Triple Fugue by Osbert Sitwell (1924)

This was Sitwell's first fiction, a collection of three short stories and three long ones or novellas. He had already established a reputation for being a caustic critic of the more quiescent zones of literature, with big attacks on 'country' poets like John Drinkwater. A way of thinking about him is as someone who is there in the room, at the party so to speak, but giving no quarter to those whom he regards as stupid or banal or unworthy; a kind of self-contained assurance about who needs taking notice of, and contrarily whom the world needs to have explained to it as a dunce. These stories have varying degrees of bitchiness to them - mainly about writers and artists and their fatuous self-appreciation. In Low Tide and its picture of two old ladies, wildly made-up and oblivious to the scorn of all around in their seaside town, and in The Greeting and its portrait of a lonely nurse and the terrible mistake she makes in first letting her patient be murdered in atrocious circumstances, and then marrying the patient's supposedly distraught husband, there is adroitness of plotting and rich circumlocutory language that is very satisfying. These are both novella-length. The three shorter pieces tend to bitchy literary satire; two of them end a little whimperingly, but Friendship's Due is as fine a story as could be asked from these ingredients. The title piece is a strange novella, again of criticism of the chatter of the literary classes, but set ahead twenty-odd years in 1948, and again fizzling a little in the end, despite being a fascinating journey. The reader can detect Sitwell's admiration for writers like Ronald Firbank and Stella Benson between these lines, the spikier ones who seemed to take no prisoners and have a sly-eyed frankness about them. There is plenty here to admire, and it is a great pity that he is almost completely lost to the modern generation of readers. I'm looking forward to his first novel, published two years later, in which he is supposed to have played a blinder.