Portrait Before Dark is a poem cycle that constitutes an imaginary dialogue between the poet and patron of the arts, Edward James, and the eccentric Viennese ballerina and star of the 1920's, Tilly Losch.
Liana Sakelliou began writing these poems in August 2009, when she was serving as writer-in-residence at West Dean College in West Sussex, England. Three days before she was to leave for the U.K., a wildfire surrounded her home and neighborhood. In minutes the pine forest and hillside olive groves were lost. For days, the suitcase and the clothes she'd packed smelled of smoke.
Edward James, the Anglo-American millionaire, gave his estate to a charitable trust, the Edward James Foundation, which includes the mansion, West Dean House, where the college is located. She sat on the satin Mae West Lips Sofa, one of Salvadore Dalí's surrealist sculptures and read James's poems. Through the biographical films that were screened at West Dean, she discovered James's friendships with artists such as Leonora Carrington, Dalí, and René Magritte, and with writers such as Christopher Isherwood, Edith Sitwell, and Evelyn Waugh. He seemed to know everyone from his era. He spoke to Freud, knew members of the Bloomsbury group, and was one of the most generous English patrons of the arts in the early 20th Century. He helped Max Ernst and Dylan Thomas, as well as the aforementioned artists. In 1933, during his marriage to Losch, James funded Balanchine's first ballet company, Les Ballets 1933, which was the foundation for his American Ballet Company. He commissioned The Seven Deadly Sins, a collaboration by Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht, featuring Losch as prima ballerina and Lotte Lenya as vocal soloist. Their marriage from 1930 to 1934 was short and disastrous, and their divorce was a scandal in London society. In 1937, Magritte painted two faceless portraits of James: "The Pleasure Principle: Portrait of Edward James" and "Not to be Reproduced," to which Sakelliou refers in her poems.
The setting of West Dean seemed made for children-with topiary birds and spirals, lush flowers, conservatories, and sheep one could pet. Sakelliou saw portraits of the James family, as well as Man Ray and Pavel Tschelitchew photos of Edward and Tilly walking through the palace corridors. She liked their faces, their poses. She wanted to write quiet, allusive poems that speak through their voices. The English woodlands serve as a flexible space for Sakelliou's concerns about the Greece's beautiful and fragile environment and the wildfires that continue to ravage the country every summer combined with her imagining the spaciousness of Edwards's and Losch's love as conflicting emotions burn down their marriage.
