Osbert Sitwell

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Osbert Sitwell, 1919

Sir Francis Osbert Dingeverell Sitwell, 5th Baronet CBE CH (born December 6, 1892 in London , † May 4, 1969 at Castello di Montegufoni near Florence ) was a British writer and influential art patron. Immediately after the war, Osbert Sitwell, who had become a pacifist through wartime experience, ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the British House of Commons. In the 1920s, he was the center of an avant-garde cultural circle together with his siblings Edith and Sachverell .

Life

Family background

John Singer Sargent : left to right Edith, Sir George, Lady Ida, Dingverell and Osbert, oil on canvas, circa 1900

Osbert Sitwell came from an aristocratic but eccentric family in Yorkshire : His parents were Sir George Sitwell , 4th Baronet and Ida Sitwell. Osbert was the second child in the relationship. His sister Edith had been born five years earlier . Five years later, his brother Sachverell was born.

The parents' marriage was deeply shattered. George Sitwell had asked for the hand of 17-year-old Ida Emily Augusta Denison after he had met her twice. Until the wedding he was not aware that the lively daughter of Lord Londesborough and granddaughter of the 7th Duke of Beaufort , who corresponded to the ideal of beauty at the time, was probably mentally severely restricted due to an illness in childhood. She was barely able to write, was unable to multiply numbers and could not handle abstract values ​​such as money and developed an alcohol addiction in the first years of their marriage. In a 1915 lawsuit, George Sitwell testified about his wife:

“She was 17 years old when I married her. It was clear that her upbringing had been neglected, but I was sure that her mind and character would develop once she left her previous environment. However, since the beginning of the marriage, she has been completely incapable of appraising the value of money. She has never seen through business matters and is not aware of the commitments she takes on from time to time. "

Extremely wasteful, Ida went into debt again and again and spent three months in prison in 1915 after Osbert's father had refused to pay her debts after a particular excess. Although George Sitwell tried to avert this sentence after the conviction, this was no longer possible. A divorce would have led to social exclusion. All three of the couple's children suffered considerably from their parents' difficult relationship and showed solidarity with one of the two spouses at an early age. The mother's imprisonment strengthened the solidarity of the three siblings Edith, Sacherevell and Osbert. In Osbert's case, the incident increased hatred of his father.

Childhood and youth

Tamara Karsawina as Firebird, 1910. Osbert Sitwell saw it in a performance shortly before the start of the First World War, and even 35 years later described this as a life-defining experience.

Osbert Sitwell has claimed in his memoir that he was very attached to his father during his childhood. He attended private schools in Scarborough and Wokingham , later he became a student at Eton College and sought advice from his father on problems with classmates at that school. George Sitwell had an early influence on his son's literary education. He gave him a copy of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock , illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley , and suggested that he read the writings of John Ruskin and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species . George Sitwell also took his son on his travels to Italy. Osbert got to know Venice - his favorite city until the end of his life -, Rome, Florence and Naples. The break between father and son did not occur until Osbert's late teenage years, when his father increasingly feared that his eldest son would turn out to be just as wasteful as his mother.

Osbert had never felt comfortable in Eton, where a sense of community and sportsmanship was emphasized - he later jokingly claims that he owed his education solely to the Eton holidays. Osbert's desire to go to Oxford found no support from his father. George Sitwell was of the opinion that his son lacked self-discipline, and he hoped that a time in the military would teach him this. The Staff College in Camberley supposed for the entrance examination for his son Royal Military Academy Sandhurst prepare, but after Osbert was twice flunked the entrance exam, his father bought him a commission in the Yeomanry . He was immediately assigned to the 11h Hussar, one of the British Army's cavalry regiments.

For the unsportsmanlike Osbert, who was also not a good marksman, serving in the cavalry was a humiliating experience. He used every opportunity to drive from Aldershot , where he was based, to London, where he saw, among other things, the performance of Ballets Russes by Igor Stravinsky's Firebird , in which Tamara Karzavina danced the lead role. For Osbert, this was one of the formative experiences in his life. Around 35 years later he wrote in Good Morning

“I now knew where I was. As long as I lived, I would be on the side of the arts ... I would support the artist in every discussion and every opportunity. "

Guard officer

Philip Alexius de László : Margot, Lady Asquith, oil on canvas, 1909; As a young guard officer, Osbert was a regular guest at her invitations

Around the same time, his mother had again so heavily owed loan sharks that his father temporarily banned her from the family home. The family quarrel led to a nervous breakdown at Osbert. He was given leave of absence from his regiment for a long time and on his return his father arranged for Osbert to serve in the Grenadier Guards in the future . As an officer of this guard stationed in London, he had enough free time to accept invitations from London society. He was a regular guest at parties given by Margot Asquith , the wife of the British Prime Minister. He also stayed with Alice Keppel , the lover of the late King Edward VII, and became friends with Diana Cooper .

