Osbert Sitwell (18921969) was a minor belle-lettrist of the interwar years, who wrote some good short stories, a number of travel books, a five-volume autobiography and a few slim volumes of verse. In the normal course of events he would today be a forgotten figure, but he and his siblings (his sister Edith) and younger brother (Sacheverell) possessed great wealth and a flair for self-publicity, which is what has kept them on the literary map. Philip Ziegler admits to agonising about whether such a man is really worth a thorough scholarly biography, but in the end concludes he is. For many readers, doubts will still persist at the end of the volume, yet Ziegler's committed advocacy almost, but not quite, manages to lift his subject into a higher class.
Had he been portrayed as a character in fiction (he partly was, as Sir Clifford Chatterley in D.H. Lawrence's novel), Osbert Sitwell might have seemed an over-ripe creation. A Guards officer who could not shoot and hated the sound of gunfire, Sitwell was selfish and incompetent, unable to keep the most simple accounts, hopeless at anything that required hand-eye co-ordination, prickly, paranoid, venal, snobbish, dishonest (both intellectually and financially), anti-Semitic and a fascist sympathiser. He was also homosexual, a semi-invalid who suffered from chronic bronchitis and an abscess at the base of his left lung, and a man of such physical ugliness that his friend Ethel Mannin described him as "a large elegant fish, a salmon or a sturgeon, perhaps, or a very superior cod".
The deep dynamic in Sitwell's career was hatred of his father Sir George, a bird-brained, eccentric "know-all" aristocrat who bequeathed Osbert the huge estate of Renishaw in Derbyshire. Hatred of his father meant that he could never wholeheartedly play the expected role of patriarch, so he retreated into homosexuality of an active kind; his sister Edith, whose sexual identity was blurred in youth when her father insisted on treating her as a boy, remained at the passive level. The Sitwells formed a kind of intellectual laager round each other, praising each other's work wildly and logrolling shamelessly for themselves and their proteges. Osbert's chief claim to distinction, indeed, was his patronage of William Walton, an impoverished young composer but indisputably a major talent.
Ziegler struggles to make the reader feel some scintilla of sympathy for Osbert. He seems to have fought courageously in the first World War, to have shown good sense and moderation during the General Strike and again in the debates about the morality of nuclear weapons in the 1950s, and to have been fearless in his denunciations of the powerful. He described Churchill as "Grock and Nero, Heliogabalus and the Fratellini and a bad hospital case rolled into an inexplicable whole." But his meanness, money-mindedness, paranoia and snobbery constantly obtrude to subvert Ziegler's project. He turned down a begging letter from an unfortunate petitioner on the grounds that the poor man had written to him in pencil, yet lavished thousands (£4,000 in one cheque alone) on his lover David Horner and then recruited Edith to pour extravagant praise on Horner's picayune literary efforts.
Ziegler is measured, very human and very amusing about the foibles of Osbert and his siblings: he describes the grotesque Edith, with her ant-eater nose and absurdly inflated view of her own literary importance, as "always one to pour depthcharges into troubled waters". As a biography, this is a fluent, professional job but my sympathies are with those, like Noel Coward, who burlesqued the risible Sitwell trio, or concluded, with Lord Beaverbrook: "This family group is less than a band of mediocrities." Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis once devised their own literary Oscar for the book of the year combining the greatest pretension and the least talent, which they called the "Osbert". Despite Ziegler's able advocacy, it is the Larkin-Amis view of the Sitwells that is likely to prevail with posterity.
Frank McLynn is a biographer and critic
