Osbert Sitwell (1892–1969)

Osbert Sitwell earlier dealt exhaustively with all his relatives in his autobiography Left Hand, Right Hand! Tales My Father Taught Me is an afterpiece entirely devoted to his father.

Sir George Reresby Sitwell had no Napoleonic dreams; he was much too pleased with himself as he was. His passion was for messing about with the landscape of his native Derbyshire, creating grandiose gardens, installing great sheets of water, commanding elegant distant views. ".Such a mistake," he told Osbert, show more "to have friends: they waste one's time." Not wasting his own. Sir George did voluminous research on "The Correct Use of Seaweed as an Article of Diet," worked on a walking stick designed to squirt vitriol at mad dogs, planned an illustrated pamphlet entitled The Twenty-seven Postures of Sir George R. Sitwell. Projects like these ran in the family. A Sitwell kinsman went to the trouble of having his coat of arms carefully inscribed on his food. show less

Difficult for me to add much as a reviewer but it is a fascinating glimpse into an aristocratic family and the Victorian-era childhood of Sir Osbert Sitwell. For a reader in 2020, the high style of the writing can be almost as challenging as Shakespearian verse to move through. Long, meandering sentences with colons, semi-colons, dashes, and ellipses, and loaded with vocabulary so rich, you might feel like you're coming down with verbal gout. Sir Sitwell is highly perceptive of nature, his show more family history, and the artistic scene at the time. The final chapter of the book focuses on a family portrait painted by John Singer Sargent. The portrait was a sign of status for the parents but the childhood glimpse of the great artist by a young Osbert and his sister Edith influenced them later in life to become artists in their own write. I'll have to let this one sit for a while before I decide on whether I have the stamina to read the other five volumes. In any case, I'm glad there were writers like Osbert Sitwell with his sensibilities about the world giving us a slice of life that must now sound like an alien world to an audience a little more than a hundred years later.

The inner leaf of this particular edition shows inky hand prints of the author. show less

'A Place of one's Own' is a novella about a couple who retire to a northern seaside town and find that their new house (being sold at an unusually cheap price, of course) is haunted.

This is a very creepy story, written in the forties but evoking the recent Edwardian past. It is also quite funny (and rather snobbish), with humour deriving from the retired couple's attempts to integrate with local genteel society.

I thoroughly enjoyed it.

'Left Hand as we are born, Right Hand as we make it', July 27, 2014

This review is from: The Cruel Month (Left Hand, Right Hand! An Autobiography, Vol 1) (v. 1) (Paperback)
This is the first volume of Osbert Sitwell's memoirs, the first half of which is a consideration of his forebears, who make him what he is. These anecdotes are then followed by a glimpse into his own earliest years, finishing with a chapter recalling the painting of JS Sargent's famous portrait of the Sitwell family.
I felt show more some of Sitwell's narrative seemed to drift a little from the topic in hand, as he moves off to tell us about interesting writers, actors, royalty etc who don't really feature in the story: thus a trip to see a pantomime starring Dan Leno leads to an incorporated mini biography of that actor. Such facts are not uninteresting, but make this a slightly 'shapeless' work.
However he laces his writing with amusing stories, and at times quite poetic writing, that bring to life what it was like to be a child of aristocratic stock in the first years of the 20th century. show less