sbert mourned for dead friends such as Ivo Charteris and Bimbo Wyndham Tennant, and for countless other companions of his generation. Among the few to survive was the future Field-Marshal Alexander. Ironically, in 1919 Osbert was almost killed by the Spanish flu, which permanently impaired his health.
He had matured into a strange mixture of eccentricity and arrogance, of frivolity and pomposity, of kindness and malice. He hoped to make his mark as a distinguished writer, unable to accept that he lacked the talent. However, he was better equipped to achieve his other goal – of becoming a patron of the arts.
Although by instinct a man of the right, the war had turned Osbert into a pacifist. In the election of November 1918 he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament at Scarborough and Whitby as an Asquithian Liberal, hoping to find a platform from which to express his views. He also developed an intense dislike for Winston Churchill after learning how he had told Sassoon that war was man’s natural occupation.
British troops were being sent to aid the Whites against the Reds in Russia, so Osbert sent an angry piece of doggerel, ‘The Winstonburg Line’, to the socialist Daily Herald, ridiculing a politician whom he saw as a warmonger. It included the lines: ‘Only three years ago/I was allowed to waste a million lives in Gallipoli’. Communist sympathisers distributed the poem at pro-Bolshevik rallies, although the last thing that Renishaw’s heir hoped to see was a Red revolution in his own country.
What really interested him was art and literature, not politics. With his siblings, he was determined to make the most of them in the exciting new world after the war.
Sacheverell had gone up to Balliol College in 1919, but Oxford, full of ex-servicemen reading for degrees to help them earn their living, did not yet enjoy the sparkling society of Evelyn Waugh’s period. Dons were unsympathetic, and his tutor sneered that his essays read like a Ouida romance. Sachie, who spent more time in London, made few friends there – two exceptions were a very young William Walton (still only sixteen) and the eccentric novelist Ronald Firbank, the genius of whose novels he at once appreciated. Sachie soon went down of his own accord, without a degree.
During 1919 the Sitwell brothers put on an exhibition of modern French art at Heal’s in the Tottenham Court Road. It was really an exhibition of the cosmopolitan School of Paris. Among the painters represented were Derain, Dufy, Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso, Soutine and Vlaminck. Since at that date only a tiny minority of English art-lovers appreciated them, this was a great achievement, and Arnold Bennett gave the Sitwells the praise they thoroughly deserved. Most reviewers damned the exhibition, however, Osbert incurring more odium for his association with it than for attacking Churchill.
They also persuaded their father to commission the neoclassicist Gino Severini to fresco a room at Montegufoni. Sadly, despite Sachie’s fervent advocacy, Sir George did so in preference to Picasso, whom he thought too expensive. No less unfortunately, he declined to lend his sons the money to buy the entire contents of the recently deceased Modigliani’s studio.
In 1920, after recovering from his Spanish flu, Osbert rushed over to Italy with Sacheverell. Recalling their father’s stories, they set out to discover the Mezzogiorno. What they saw at Lecce in Puglia (in those days visited by few tourists), and at the remote Carthusian monastery at Padula in the Cilento, deepened the taste for the Baroque that George had given them. (In 1975 Sacheverell told me how, when they arrived at Lecce, the city fathers insisted on paying their hotel bill because they looked so distinguished.) In Sachie’s opinion, there were more beautiful buildings at Lecce than at any place he ever saw save Venice. They inspired him to write what he considered to be his best book, Southern Baroque Art.
However, the two established their headquarters on the other side of the peninsula, at Amalfi, in a Capuchin friary that had been turned into a hotel. They returned here again and again, finding it a good place in which to work. Ironically, it was also among Sir George’s favourite hotels.
On the way home they called on the Futurist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, one of Sachie’s great heroes, in Fiume, where he was briefly dictator of the little independent state. They hoped to persuade him to write a preface to a new edition of Rabelais that Picasso was illustrating. D’Annunzio was not interested, and would only talk about greyhounds or complain of his boredom. Neither brother spoke enough Italian to understand much of what he was saying.
In late 1919 the Sitwell brothers’ London base became a small house in Carlyle Square, between the King’s Road and the Fulham Road in Chelsea, which in those days was still a slightly seedy area. (Edith declined to join them, refusing to leave Helen Rootham.) The ‘amusing’ decor included conch-shaped dining chairs from Naples, stuffed birds, and a bowl of press-cuttings about themselves. There were some good pictures, ancient and modern. The pair were looked after by a devoted housekeeper, Mrs Powell, who had been in service at Castle Howard.
Here, eager to find allies, they entertained the literati with excellent dinners. Hyper-sensitive to criticism, they refused to tolerate anyone who questioned their obvious brilliance. Anyone suspected of doing so was immediately dropped from the guest list.
