Osbert Sitwell

Sir Osbert Sitwell (1892-1969), 5th Baronet, was a minor British writer, most associated with the 1920s and 30s, one of the Sitwell writing family. A second-tier figure in English literature, he published poetry, novels and travel books, but he is most remembered today for his multi-volume autobiography, a classic of the nostalgic memoir genre. Here in this well-written study he receives the full biographical treatment that would have been accorded a major writer.

Philip Ziegler is a sympathetic but firm assessor of Sir Osbert's life and work, always plausible in his judgements, and ever alert to the nuances of a complex and multi-faceted personality. He is sensitive in dealing with Osbert's long repressed homosexuality. The writer never "came out" and certainly would have been appalled to see his private affairs discussed publicly. But everyone "knew". Sir Osbert lived for almost forty years with a younger man, David Horner, a distant relative of the notorious "Little Jack Horner" of literary fame. They travelled everywhere together, shared interests, were nearly inseparable. But ultimately they grew tired of one another, and it was sad to read how their relationship fizzled out amidst bitterness and recrimination.

But really, Osbert's most important relationship was with his older sister, Edith. They were both poets; she was a better one, and he knew it. Together - with their younger brother Sachevererll - they comprised one of the most eccentric families in English literature. ( )

Very well-written biography of a leading literary figure of the first half of the twentieth century, of whom I knew virtually nothing before I read the book. Meticulously researched, elegantly written and underpinned by humane judgements of all the dramatis personae, this is a biography which can be read with pleasure by anyone interested in either the history or the literature of the period. ( )

It can be hard to separate the Sitwells, held together as they were in their own and the public's eye as a social and artistic triumvirate. Victoria Glendinning disentangled Edith and Sarah Bradford prised away Sacheverell, but this is the first full-length life of Osbert Sitwell. That Philip Ziegler, one of Britain's foremost biographers, chose to cast his kindly light on him is an act that seeks to answer less than it asks.

Osbert resembled an ostrich or a "superior cod", depending on the observer. He wrote novels that struggled to be inferior, leaden verse and prose in which, Virginia Woolf remarked: "the hododendrons grow to such a height". And she liked him. His one work of any lasting merit was his five-volume autobiography, Left Hand! Right Hand!, a period-piece curiosity of which the principal victim was his father Sir George Sitwell, for whom he affected a vicious hatred. Where Sir George was a pennypincher, Osbert was a spendthrift, and while Sir George was eccentrically inventive (a musical toothbursh and small revolver for shooting wasps were two of his better ideas), his profligate son's main flair was for self-publicity and argument, unable as he was to resolve his position as an artist and an aristocrat.

What else can be said of the man? He served with some honour in the First World War, acted as a generous patron for artists such as Dylan Thomas and William Walton, and inadvertently inspired art, being lampooned by writers such as Noel Coward, Wyndham Lewis and D.H. Lawrence. Ziegler himself writes with a playful lyricism sorely lacking in his subject. He has researched meticulously and his judgements are generally sound, but despite this his motives for tackling such a man are never convincing. Osbert Sitwell found most things dull, dull, dull; it is to the credit of Ziegler, a past master of difficult men (Edward VIII, Lord Mountbatten) that this book is as eminently readable as it is. Let the Sitwell chapter now close. --David Vincent

A biography of Osbert Sitwell who, along with his siblings Edith and Sacheverell, was renowned for his bizarre behaviour and unusual talents. He was also a close friend and sometime sparring partner of T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connolly.