Sitwelliana, II

THE SCARLET TREE (381 pp.)--Sir Osbert Sitwell--Little, Brown ($3.50).

Sir George Reresby Sitwell of Renishaw was an extraordinary man. He spent money like water, dabbled in medieval lore, invented a musical toothbrush that played Annie Laurie. In a milder way, his wife, Lady Ida, was extraordinary too. Though she invented nothing, she also spent money like water (she once paid a large price for a pig said to be psychic), as befitted a daughter of the Earl of Londesborough and a descendant of the royal Plantagenets.

Sir George and Lady Ida had three children. Edith, the eldest, is the sad-looking, six-foot, sixtyish spinster now renowned for her exotic garb, her exotic prose, her "glittering plinths of jacynth" poetry. The elder son and successor to the title is Osbert: traveler, memoirist, novelist, literary crony of the King & Queen. The younger son is Sacheverell, amateur of baroque art, and biographer of Franz Liszt.

The Scarlet Tree is Vol. II of Osbert's autobiography, covering the period of his seventh to 17th years (1899-1909). Like Left Hand, Right Hand! (TIME, May 15, 1944), it is a combination of acute filial impiety, antique sentence structure and genuine literary skill. If anyone else had dared publish half its secrets, the Sitwell trio would have screamed with rage, summoned their solicitors and sued with a vengeance.* As it is, The Scarlet Tree is by no means the spectacular Sitwell history that may some day be written, but it is a family album with portraits in the best Sitwell style, and a precious, corrosive, amusing record of a swaddled & sheltered Victorian-Edwardian childhood.

The Little Sitwells. That childhood was so sheltered, so beset with nurses, governesses, tutors and eccentric relatives, that it is no wonder the three little Sitwells, grown up, confuse heredity--"that fragile scarlet tree we all carry within us"--with an extraordinary environment. Edith as a girl was hung with corrective clamps and braces, including a nose-shaper, and was forced to swing herself dizzy on rings and parallel bars.

Sir George, when not off resting in Italy or planning new marble fountains for the Sitwell estate in Derbyshire, would give Osbert earnest paternal lectures: "Unless you learn to play ping-pong properly, you can never hope to be a Leader of Men." Sacheverell was ruled by governesses and tutors to within an inch of his life. At four he was examining the architecture of Kensington Palace; at ten he was writing letters about Umbrian vases, Turkish armor, Stone Age remains.

Sousa on the Stomach. Sacheverell looked, says his brother, much as Henry VIII must have looked as a child: "broad face, green eyes and tawny hair." Edith was already "gothic" in aspect, gawky, nervous, dressed in expensive but "disfiguring" garments. She was nagged eternally by her mother, who was "always cruelly finding fault with her in front of other people." At 14 Edith's sensibilities had become so acute that she vomited on hearing John Philip Sousa conduct his brass band in London's Albert Hall.

Osbert was packed off early to the first of a series of fashionable schools and wound up, of course, at Eton. As he remembers them, they were all so horrible that he reviews the experience with "insuperable repugnance." He was highly unpopular with other boys, and, in turn, loathed both them and the masters. One of his contemporaries was Lord Digby's son, who frequently received a box of orchids from the family conservatory. Osbert sometimes got an orchid to wear in his buttonhole; he is "still grateful," he says, "for the magic with which these flowers temporarily touched so dreary an existence."

The existence as a whole was hardly dreary. Edith and Osbert performed musical marvels on a pianola, while Sacheverell, too young to pump, "listened to us both with a flattering air of respect and, even of rapture." A well-meaning aunt gave lectures on the social impossibility of otherwise well-meaning people who pronounced girl as gurl. There were ancestral ghosts in Tudor or Jacobean chambers, and the spectacle of daily prayers, attended by a long line of footmen and housemaids, "seemingly well-drilled as a corps de ballet." Big-eyed, the little Sitwells took everything in. Their world was almost as special as their scarlet tree.

* A reckless British reviewer once observed in print that the Sitwells were "literary curiosities . . . whose energy and self-assurance pushed them into a position which their merits could not have won. . . . Oblivion has claimed them and they are remembered with kindly, if slightly cynical, smiles." The Sitwells promptly sued for libel, were awarded damages of -L-350 each (TIME, March 3, 1941).

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