Word: osbert
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...notice: Communist Playwright Sean 0'Casey's Drums under the Window, which stirred personalities, poetry and politics into a uniquely Irish stew; Liberal Franz Schoenberner's Confessions of a European Intellectual, which touched more gaily than profoundly on the soul of European man; Tory Poet-Essayist Osbert SitwelPs The Scarlet Tree, which drew pay-dirt from the inexhaustible lode of English aristocratic peculiarities...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...