In 1923, assisted by her brothers, Edith gave a recitation of her verse at the Aeolian Hall, chanting through a ‘sengerphone’ to music by William Walton. Façade was when the wider public became aware of ‘the Trio’, even if many people in the Aeolian Hall thought it ‘nonsense’ and there was heckling. (One old lady attacked Edith with an umbrella.) Nasty reviews appeared in the press. But others, including Lytton Strachey, applauded. Harold Acton, who brought with him a twenty-year-old Evelyn Waugh, hoped Edith would give more recitations like this. The not-so-young novelist Ada Leverson gasped, ‘Wasn’t it wonderful?’1 Arnold Bennett also enjoyed the evening.
Predictably, the Trio reacted with fury when later that year Noël Coward’s revue London Calling featured a skit in which the comedienne Maisie Gay played the poetess ‘Hernia Whittlebot’. A squat, goggle-eyed, froglike creature who wore a dress of draped sacking and Bacchanalian clumps of grapes for earrings, flanked by her brothers ‘Gob’ and ‘Sago’, she howled nonsense verse through a trumpet.
The ‘poem’ that drew the heartiest guffaws among philistines in the audience was ‘Poor Shakespeare’, whose opening lines made crude references to the wind coming from ‘a goat’s behind’.2
For some time after, Coward continued to mock ‘the Swiss Family Whittlebot’, who, he sneered, were ‘two wiseacres and a cow’. He made particular fun of Edith, publishing two slim volumes of nonsense poems attributed to Hernia Whittlebot. It was decades before they forgave him.
Yet this sort of ridicule was useful publicity, of a sort. The fact that Coward took the trouble to single out the Trio for mockery in his revue (which ran at the Duke of York’s Theatre for over a year) shows just how much they had become a feature of the London scene.
Another performance of Façade in 1926 at the Chenil Galleries in Chelsea was received with acclaim by nearly all the music critics, notably the great Ernest Newman of the Sunday Times. The Sitwells had survived the mockery and triumphed in the end.
All three understood public relations. The young Cecil Beaton – who had himself introduced to Edith in the same year, hoping that the Trio might further his career – was particularly useful. His photographs, especially those of Edith (one in a coffin horrified Lady Ida), were a great help in promoting their image, and in return they recommended him to their friends. They also persuaded Duckworth to publish his first book, The Book of Beauty.
Beaton genuinely admired them, and not only because he was a social mountaineer. ‘With their aristocratic looks, dignified manner, and air of lofty disdain, they seemed to me to be above criticism,’ he wrote in his diary for 1928. He added, ‘A whole new world of sensibility opened to me while sitting in candlelight around the marble dining table in Osbert’s house in Chelsea.’3
In contrast, Bloomsbury rejected Beaton. When he wrote to ask Virginia Woolf if he might photograph her, she declined – unpleasantly dismissing him in a letter to Vita Sackville-West as ‘a mere catamite’. Her refusal strengthened Beaton’s commitment to the Sitwells.4
In 1924 Sachie published Southern Baroque Art: A Study of Painting, Architecture and Music in Italy and Spain of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, which created a sensation. Many aesthetes found it shocking – the Baroque had been despised since the eighteenth century – but others were enchanted.
Today it seems very old-fashioned, with no awareness whatever of the geometry and mathematics behind Baroque architecture and an embarrassing inability to see that the florid buildings of Lecce cannot rival those of Rome or Naples. In the view of one modern authority, it was ‘a sort of conjuring trick of a book, in that it managed to communicate a modish enthusiasm for Baroque art without actually discussing it in visual terms’.5
Even so, it provided an introduction and a gazetteer to a neglected style. It was undeniably readable, full of exotic detail and good stories then little-known – for example, the Cypriot origins of El Greco, or how Carlo Gesualdo, composer of exquisite madrigals, had murdered his wife and her lover. As Kenneth Clark put it, ‘The music of Scarlatti, the singing of Farinelli, the Commedia dell’ Arte, all these were part of the Sitwellian revolution.’6
Southern Baroque Art explains why contemporaries held Sachie in such esteem. Fifty years later, John Piper referred to it as ‘the most wonderful book . . . a completely revolutionary approach to architecture, which seemed to be the reverse of all I’d been taught by my elders and betters’.7 Undoubtedly, it enhanced the Trio’s reputation. Clearly there was more to them than megaphones.
