Nobody has ever looked like Edith Sitwell, or not for at least five hundred years, when an ancestor of whom she is unduly proud, and from whom she may have been cloned, was a prominent figure in the Wars of the Roses. It was, of course, Edith's mad and malicious father who started all this fixation with ancestry - a truly brilliant Renaissance scholar, to whom it never occurred to consider how many thousands of other people also came from the same stock.
John Freeman asks whether she would be recognised in the street if she wore an ordinary dress and coat. She says she probably would, rightly enough too, for that wonderfully medieval face, like a saint in a stained-glass window, does not look as though it has ever gazed on the industrial age. And so, appropriately, she parades for ever in those grand costumes, and the public wouldn't dream of having it otherwise.
There is a streak of silliness in her posturing. While accepting a Damehood, she claims to hate snobbery. But this is clearly a reaction against the miserable stately-home childhood that she prefers not to talk about, especially her father's plan to give her plastic surgery to make her look more like a conventional deb. She also, politely but firmly, declines to say why she is still single.
Among her dislikes, she mentions "Being asked silly questions" - which Freeman could have taken the wrong way, but didn't. You may be surprised to hear how perfectly Dylan Thomas behaved in her presence, when he is universally pictured as the swaggering shocker. And it is odd to hear her pronounce the word 'profile' in the French way ("profeel"), a clear echo of the mid-19th century.
She remains a good, though not a great poet, claiming (mysteriously) that a poem must have two parents. You can start writing it with just one, but the other must come into the picture before you can develop the poem as a whole.
