'Discipline Results in Freedom'

Eccentricity, it appears, is an inheritable trait, like dimples and hemophilia. Take the case of the Sitwells. I know Dame Edith and her brothers, Sir Osbert and Sir Sacheverell, largely by reputation, and they impress me as an eccentric English phenomenon that has never successfully crossed the Atlantic. Dame Edith, the family poet, even published an amusing volume of prose, The English Eccentrics (1933). 

Until recently I knew nothing about their father, Sir George Sitwell (1860-1943), who is clearly responsible for passing along the eccentricity gene. Inevitably, he is identified as an antiquary, a vast sub-category among eccentrics. Sir Harold Acton, no mean eccentric himself, described Sir George as “the strangest old bugger you ever met.” Even Dame Edith and Sir Osbert judged Daddy as the oddest of ducks and not always a pleasant fellow. In her 1965 autobiography Taken Care Of, Dame Edith said of her mother and father: “[T]hey were parents I would not recommend to anybody.” “I doubt,” wrote Sir Osbert of his sister in his five-volume autobiography, “whether any child was ever more mismanaged by her parents.” One of Sir George’s books was titled Idle Fancies in Prose and Verse. In the fourth volume of his autobiography, Laughter in the Next Room (1948), Sir Osbert writes of his father:

 

“The general atmosphere, which was always menacing, the interruptions, the scenes, the surprises, and the ambushes laid, the fussing, the necessity my father felt both for consulting and contradicting me, the economies, the extravagances, all put it beyond possibility to write a line when he was in the house.”

 

In the final decade of the nineteenth century, Sir George served as a Conservative politician in the House of Commons. He banned electricity in his house until the nineteen-forties. Visitors were issued candles. His only sustenance late in life was roasted chicken. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography refers to “his active, inventive, but erratic mind,” and quotes Sir George as saying, “I must ask anyone entering the house never to contradict me or differ from me in any way, as it interferes with the functioning of the gastric juices and prevents my sleeping at night.”

 

Sir George redesigned the garden at Renishaw Hall, the family seat in Derbyshire. In 1909 he purchased the Castello di Montegufoni, near Florence, restored the building and made it his residence in 1925. That same year he published On the Making of Gardens, republished in 1949. On this date, August 19, in 1951, Marianne Moore – a benign example of American eccentricity -- reviewed the new edition in the New York Times Book Review. She writes:

 

“Poetic implacability was never seen to better advantage than in the style of Sir George Sitwell, in which nicety is barbed with a kind of decorous ferocity, as when he says, ‘Forgery in art is not a crime unless it fails to deceive.’”

 

Moore recognizes the eccentricity of Sir George’s thinking in the garden book: “Sir George Sitwell shows us in this glittering treatise how to look at what we see; his stately observations are applicable to small as well as to great gardens; and throughout, an inescapable lesson is afforded us—that discipline results in freedom.”

 

One way to gauge the liberality of a nation is to examine its treatment of eccentrics, even those who are not themselves liberal-minded. Using that measure, twentieth-century England comes off as an often marvelously tolerant place.

 

[Moore’s review can be found in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, Viking, 1986).]