One of the meanest and truest things that have been said about the Sitwells was F. R. Leavis’s comment that they belong not so much to the history of literature as to the history of publicity. The three Sitwell siblings, Edith, born in 1887, Osbert, five years her junior, and Sacheverell, five years younger still and known to family and friends as Sachie, were among the earliest examples of that twentieth-century phenomenon, the person who is famous for being famous. In his gossipy and pleasantly readable new biography of Osbert Sitwell, Philip Ziegler estimates that at the height of Osbert’s success, for every one person who had read his books there were ten who knew something of him and his family. Today the ratio would probably be more like one to a thousand. Most educated people know who Osbert Sitwell was, but you don’t often see anyone curled up with one of his books, not even Left Hand, Right Hand!, the five-volume autobiography that was so extremely popular during the Forties and Fifties.

The cover design for the new biography is telling, for “Philip Ziegler” is printed in letters at least twice the size of those in “Osbert Sitwell.” This is perhaps as it should be: Ziegler, the clever and graceful biographer of William IV, Melbourne, Diana Cooper, Mountbatten, Edward VIII, and Harold Wilson, has proved over the course of his career to be a far better writer than Sitwell ever was. Mediocre poetry and fiction, moderately amusing travel writing, light journalism, and autobiography: Sitwell’s work has not stood the test of time. It is hard to credit that in his day some very intelligent people believed him to be one of the foremost writers of his generation. Today’s readers are liable to be alienated by his work’s aristocratic plumminess, what Ziegler aptly describes as its “clotted-cream lyricism,” and to see the point of Michael Holroyd’s complaint that “at its most elaborated and elongated his prose reads like that of Sir Thomas Browne, after being translated into French by Proust and subsequently rendered back into English by Henry James.”

Ziegler is fully aware of his subject’s second-rateness, and even admits to having at first doubted whether Osbert was worth a book. (He refers to him throughout as Osbert, not out of familiarity but to avoid confusing him with the other famous members of his family; I will follow suit.) “Often over the past few years,” he says, “I have wondered if I were writing only for my own entertainment and for a handful of kindred spirits who are happy to grub around among such disregarded fossils… . Yet at the end, I am satisfied that Osbert is worth a book; not so much for what he did as for what he was.”

England between the wars enjoyed a sort of literary silver age. Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Henry Green, Aldous Huxley, Anthony Powell, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, John Betjeman, Nancy Mitford, and Cyril Connolly were all in their heyday; they knew one another, corresponded, commented extensively on one another’s work, characters, and sex lives. Osbert Sitwell was not a heavy hitter with- in this society, but he was one of its more colorful figures, pompous, bitchy, exhibitionistic, and a ready purveyor of scathing wit.

Ziegler cannot help liking Osbert, and treats him with an endearing protectiveness. For instance: “About halfway between the two world wars, Osbert found his poetic voice. It was not a very loud voice nor necessarily one well calculated to resound down the centuries, but it was individual, authentic, and in its own way curiously beguiling.” While openly acknowledging Osbert’s egotism, irritability, and snobbery (“Osbert attached immense importance to his royal connections… . [H]e never missed a chance to hobnob with royalty and rarely failed to refer to such intimacies when an opportunity arose or could be contrived”), it is clear that Ziegler became very fond of his subject during the course of his research.

Osbert was proud of his aristocratic ancestry, a fact of which anyone who has labored through the first volume of Left Hand, Right Hand! must be aware. It was indeed “imposing, if not quite so splendiferous as he, and still more his sister Edith, were accustomed to assert,” writes Ziegler. The family had been landowners for over six hundred years; the magnificent but cold and gloomy family seat, Renishaw, was built in the seventeenth century. The family fortune came from manufacturing, a regrettable fact discreetly glossed over in Left Hand, Right Hand!; the baronetcy was a gift from the Prince Regent to an ancestor of Osbert’s who rejoiced in the Wodehousian name of Sitwell Sitwell. On his mother’s side Osbert was descended from the Dukes of Beaufort, hence from the Plantagenets: to Osbert and his siblings, this “was a subject of infinite satisfaction.”

Osbert’s father, Sir George Sitwell, was an eccentric, but not nearly so grotesque as the caricature in Osbert’s autobiography. Thousands of readers laughed at Sir George as limned by Osbert, but “few,” Ziegler writes, “stopped to consider what bitterness must lie behind this pillorying of a parent, or whether it was proper for a son to decry his father with such gusto.” An egotist of gigantic proportions, selfish, tyrannical, and detached, Sir George could not have been an easy father, but then Osbert, as selfish as his father and far more malicious, was not an easy son. Kenneth Clark found Sir George “nicer and sadder than Osbert allowed in his ungenerous portrait”; Sachie wrote that “He wasn’t nearly as comic a figure as [Osbert] made him appear. He was a much nicer person. I think he was much nicer than Osbert.” Ziegler obviously shares Sachie’s opinion, and deplores the large portion of Osbert’s life that was wasted in pointless guerrilla warfare against a father who would dearly have liked to be his friend.

Osbert survived at Eton, but didn’t shine; a contemporary remembered that “he spent most of his leisure at Westbrook’s, the Eton florists, arranging flowers.” He left in 1909, at the age of sixteen, unsure just what to do next. He expressed a tentative interest in the Diplomatic Service, but Sir George leaned more toward the military, and Osbert was sent to a crammer. He failed the entrance exam for Sandhurst (“in those days no easy matter,” as he ruefully admitted), then failed it again. He eventually joined the XIth Hussars, but finding the cavalry uncongenial, for he detested horses, machinery, and guns, transferred to the Grenadier Guards. When war was declared in 1914 he went to France with his regiment.

