In autumn 1915 he was in a reserve battalion at the Loos offensive, during which the British used gas for the first time. Shortly after occupying a German trench he saw really savage hand-to-hand fighting at bayonet point when the enemy counter-attacked. Still only twenty-three, he was promoted to captain. His platoon remembered him as brave and efficient, and were grateful for the trouble he took to see they had decent rations – and for buying them a Christmas dinner out of his own pocket.
In January he wrote his first poem, ‘Babel’. (The original, written in the trenches, survives at Renishaw.) It was not a very good poem, but it gave him a sense of having found a purpose for his life – if he lived. He spent the rest of the war turning himself into a poet.
Despite casualties all round him, with guardsmen – some of them school friends – pulped into bleeding fragments, hung out to die a lingering death on the barbed wire or maimed for life, Captain Sitwell bore a charmed existence. But in April 1916 he cut his finger, and the ubiquitous mud ensured blood poisoning. After several weeks in a hospital behind the lines he was shipped home, still seriously ill, to convalesce at Renishaw, where a qualified nurse was engaged to look after him – ‘which aroused the strongest feelings of competition in my father’.11
George, too old to fight, was serving his country in a different way. From 1916, damage done by German submarines to British shipping meant food was in short supply and had to be rationed. Farmers were paid subsidies to grow crops or produce meat on a bigger scale, so Sir George put 2,000 acres under the plough, supplying bumper yields of potatoes. His son sneered at the sight of his father driving round the estate in a dog cart with his agent; yet not only was Sir George’s produce useful but, because of the subsidies, it brought in a lot of money.
Although Osbert rejoined his regiment, he never served in France again despite repeated requests to do so. This was either because the medics diagnosed a weak heart, or because Lady Ida’s scandal had given his senior officers the impression that he lacked the ‘moral fibre’ to command troops in action. In any case, he was thoroughly disillusioned with the war.
He followed Siegfried Sassoon’s example in writing anti-war poems that appeared in the Nation. His disillusionment was expressed in his ‘World-Hymn to Moloch’ of 1917:
In spite of all we’ve offered up
Must we drink and drain the cup?12
When a former foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, provoked outrage by sending a letter to the Daily Telegraph urging the Allies to stop fighting and negotiate, Osbert wrote (from the Guards’ Club) to congratulate him. He also admired Sassoon’s public protest against a war that had turned into one of ‘aggression and conquest’.13
Meanwhile, Sacheverell joined the Grenadiers straight out of Eton. Diana Manners never forgot meeting him just after he did so, ‘a tall innocent boy in uniform – looking to my older, pitying eyes too tender and frail and quite unfit for the fearful trenches of Flanders’.14 However, bouts of severe ill health kept him away from the Front, in a training battalion at Aldershot. He spent much of the time with Osbert in London, where they leased a house at Swan Walk, Chelsea (paid for by Sir George), giving parties for their new intellectual friends and going to avant-garde art exhibitions and the ballet.
Sometimes the brothers went home to Renishaw – as did Edith, with whom they kept close contact. In 1916 she and Osbert published a slim volume of verse, only twenty-eight pages, which they called Twentieth Century Harlequinade – from a poem by Osbert. Both brothers contributed to the six anthologies of verse, Wheels, that Edith brought out between 1916 and 1921. Other contributors included Aldous Huxley and, less impressively, Nancy Cunard and Iris Tree. The slim volumes attracted attention, and helped the three Sitwells to acquire a place among the period’s avant-garde poets.
Edith was definitely the leader, however, publishing Clowns’ Houses and The Wooden Pegasus, and by 1920 she had become fairly well known. She also produced an elegant little book in prose, Children’s Tales from the Russian Ballet. She was trying to write verse in a new way, using simple, almost nursery-rhyme language combined with the imagery of French symbolism, looking for assonances and dissonances. The result was undeniably original.
Osbert and Edith also devoted a lot of time to what would today be called networking, cultivating anyone prominent in literature or art. Among the writers were a subaltern in the Manchesters, Wilfred Owen (who was killed just a week before the Armistice); Siegfried Sassoon; Lytton Strachey; Robert Graves; Aldous Huxley; and the ‘Super-Tramp’, W. H. Davies – who, rather surprisingly, became a great friend of Osbert. As for artists, Osbert had dinner with Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis at the Eiffel Tower restaurant in Fitzrovia, while Edith met Nina Hamnett, who took her to see Walter Sickert.
Others included Oscar Wilde’s friend Robbie Ross, and Sir Edmund Gosse, a highly influential critic who had ‘discovered’ Rupert Brooke. (On first seeing Gosse, Huxley described him as ‘the bloodiest little old man I have ever seen’.) Osbert invited Gosse to dine at St James’s Palace when he was Captain of the Guard. Another whom he wined and dined was the immensely successful novelist Arnold Bennett, who helped him become literary editor (with Herbert Read) of a quarterly, Art and Letters, although this ceased publication after barely a year.
Osbert failed to make much impression on Bernard Shaw or H. G. Wells, however, despite entertaining them lavishly. Others, too, had reservations. Referring to Wheels, in a letter to his brother of August 1917, Aldous Huxley sneered unpleasantly that ‘the folk who run it are a family called Sitwell alias Shufflebottom . . . I like Edith, but Ozzy and Sachy are still rather too large to swallow. Their great object is to REBEL.’15 Huxley would come round, but only for a time. Even so, when the twenty-year-old Sacheverell published his first slim volume of verse, The People’s Palace, the following year, Huxley – perhaps with tongue in cheek – called him ‘le Rimbaud de nos jours’.
On Armistice night 1918 the Sitwell brothers gave a small dinner party at Swan Walk for the great Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who bemusedly asked Osbert, ‘Qu’est que c’est, cette Aldershot? C’est une femme?’ when Sacheverell ran off to catch the last train. They had invited Diaghilev without having any idea that Germany was on the verge of collapse – even in November, many thought the war would continue for another two years.
The evening that they spent entertaining Diaghilev asserted their determination to be in the avant-garde, now that the Great War was over. ‘It’s quite evident, if you read the family letters, that we’ve been working up to something for a long time, for well over a century,’ Sir George had told Osbert.16 That ‘something’ was about to happen.
Chapter 17
‘SITWELLIANISM’
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 Sitwellia
n 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.
Renishaw Hall Page 14