Renishaw Hall

by Desmond Seward

  Edith’s poetry was being published to acclaim. It included the volumes The Sleeping Beauty in 1924, Troy Park in 1925 and Gold Coast Customs – one of her most important works – in 1929. Apart from Eliot, no Bloomsbury, let alone Georgian, could rival her and she was taken very seriously indeed. After reading Gold Coast Customs, W. B. Yeats commented that ‘something absent from all literature for a generation was back again, and in a form rare in the literature of all generations, passion ennobled by intensity, by endurance, by wisdom’.9

  She enjoyed playing to the gallery. All three of the Trio secured entries in Who’s Who fairly early in their careers, an indication of the impact they had made. Edith’s entry tells us archly how ‘in early life [she] took an intense dislike to simplicity, Morris-dancing, a sense of humour, and every kind of sport except reviewer-baiting; and has continued these distastes ever since’.

  If not in the same class as his siblings, Osbert strove manfully to keep up, churning out verse, essays and short stories, and even a single embarrassingly bad play, All at Sea, which he wrote with Sacheverell. Yet while his 1919 book of verse Argonaut and Juggernaut was mocked by traditionalists, it turned him into a poet who interested avant-garde critics. Discursions on Travel, Art and Life (1925) was also taken seriously – Frank Megroz thought it ‘entrancing’.

  His first novel, Before the Bombardment (1926), was a satirical recreation of the upper-middle-class life in Scarborough that had been ended by German shells. Although there was not much of a plot, the critic James Agate ranked it among the twenty best novels to appear since Dickens’ time, while it became a favourite of George Orwell.

  In Anthony Powell’s view, the weakness of all Osbert’s novels and stories was that while full of good ideas, he simply could not write well enough. Powell believed his real role was as a leader of literary fashion, a writer of lively letters to the newspapers, someone who kept the arts before the public eye – ‘by no means a useless function’.10 Even so, Before the Bombardment is still readable.

  Osbert banged the Baroque drum with enthusiasm, and not only in his Discursions. As a committee member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club, he wrote an introduction to the catalogue for its 1925 exhibition, Seventeenth Century Italian Art, in which he extolled artists such as Caravaggio, Carlo Dolci, Domenichino, Artemisia Gentileschi and Strozzi – all disdained by the pundits. Most of the pictures shown were loaned by great English country houses, including Renishaw, and Osbert helped to track them down.

  At Oxford, Sachie had ‘discovered’ the composer William Walton, who became almost an adopted brother. (Constant Lambert put about a rumour of William being Sir George’s son by that great composer Dame Ethel Smyth.) When Walton went down without a degree in 1920 Sachie and Osbert invited him to live in the attic at Swan Walk, and then at Carlyle Square, where he stayed for fifteen years. They paid for lessons from leading musicians such as Busoni and Ansermet, gave him clothing and pocket money, and took him to Renishaw and on their travels. They also contributed to his work; in 1929 Osbert selected and supplied the words for his immensely successful oratorio, Belshazzar’s Feast.

  Walton did not always make a good first impression – ‘rather like a maggot, but I believe he has more character than appears’, observed the novelist Edith Olivier.11 Disappointingly, he produced comparatively little music during his time with the Sitwells. Eventually his enormously rich mistress, Alice, Viscountess Wimborne, who was twenty years older but still beautiful, gave ‘Willie’ a flat and persuaded him to leave the Sitwells.

  Sheltering and supporting Walton was a remarkable gesture on their part. While it included an element of posturing, it was nonetheless a piece of patronage in the grand style. It also gave Osbert the idea for encouraging other gifted acquaintances, if in a less demanding way.

  The only entertainment Edith could offer in her shabby flat was mugs of tea and buns. Yet during the twenties every English writer of note went at least once up the stone stairs to her Saturday tea parties, filling the tiny drawing room to capacity. When she gave a party for her American poet friend Gertrude Stein, even Virginia Woolf accepted an invitation.

  ‘We were at a party of Edith Sitwell’s last night,’ Mrs Woolf reported to her sister Vanessa. ‘It was in honour of Miss Gertrude Stein who was throned on a broken settee (all Edith’s furniture is derelict, to make up for which she is stuck about with jewels like a drowned mermaiden).’12 Among other guests were Siegfried Sassoon and E. M. Forster. The refreshments consisted of bowls of cherries and jugs of barley water.

