The Man Who Lost Himself by Osbert Sitwell (1929)

There is a strong contrast between this second novel and his first, Before the Bombardment, published a few years earlier. Where that first one was a cracking satire, operating a high pitch of frustration-inspired, hypercoloured rage and tension, this piece lies in the outflow of that process, washed down with the tidal ebb of those currents. Its style is biographic and painstaking; it forms a psychological portrait of a formerly great writer, coasting in after years, having decided bitterly in the seized and blocked atmosphere of unrequited love that his prior dedication to Art, and its attendant penury, was not the life he wanted after all. There are moments of satire, particularly of American and British 'lady travellers' of the 1920s, but these are few and far between. Sitwell pushes the telling of the story from memory ahead in time, as he did in the title story of Triple Fugue, but this time the life is being looked back upon from forty years later, in the late 1960s. This allows him to attempt prescience, the main success of which is in the prediction of another world war, though he has it waged between 1953 and 1957, with the First World War known as the Little World War, while the subsequent one is the Great World War. Sitwell himself is the writer-narrator, and his subject is his fictional former best friend, Tristram Orlander. Tristram starts out the darling of the literary set, his poetry and early novels exploding upon the firmament of Art, but not selling more than adequately. His love for the husky-voiced, bright blue-eyed Ursula Rypton is obsessive and adoring. She, however fond she is of him, doesn't see him as marriage material, and his adoration probably gets in the way of seeing that she's worldly enough to want financial comfort in life. The stresses of the disappointment damage Tristram's nerves and health, and under his doctor's orders, Osbert and he set off for a rejuvenating tour of Europe in a time contemporaneous to the writing of the novel - mid to late 1920s. The boat-trip to Gibraltar provides Sitwell with his best opportunity to satirise, and he does so with gusty energy. Then they arrive in Spain and quickly find themselves in Granada, in the shadow of the Alhambra. It is here that the psychological action intensifies a great deal, and this novel gains strength and purpose beyond the slightly dilletante atmosphere it has hitherto maintained. The two of them, sometimes alone, sometimes with encountered associates, even sometimes with the aforementioned lady travellers, explore the exotic, sometimes disturbing locale and heal under the intensity of the heat. In the shadows of the empty galleries of the great building on the hill, and in some of the smaller ones that surround it, and in the dappled woods that lead up to the eminence, they tap the vein of self-reflection and a new understanding. Tristram's shattered nerves seem harmonized. Then comes the news from Britain that Ursula has married, and danger rears up again. But, seemingly to Osbert, Tristram survives the shock well. Osbert soon has to return to Britain, but Tristram decides to stay longer, almost addicted to this hot, foreign clime which has been so inspiring. Left on his own, things start to feel less sure, and no doubt the disappointment over Ursula is having an insidious effect. After a wild night of drinking, he stumbles into an elegant local hotel, which has an oily concierge he's always disliked. Having gone too far inside than is polite without asking to see a guest, faced with this disturbingly obsequious and yet challenging creature, and feeling decidedly exhausted and wobbly while trying to keep face, he stumblingly asks for.......himself, knowing that the concierge doesn't know his name, and it can simply seem like he has enquired in the wrong hotel for a friend. But, shocked, he receives the answer that yes, Mr Orlander is in, and will he step this way? His nerves jangling, he totters after the concierge, and is led to a room and left just inside the door having been admitted. In a chair facing away from him is a figure with grey hair. As he walks forward the figure turns, and reveals...an older version of himself, glaring at him soundlessly with rage in his eyes. At this point Tristram wakes up back in the lobby, trembling and disoriented, completely nonplussed by the experience, as though he has fainted and it was all a dream. He slowly reassembles himself over the ensuing days, glossing over the meeting with the initial notion of it being a nervous fantasy, and then dismissing it from his mind altogether. But events have taken their toll on his mind; back in London, he distances himself from his former friends, developing the slick style for which he later became known. His decision to follow what will pay is clear; though his literary reputation goes proverbially south, his public acceptance could not be greater. He becomes wealthy and garrulous. Finally, forty years having elapsed, he feels twinges of regret over the gap between himself and his old associates. In the late 1960s, he meets Osbert again for the first time in many years, and then sets up a dinner date with Ursula. The sight of Ursula as an old woman, and the feeling that she is only mildly interested in him, set the tone for what could be an awful encounter. But then, for a brief period, they manage to recapture the feeling of their youth, and spend an hour locked in fascination before the feeling fades again. Tristram is both disturbed and energised, and further develops a nascent scheme he has for a return to his old literary style in one last great novel. He decides he needs to return to Spain, the scene of his greatest successes (he has set a bestselling trilogy there). At the very same hotel in Granada, after an eerie long walk visiting old haunts which has exhausted him, he settles in his chair to relax and read before dinner. There is a knock at the door and he shouts admittance. He turns slowly around to see.......of course, his younger self. This time the younger man, lively, sinuous and wild and full of promise, appears to be glaring at him with hate in his eyes. Then the tale returns to the teller, Osbert, to say that Tristram was found dead in his room, and all attempts to discover the young man who visited him have been fruitless. As he gave the same name as Tristram, and looked so like him, it is assumed that the visitor may well have been an illegitimate son. Only Osbert knows the deeper story of the original experience back in the 20s, as Tristram told him as a curiosity before he put it out of his mind forever way back then. In the end, this novel is brilliantly entertaining, though it is a slow starter. There are quite a few candidates for who it might be who was an inspiration for Orlander: Arnold Bennett comes to mind, as does Robert Hichens, as does, most likely perhaps, John Galsworthy. In all likelihood, it is notional satire only; a portrait of a tendency. This one is a dilatory burner, its fires stoked by fine prose, with the stuff of intimate psychology for fuel.