Dame Edna Everage once claimed: 'I was Dame Edith Sitwell in a previous life', and I think this was probably true.
Though Richard Greene, in this wonderful new biography, makes a valiant stab at saying his subject was a great 'knuckle-dusting modernist poet', what remains remarkable about Edith Sitwell is that she was a peerless and forthright eccentric, belonging more to the music hall stage than to the history of English literature.
As a poet she was, well, too poetical - yards of stuff about marionettes, fairgrounds, satyrs, nymphs and fauns. What people may conceivably recall is that she wrote and performed Facade with Sir William Walton.
Edith hid behind a curtain and recited rhythmical gibberish through a megaphone ('When Sir Beelzebub called for his syllabub' etc), while Walton conducted the band in a medley of sea-shanties. You can easily imagine Dame Edna pulling off a similar stunt.
If the poetry isn't much cop, the life was extraordinary, starting with Edith's family.
Her mother, Lady Ida, was completely off her head. Prone to 'ungovernable, singularly terrifying rages', Lady Ida was a secret alcoholic - Edith remembered having to go and pawn her mother's false teeth to buy brandy. Always short of cash, Lady Ida got involved in a bonds swindle and spent three months in Holloway for her part in 'a criminal conspiracy to commit fraud'.
Lady Ida's immediate family were the Earls of Londesborough and the Dukes of Beaufort, who possessed the sorts of stately homes where Liszt came to play the piano.
The ethos of such a world, however, was that women were deliberately not to be educated or expected ever to do anything - it was bad form 'to have any character or individuality'.
Edith's grandmother was so obligingly dim, she didn't notice when her favourite parrot had died, so 'the parrot was stuffed to give the illusion of life' and she carried on giving it rides around the park in her coach.
Lady Ida took dimness to a particular extreme. She went down with aphasia, a neurological disorder that impaired any comprehension of language. As Edith reflected: 'It is hard to imagine a more difficult circumstance in which to make conversation', though nobody else noticed.
In such a crowd, Edith felt herself to be an electric eel in a pool of flatfish. They shrank from her in horror, for example, when she voiced opinions about Bach and Mozart. Her father's side, however, were a bit more colourful. The Sitwell money came from the coal found under their land. Renishaw Hall, the family seat, was on the outskirts of Sheffield, and at night you could see the blast furnaces flaring up. It was a spooky place, with empty drawing rooms and ballrooms, with 'the windows as tall as waterfalls'.
Sir George, Edith's father, invented a revolver for killing wasps. When he wanted an alpine garden he fired a blunderbuss full of rare seeds at a cliff.
He almost became a vegetarian when his pet kitten was 'served as a fricassee of chicken' by a Japanese cook. As an MP, he spent his election expenses on bulbs.
Lady Ida and Sir George thought Edith was too tall and gangly with weak ankles - so she was strapped into metal orthopaedic braces and iron corsets, like medieval instruments of torture.
Not only that, as her long nose was considered a 'cartilaginous deformity,' she was forced to wear a nose truss. Prongs were clamped on to her face, held in place by a leather belt buckled around her forehead. It is little wonder Edith lacked confidence in herself - and Greene tells us 'there is no solid evidence she ever had sex with a man, or a woman for that matter'.
[insert: Unfinished portrait by Wyndham Lewis: Sitwell is painted with no hands, as she fled the studio after being lunged at by the artist]
Looking, as she quirkily did, like an effigy on a Plantagenet tomb, Edith developed a personality that was both pious and strait-laced, flamboyant and vulnerable. Fiona Shaw must play her in the biopic.
Because the upper classes 'delegated the love of small children to the servants', Edith kept her old governess, Helen Rootham, alongside her until Helen's death in 1938, when Edith was 51. The pair of them travelled to Berlin and Paris, where Edith loved the company of musicians, writers and artists.
She got to know everyone over the years, particularly when she took up residence of The Sesame Club in Mayfair. T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene and Alec Guinness were friends.
She was photographed by Cecil Beaton. Wyndham Lewis painted her portrait, which is now in the Tate. If you wonder why it is unfinished - no hands - it is because Lewis made a lunge for her and she fled the studio. This was the nearest Edith came to an erotic experience.
Edith was the first to recognise the talents of Wilfred Owen and Dylan Thomas and 'regarded it almost as a religious duty' to get their poems into print.
Thomas led her a dance, however, and Edith also acted as patron for the ghastly Russian artist Pavel Tchelitchew, whose works she collected. Such was Edith's unworldliness, she never saw through him - she generally had a weakness for camp or pretentious ne'er-do-wells and spongers.
Noel Coward was unique in not falling for Edith's dotty charm. Perhaps he sensed competition? In one of his plays he mocked her as Hernia Whittlebot. 'Edith Sitwell very simply hated Noel Coward.' After that, though, they were reconciled eventually.
In old age, she promoted Kingsley Amis. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg offered her heroin, which she declined 'because it made her come out in spots'.
Edith earned her living compiling useful anthologies and writing popular biographies of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift and Queen Elizabeth I. George Cukor invited her to Hollywood to write a script about Elizabeth for Vivien Leigh.
While in America, Edith met Marilyn Monroe, who became a soul mate. Marilyn, she said, is 'an innocent fertility daemon, the vegetation spirit that was Ophelia'. They'd read Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins together.
Edith was proud of her public speaking skills. Giving a recitation from Macbeth, she was 'awfully pleased' when a member of the audience, among whom was Harpo Marx, 'uttered the most piercing shriek and was carried out by four men'.
Edith was always hard up. Her overdraft in 1938 was £1,031, which by 1956 had risen to £13,000. The villain of the piece, Greene reveals, was her elder brother Osbert, an 'utterly, completely selfish' person who illegally withheld Edith's inheritance from Sir George, deliberately leaving her 'in crushing anxiety over her debts'. Debts, drink and 'simple loneliness', indeed, broke Edith's health and spirit.
After the treatment she'd endured in childhood, her joints gave her trouble. She also had 'poisoned glands and received oxygen injections in her shoulder'.
Nevertheless, when she had a bout of insomnia, her solution was a world cruise. In Ceylon, she nearly went to prison for jewel smuggling, though this was a misunderstanding, and when crossing the Atlantic, 'a hurricane blew open the porthole of her cabin and water poured in'.
Edith's final months were plagued by noise from the builders next door. Her plan was to buy vipers in Harrods, fatten them up, and post them in a parcel to the culprits.
On the day she died, in December 1964, she drank a double dry martini for breakfast. 'I'm dying, but apart from that I'm all right,' she stated.
Her first editions, sixpence on publication, command sums in the region of £1,500 now from rare book dealers, so somebody is a fan - Dame Edna's manager Barry Humphries (a well-known bibliophile) perhaps?
What I am a fan of is Richard Greene's biography, which is brilliant, wise, funny and affectionate. It is perfection, actually, and I am consumed with professional jealousy.