  Edith dressed in an eye-catching style of her own invention, in brightly coloured pre-Raphaelite robes, with tall hats and bizarre jewellery. Huge rings of amber or ivory, of jet or aquamarine, were a speciality, as she was very proud of her hands. The effect was not always quite what she intended, however. In 1923 she was mobbed outside a music hall, mistaken for the comedienne Nellie Wallace in costume – and Nellie’s most popular role was the Widow Twankey.

  Yet women can see a beauty in one of their own sex that is imperceptible to men. Some female observers discerned a strange allure in Edith. Writing to Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf compared her to ‘a clean hare’s bone that one finds on a moor with emeralds stuck about it’.13 Perhaps Virginia was trying to make Vita jealous, but she also told her sister Vanessa that she found Edith very beautiful. Curiously, save for Wyndham Lewis (while painting her portrait), the only men who ever thought her beautiful were homosexual, such as Cecil Beaton or her platonic love, Pavel Tchelitchew.

  Not only had Edith become one of the sights of literary London, but she possessed real influence in the literary world. So did her two brothers. After Façade, the Sitwells held an acknowledged position throughout the 1920s as trailblazers in the worlds of modern art and modern letters. Sir Edmund Gosse called them a ‘delightful but deleterious trio’, claiming in 1927 that the modern writers who interested the young most were the Sitwells, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Siegfried Sassoon – in that order.

  During the same year a literary critic, Rodolphe Mégroz, devoted a whole volume to them, The Three Sitwells.14 ‘Sitwellianism’, he stated solemnly, is ‘a freak product of centuries of bucolic culture and continuously augmented tradition such as only the English county family can boast today, married to the evanescent spirit of futurism.’ Even if few people were able to swallow such nonsense, there were plenty who saw the Trio as an interesting phenomenon.

  They had enemies, however, and not just Noël Coward. Wyndham Lewis suddenly turned against them, while the verse of all three was savaged by the poet and journalist Geoffrey Grigson. More seriously, in 1932 a Cambridge don, F. R. Leavis (in New Bearings in English Poetry) sneered, ‘The Sitwells belong to the history of publicity rather than literature.’ Leavis was an influential academic who carried much greater weight than Coward, Wyndham Lewis or Grigson, and his gibe did them lasting damage. But he missed the point.

  ‘The great thing about the Sitwells was that they believed, however idiosyncratically, that the arts were to be enjoyed,’ wrote Anthony Powell, more perceptively, ‘not doled out like medicine.’15 Cyril Connolly agreed. They were the ‘natural allies of Cocteau and the École de Paris, dandies, irreproachably dressed and fed, who indicated to young men just down from Oxford and even Cambridge that it was possible to reconcile art and fashion’.16

  Yet the Sitwells were far more than fashionable dilettantes with a following restricted to the ‘Bright Young Things’. Even if it should not be exaggerated, their influence was much stronger than either Powell or Connolly, let alone Leavis, realised. While their writing (Edith’s verse occasionally excepted) was not of the first quality, they undoubtedly made a modest but lasting impact on the arts and really did help to shape taste.

  They were convinced that the art of every age is worth investigating, and their interest in Baroque and Rococo paved the way for a more serious re-evaluation by Anthony Blunt and Denis Mahon, while they encouraged a new appreciation of Strawberry Hill Gothic.
They also helped to create a whimsical, nostalgic mood which influenced Rex Whistler’s painting and Cecil Beaton’s photography and designs for the stage as well as a decorative style that Osbert Lancaster called ‘Curzon Street Baroque’. The mood was reflected as late as the 1960s in Lancaster’s own murals and stage sets.

  The Trio lived as much for the extreme avant-garde as they did for the neglected past, with their admiration for the Paris School, affection for Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism, and worship of Picasso and Cubism. (Osbert had his head portrayed by Frank Dobson, who in those days was still influenced by Futurism and one of the most interesting sculptors in England.) Their love of the Romantic tradition in painting looked forward to the English neo-Romantics of the mid twentieth century, in particular to John Piper.

  All this was too much for Bloomsbury.

  Chapter 18

  RIVALRY WITH BLOOMSBURY

  nevitably, the Sitwells clashed with the Bloomsbury Group, who then dominated London’s literary and artistic scene. To put it mildly, their tastes were not the same. As the Trio saw it, the Bloomsburies were both iconoclastic and dogmatic, innovative yet limited.