Sachie’s elegant if oddly impersonal ‘autobiographical fantasia’, All Summer in a Day, was also well received when it appeared in 1926. Writing in the New York Herald Tribune, Rebecca West (a passionate admirer of Façade) thought it ‘in many respects a delightful book’. She added, ‘neither the importance of the Sitwells as a group nor of Mr Sacheverell Sitwell can well be exaggerated’.8
In 1926, too, he wrote a ballet plot for Diaghilev, The Triumph of Neptune, with Lord Berners supplying the music and George Balanchine the choreography. His plot was a ‘harlequinade scenario’ of twelve tableaux whose design was inspired by ‘penny-plain and tuppence-coloured’ prints from the early nineteenth century – the story being how the sailor Tom Tug, changed into a fairy prince, marries the sea god’s daughter. It was performed by the Ballets Russes at the Lyceum in December.
He carried on breaking new ground with books such as German Baroque Art (1927) and The Gothick North (1929). Like Southern Baroque Art, these owed a lot to what his father had told him as a boy. At the same time he was regularly publishing verse, including The Cyder Feast, with its poem on the Renishaw woods. Yet, while firmly believing that the art of every past age deserves revisiting, he was genuinely thrilled by Modigliani, Picasso and Matisse.
Edith’s poetry was being published to acclaim. It included the volumes The Sleeping Beauty in 1924, Troy Park in 1925 and Gold Coast Customs – one of her most important works – in 1929. Apart from Eliot, no Bloomsbury, let alone Georgian, could rival her and she was taken very seriously indeed. After reading Gold Coast Customs, W. B. Yeats commented that ‘something absent from all literature for a generation was back again, and in a form rare in the literature of all generations, passion ennobled by intensity, by endurance, by wisdom’.9
She enjoyed playing to the gallery. All three of the Trio secured entries in Who’s Who fairly early in their careers, an indication of the impact they had made. Edith’s entry tells us archly how ‘in early life [she] took an intense dislike to simplicity, Morris-dancing, a sense of humour, and every kind of sport except reviewer-baiting; and has continued these distastes ever since’.
If not in the same class as his siblings, Osbert strove manfully to keep up, churning out verse, essays and short stories, and even a single embarrassingly bad play, All at Sea, which he wrote with Sacheverell. Yet while his 1919 book of verse Argonaut and Juggernaut was mocked by traditionalists, it turned him into a poet who interested avant-garde critics. Discursions on Travel, Art and Life (1925) was also taken seriously – Frank Megroz thought it ‘entrancing’.
His first novel, Before the Bombardment (1926), was a satirical recreation of the upper-middle-class life in Scarborough that had been ended by German shells. Although there was not much of a plot, the critic James Agate ranked it among the twenty best novels to appear since Dickens’ time, while it became a favourite of George Orwell.
In Anthony Powell’s view, the weakness of all Osbert’s novels and stories was that while full of good ideas, he simply could not write well enough. Powell believed his real role was as a leader of literary fashion, a writer of lively letters to the newspapers, someone who kept the arts before the public eye – ‘by no means a useless function’.10 Even so, Before the Bombardment is still readable.
Osbert banged the Baroque drum with enthusiasm, and not only in his Discursions. As a committee member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club, he wrote an introduction to the catalogue for its 1925 exhibition, Seventeenth Century Italian Art, in which he extolled artists such as Caravaggio, Carlo Dolci, Domenichino, Artemisia Gentileschi and Strozzi – all disdained by the pundits. Most of the pictures shown were loaned by great English country houses, including Renishaw, and Osbert helped to track them down.
At Oxford, Sachie had ‘discovered’ the composer William Walton, who became almost an adopted brother. (Constant Lambert put about a rumour of William being Sir George’s son by that great composer Dame Ethel Smyth.) When Walton went down without a degree in 1920 Sachie and Osbert invited him to live in the attic at Swan Walk, and then at Carlyle Square, where he stayed for fifteen years. They paid for lessons from leading musicians such as Busoni and Ansermet, gave him clothing and pocket money, and took him to Renishaw and on their travels. They also contributed to his work; in 1929 Osbert selected and supplied the words for his immensely successful oratorio, Belshazzar’s Feast.
Walton did not always make a good first impression – ‘rather like a maggot, but I believe he has more character than appears’, observed the novelist Edith Olivier.11 Disappointingly, he produced comparatively little music during his time with the Sitwells. Eventually his enormously rich mistress, Alice, Viscountess Wimborne, who was twenty years older but still beautiful, gave ‘Willie’ a flat and persuaded him to leave the Sitwells.
Sheltering and supporting Walton was a remarkable gesture on their part. While it included an element of posturing, it was nonetheless a piece of patronage in the grand style. It also gave Osbert the idea for encouraging other gifted acquaintances, if in a less demanding way.
