n 1950 a specialist informed Osbert that he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, possibly due to undiagnosed encephalitis (a viral inflammation of the brain) caused by the Spanish flu that had nearly killed him thirty years before. Because of inadequate medication, Parkinson’s was an even worse affliction than it is now. But for some years Osbert managed to lead a reasonably normal life.
In August 1957 Waugh paid him another visit, writing when he got back to Combe Florey, ‘Thank you for days of enchantment.’1 He recalled it a little differently in a letter to the Duchess of Devonshire. ‘The talk is mostly of medicines. I just managed to keep my end up on sleeping draughts but Mr Hartley has us all beat by a great [insect] bite in the left foot over which he has consulted two doctors and a chemist.’2 It was Waugh’s last visit.
Despite his increasing disability, Osbert continued to write and went on sending copies of his books to Waugh, who in 1959 thanked him for yet another, Fee Fi Fo Fum. This was a reinterpretation in a 1950s setting of English fairy stories, such as Jack and the Beanstalk. Waugh, who had just returned from Africa, adds, ‘I was asked to dinner by a native chief in Tanganyika who said “Don’t dress. Come in your tatters and rags.”’3
By now, Osbert fell over constantly. When he lunched at Chatsworth in the summer of 1960, he had to be carried into the dining room by the Duke of Devonshire and Lord Antrim. Ann Fleming, who was present, reported to Waugh that ‘during the meal his fork started knocking against his plate, the din was awful, and it was difficult to maintain unembarrassed conversation’.4
In October that year he underwent an operation on the brain. The result was encouraging. To some observers, he looked healthy enough, while his speech and handwriting improved. But it was a temporary respite that would last less than three years.
Meanwhile, Edith’s feud with David Horner came to a head. In her letters to Sachie she referred to ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’, ‘the creature’ or ‘the animal’, later claiming that only her newfound religious faith had stopped her from murdering him. She was shocked by his homosexual affairs. It is only fair to say that even observers less biased than Edith found Blossom grotesque, W. H. Auden laughing at him as ‘a rose-red cissy, half as old as time’.5
Horner returned Edith’s loathing, claiming that she had been driven mad by sexual frustration and ought to be in a lunatic asylum. By now her drinking was out of control, she fell frequently and made noisy scenes, all of which he cited in support of his theory. Penelope Sitwell recalls an atmosphere of mutual hatred that was quite terrifying. When Edith went to hospital with a kidney infection, David insisted that Renishaw did not have the resources to look after such a sick woman and gave Osbert an ultimatum – either he or she must go.
In August 1960, Edith was forced out of what had been her home for two decades, even leaving behind Rex Whistler’s portrait. Despite her formidable personality, she could not cope with the day-to-day business of life: her finances were in chaos, and she had little ready money. No doubt, her father had supposed Osbert would provide for her, in the way he himself had provided for Aunt Floss. But her brother gave her nothing.
She took refuge at her London club for ladies, the Sesame, saved from bankruptcy by an admirer, Elizabeth Salter, who acted as her unpaid secretary and put her affairs in sufficient order to provide her with an adequate income.
It seems odd that he should behave so cruelly, as in some ways he was a kind man. (Although an agnostic, he had urged Edith to become a Catholic because he thought it might give her peace of mind.) But, ruthless in the pursuit of his own comfort, he would not tolerate the prospect of endless rows. As a friend of Sacheverell, the Byzantinist Sir Steven Runciman, observed, ‘The Sitwells could never stop quarrelling with each other.’6 Yet once they had been so united.
In a poem, ‘Serenade to a Sister’, Sachie expressed his sadness at being banished from Renishaw, ‘the lost paradise’.
Why
cannot I walk into the wood
We called the wilderness
Beyond the statues of the warrior and the amazon?
Why
cannot I walk into the wood
Through the wooden gate
where I was often frightened as a child
And look down to the lake between the trees?7
Edith must surely have shared his sense of loss.
Meanwhile, Osbert was far from forgotten in the land of letters. In January 1961, Graham Greene sent him a copy of the recently published A Burnt-out Case, inscribed, ‘For Osbert with great affection’. Greene was an old if not a close friend, who back in the twenties had told Osbert how much he enjoyed his verse, while Osbert admired his novels.
Early in 1962, Tales My Father Taught Me, which Osbert had begun years before, appeared as a postscript to his memoirs. In the final chapter, ‘The New Jerusalem’, Sir George – cutting the usual ludicrous figure – advises his son to emigrate to Canada or America and build a new Renishaw, a replica of the old. Although suavely amusing, the book was a last vicious kick at his parent – time had not diminished Osbert’s hatred. On this occasion, however, more than one reviewer realised the portrait bore little resemblance to reality.
The three Sitwells appeared together at a concert given at the Festival Hall on 9 October 1962 to celebrate Edith’s seventy-fifth birthday. In a wheelchair, heavily fortified by alcohol, during the first half Edith read in that beautiful voice some of her poems; these were intermingled with a Rossini sonata, a Mozart divertimento and Benjamin Britten’s setting of Still Falls the Rain, which was sung by Peter Pears. The second half was a performance of Façade, conducted by William Walton.
It was the very last appearance of the ‘delightful but deleterious trio’.
Blossom’s nemesis arrived in January 1963, when Osbert engaged Frank Magro as his valet. A Maltese bachelor in his thirties, a clerk in a travel agency and in no way a professional ‘gentleman’s gentleman’, Magro was fascinated by his employer. Catering for Osbert’s every whim, he not only washed, shaved and dressed him, but managed his correspondence and read to him – including the twelve volumes of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, in English. Soon he was promoted to private secretary. Horner, who recognised a rival, detested him.