  Another divisive factor was class. Philip Ziegler, author of the definitive biography of Osbert Sitwell, writes of him as being torn between pride of birth and belief in the artist’s superiority.1 This verdict, which is also true of his siblings, cannot be bettered. During the 1920s the patrician element in the image that they cultivated – elegant and haughty, with a great country house in the background – dazzled many. However, it rankled with the Bloomsburies, including Virginia Woolf, who felt that literati had no business to be ‘aristocrats’.

  ‘It is a period that is now thought to have roared with routs of ladies in low brimmed hats lurching out of the Eiffel Tower restaurant supporting their bearded Priapus; but its products were for the most part dismal and puritanical’ is how Kenneth Clark recalled the twenties. ‘In painting the dull purples and browns of Bloomsbury applied to a street-scene or still-life; in poetry the Georgians . . . It was a world in which fantasy, richness and elaboration were completely excluded. Into this world of virtuous fowls, laying their identical eggs, there strayed three golden pheasants – the Sitwells.’2

  At first, the Trio courted the Bloomsburies, who were not unfriendly. Osbert and Sachie were impressed by what Roger Fry and Clive Bell had written on Impressionism, which encouraged them to go to Paris and find pictures for their 1919 exhibition. However, they soon developed reservations.

  They rejected Roger Fry’s pseudo-classicism and Clive Bell’s ‘Significant Form’. In contrast, they admired the Vorticists (who in 1914 had rebelled against Bloomsbury’s adulation of the French Impressionists above all other painters), and they even contemplated mounting a Vorticist exhibition in Paris, despite the movement having petered out during the war.

  Another reason for the parting of ways was the Bloomsbury Group’s sheer drabness. Looking back from the 1970s, Cyril Connolly wrote that the Sitwells had not merely combined art with dandyism, the only valid alternative to Bloomsbury,3 but tried to build their own group. What made friction inevitable was that the Bloomsburies were no less self-obsessed, if smug rather than haughty. Nevertheless, Osbert and his siblings stayed on outwardly friendly terms with the leaders – the Woolfs, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry – whom they referred to in private as the ‘Junta’.

  There were no open hostilities and the Junta were invited to dine, but it was an uneasy relationship. Ziegler imagines the atmosphere at these dinner parties as resembling that in Glencoe between MacDonalds and Campbells, just before the massacre.4 The Junta did not think much of Osbert’s or Sachie’s verse, if one or two felt a reluctant admiration for Edith’s. Nor, except for Roger Fry, did they like Baroque art. Even Fry was astounded by Osbert’s enthusiasm for C. R. W. Nevinson, whose work he himself dismissed out of hand.

  The cold perfectionism of Cambridge University, which had formed the minds of more than a few Bloomsburies, was incomprehensible to the Trio. And while the immaculately tailored Osbert made fun of the flaming red ties and shaggy tweed suits affected by male Bloomsburies (‘woven from the manes of Shetland ponies’), the Bloomsburies claimed to despise Sitwell ‘dandyism’. Yet the Trio’s patrician background secretly impressed the Junta, even if they did not care to say so. One need only contrast Charleston, the Sussex farmhouse that epitomised the good life for Bloomsburies, with Renishaw to see why. But sometimes they admitted in their diaries what they thought in private.

  After their first meeting in May 1925 at his house in Carlyle Square, Virginia Woolf (always a crashing snob) wrote, ‘Osbert is at heart an English squire, a collector, but of Bristol glass, old-fashioned plates, Victorian cases of humming birds, & not of foxes brushes & deers horns.’ She added, ‘And I liked him too.’ But in March 1926 she grumbled, ‘They’re aristocrats, I say, thinking criticism upstart impertinence on the part of flunkeys.’ She also remarked that he had a ‘very sensual, royal Guelf face’. Later she sneered that in Osbert’s prose ‘the rhododendrons grow to such a height’, while she described his collected poems as ‘all foliage and no filberts’.5

  For his part, Osbert thought Virginia something of a joke, claiming that she and E. M. Forster must be the natural children of a secret love affair between George Eliot and Ruskin. At one of his Carlyle Square dinner parties Virginia said she knew ‘Captain Sitwell’ said horrible things about her, which was all too true, although he blandly denied it. Just before her arrival, he had told guests she would come wrapped in an old lace curtain from a Notting Hill boarding house that smelt of mothballs – probably a not entirely unfair description of the impression made by Mrs Woolf’s wardrobe.

