Correction Appended


By Philip Ziegler.

Illustrated. 444 pp. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

Philip Ziegler is the author of many biographies, a fair proportion of which are of English aristocrats, so he seized his chance when somebody pointed out to him that Sir Osbert Sitwell, a terrific aristocrat and also an author of note, had escaped full-scale biographical attention. The result is an elegant and expertly written account of a very peculiar man.

In the years immediately after World War II, Osbert Sitwell was more or less automatically included in any list of the top contemporary English authors, and his sister, Edith, was high on the list of poets. Nor was Osbert's reputation confined to the discerning few; his five-volume autobiography was hailed as one of the prose masterpieces of the century, and unlike most books for which such claims are made it also sold in incredible numbers. His annual income from writing in those years reached a figure equivalent to about $320,000 in modern money. His fame spread to America, where he and Edith toured triumphantly in 1948. Life magazine hailed them as ''England's most celebrated living literary family'' and said they ''gave the New York literary set its biggest thrill in years.''

Sir Osbert was born in 1892 and succeeded to the baronetcy in 1943. His health began to fail in the 1950's, and his output faltered. His almost inseparable sister broke down and died in 1964. Osbert lived on, with much pain and discomfort, till 1969, still rich from other sources, but no longer from his writing; he had ceased to be counted among the great authors of the age.

Ziegler's tone is in general friendly and amused. He does not dissent from some of the criticism the Sitwells attracted even at the height of their celebrity. Philip Toynbee, an influential reviewer, called Osbert's style ''pompously mandarin,'' a verdict here accepted. Elizabeth Bowen once wrote of one of Osbert's stories '' 'Defeat,' I say in all sobriety, is one of the finest, if not the finest, stories that I have read in the English language''; of this assessment, Ziegler remarks, ''If this is what she writes in all sobriety, one hardly dares surmise what she might not have written if the worse for drink.'' And he gives it as his opinion of the three Sitwells (the third was a younger brother, Sacheverell, an esteemed writer on art and architecture) that their ''reputation . . . outstripped their actual achievements.''

What prompted so fine a writer as Bowen to join the claque? Herself an aristocrat, she was perhaps still not immune to the Sitwells' unparalleled powers of self-advertisement, which included claims to royal descent. The three of them, described by the critic Edmund Gosse as a ''delightful but deleterious trio,'' lived and gloried in the glow of their own celebrity. As that stern critic F. R. Leavis remarked, they belonged to the history of publicity rather than that of poetry.

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When Sacheverell annoyed his brother by marrying, the troika broke up. Osbert settled into an almost lifelong homosexual relationship, but always remained close to Edith. A dominant factor in all their lives was their extraordinary father, Sir George, on whom Osbert took their revenge with a monstrously comic portrait in his autobiography. He claimed that he had thus ''conferred immortality'' on his parent.

Ziegler tones down, without eliminating, the old man's eccentricity. He was certainly strange, though not entirely without a kind of weird reasonableness and some genuine solicitude for his offspring, who in their own ways were just as eccentric and selfish as he was. But the circumstances in which he brought them up were such that nothing like ordinariness could be expected of them. Possession of a vast, gloomy Yorkshire stately home, cold and without electricity though built over the coal mines that were the foundation of the family's wealth, did not prevent Sir George from buying an immense and dilapidated castle in Italy, ''pure Charles Addams,'' said a friend. ''The roof is in splendid order,'' Sir George reported, ''and the drains can't be wrong, as there aren't any.'' He represented this purchase as a shrewd investment made on behalf of his heir, all the time complaining sternly about Osbert's extravagance.

These complaints were not entirely unjustified. As seems to happen even in very rich families, money was sometimes temporarily short. Lady Sitwell got into some avoidable financial muddle and actually ended up in prison. And much of this excellent book is devoted to money troubles of various kinds. Osbert caused some of them by exercising his right to the best of everything. He went to Eton for a while (''educated in the holidays from Eton'' was his famous entry in ''Who's Who'') and then twice failed the examination for entry to the military academy at Sandhurst. A hater of horses, he was commissioned, quite inappropriately, in a cavalry regiment, from which he was rescued and transferred to the aristocratic Brigade of Guards. This unearned and unsuitable advancement will seem extraordinary only to nonaristocrats.

The duties of a peacetime Guards officer could hardly have been lighter. Osbert was stationed in London, and his military duties occupied a couple of hours each morning. The rest of the day he was out of uniform and into expensive London high life. However, the beginning of the war in August 1914 changed all that. Like his brother officers, Osbert took his evening clothes to France, assuming he would be spending Christmas partying in Berlin. He saw action, but an infected cut in a finger led to his being invalided out.

This military adventure left him with a hatred of war almost as intense as his loathing for the middle classes, whose manner of life seemed to him merely squalid and intrusive. They had thrust themselves in between the gentry and their servants, with whom one had always known how to get on. Although Sitwell's talent and interests set him somewhat apart from other members of his class, many of his reactions were stereotypical: he was anti-Semitic, took Franco's side in the Spanish Civil War, wrote that Fascism on the lines laid down by Mussolini in Italy would ''give the people what they really wanted.'' Perhaps not surprisingly, he detested Winston Churchill.

A familiar figure in literary circles, he was both respected and ridiculed, his obsession with his rank being part of the joke. D. H. Lawrence put something of him into his report on Sir Clifford Chatterley's writings. Virginia Woolf was exasperated by his ''childish vanity'' but, like many others, found that she liked him. Easily offended himself, he made enemies, and with Nol Coward, for instance, he had a long and sometimes rancorous feud. On the other hand, he was admired by the royal family -- an unusual privilege for an author, and one that delighted him. Ziegler says ''he was subtly ill at ease with almost every other human being and took some pleasure in the belief that he was different from and, in certain respects, superior to those around him.''

The story of his long, slow decline is touching because he was courageous as well as absurd. He gamely continued to travel, moving from Yorkshire to London or to the Italian castle, but his eyesight, his heart, his legs and his prostate began to fail, and he succumbed to Parkinson's disease. Meanwhile he quarreled with his longtime companion, and became dependent on a kind of secretary-valet. He could afford to be luxurious and as comfortable as his body permitted. He was well cared for and is said to have had ''moments of enjoyment.''

Philip Ziegler concludes by asking himself whether Osbert Sitwell was ''worth a book,'' and of course his answer is yes: for one thing the autobiography is an ''unequivocal masterpiece,'' but even if that were not so ''the entertainment was so great, the dramatis personae so bizarre, the background so rich'' that all his trouble was justified. Certainly Sitwell was worth this book, with its well-judged tone -- sympathetic, yet loving the bizarrerie and the richness, teasing as well as affectionate. Behind its pages lies a great deal of hard research in archives as far apart as Renishaw, Yorkshire and Austin, Tex. Dozens of people were interviewed, many of them now dead, their reminiscences safely stored in Tulsa, Okla. The least one can say is that nobody else need ask Ziegler's question for a long time to come; which is not to say, this being an age of biography, that nobody will.

Correction: January 16, 200, Sunday A review of Philip Ziegler's biography ''Osbert Sitwell'' in the Book Review on Dec. 19 located the stately home of the Sitwell family incorrectly. It is in Derbyshire, not Yorkshire.

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