This Catalogue of Sales (Google Book Search) for Sotheby & Co., from February - June, 1962, tells a different story:
252 SITWELL (EDITH) The Autograph Manuscript of her "Answer to Henry Reed," 13 pp., folio, signed below title, unbound. This interesting essay is a reply to a broadcast talk by Henry Reed in October 1946, in the Third programme series "The Poet and his Critic," devoted to Edith Sitwell's poetry. INCLUDED IN THE LOT are a typescript of Henry Reed's talk... (p. 54).So Sitwell's "Answer" is not so much a reply to Henry Reed, as it is her response.
The poet D.S. Savage describes what the BBC's "The Poet and His Critic" program was attempting, while painting a dismal portrait of its failure. From "Letter from England," in the Spring, 1948 Hudson Review (p. 90):
[The Third Programme's] musical record has been good, and its dramatic record not so bad, but on the literary side it has been deplorable. It has ventured into literary criticism. In a series entitled "The Poet and his Critic", a number of poets, some of them good ones, lent themselves to a painful exhibition in which the critic gave an appraisal of his pet poet on one day, the poet replied with a reading of his poems on the next, and there followed a coy little game of bat and ball on the third occasion between the two. But not all the poets were good ones, and the B.B.C. functionary in charge had scoured the alleys for the weirdest collection of so-called critics it would be possible to find within a hundred yards of Fleet Street.
This seems to indicate that Reed hosted at least two Saturday evening programs on Edith Sitwell, if he wasn't involved in all three: the first on October 26th, the second on November 2nd, and the last, November 9th, 1946 (with Sitwell, herself?).
