Collage

Collage Taken Care Of: An Autobiography by Edith Sitwell. Atheneum Publishers, $5.95.

We do not regret that most of the very greatest writers did not leave behind them extensive autobiographies, memoirs, and criticism. It is too bad that we had to find out what Tolstoy thought of Shakespeare; we can be glad that we will never know what Shakespeare thought of Tolstoy. But we welcome the less major or the minor writer in his recollections of his life and of the world in which he moved because his eye, if he has any standing at all as an artist, will have been trained by himself to observe not only the details of his world but his own responses to these details. Since his standing with us is not that of a god, but rather that of someone only a bit brighter than we are, we can regard his observations either as profundities or merely as contributions to social and literary history—and let it go at that. To hear the author of War and Peace say that he could read Shakespeare with nothing but “repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment” reveals nothing to us about either of them, but we enjoy Voltaire’s verdict on Hamlet, “a gross and barbarous piece… which would never be borne by the lowest of the rabble in France or Italy,” as a marvelous comment on the state of the French drama in the eighteenth century, on the Age of Enlightenment, on Voltaire himself—and finally, under these circumstances, we may even grant it to have a certain kind of validity as a criticism of Hamlet. Dr. Johnson in his miscellaneous writings is, of course, a fine example of this literary law in beautiful working order, as is Trollope in his autobiography and Gibbon in his. In our own day we have the case of Edith Sitwell’s brother, Sir Osbert—certainly a minor literary figure if there ever was one—whose four volumes of autobiography are almost unique in their power to light up for us a certain corner of the world in the first quarter of this century.