Osbert Sitwell received an annual payment of £ 700 from his father during this period to cover his expenses. Despite this relatively generous apanage, Osbert quickly got into debt with expenses for club memberships, extravagant clothing and entertainment, which led to violent arguments between father and son.

By the summer of 1914, George Sitwell had had enough of his son's extravagance. He informed Osbert that he would either have to forego the annual apanage or return to the family seat of Renishaw Hall and take a position in the Scarborough township . His military service would be limited to serving in the reserve. Osbert would have been forced to follow his father's wish or to be left without financial means. However, the outbreak of World War I prevented Osbert from taking up his position with the Scarborough city council. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War he was called up for military service.

First World War

During the First World War , Sitwell fought near Ypres . He made his first experiences of trench warfare shortly before Christmas 1914. In Laughter in the Next Room (1949), Osbert recorded how deeply he was shaken by the destruction of the ongoing bombing. Osbert spent four days in each of the trenches, comparing them to coffins over which death brooded before he could recover four days behind the front. To escape the madness of war and the unbearable boredom in the trenches between attacks, he read Dickens, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. George Sitwell sent his son waterproof boots, antiseptic soap, and flea powder and urged him to write whatever he needed.

Roger Fry : Portrait of Edith Sitwell, oil on canvas, 1915; as early as 1916 Osbert Sitwell published a first volume of poetry together with his sister.

As early as 1915, Osbert, who was 23 at the time , was promoted to the rank of captain . In January 1916 he wrote his first poem, which was entitled Babel . Writing poetry made him feel like he had found a purpose in life. Together with his sister Edith, he published a small volume of poems as early as 1916, which, based on a poem by Osbert, was entitled Twentieth Century Harlequinade .

In April 1916, he suffered a small cut on a finger, which led to blood poisoning under the living conditions in the trenches . It was so serious that after several weeks in a hospital behind the front line, Osbert, who was still seriously ill, was ordered back to Great Britain. He was supposed to recover at the Renishaw Hall family home. After his recovery, Osbert was not reassigned to the front, although Osbert had asked to be transferred there. It is unclear whether his superiors refused to allow him to continue working at the front because doctors diagnosed him with a weak heart, or whether the scandal surrounding his mother Ida's imprisonment had raised doubts among his superiors as to whether he had the strength of character to have troops in one To wage battle.

Osbert continued to write poems that, like Siegfried Sassoon's, reflected his disillusionment with World War I and appeared in the British weekly newspaper The Nation . Like Sassoon, Osbert had come to believe that this phase of the war was all about conquest.

Osbert's younger brother Sachverell had started his military service with the grenadiers immediately after graduating from Eton College . However, a series of several serious illnesses prevented his frontline deployment and he served in a training battalion in Aldershot. He spent as much time as he could with his brother in London, where he had now rented a house in Chelsea. Dingverell, like his brother, was interested in culture and together they attended avant-garde art exhibitions and modern ballet performances. Both brothers contributed poems to the six anthologies that their sister published between 1916 and 1921. Other contributors included Aldous Huxley , Iris Tree, and Nancy Cunard . On the day of the armistice, the great Russian impresario Sergei Pavlovich Dyagilev was the guest of the two brothers for dinner.

Years after the First World War

Lady in a Red Hat - Vita Sackville-West , painting by William Strang , 1918

In 1919 Osbert Sitwell contracted the Spanish flu , an epidemic of flu caused by an unusually virulent derivative of the influenza virus ( subtype A / H1N1 ) that killed tens of millions of people worldwide. The illness resulted in Osbert's health problems for the rest of his life. Osbert hoped to make a name for himself as one of the outstanding writers of his time and for a long time was unable to see that he lacked the talent for it. However, he became one of the great art patrons of his time.