  Nonetheless, he quite liked her. ‘Her beauty was certainly impersonal, but it was in no way cold, and her talk was full of ineffable fun and lightness of play and warmth.’6 If there was a streak of malice in her, he adds, there was also unusual gentleness and kindness. Yet despite expressing admiration for her prose, not a single copy of any of her books was in his library at Renishaw.

  Even so, there was friendship between them – of a sort. In 1940 Osbert published Two Generations, his great-aunt Georgiana’s memoir of Renishaw with his aunt Floss’s journal. (Printing these had been the idea of his father, who edited them, but insisted that Osbert should take the credit.) Virginia wrote to him to say how much she enjoyed it, saying somewhat surprisingly that she had liked Florence more than Georgiana had.7

  Vanessa Bell also wrote to Osbert in April the following year, in reply to what had clearly been a moving letter of sympathy from him after Virginia’s suicide. Vanessa then recalls a recent letter from him about a dinner party where she and Osbert had been guests.8 There is no hint of enmity.

  A Bloomsbury for whom Osbert had nothing but praise was T. S. Eliot, whose poetry he described as an enormous source of pleasure and excitement. He was fascinated by the American with the strange, bony features. Such unqualified admiration was all the more remarkable in view of Eliot’s contempt for Osbert’s own verse, which he openly dismissed as third-rate, and his declining an invitation to Renishaw.

  Osbert was not so complimentary about other Bloomsburies. After Lytton Strachey was safely dead he wrote that he had looked like a pelican, or a satyr-like Father Time. (Yet, when writing of Sir George, Osbert may have well been influenced by Strachey’s iconoclasm in Eminent Victorians.) He also made fun of Roger Fry, apostle of Cézanne and Van Gogh and pioneer of ‘avant-garde painting’, claiming that Fry had once been a fervent admirer of Alma-Tadema and that Fry’s own early pictures were inferior versions of Alma-Tadema’s work. There could be no crueller insult, but Fry, too, was dead when Osbert made it.

  At the end of the war and just after, he was close to Aldous Huxley – on the fringes of Bloomsbury – but in 1921, Huxley gave a character in Crome Yellow traits that were recognisably those attributed to Sir George by his son. Worse still, he caricatured Osbert himself in a short story (‘The Tillotson Banque
t’) as Lord Badgery, a rich, pacifist peer with pig’s eyes, thick lips and a ‘Hanoverian nose’, who revelled in malice and every two minutes changed any topic he was discussing. It ended their friendship.

  Looking back, Edith – an equally good hater, and vicious when she thought other writers failed to admire her work – savaged ‘this world of superior intellect’ whose inhabitants seemed ‘inexplicably intertwined’. ‘The trouble was,’ she told her friend Elizabeth Salter, ‘the Bloomsbury group civilised all their instincts away.’9 She enjoyed Gertrude Stein’s gibe that Bloomsbury society was like the Young Men’s Christian Society with Christ omitted, observing that some male followers looked as if they were foetuses waiting to be born.

  She tells us she knew Lytton Strachey only slightly and did not care for his work, saying that he saw the people about whom he was writing in profile, never full face. She also referred to his ‘nibbling, rat-like little books’, although she owed a good deal to his style in her own prose histories.10 When his letters to Virginia Woolf were published, they made Edith ‘blush all over’ with their feminine mannerisms and name-dropping, while his long ‘gardener’s beard’ reminded her of a comic demon in a Russian ballet. Nor did she like the way he snubbed people. Fortunately, she did not know that Strachey had said her nose resembled an anteater’s and called her poetry absurd.

  However, Edith was fond of Roger Fry, who painted her portrait several times. Fry’s hopeless impracticality made her laugh, while she admired his gift for making and keeping friends. She also liked Aldous Huxley and his first wife Maria, of whom she saw a lot during the twenties. Huxley she regarded as one of the most accomplished talkers she had ever met, revelling in his monologues on the love life of the octopus with ‘so many arms to enfold the beloved’, or on that of melons – no melon, apparently, was safe from the advances of another melon. She considered T. S. Eliot, a loyal friend, to be one of the greatest poets of the last hundred and fifty years.