Osbert’s experiences in the trenches turned him into a lifelong pacifist. It was during the war that he began to write poetry, and it was war poetry very much in the spirit of what his friends Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were producing, though hardly of the same quality. “If not blazing a solitary trail,” Ziegler writes with characteristic diffidence, “Osbert was at least in the forefront of the new poetic movement.” Back in England, he honed his modernist credentials by attacking the so-called Georgian poets. Typically, Osbert the polemicist chose to ignore the many pieces of first-rate work which had been published in the Georgian Poetry volumes, and his clever modern dismissiveness did not find favor everywhere: Eliot, for example, expressed contempt for “the poets who consider themselves most opposed to Georgianism and who know a little French.”

It was during World War I that the Sitwells began to operate as a team: to be precise, at a poetry reading in Lady Colefax’s drawing-room in December, 1917. The cultivation of a group identity turned out to be a brilliant ploy. Each Sitwell in his own way was striking, but together they made an indelible impression. As the years wore on and their work and lives diverged, they would come to resent their corporate identity: in 1949 Edith scolded, “We do not like to be treated as if we were an aggregate Indian god, with three sets of legs and arms, but otherwise indivisible. We have all three suffered very much from this. It vulgarizes and cheapens everything and deprives all the work of its importance.”

But as Ziegler demonstrates, they had no one to blame but themselves, and in their triumphant publicity tours to the United States after the Second World War—at about the same time Edith registered her complaint—they continued to capitalize on their attractions as a trio. There, Ziegler writes, “they were confident that they would give a good account of themselves but had some doubt whether the Americans were worthy of them and whether they would be properly appreciated.” In the event, they were appreciated beyond their wildest expectations; they basked in the adulation.

Osbert was a homosexual of a masculine, repressed type. In youth, as an eligible bachelor, he had had a “nasty fright” when he was briefly pursued by Violet Keppel, later Violet Trefusis: “By Jove, I wish he’d accepted her!” her husband, Denis Trefusis, remarked when told of the incident many years later. Osbert was fearful and extremely circumspect about his sexuality, often registering his disapproval of those who came across as too gay. “Once he and Harold Nicolson were side by side filling in embarkation cards before a Channel crossing. ‘What age are you going to put, Osbert?’ asked Nicolson. ‘What sex are you going to put, Harold?’ Osbert retorted.”

The person Osbert eventually chose as a life-companion was David Horner, a tall, beautiful young man of “corroding frivolity” a few years younger than himself, a junior member of the ancient Horner family of Mells Abbey. Horner had little money of his own, but had recently been left a fortune by an older friend. He banked the cash and lived more or less off Osbert until very nearly the end of their days, some forty years later. “If Osbert thought he was getting value for money,” Ziegler writes rather stiffly, “and did not begrudge supporting the partner he loved, there is no reason a biographer should be more censorious.” He can’t help it, though: Horner, “a big gay butterfly, fluttering around and drawing honey from all the flowers,” according to Osbert’s secretary, emerges as the evil sprite of this story, a compulsive troublemaker who purposely did a great deal of damage to Osbert’s relations with his siblings and his friends. He also, says Ziegler,  

reinforced Osbert’s baser prejudices. He was a snob… . He was a racist… . He was an anti-Semite, of a violence which made Osbert’s previous tendencies seem almost benevolent. His wit was almost invariably unkind… . His impatience and fretfulness were notorious… . All of these were frailties which Osbert shared and all of them became more marked as time wore on.

Sir George Sitwell died in 1943, and Osbert inherited the title and estates. “I love being a baronet,” he gloated with characteristic frankness. “It’s the most heavenly new toy.” He also loved being in control of the family fortune, and rather unexpectedly—for he had been a life-long spend- thrift—he managed it very well, leaving it in a substantially improved condition to his heir, Sachie’s son Reresby, upon his own death twenty-six years later.

As early as 1949 he began to notice tremors in his hands, the first signs of Parkinson’s disease, which was to blight his last years and turn the one-time dandy into a cripple pathetically dependent on the ministrations of others. Surprisingly, the irascible Osbert showed courage and real gallantry as the dreadful disease progressed. Travel, which had always been meat and drink to him, he kept up to the bitter end. “Getting in and out of gondolas will prove a difficult proposition,” he told a friend, apropos a trip to Venice in 1967; “More amusing for bystanders than for me.”

Osbert died in 1969. His career had been a triumph of willpower and oomph over the limitations set by mere talent. As a writer, he was never up to much, and although Ziegler claims that Left Hand, Right Hand! is an “unequivocal masterpiece,” in my opinion he is very much mistaken. Perhaps his affection for Osbert has clouded his judgment. One of the attractive elements of this biography is the way that Ziegler tries and fails to repress his own emotional responses: his dislike of Edith, for example, his virulent distaste for David Horner, his almost perverse good will, in spite of all their faults, towards Sir George and Osbert.

For there is no doubt that Osbert was not a very admirable human being: even his closest friends felt, and were infected by, his constitutional malice. Siegfried Sassoon, who knew him extremely well, found it difficult to be his friend.

Something in his character makes it impossible for me to feel kindly towards him. His neurotic spite and jealousy are ill-concealed by his ‘social charm’. He seems incapable of serenity, or of tolerance of his contemporaries. His portrait should be a restless reflection in a valuable gilt Chippendale mirror. Peacock en casserole should be his staple diet. How tiresome he can be with his everlasting chatter about his antiquarian father; and his disreputably aristocratic mama; and his untidy financial affairs. Perhaps I am severe on him, but he is always merciless to everyone but himself and his brother and sister.

One feels that Osbert Sitwell must indeed have often been a tiresome person, and a treacherous one; it is Ziegler’s considerable achievement to have made his biography funny, compelling, and even charming while never pretending that Osbert was more or better than he was.