Keeping the old flag flying
David Hughes
OSBERT SITWELL by Philip Ziegler Chatto, £25, pp. 460 Afirst glance at this volume strikes one or two ominous notes. On both jacket and spine the biographer is the star, his name twice the size of his subject, whom the blurb darkly describes as 'never dull'. In the acknowledgments the book's origin is ascribed to Sir Stephen Tumim, who judiciously wondered in Ziegler's hearing why Sir Osbert was the only one of the three Sitwells never to have been accorded by the bio-industry a full-length life. At once one suspects a murky reason, such as tedium. But known as a biographer for putting the best case for difficult men, Mountbatten and Edward VIII among them, Ziegler at once determined to click the missing panel into the Sitwell triptych. Nowhere does he offer further explanation for devoting a span of his maturity to a man whom he presents, or who here with- out mercy presents himself, as one of the 20th century's titanic bores.
We have to take for granted Osbert's charm, that most incommunicable of human allures. There was evidently lots of it, as when he said politely to a Jewish lady who had got his goat, 'Would you like a cup of tea or some vinegar on a sponge?' But the real vestiges of his sweetness that survive in these pages are soured by his quarrels. Stimulated by his father — Sir George is the anti-hero of the five-volume hymn of hate/love that is his son's elegant autobiography — an appetite for pettiness kept eating into Osbert's brains. Siegfried Sassoon was dismissed for a slight, Michael Arlen was 'that horrible little Armenian', J. C. Squire thrust into oblivion for giving him a poor review, not to mention Freud Maddox Fraud, niftily renamed by Osbert for some passing crudity. In a 1923 sketch Noel Coward called the family the Whittle- hots and only after the second world war did Osbert shake the Master's hand, but by mistake, on an ill-lit staircase at Bucking- ham Palace.
This is serious loathing, corrupting (and amusing) only the loather (if not us). No wonder T. S. Eliot, in a letter to Pound, forgot himself so far as to insert a rogue aspirate into the Sitwell name. Meanwhile all modern literature was sat upon by Osbert. Without even knowing that Huxley called his family the Shufflebottoms, he never forgave Aldous for putting him in disguise into a story. D. H. Lawrence was eternally detested for casting him as Sir Clifford, scribbling husband of Lady Chat- terley, whose short stories were 'clever, rather spiteful, and yet, in some mysterious way, meaningless', a judgment of Sitwell's own work in most genres — stories, poems, novels, essays — which, between Ziegler's lines, holds to this day. This man 'of prince- ly apartness', as John Lehmann described him, had a talent for getting on the wrong side of other people's genius.
Early self-hype set his generation against him. 'They were amiable amateurs playing at being revolutionaries,' comments Ziegler on the Sitwell trio, and that charge irked Osbert through a life increasingly haunted by ill-health and lack of luck in love or work. Without royalties, there was only royalty, which he venerated to excess, hit- ting it off a treat with the present Queen Mother. 'Here we are, back at the old busi- ness,' she wrote to him jollity in 1937, `buckling to, doing our best, keeping the old Flag flying hoorah... So indeed was Osbert in his books, but to less regal effect. For love he fell back on a cultivated play- boy, David Homer, a relationship that for 40 years dared not speak its mind.
So what about his writing, principal if not sole excuse for this tenderly critical study? Osbert's days were dedicated whole- And what, pray, is this brilliant invention that everybody needs?' heartedly to hours of deskwork. We must ignore Lady Colvin's early view that the Sitwells were 'quite nice and amusing young people, if only they would not write poetry'. Yet nothing either quoted or origi- nated by Ziegler much contradicts this compliment. At various stages Virginia Woolf, who quite liked him, pinned Osbert's work down in images more adroit than any in his own verse. 'All foliage and no filberts,' she once snapped, then later: i don't care for Osbert's prose; the rhodo- dendrons grow to such a height in it.' Meanwhile Osbert, with more pomp than his circumstances justified, was talking of `the sacredness of my task', conceiving of everything as a poem, elevating his vanitY into an art.
At the same time he was impractically running Renishaw Hall, entertaining the likes of Ravel, Massine and Gershwin (guests unmentioned by Ziegler) in Carlyle Square, and at last inheriting the Tuscan folly of Montegufoni, beloved of his detest- ed father. Again Mrs Woolf comes to our rescue: Osbert's childish vanity was always `striking the two notes: rank and genius • The more acerbic Wyndham Lewis said he was the last man in London to mix his mind with his Mayfair. Certainly he pursued the anomalies of privilege as if inventing them. While intensely snobbish, he was amiable to the underdog. He engaged in farcical litigation against newspapers as well as his own father. He was immensely rich, but never had much money; the less money he had, the more he squandered. The more proper- ty he owned — 'just the bare luxuries of life and not the necessities' — the less secure he felt. An airy aristocracy of boredom was the empyrean of Osbert's choice.
Perhaps he even wrote to avert boredom; there are worse motives. But it disturbs anyone acquainted with angst that he found anything, from fighting an election at Scarborough in 1919 to the second world war CI feel quite sick with boredom'), bor- ing. The boring thing about people with low boredom thresholds is that they are themselves boring. My eyes glaze even as I record Sitwell's habit of changing the sub- ject at dinner every two minutes, caricatur- ing his so-called friends — Ottoline Morrell, Edward Marsh, Edmund Gosse — in flashes of wit rarely captured in this book, holding the table by force. It is all so sadly small-minded that it seems small- minded on my part to mention it.
Philip Ziegler has impeccable virtues as a narrative biographer, but he lacks or hides the critical gifts to persuade us that Sitwell was a writer of quality we need read. He ever so faintly damns his subject with even fainter praise. Or is he disingenuously leav- ing judgment to us or to posterity? His own writing is too precisely cool to give awaY much of what he might feel. But his portrait of Osbert Sitwell is an engaging mixture of the touchy, the slightly touched, and finally the touching.
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