The Tail of Sir Osbert

LEFT HAND, RIGHT HAND--Sir Osbert SitwelI--Little, Brown ($3).

All scions, says Sir Osbert Sitwell, have a tail. A scion's tail, Sir Osbert explains, is the life of his ancestors, who spread out behind him like a peacock's fan, and whose influence is present "in every gesture and look, in every decision he takes." Sir Osbert is not only a scion with a tail that runs back almost to Piltdown man, but one of Britain's most iridescent contemporary writers (England Reclaimed, Escape with Me). Left Hand, Right Hand ("the lines of the left hand are incised unalterably at birth . . . those of the right hand are modified by one's actions") is a neo-Proustian, witty remembrance of things (mainly amusing) from the proud Sitwellian past. It is also a latter-day Book of Snobs, in which converge "all [the] diverse rays of lineage" that form that "mixture of blood which in England constitutes the aristocratic tradition."

Osbert's father was fourth baronet and Lord of the Manor of Long Itchington. "It is quite evident," he once remarked, "if you've read the family letters, that we've been working up toward something for a long time." At these words Osbert "experienced a slight lifting of the heart." But his father was not referring to the literary notoriety of his three children.* Sir George, wealthy landlord of the great Yorkshire estate of Renishaw (inherited by Sir Osbert in 1943) believed that art was merely "part of the general make-up of the cultured man." To prove it, he once tried to have "all the white cows in the park stenciled with a blue Chinese pattern."

Heraldry and Hustings. Though he never worked, Sir George was always busy. Twice Tory M.P. for the fashionable seaside resort of Scarborough, his chief political handicap was that he could never remember his constituents' names. When not immersed in heraldry, he spent his time sitting on a tall wooden tower in the park, a gray umbrella over his head, a telescope at his eye, figuring out his latest ideas in landscape gardening. "I don't propose to do much," Sir George would say casually, "just a sheet of water and a line of statues." He also liked practical jokes, if he was not the victim. Once he arranged a collapsible Chippendale chair for a stout alderman, then accidentally sat on it himself. When Osbert laughed, Sir George reproved him sternly: "I might have most seriously injured my back."

Sir George took special pride in his ancestor, Sir Sitwell Sitwell, an 18th-Century baronet who once hunted an escaped Bengal tiger over the Yorkshire moors with a pack of hounds. (Sir Sit-well's ghost occasionally appeared at Reni-shaw, peering gloomily through the glass front door.) Another ancestor was Lord Hutchinson of Alexandria and Knock-lofty, whose father succeeded in making one of his nieces the full-salaried colonel of a crack regiment. He protested bitterly when the War Office reduced the old lady to half pay.

Little Osbert pondered this genealogy as he lay on his mother's bed for hours every morning, staring at her gleaming bottles of perfume, vases of flowers, silver hairbrushes and the loop of thick rope that was knotted around the bed head. "A bit of hangman's rope, darling," Lady Ida would explain languidly. "Nothing's so lucky! It cost -L-8." Downstairs Sir George would be at work on a study of "the decorative motives employed in the leaden jewelry of the Middle Ages," or jotting down aphorisms in a notebook entitled The Wisdom of Life. Sample wisdom: "Never open a letter from a correspondent known to be troublesome, until after luncheon." Osbert never lunched with his father because Sir George believed that company "obstructed the normal course of the gastric juices," took lunch attended only by his favorite footman, Henry--whom he always called "The Great Man." Henry, when speaking to other members of the family, called his orange-bearded master "Ginger."

When little Osbert toddled into Renishaw Park, he gazed out across a countryside studded with great houses. Also beyond the park lay the iron mines and forges from which the great landlords got their income. At night the glare of the furnaces lit up the countryside "with a wild glory . . . causing the rabbits to be frozen for an instant into immobility . . . and making the great owl hiccup uneasily in the trees. . . . Gangs of miners returning from their work would tramp along the roads, wearing stuttering clogs, cord trousers and scarlet tunics" (for decades they bought the castoff jackets of the British Army). Osbert would run home to bed and Sir George would tell him a bedtime story about the Crusades.

Though Sir George had a horror of poor relations and believed friendlessness was the ideal state, guests flocked to Renishaw. Most unwelcome visitor was the Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Archibald Campbell Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury, who suffered from an "occupational disease" known as "episcopal sore throat." "Port was then held to be the best disinfectant," so a bottle of 1815 ("the finest vintage ever known") was always taken up to the archiepiscopal room by the Sitwells' awed butler. The Archbishop "gargled away bottle after bottle, year after year, until the large stock became exhausted."

Psittacosis and Circus Clowns. Periodically, Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell visited their fabulously wealthy grandparents, the Earl and Countess of Londes-borough. When the Earl went bathing, a mile of red carpet was laid down from his Scarborough villa to the sea. When he inherited his estate, he promptly gave all his chief servants checkbooks "so that they could draw on his funds . . . without worrying him." An excessive fondness for parrots caused the Earl's death (in 1900, from psittacosis). His hawk-faced wife, who once caused Napoleon III to burn with a hard gemlike flame, ran Londes-borough Lodge with an iron hand. Her brother, Lord Raincliffe, who had a passion for circus clowns and fire engines, often came to stay, locked himself in his room for hours every day, conducting imaginary orchestras. A more humdrum guest was Florence Sitwell, who ran a "home for fallen women," held "quiet Sunday afternoons in the garden" for local barmaids.

In 1900 famed U.S. Portraitist John Singer Sargent put the whole Sitwell family on canvas. (The picture is now at Renishaw.) "No picture, I am sure," says Sir Osbert, "could have given the artist more trouble, for my father held strong views concerning the relationship of the patron to the painter." Though Sir George rarely mounted a horse, he insisted on being portrayed in a dark grey riding jacket and boots.

The portrait was almost the summation of an epoch. A few months after Sargent finished it, little Osbert heard the village church bells toll for the death of Queen Victoria, and for the "sunset hour of one of the great periodic calms of history." Then he saw his aristocraticelders' lips move in bewilderment. "What shall we do now?" they said.

* The others: Edith (Collected Poems, The English Eccentrics, Victoria of England); Sacheverell (Life of Liszt, Old Fashioned Flowers).

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