In the years after the First World War, Osbert Sitwell and his siblings in London formed the center of an avant-garde cultural circle, including Margot Asquith, Raymond Asquith , Nancy Cunard, Vita Sackville-West , George Moore , Lady Diana Cooper , Alice Keppel and others their daughter Violet Trefusis . Edith Sitwell was the best known of the three siblings. In addition to the anthologies she edited, she had also published her own volumes of poetry and published the prose work Children's Tales from the Russian Ballet . The siblings were in close contact with numerous writers. In addition to Aldous Huxley, they knew Wilfred Owen , who had fallen shortly before the armistice, and Siegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey , Robert Graves and the Welsh poet WH Davies , who became close friends with Osbert. A highly successful novelist at the time, Arnold Bennett helped Osbart become editor of a quarterly art magazine. However, this publication stopped appearing after a year.

Osbert Sitwell (right) with his brother Dingverell, 1925

In 1919 the Sitwell brothers held an exhibition of modern French art on Tottenham Court Road , London. Among the painters whose works were shown included André Derain , Henri Matisse , Amedeo Modigliani , Pablo Picasso , Chaim Soutine and Maurice de Vlaminck . With modern French art largely unknown in Britain at the time, the exhibition was a great achievement. Most British art critics had negative reviews of the exhibition, but Arnold Bennett highlighted the achievement of the two Sitwell brothers.

In the 1920s, Osbert Sitwell met the journalist David Horner and became his longtime partner. During the Second World War he lived with his sister on the family estate "Renishaw Hall" near Sheffield . In 1948, on the death of his father, he inherited the title of Baronet , of Renishaw in the County of Derby.

At the time of his death, Sir Osbert Sitwell had been suffering from Parkinson's disease for several years ; his ashes were buried on the Cimitero Evangelico agli Allori in Florence.

Awards

Worth mentioning

  • The Sitwell family is related to countless other nobles in England. The Sitwells and Winston Churchill , a member of the Duke of Marlborough family , have common ancestors.
  • The Sitwell siblings had never forgiven their father for failing to pay their mother's debts, which would have saved Lady Ida from prison. Lady Ida Sitwell, fell for a crook - who involved her in fraudulent financial transactions and for which she was jailed for three months (1913).

Publications

  • 1919 Argonaut and Juggernaut
  • 1921 At the House of Mrs Kinfoot
  • 1924 Triple Fugue
  • 1925 Discursions on Travel, Art and Life
  • 1926 Before the Bombardment
  • 1929 The Man Who Lost Himself
  • 1934 Miracle on Sinai
  • 1937 Those Were the Days
  • 1940 A collection of short stories Open the Door
  • 1940 A Place of One's Own
  • 1943 Selected Poems
  • 1944 Sing High, Sing Low
  • 1945 Left Hand, Right Hand
  • 1946 The Scarlet Tree
  • 1948 Great Morning
  • 1949 Laughter in the Next Room
  • 1950 Noble Essences: a Book of Characters
  • 1960 The Cinderella Complex

literature

  • Sarah H. Bradford: The Sitwells: And the Arts of the 1920s and 30s , National Portrait Gallery, ISBN 1-85514-141-8
  • John Pearson: The Sitwells: A Family's Biography , Harvest Books (1980) ISBN 0-15-682676-3
  • Desmond Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . Elliott and Thompson Limited, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-78396-184-9 .
  • Philip Ziegler: Osbert Sitwell , Chatto & Windus, London (1998)
  • Laughter in the next room . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1949 ( online ).

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ↑ a b c Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 161.
  2. ^ Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 101
  3. ^ Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 153.
  4. ^ Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 154.
  5. ^ Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 155.
  6. ^ Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 133
  7. ^ Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 138.
  8. ^ Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 143.
  9. ^ Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 144.
  10. ^ Osbert Sitwell: Good Morning , p. 141
  11. ^ Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 145.
  12. ^ Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 146.
  13. ↑ a b c Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 148.
  14. ↑ a b c d Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 156.
  15. ^ Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 152.
  16. ^ A b Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 157.
  17. ↑ a b c d Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 158.
  18. ^ A b Sitwell: Renishaw Hall: The Story of The Sitwells . P. 159.
  19. ^ Niall PAS Johnson, Juergen D. Mueller: Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918–1920 "Spanish" Influenza Pandemic . In: Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Volume 76, No. 1, 2002, pp. 105-115
  20. ↑ Honorary Members: Osbert Sitwell. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 22, 2019 (incorrect year of death).
  21. ^ The Sitwell family
predecessor Office successor
George Sitwell Baronet (of Renishaw)
1948-1969 		Dingverell Sitwell
personal data
SURNAME Sitwell, Osbert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sitwell, Francis Osbert Dingverell, 5th Baronet
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH 4th May 1969
Place of death Castello di Montegufoni near Florence