Richard Luckett on
a 'writer of English prose' To make one's debut on the stage of the World to the plaudits of a claque is not necessarily to be placed at an advantage. For an artist such support may well act as a buffer against the sharper pains of the almost inevitable early discouragements, but it is just as likely to blind him to real deficiencies in his Work. There is a further, perhaps greater snag; if the claque is identified as such by the outside world any genuine merits that he possesses may be arbitrarily disregarded. And Should the claque consist of relatives who are also artists all the difficulties are intensified; Claque clique, coterie, family combine in a "ion certainly incestuous, probably fatal. The Sitwells, Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, are surely a case in point. Max Beerbohm, early in their careers, produced a delightful cartoon in which Osbert and Sacheverell, through the voices of elegantly held pet par:Its, proffered each other a meed and more of "jaise. Hostile critics and the popular press 'aferred to them collectively and the trio, resPonding rather as they had previously done When threatened by the domestic tyrannies of their formidable father (though Sacheverell _tells us that Sir George has in part been mis'ePresented), closed ranks. They shared each °,ther's enemies with a fine generosity, a plittlanx embattled against the 'Philistines '— !.rld the ' Philistines ' seemed to include, at .utnes, the British public at large. Unwilling vXPonents of the military arts though the two rtnales had been, they sought battle according ,0 the best principles of defence, and it was '41:erefore impossible to avoid publicity. The
ore publicity they attained the more the
lic rl°tion of 'the Sitwells ' hardened in the pubmind. The Russian Ballet and the Baroque, ee verse and musical verse, pierrots and Piers all became a coagulate and definitely ec centric mass. Yet in fact the relationship was pa? YS looser and less self-deceiving than the front implied, and when Osbert came by Write his autobiography he used the Beer:'Inn cartoon as an illustration. But the dam;Re had long since been done; there had brown up a marked reluctance on the part of v?th critics and readeis to sort out the indis dual qualities of the three, and time has earcely clarified matters. wlhe publishers describe Sacheverell Sit
latestvolumesas " a major new work by
e of the finest and most original writers of alish prose today .. . a self-portrait of the or, though in no sense a straightforward s'Ioarrative autobiography." It is a puff with a wItlewhat ominous tone to it: there has alwls been a sharp distinction between rtters of English and writers of English wr°...se. The difference is fundamentally this: thriters of English prose have come to share tr great perception of Monsieur Jourdain
What they have been speaking (and writ all their lives is prose, no less — and they
have allowed it to haunt them. From being conscious of the medium they use they have slithered on to being self-conscious about it, which is altogether a different thing. There can be no doubt that Sacheverell Sitwell comes into this category; his style is manner'd to a degree, complete with studied use of the evocative word, of archaic constructions, of equally old fangl'd ellisions (sic); and of the subsidiary clause become a separate sentence. All of which may make the potential reader wary, as is very proper, considering that he has to face 450 pages of it. It is also very proper that he should be disconcerted by the notion of an autobiographical work, which contains no narrative element, extending to such proportions. Osbert Sitwell's memoirs were notably discursive, but their ambages (surely a word a Sitwell must have used somewhere) were restricted by a chronological progression, and this element of the chronicle helped to make the work as a whole his finest achievement. When, long ago, Sacheverell published what he termed ' an autobiographical fantasia,' Al! Summer in a Day, its comparative brevity made the subjugation of detail to atmosphere, and the massing of efforts on the analogy of music, a viable solution to the problem of form. Now we have an elaborate edifice, organised into eleven books separated by ' entr ' actes.' If this smacks of expediency rather than design it is because there is no great principle of order here, but not, I think as a result of lack of effort on the author's part.
' Self-portrait ' is surely the damaging word. A painter must look into a glass, and render the image that he sees. To delineate the scope of the picture, or to sketch in a background, is at once to perform an action that relates what he is doing to what he does when he paints any other object. In good selfportraits there is almost always a tension between what the painter sees reflected and what he knows to be there. But the writer lacks this easy reference to an objective world, and this has the paradoxical consequence that many of the best literary selfportraits are realised through the medium of fiction — one thinks of Benjamin Constant, of Stendhal or of Lermontov. Sitwell's method, however, makes distancing an impossibility; he describes his reveries, his daydreams, his waking and his insomniac thoughts. Sometimes he may tell a story of a crime that has fascinated him, or a legend that has attracted him; sometimes he recounts incidents from his travels or offers his reflections on things that he has read. But facts, anything that offers us a hold, a way of placing him, do not feature. Such reticence is not new; it was impossible to deduce from Sir Osbert's memoirs the circumstances of his mother's disgrace, and this and similar evasions suggested that Sir Osbert was lacking in candour and unwilling to pay the full penalties of entering into trade — which is what he was doing by turning writer. Because Sir Sacheverell doesn't aspire to offer a chronicle it is in his case less heinous, though it can sometimes be exceedingly irritating. All in all, the fact that there is precious little of a self-portrait here is scarcely surprising.
