Osbert Sitwell

Curiously, Osbert, the senior of the three extraordinary children of Sir George, has never had a major biography of his own, though both his siblings have. Perhaps would-be biographers thought that, after the glories of his multivolume autobiography, beginning with Left Hand, Right Hand, there was very little a biographer could add--and that any work he or she could do was bound to be overshadowed by the lambent prose and sprawling magnificence of their subject's own work. Fortunately, Philip Ziegler, who has created notable studies of Lord Melbourne, Lady Diana Cooper and Lord Mountbatten, took up the challenge and was able to survive with credit on both counts. He has the measure of the English aristocracy and its often peculiar ways, writes with considerable panache and has largely succeeded in making the extremely odd Osbert comprehensible if never entirely likable. It seems strange now, when they are seen largely as eccentric fringe figures, how Osbert, Sacheverell and Edith dominated English literary culture for much of the period between the wars, even to the point of becoming journalistic celebrities. On their American tours in the 1950s, Osbert and Edith became almost as celebrated over here. Edith had a fierce but small poetic talent and Osbert was a highly skilled man of letters who could turn his hand with equal facility to verse and travel journals, but who only really hit his stride in the magisterial memoirs. Indelibly snobbish, thin-skinned, imbued with all the unpleasant prejudices against Jews and dark-skinned people that were endemic to his time and class, Osbert could also be extremely generous, was a warm and witty (and endlessly extravagant) host and cherished many notable friendships. Despite his efforts, he may have never really escaped the shadow of Sir George, which he tried so hard to exorcise with ridicule in his memoirs. In midlife he implicitly acknowledged his homosexuality by taking on a companion, David Horner, who drove a wedge between Osbert and the rest of the family. The later onset of Parkinson's disease, against which he struggled hopelessly but courageously for years, further clouded his life at the close. Osbert's is a story that encompasses wide swathes of English cultural and social life in the first half of the century. Ziegler has told it so stylishly that even its hypercritical subject might have approved. Illus. not seen by PW. (Dec.)