Father Rides Again

LAUGHTER IN THE NEXT ROOM (400 pp.) --Sir Osbert Sitwell--Little, Brown ($4).

Life With Father is not merely the title of a play; it is fast becoming the right name for a whole period--the days when pounds were made of gold and fathers loomed over their children like oaks. Now that the oak is no more, a whole generation seems anxious to recall the vast, umbrella-like image of father in his prime.

Much of the fourth volume of Osbert Sitwell's "biography of a family" is devoted to the new forms of literature, music and painting that took root in Britain after World War I. But the old Victorian form of father, Sir George Sitwell, Bart., makes the other characters (even such brilliant ones as Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and T. S. Eliot) look slightly dwarfish. Something of father Sitwell's impressiveness can be judged from the fact that when 24-year-old Evelyn Waugh, already a hardened connoisseur of the old regime, first laid eyes on him, Waugh simply became incapable of speech --"struck mute, in a kind of ecstasy of observation."

Oh Never Leave Me! The secret of father Sitwell's impressiveness was not so much that he was very rich but that he never so much as recognized such enfeebling concepts as self-doubt and humility. He had well-founded doubts, however, of his children's self-reliance. "It is dangerous for you," he often informed Osbert, Sacheverell and Edith, "to lose touch with me for a single day." Like many Victorians, he invested his maddest behavior with an aura of impeccable sanity.

Seven sitting rooms of the Sitwell family seat, Renishaw, were used as studies by Sir George. Piled upon their floors like snowdrifts were heaps of documents concerning his incredible projects and affairs. Boxes of papers were neatly labeled, though not often correctly: thus, the box inscribed "Osbert's Debts" might well contain instead papers on "Pig-Keeping in the 13th Century," or "The Use of the Bed," or "My Advice on Poetry."

His proudest idea was a new egg ("The yolk will be made of smoked meat, the white, of compressed rice, and the shell, of synthetic lime ... It will be delicious"). Under his remorseless hand, builders labored for half a century constructing pavilions, terraces, bridges and lakes. And still, he was never happier than when giving help to others; e.g., telling his tailor how to cut trousers, his tobacconist how to roll cigarettes, his banker about the banking system of the medieval Florentines.

A believer in barter, he scandalized a housemaster at Eton by trying to pay for his son's education in pigs and potatoes. And when Osbert went to World War I with the Grenadier Guards, father Sitwell had, as usual, a practical suggestion to make. "Directly you hear the first shell, retire ... to the [cellar], and remain there quietly until all firing has ceased . . . Keep warm and have plenty of plain, nourishing food at frequent but regular intervals. And, of course, plenty of rest."

Mr. Whistler Regrets. Even time stood still for father Sitwell. In the late '20s he suggested throwing an "Artists' Party," was vexed to hear that all his intended guests (Sargent, Rodin, Renoir, Whistler, Degas) were too dead to attend. As for his children's literary efforts, he either maddened them by rewriting their poems ("Two brains, dear boy, are better than one"), or warned them, against literary excess ("My cousin . . . had a friend who killed himself by writing a novel"). One paternal judgment on his gifted daughter: "Edith made a great mistake by not going in for lawn tennis."

Nothing really affected father Sitwell's innate dignity--not even his habit of crawling on all fours around his house, a Malacca cane clenched between his teeth, in order to observe his latest building schemes from a fresh angle. But once, as Osbert remembers it, he did demean his noble station--when his butler, whose wages were overdue, politely requested an accounting. Shocked to the core by this impudence, Sir George stalked the shrinking varlet slowly across the room, finally whispered in his ear the terrible words: "Shut your ugly mug, can't you?"

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