The Last Year of a Rebel: A Memoir of Edith Sitwell by Elizabeth Salter (Houghton, $5.00). This book belongs to a genre which, despite its undoubted interest, requires its practitioners to walk a shady tightrope of good taste, threatening from time to time to plunge off into sentimentality or—what is worse—undignified disclosure. That Miss Salter succeeds in maintaining her balance is partly a tribute to her and partly to the great and delightful eccentric about whom she writes. She was Dame Edith’s secretary for the last eight years before Dame Edith’s death, and what she is telling is the story not only of a friendship and the triumphant Indian Summer of a remarkable life, but of the long dying until at last “all was over, bar the shouting and the worms.” While I am not entirely sure of the audience to whom this (on the whole delightful) book is addressed, I judge myself to be part of it, and hope there will be many others. One other thing—I cannot forbear pointing out the felicity of the author’s choice of the effigy of Elizabeth I as the last photograph in the book after the series of photo-
P. L. BUCKLEY
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