Books: The Fruit Was Ripe …

GREAT MORNING (360pp.)—Sir Osbert Sifwell—Little, Brown ($4).

Sir Osbert Sitwell, who will be 55 in December, is now on Volume III of a five-volume autobiography. He writes with the assurance that, whatever may happen to English aristocracy, the cadences of his prose are not likely to perish sooner than those of Walter Savage Landor or Sir Thomas Browne. Great Morning is a tribute from the worldliest of the artistic Sitwells to the most Arcadian period that any Englishman can remember: the last years of the peace that ended in August 1914.

Books of this kind are taking on a peculiar value in the mid-20th Century, in whose world “nostalgic” is apparently becoming as approving an adjective as “progressive” used to be.

As in Sir Osbert’s previous volumes Left Hand, Right Hand and The Scarlet Tree, the dark patches in the tapestry are family matters: the confused tyrannies of the writer’s puttering father, the rages and tragic secrecies of his Plantagenet mother. Sir Osbert himself was 19 in 1911, free at last from Eton, but not free from Sir George Sitwell’s fuzzy determination to make him a cavalryman. One gentle burlesque that makes this book vivid is Sir Osbert’s memory of cavalry training at Aldershot.

The Half-Centaur. “… A polar cold prevailed, and the air was thick with fog of the texture of a polar bear’s pelt. Out of these unfathomable, and therefore vast, spaces of frozen fur, of white and yellow, there showed occasionally a horse’s teeth or glaring eyes, or a frostbitten or port-nipped military face, conjured up out of the gloom and darkness, like a materialization at a seance. . . . Men shouted, sergeants commanded; bugles every now and then indulged in a brazen, idiot bray. . . .”

It was believed in 1911 (so Sir Osbert was given to understand) that in the coming war the Horse would come into its own. But Sir Osbert loathed horses, especially the one he had to ride. “When the Commanding Officer used to send for me, as he often did—and, I may add, with no view to congratulating me on my efforts—this agile and vindictive beast would often set off towards him at the fastest gallop, meanwhile, by one of his tricks, causing me to measure my length in the intervening wastes of snow and sand, and there abandoning me, would arrive, the cynosure of all eyes, the solitary half-centaur moving through this vast expanse, panting and foaming, in front of the great man.”

Tower Duty. Eventually, Sir Osbert persuaded his father to let him give up horsemanship; he entered the Grenadier Guards. Great Morning is dedicated to one of Sir Osbert’s friends and contemporaries in the Guards, then “a charming and elegant young man,” now Field Marshal Viscount Alexander of Tunis (and Canada’s Governor General). Most of his other Guardsman friends were dead before 1916. Happily stationed in London, resplendently uniformed and detailed to duty at the romantic Tower or at Buckingham Palace, young Sitwell in his free evenings discovered the world of fashion. Heady excitements were to be found there: the great hostesses such as Mrs. Asquith, Mrs. Keppel, Lady Cunard; the new beauties, including Lady Diana Manners; the first open roadsters (in other years only “the fastest of fast actresses” would have gone driving alone with a young man); the first dazzling London seasons of Diaghilev’s Russian ballet.

Writes Sir Osbert: “The air of our ancient civilization had then a lightness about it that has now everywhere vanished, if not forever, at least for several centuries. The fruit was ripe, and we were eating it!”