The Head of the Jaeger School of Literature

 As you might expect of a book 'written under considerable difficulty', Edith Sitwell's autobiography, Taken Care Of, is something of a mess – but, most of the time, it's a richly enjoyable mess. As is invariably the case with autobiographies, the early chapters are the best, the most vivid and interesting, and things tail off later (for a classic example of this, see Charles Chaplin's My Autobiography). As Taken Care Of goes on, it becomes a collection of more or less random memories, vignettes, critiques savage and laudatory, and short miscellaneous essays, hung on the flimsiest of autobiographical frameworks, but it does manage to come in to land in the near present, with Edith's memories of America, including accounts of a hair-raising visit to Los Angeles's Skid Row (which sounds even worse than LA today) and of a conversation with Marilyn Monroe, with whom she had an instant and genuine rapport. 
  Along the way Miss Sitwell airs her views on poetry, and quotes far too much of her own verse, which had always struck me as strident, self-conscious and hollow, but of which she herself clearly thought very highly. She also regarded both Dylan Thomas and Roy Campbell as great poets – wrong on both counts, I'd say. As promised in the Preface, she lambasts Wyndham Lewis and D.H. Lawrence (who 'looked like a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden. At the same time he bore some resemblance to a bad self-portrait by Van Gogh.') Though she praises some of Lawrence's poetry, she delivers a well deserved kicking to that terrible novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, observing that Lawrence's 'loathing for Sir Clifford Chatterley amounted practically to a mania. Sir Clifford was so criminally offensive as to be a Baronet, and he, with most men, fought like a tiger in the First World War, instead of remaining safely at home, fornicating and squealing, shrilly, about the oppression from which he had suffered.' As for the notorious sex scenes, Edith describes some of these with due distaste, and concludes: 'I do not think the four-letter words in this book are as harmful as the descriptions of sexual intercourse, which in my opinion would freeze any impulse to love between boy and girl.' In a lecture at Liverpool, Miss Sitwell dubbed Lawrence 'the head of the Jaeger school of Literature since he was soft, hot and woolly.
  Messrs Jaeger protested mildly. "We are soft," they wrote to me, "and we are woolly, but we are never hot, owing to our system of slow conductivity."
  I replied, begging them to invent a system of slow conductivity for Lawrence, adding that I regretted having made the comparison, since their works are unshrinkable by Time, whereas the works of Mr Lawrence, in my opinion, are not.'