Travelling at home
Alan Bell
SACHEVERELL SITWELL'S ENGLAND edited by Michael Raeburn Orbis, fI5.00 Sir Sacheverell Sitwell has travelled so widely and written so much, in prose and verse, over so long a period of time that many will appreciate him principally as the observant and evocative describer of for- eign parts. A major strand of pre-war aestheticism owed its inspiration to South- ern Baroque Art, 1924, and our whole conception of many exotic parts of Europe and Central and South America has been informed by a lifetime of his well- modulated writing: not for nothing is he a freeman of the City of Lima. Yet he is equally important as the historian and interpreter of English artistic and architectural traditions, and there must be many who have had their eyes opened by British Architects and Craftsmen, first pub- lished in 1945 and often reissued since. The pre-war Conversation Pieces was an impor- tant contribution to the history of 18th- century painting, and he has written well about church monuments, monastic ruins and many other English subjects with a catholicity of taste and observation quick-
ened by a poet's eye.
It was a good idea to make an anthology of his writing on England, and with Michael Raeburn's tactful editing the re- sult is delightful. Sacheverell Sitwell's Eng- land is inevitably patchy in its coverage; there is nothing west of Bristol or further north-west than Liverpool, and Sussex gets but a single page. Based on texts which usually antedate Gunnis, Pevsner and Col- vin, as well as a score of standard mono- graphs on individual architects, it must be read for its enduring qualities of sympathe- tic interpretation rather than as the final word in systematic attribution. It would be an infuriating book to keep in a car, alongside Buildings of England and Col- lins's Guide to English Parish Churches, but for armchair touring Sir Sacheverell proves himself an admirable cicerone learned, humorous and tactful, and con- stantly full of surprises.
The prose, as always, is meandering but controlled, matching the journey and the guide. He is able to take in the unfamiliar (the Clayton monument at Bletchingley, for example, or St Mary's, Beverley, or Harefield church in Middlesex, each of which vaut un detour) while seeming a little skimped on better-known sights like the almost overwhelmingly profuse plaster- work at Claydon. Like a good guide, too, he is open to mild objections from his party. One can admit the 'sternness' of Durham Cathedral without asserting its `grimness', or feel that Easton Neston or Kedleston have not been quite respectfully enough treated. Sometimes conditions have changed — for the better at Seaton Delaval, where the inappropriate indust- rial surroundings no longer inflect so heavy a pall on the atmosphere; or for the worse at Great Tew, recorded here before so much of the `mousefue thatching troubled him.
The editor has wisely sandwiched the main text between two long extracts from All Summer in A Day, 1926, in which Sitwell recalls the Scarborough of his child- hood, and a trip to the sands with his tutor, 'Colonel Fantock'. There are florid hotel balconies and seaside pierrots, not obviously connected with the subtle evoca- tion of architectural craftsmanship later in the book. They are essential to it, how- ever, 'for it was there, scrambling upon the rocks, that I first began to think, and hear, and see'. A discreet autobiographical vein runs through the book, enlivening the passages on Renishaw with recollections of the sound of the colliery engines panting away in the middle distance, or of the final days of the Venetian saloons of Sutton Scarsdale which his brother Osbert later managed to preserve as a ruin.
Experience is far from localised, of course. Our guide has a vast range of observation to draw on. The wings of Seaton Delaval bring to his mind the ruined stables of the Moulay Ismail, at Meknes, in Morocco. Bolsover is 'dead,
dead, as the Mayan ruins of Uxmal or Chichen Itza. . . but with a ghostly poetry that fires the imagination, that can never be forgotten, and that never cools'. 'Per: sons familiar with Alcobaga or Belem have features of Kingston-on-Soar church, Nottinghamshire, specially commended to them. Those whose experience is more conventional are not upbraided for their limited range, but are left to take for granted the parallels adduced by their mentor at Heckington Church, Lincoln- shire, who writes 'as one who has admired such a piece of technical virtuosity as the red chapels of Banteai Srei far away in the Cambodian jungles, near to Angkor'. The whole anthology is flavoured by this uni- que vision, and it should take its readers back to the larger books from which it is drawn.
Previous page
