactive sense but girded, embraced by books, between whose covers lay the word-perfect world she sought. She grew into a tall, dark beauty in the classic 1920s style of Louise Brooks, the legendary silent screen star. Some who knew her claimed she was the most striking woman they ever met."

Marriages and Scandal

After Elinor eloped with Horace Wylie, Philip Simmons Hichborn committed suicide in this building.

The future Elinor Wylie "became notorious, in her time, for her multiple marriages and affairs." On the rebound from an earlier romance she met her first husband, Harvard graduate Philip Simmons Hichborn (1882–1912), the son of a rear-admiral. She eloped with him and they were married on December 13, 1906. She had a son by him, Philip Simmons Hichborn, Jr., born September 22, 1907 in Washington, D.C. However, "Hichborn, a would-be poet, was emotionally unstable," and Elinor found herself in an unhappy marriage.

She also found herself being stalked by Horace Wiley, "a Washington lawyer with a wife and three children," who "was 17 years older than Elinor. He stalked her for years, appearing wherever she was."

Following the November 1910 death of Elinor's father, she left her husband and son, and began living with Wylie. "After being ostracized by their families and friends and mistreated in the press, the couple moved to England" where they lived "under the assumed name of Waring; this event caused a scandal in the Washington, D.C., social circles Elinor Wylie had frequented." Philip Simmons Hitchborn Sr. committed suicide in 1912.

With Horace Wylie's encouragement, in 1912 Elinor anonymously published Incidental Number, a small book of poems she had written in the previous decade.

Between 1914 and 1916, Elinor tried to have a second child, but "suffered several miscarriages ... as well as a stillbirth and ... a premature child who died after one week."

After Wylie's wife agreed to a divorce, the couple returned to the United States. Elinor and Horace Wylie married in 1916; "By that time, however, the couple were drawing apart."

Elinor began spending time in literary circles in New York City—"her friends there numbered John Peale Bishop, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Carl Van Vechten, and ... William Rose Benét."

Career

Vanity Fair magazine (cover by John Held), where Wylie worked 1923-1925

Elinor Wylie's literary friends encouraged her to submit her verse to Poetry magazine. Poetry published four of her poems, including what became "her most widely anthologized poem, 'Velvet Shoes,'" in May 1920. With Benét now acting as her informal literary agent, "Wylie left her second husband and moved to New York in 1921." The Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB) says: "She captivated the literary world with her slender, tawny-haired beauty, personal elegance, acid wit, and technical virtuosity."

In 1921, Wylie's first commercial book of poetry, Nets to Catch the Wind, was published. The book, "which many critics still consider to contain her best poems," was an immediate success. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louis Untermeyer praised the work. The Poetry Society awarded her its Julia Ellsworth Ford Prize.

In 1923 she published Black Armor, which was "another successful volume of verse." The New York Times enthused: "There is not a misplaced word or cadence in it. There is not an extra syllable."

1923 also saw the publication of Wylie's first novel, Jennifer Lorn, to considerable fanfare. Van Vechten "organized a torchlight parade through Manhattan to celebrate its publication." She would write "four historical novels widely admired when first published, although interest in them diminished in the masculine era of the 1940s and 50s."

She worked as the poetry editor of Vanity Fair magazine between 1923 and 1925. She was an editor of Literary Guild, and a contributing editor of The New Republic, from 1926 through 1928.

Her last marriage (in 1923) was to William Rose Benét (February 2, 1886 - May 4, 1950), who was part of her literary circle and brother of Stephen Vincent Benét.

Wylie was an "admirer of the British Romantic poets, and particularly of Shelley, to a degree that some critics have seen as abnormal." "A friend claimed she was 'positively dotty' about Shelley, not just making him her model in art and life but on occasion actually 'seeing' the dead poet." She wrote a 1926 novel, The Orphan Angel, in which "the great young poet is rescued from drowning off an Italian cape and travels to America, where he encounters the dangers of the frontier."

By the time of Wylie's third book of poetry, Trivial Breath in 1928, her marriage with Benét was also in trouble, and they had agreed to live apart. She moved to England and fell in love with the husband of a friend, Henry de Clifford Woodhouse, to whom she wrote a series of 19 sonnets which she published privately in 1928 as Angels and Earthly Creatures (also included in her 1929 book of the same name).

