A Little Order by Evelyn Waugh

Author:Evelyn Waugh [Waugh, Evelyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780718197803
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

There is no identifiable school of Sitwell. Three of them was enough.

No one sought to ape their escapades. They spread no infectious literary rash. We simply basked in the warmth they generated and went back to our several tasks exhilarated. But their influence permeates all that remains of civilized English life.

It is best defined I think as pure enjoyment – of people and places, art and absurdity, the latest thing and the oldest; an equal zest for battle and for placid contemplation.

Sir Osbert was a regular soldier before the first World War. He belongs to a generation most of whom were killed or fatally embittered. He emerged from the war with some bitterness too, but this he extruded in his satirical writing. It never appeared in his life, which was unfailingly gay even in his rages. A great waste of time had been forced on him in stables and trenches. He was determined to make up for it. Where others sought mere distraction, he and his brother found real enjoyment.

They declared war on dullness. The British bourgeoisie were no longer fair game. Their self-complacency had gone with their power during the war. The Sitwells attacked from within that still-depressing section of the upper class that devoted itself solely to sport and politics. By 1939 English society had been revolutionized, lightened and brightened, very largely through the Sitwell influence. They taught the grandees to enjoy their possessions while they still had them. They made the bore recognized and abhorred as the prime social sinner.

They attacked from without the professional worlds of art and literature, where a new and insidious philistinism was being preached. Mud from the fields, where “conscientious objectors” had played at farming, bespattered everything. There was a shrinking from the rare and lovely and elaborate, and a welcome for the commonplace. Scrawls from the Infant School were as “significant” as the finest draftsmanship. Vocabularies were purged of all but their drabbest epithets. A decade later all this bilge was canalized by the Marxists. Then it had half London and Paris awash. The Sitwells careered like Indians round these covered wagons, loosing their flaming arrows into the Bible readings.

Sir Osbert and his brother Sacheverell had a well-bred disdain for the conventions of good taste. They revelled in publicity. Most English writers genuinely shrink from it. Others have a guilty vanity that makes them woo it in secret. The Sitwells left their press cuttings in bowls on the drawing-room table. Popular newspapers with all their absurd vulgarity were just a part of the exciting contemporary world in which the Sitwells romped. They were weapons in the total warfare against dullness.

The Sitwells were frankly and recklessly resolved to be conspicuous. Others produced slim volumes of verse and waited timidily for the reviews. Miss Edith Sitwell’s poems were recited through a megaphone from behind a screen. I vividly remember the first night of “Façade.” My memory differs slightly from Sir Osbert’s. He was aware of hostile demonstrators among an audience which seemed to me uniformly enthusiastic.

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