Dumb-Animal by Osbert Sitwell (1930)

 This was the author's second volume of stories and novellas, following his debut, Triple Fugue, six years earlier. The title story is a sad and horrifying glimpse into the inhumanity that stretches between people and animals, and the thoughtlessness. That Flesh is Heir To is in Sitwell's pyrotechnic mode, as are most of the works in this volume, where he bitingly explores some societal flabbiness or vulnerability. In this case, the novella follows a nondescript but piercing woman's continuing odd proximity to instances of plague and fatal illness. Of course, it is she all along, with her terribly decent concern for the health of those with whom she interacts, who is carrying the devastating bacillus. It's occasionally very funny, but just misses finishing well. Echoes is short and prescient, detailing a visit to a Mediterranean seaside town, and the growing fascism with which it's being infected, realised in its people's savage treatment of someone who is intellectually disabled. The Love-Bird tells the story of an eccentric dilettante, who divests himself of the family fortune once it has been inherited, leaving only his favourite things, often automata and strange moving toys, many of which are birds, amongst which he loses himself. On a visit to the Zoo, a little love-bird takes a decided liking to him, the charm of a living thing enchanting him for the first time. When one flutters in through his window one afternoon later on, he catches it, and places it in a cage he owns with an automaton fellow of its own kind. The real bird goes mad with jealousy of its mechanical rival, and is found dead next to it, both of them plucked and ragged. Another example of the author's more high-concept mode. Charles and Charlemagne speaks of the glittering career of an American in London, when such women were in the midst of conquering British society. Adèle is first inconspicuous, but slowly grows less concerned by what all around her think. Finally she is quite notorious, and Sitwell delights in enumerating all her changes of decor with each lover that she takes on, these being her particular eccentricity. She has a most unusual and chilling end in the South Seas. Alive-Alive Oh! is a throwback to the literary satires of his earlier volume. A middling and largely dreary poet gains the most extravagant praise, and just as his career shows signs of waning, it is saved by his war poetry. He has always been fashionably ill, and the public and all the critics are waiting for him to die early, so as to set the proverbial seal to his reputation. He disappears to Italy at what is thought to be the final stages of his life, and his death is duly reported. Much, much later, Sitwell is astonished, as a visitor to Italy, to discover that he is still alive and living in absolute secrecy, the death stage-managed to make sure of his literary survival. Happy Endings is not even a novella, it is a short novel. This final piece takes the tone down a few notches from the conceptual spinnings of most of the longer works in this volume. It is an example of Sitwell engaging on a more low-key and moving level with material which is familiar to him. It is a story which uses, as he often does, himself as the main character. In this instance, he is a young man, sent to military college in Aldershot before the war. This is his opportunity to send up the stupidity and dense-headedness of the 'scholars' and masters, in his usual satiric vein. But he creates a moving portrait of one of the masters who befriends him, Mr Windrell, who is a devotee of 'the Circle' and is fascinated by past lives and future ones, wizardry, and occult sciences - no doubt influenced by the notoriety of Crowley and company at the time. He is racked with consumption, and Sitwell takes time to present him somewhat sympathetically, as well as exploding mercilessly all his silly superstitions. It ends with something unexpected - scenes on the battleground at Loos, and quite harsh depictions of corpses and the stench of death. Most of his contemporaries at the college are done away with through the course of the war, and there is, amongst his tart celebration of their dunderheadedness, also elegiac wonder at how pointless and grotesque were their deaths. The very end is a feeling exploration of Mr Windrell after the war, dying in 'Newborough' (Scarborough), whose experiences in witnessing the horror of the conflict have finally disabused him of his crazy obsessions, though he can't quite admit it. This is a very fine piece of work, completing a volume of widely varying colours, which is by turns hilariously funny and profoundly erudite.