The only entertainment Edith could offer in her shabby flat was mugs of tea and buns. Yet during the twenties every English writer of note went at least once up the stone stairs to her Saturday tea parties, filling the tiny drawing room to capacity. When she gave a party for her American poet friend Gertrude Stein, even Virginia Woolf accepted an invitation.
‘We were at a party of Edith Sitwell’s last night,’ Mrs Woolf reported to her sister Vanessa. ‘It was in honour of Miss Gertrude Stein who was throned on a broken settee (all Edith’s furniture is derelict, to make up for which she is stuck about with jewels like a drowned mermaiden).’12 Among other guests were Siegfried Sassoon and E. M. Forster. The refreshments consisted of bowls of cherries and jugs of barley water.
Edith dressed in an eye-catching style of her own invention, in brightly coloured pre-Raphaelite robes, with tall hats and bizarre jewellery. Huge rings of amber or ivory, of jet or aquamarine, were a speciality, as she was very proud of her hands. The effect was not always quite what she intended, however. In 1923 she was mobbed outside a music hall, mistaken for the comedienne Nellie Wallace in costume – and Nellie’s most popular role was the Widow Twankey.
Yet women can see a beauty in one of their own sex that is imperceptible to men. Some female observers discerned a strange allure in Edith. Writing to Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf compared her to ‘a clean hare’s bone that one finds on a moor with emeralds stuck about it’.13 Perhaps Virginia was trying to make Vita jealous, but she also told her sister Vanessa that she found Edith very beautiful. Curiously, save for Wyndham Lewis (while painting her portrait), the only men who ever thought her beautiful were homosexual, such as Cecil Beaton or her platonic love, Pavel Tchelitchew.
Not only had Edith become one of the sights of literary London, but she possessed real influence in the literary world. So did her two brothers. After Façade, the Sitwells held an acknowledged position throughout the 1920s as trailblazers in the worlds of modern art and modern letters. Sir Edmund Gosse called them a ‘delightful but deleterious trio’, claiming in 1927 that the modern writers who interested the young most were the Sitwells, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Siegfried Sassoon – in that order.
During the same year a literary critic, Rodolphe Mégroz, devoted a whole volume to them, The Three Sitwells.14 ‘Sitwellianism’, he stated solemnly, is ‘a freak product of centuries of bucolic culture and continuously augmented tradition such as only the English county family can boast today, married to the evanescent spirit of futurism.’ Even if few people were able to swallow such nonsense, there were plenty who saw the Trio as an interesting phenomenon.
They had enemies, however, and not just Noël Coward. Wyndham Lewis suddenly turned against them, while the verse of all three was savaged by the poet and journalist Geoffrey Grigson. More seriously, in 1932 a Cambridge don, F. R. Leavis (in New Bearings in English Poetry) sneered, ‘The Sitwells belong to the history of publicity rather than literature.’ Leavis was an influential academic who carried much greater weight than Coward, Wyndham Lewis or Grigson, and his gibe did them lasting damage. But he missed the point.
‘The great thing about the Sitwells was that they believed, however idiosyncratically, that the arts were to be enjoyed,’ wrote Anthony Powell, more perceptively, ‘not doled out like medicine.’15 Cyril Connolly agreed. They were the ‘natural allies of Cocteau and the École de Paris, dandies, irreproachably dressed and fed, who indicated to young men just down from Oxford and even Cambridge that it was possible to reconcile art and fashion’.16
Yet the Sitwells were far more than fashionable dilettantes with a following restricted to the ‘Bright Young Things’. Even if it should not be exaggerated, their influence was much stronger than either Powell or Connolly, let alone Leavis, realised. While their writing (Edith’s verse occasionally excepted) was not of the first quality, they undoubtedly made a modest but lasting impact on the arts and really did help to shape taste.
They were convinced that the art of every age is worth investigating, and their interest in Baroque and Rococo paved the way for a more serious re-evaluation by Anthony Blunt and Denis Mahon, while they encouraged a new appreciation of Strawberry Hill Gothic. They also helped to create a whimsical, nostalgic mood which influenced Rex Whistler’s painting and Cecil Beaton’s photography and designs for the stage as well as a decorative style that Osbert Lancaster called ‘Curzon Street Baroque’. The mood was reflected as late as the 1960s in Lancaster’s own murals and stage sets.
The Trio lived as much for the extreme avant-garde as they did for the neglected past, with their admiration for the Paris School, affection for Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism, and worship of Picasso and Cubism. (Osbert had his head portrayed by Frank Dobson, who in those days was still influenced by Futurism and one of the most interesting sculptors in England.) Their love of the Romantic tradition in painting looked forward to the English neo-Romantics of the mid twentieth century, in particular to John Piper.