Magro could be difficult, and his protective attitude to his employer became so irritating that Sacheverell grew to loathe ‘the Maltese’. At Renishaw the staff resented his pretensions, refusing to treat him as a ‘gentleman’. But Osbert rejected every criticism.
The improvement worked by the brain operation eventually wore off. In London Osbert sometimes went to his club, the St James’ in Piccadilly, where he made a tragic spectacle with his ravaged face and staring eyes yet still kept an air of Hanoverian distinction.8 He never ate at the club, for fear of spilling food over himself. When Magro came to take him home, he would be inserted with difficulty into a huge black overcoat with an astrakhan collar. He began to spend more time at Montegufoni for the sake of the climate.
In 1963 he broke with David Horner, whose promiscuity had been irritating him for some time. A year before, either drunk or chasing a handsome young cook, Blossom had fallen down a flight of stone stairs into a cellar at Montegufoni, cracking his skull and breaking an arm and several ribs. (There were rumours that he had been pushed.) A haemorrhage reduced him to a wreck, and despite a partial recovery he changed almost overnight into a querulous, fiendishly tempered old man who was incapable of controlling his rages. He also grew insanely jealous of Frank Magro. In consequence, when Osbert left for Italy in September he did so without Horner and never saw him again, after more than thirty years of friendship.
Renishaw became increasingly run-down. After the war, Osbert had even contemplated demolishing the ballroom until the house was classified as a building of historical importance in 1951.9 Roofs leaked, paper flapped on the walls. The gardens fell further into the decay into which they had been let slip during the war, with overgrown flowerbeds and unkempt lawns. Some of the statues were hidden by shrubbery.
During a visit in 1961 to retrieve Edith’s belongings, Elizabeth Salter was shocked by the neglect. Two years later, Nancy Mitford and her sister the Duchess of Devonshire found ‘a ghostly house’, Debo commenting, ‘I never saw such ingrained gloom’ – they doubted if Reresby would want to take it on.10
Osbert was further demoralised by Edith’s death in 1964, just before the publication of Taken Care Of, her embittered and sometimes spiteful autobiography. If occasionally grotesque, she had been the most gifted of the three, with a streak of genius. Throughout her life she suffered from loneliness and even terror, as he must have known; now that she was dead, did he reproach himself for letting Horner turn her out of Renishaw?
Evelyn Waugh’s last letter to Osbert, dated 10 December 1964, was one of sympathy for Edith’s death. ‘How well I remember climbing those stairs at Pembridge Gardens (?) Square (?) – sitting entranced by her anecdotes.’11 When Waugh himself died in the spring of 1966, Osbert – now a chair-bound wreck – wrote to his widow Laura to say how sorry he was. In her reply, she said of Evelyn, ‘I know he is much happier out of the world.’12 Osbert may well have envied him.
One consolation during these last years was John Lehmann, who had founded New Writing and The London Magazine. With the approval of all three he embarked on a study of the Trio as ‘leaders of taste in their time’. Its title, A Nest of Tigers, was inspired by Edith’s joke about herself and her brothers – ‘We are as happy as a nest of tigers on the Ganges.’ Lehmann let Osbert make corrections to the manuscript, so that the book, eventually published in 1968, ended up as a paean of praise. Osbert, who lived just long enough to have it read to him, was delighted. However, Sachie was incensed by the inclusion of Edith’s tale of being sent out when a girl to pawn their mother’s false teeth and buy a bottle of whisky. (This was to show that her childhood had not been unlike what she imagined was that of working-class poets.)
Back from Italy, Osbert visited Renishaw for a last time in the summer of 1965. He had grown so attached to Frank Magro while abroad that he let him eat with him in the dining room, which angered other members of staff. Although their employer could not put food into his mouth without Magro’s assistance, they refused to serve a valet and, when Osbert ordered them to do so, left en masse. He stayed on for another month, Frank cooking his meals and feeding him in the great red room beneath the family portraits. But the row had upset him so much that he trembled more than ever. He decided it was time to leave – for good.
The last years of Osbert’s life were lived out at Montegufoni, nursed by Magro. When he died in 1969 he had become almost blind, slumped in his wheelchair with his head on his chest, muttering inaudibly and forgetting in mid-sentence what he was trying to say. A heart attack finished him off in May. Sachie and Georgia, with their sons Reresby and Francis, were at his deathbed, and he was buried in the Protestant cemetery at Florence.
Sacheverell went on writing for nearly twenty more years. His books still found readers, if a dwindling band, and in 1984 he was made a Companion of Honour. He got on better with Reresby after Georgia’s death, occasionally visiting Renishaw. He died aged ninety in 1988.13
Today, few people read Osbert’s autobiography, and Sachie’s Southern Baroque Art is a museum piece. Edith continues to have admirers, however – a recent biographer calls her one of ‘the great poets of her generation’, although not everyone may agree.14
Yet it would be wrong to relegate the Trio to the level of their old Bloomsbury rival Lytton Strachey (even less read) and dismiss them as mere minor writers who occasionally had something interesting to say. Instead, they should be seen through Waugh’s eyes, as stimulating personalities who made a remarkable impact on their generation and on the taste of their period.
‘For all their faults, the Sitwells were a dazzling monument to the English literary scene,’ wrote Cyril Connolly, looking back at the twenties.15 They are well worth studying if we want to understand England in the heady years after the First World War. At the time, they really did seem delightful and deleterious.
Somewhat ironically, Renishaw Hall – which played a vital part in inspiring all three of them – does a better job of preserving their memory than any of their books.