Volume 28, Number 20 · December 17, 1981
The Clowning Victim
By Alan Pryce-Jones
Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions
by Victoria Glendinning
Knopf, 393 pp., $17.95
Edith Sitwell: A Biography
by Geoffrey Elborn
Doubleday, 322 pp., $15.95
Like buoys in a treacherous estuary, guiding or warning the traffic, a succession of literary reputations still scatters light on the crowded lanes of the twentieth century. Some of them have dimmed, just as some of the lanes are now silted up. Nobody steers by Wells or Bennett, once so illustrious. Nobody troubles to run down the Georgians. Explorers get tired of being blown off course just as they are getting closer to Ford Madox Ford or William Gerhardie. Even the great lighthouses, Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Auden, have gathered with the years a certain amount of guano to mess up their pristine white paint. It no longer seems profitable to look into remoter waters guided by Proust and Mann and Kafka and Valéry.
Review, 3164 words
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