His is a credo that starts from rejection.' There is no golden city. Sir Sacheverell cannot accept the Christian consolations, nor the consolations of any other religion. So what signifies is the quality of life, which he sees not as a matter of material comforts but of sensations and, since the highest sensations are aesthetic, of art. In particular he is concerned with the art of Europe, though he is not ignorant of, nor unresponsive to, the art of other countries, notably China and Japan. He is concerned to celebrate those things that he has valued and to evoke, by direct or indirect means, the sensations that they have awakened in him. His book, the fruits of fifty years during which he has been occupied principally in writing about works of art, is intended to stand as a summation of what he has experienced and learned, and as a warning. For whilst it is a celebration it is also an attack, on the growing standardisation that afflicts the world, on the cult of numbers, on the exaltation of equality.
Such feelings are not new, and they are certainly not new to Sir Sacheverell. In the preface to his first prose book, published in 1924, he announced that "the negro sculptors, obscured in a black anonymity, are now extravagantly praised, so it is surely time for someone to set up again the crumbling statues to Gongora and to Luca Giordano." Again, he pointed out that" Life, in its human aspect, is very ugly, and has always been so, it being the duty of Art to improve and select, transmuting for our own eyes that which we know to have been sordid into what we can be persuaded was beautiful." These attitudes are implicit in his present book, and in many ways they have hardened. He sees black Africa relapsing into " sempiternal darkness" and India, he tells us, " pullulates and grows hungrier." Despair is never very far away, and all we can hold against it are the moments of beauty that we once experienced and can, with luck, recall. There are moments of hope: works of art are more accessible than they were, reproductions, recordings and easier travel have brought them within reach of the many, yet Sir Sacheverell is also aware that these things have brought about the desecration of much that he admires. He cannot effect any reconciliation between his feelings on these subjects, and there, oddly enough, is part of the yalLie of his book. There is much in it that is unprofitable. I remember once being in the Midlands and coming, purely by chance, on an item in the local paper that was a report on the prosecution by Sir Osbert Sitwell of two men found poaching on his estate. It came as a.
shock, not because I believe it to be unreasonable of those who preserve to endea vour to prevent poaching (though my sympa thies are all with the poachers) but because I had thought of Sir Osbert solely in the con text of his artistic exploits. Reading For Want of the Golden City I experienced something of the same surprise; Sir Sacheverell emerges as being far more representative of the attitudes of his class and generation than I would have anticipated. There is a good deal of prejudice and much that is contradictory; after all, someone who admits to writing a book on Holland in three weeks can have little cause to complain at the speed of communications and accessibility of information that characterise the present. So it is as a record that this book establishes itself, and a record not of a life but of opinions, and of the contradictions that opinions can breed. For I don't note these contradictions in order to castigate them, but to observe that they are symptomatic, and that many of them are present in my own thinking, and that of many other people. Everybody who buys a cottage in the Dordogne and then resents it when an English family buys the one next door, and everyone who makes money by praising the little known and then discovers that the subject seems devalued when it becomes a subject of general interest, is in fact involved in the problems that beset Sir Sacheverell. Nor should those who are elitist in their views about matters pertaining to art and to in tellect and anti-elitist in other matters con sider that they are clear of his dilemma.
I began by remarking on the disadvantages that Sir Sacheverell had suffered as one of a ready-made group of writers. He has been done scant justice for the best of his writing on architecture, painting or music. His British Architects and Craftsmen, his Southern Baroque Revisited and his book on Liszt are all admirable works which both inform and quicken the observer's and listener's response. But some of the disadvantages of being a Sitwell were not the fault of others, and chief of these was the notion that he might be, in some sense, a ' writer ' independent of his subject. There is a conflict here which comes over very clearly in For Want of the Golden City. Sir Sacheverell is an excellent writer on the arts, but his ambition was and is to be something more than that, a poet, and it was an ambition fostered by the dubious example of his sister and brother. To know this is to have a great deal explained: for one thing it accounts for the inaccuracies, blatant and obvious, which suddenly occur in the pages of a writer who, on the whole, seems exceptionally well informed. Two instances from the present book come to mind: the assassination of the Russian premier Stolypin, which took place in 1911 at Kiev, is moved to 1905 in Odessa and made a prelude to the 1905 revolution; in a rather different sphere, it is asserted that that most interesting of all Christian relics, the Santa Sindone of Turin, was brought from Cyprus in 1452. This was certainly the date when Margaret de Charny handed the Holy Shroud over to the Duke of Savoy, but if it really had come from Cyprus and not from France, as seems to have been the case, there are grounds for shaking Sir Sacheverell's agnos ticism. Yet I do not suppose that this much worries him, since it is the effect of a ' fact,' its value as image, that interests him, and not the fact itself. It is a pity, since when he is dealing with a world that he is observing, and not rather laboriously recovering with his imagination, he is at least a good writer. It is in the flashes of observation and the sense of struggle that his book comes fitfully but sometimes vividly alive. And if we can only define the golden city by our lack of it, then that perhaps is all we can expect.
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