Elinor Wylie died of a stroke at Benét's New York apartment, while working with him preparing the 1929 Angels and Earthly Creatures for publication.

Writing

Poetry

Wylie's "highly polished, articulate, and deeply emotional verse shows the influence of the metaphysical poets," such as John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. If her poetry is derivative of anyone, though, that would be "of the British Romantic poets, and particularly of Shelley," whom she admired "to a degree that some critics have seen as abnormal."

In her first book, Nets to Catch the Wind, "Stanzas and lines were quite short, and the effect of her images was of a highly detailed, polished surface. Often, her poems expressed a dissatisfaction with the realities of life on the part of a speaker who aspired to a more gratifying world of art and beauty." Louis Untermeyer wrote that the book "impresses immediately because of its brilliance ... which, at first, seems to sparkle without burning.... It is the brilliance of moon-light corruscating on a plain of ice. But if Mis. Wylie seldom allows her verses to grow agitated, she never permits them to remain dull.... in 'August' the sense of heat is conveyed by tropic luxuriance and contrast; in 'The Eagle and the Mole' she lifts didacticism to a proud level ... never has snow-silence been more unerringly communicated than in 'Velvet Shoes.'" Other notable poems include "Wild Peaches," "A Proud Lady," "Sanctuary," "Winter Sleep," "Madman's Song," "The Church-Bell," and "A Crowded Trolley Car."

In Black Armor (1923), "the intellect has grown more fiery, the mood has grown warmer, and the craftsmanship is more dazzling than ever.... she varies the perfect modulation with rhymes that are delightfully acrid and unique departures which never fail of success ... from the nimble dexterity of a rondo like 'Peregrine' to the introspective poignance of 'Self Portrait,' from the fanciful 'Escape' to the grave mockery of 'Let No Charitable Hope.'"

Trivial Breath (1928) "is the work of a poet in transition. At times the craftsman is uppermost; at times the creative genius."

Wylie's biographer Stanley Olson called the sonnets that begin 1929's Angels and Earthly Creatures "perhaps, her finest achievement.... The love in these lyrics is not a private love, not a variety of confession, but an abstracted one.... The nineteen sonnets are paced with strength, energy and undeniable feeling, sustained as a group by shifting through the complexities and vicissitudes of love." Untermeyer also praised the sonnets, but added: "The other poems share this intensity. 'This Corruptible' is both visionary and philosophic; 'O Virtuous Light' deals with that piercing clarity, the intuition ... The other poems are scarcely less uplifted, finding their summit in 'Hymn to Earth, which is one of her deeper poems and one which is certain to endure."

Fiction

Wylie's four novels "are delicately wrought and filled with ironic fancy." They were "widely admired when first published, although interest in them diminished in the masculine era of the 1940s and 50s."

Publications

Poetry

• [Anonymous], Incidental Numbers. London: private, 1912.
• Nets to Catch the Wind. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921.
• Black Armour. New York: Doran, 1923.
• Trivial Breath. New York, London: Knopf , 1928.
• Angels and Earthly Creatures: A Sequence of Sonnets Henley on Thames, UK: Borough Press, 1928. (also known as One Person).
• Angels and Earthly Creatures. New York, London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929. (includes Angels and Earthly Creatures: A Sequence of Sonnets).
• Birthday Sonnet. New York: Random House, 1929.
• Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932.
• Last Poems of Elinor Wylie, transcribed by Jane D. Wise, foreword by William Rose Benet, tribute by Edith Olivier. New York: Knopf , 1943. Chicago: Academy, 1982.
• Selected Works of Elinor Wylie. Evelyn Helmick Hively ed. Kent State U Press, 2005.

Novels

• Jennifer Lorn: A Sedate Extravaganza. New York: Doran, 1923. London: Richards, 1924.
• The Venetian Glass Nephew. New York: Doran, 1925. Chicago: Academy, 1984.
• The Orphan Angel. New York: Knopf, 1926. Also published as Mortal Image. London: Heinemann, 1927.
• Mr. Hodge & Mr. Hazard. New York. Knopf , 1928. London: Heinemann, 1928. Chicago: Academy, 1984.
• Collected Prose of Elinor Wylie. New York: Knopf, 1933.

Fonds

• Papers reside in the Elinor Wylie Archive, Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT, and in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library.