HAROLD ACTON

More Memoirs of an Aesthete

1970

DURING THE WAR, I had an initial impression of Harold Acton when he came to stay for quite some time with my parents, Alan and Poppy. Their house had been destroyed in the blitz, and they rented a flat in Athenaeum Court in Piccadilly, conveniently close to the War Office, where Alan was then at work. For fear of being buried alive, Poppy refused to go down to a shelter. In my memoir Fault Lines I have described how night after night we sat in the dark with the windows open as a precaution against blast. This was apocalypse worthy of John Martin, the visionary painter. Searchlights fitfully illuminated the room, relieving all of us in silhouette. Against the rolling roar of the bombers and the crash of anti-aircraft guns,Harold taught us Chinese to help pass the time. He sang Chinese songs learnt in the Thirties when he lived in Peking, as he persisted in calling it. From then until the end of his life, “nin how,” the Mandarin for “How are you?” was as good as a password.

I was seventeen when I first went to La Pietra, the house on the Via Bolognese in Florence that Harold had inherited from his father, Arthur Acton. Every visit was entertaining, wonderfully operatic. A gnarled old lodge-keeper in rustic clothes and a floppy hat spent a lifetime opening the gate at the entrance. Then as now, cypresses lined the long straight drive, and the heraldic coat of arms of a Renaissance cardinal adorned the imposing façade. A manservant would be waiting at the front door. The house seemed to exist in some timeless sphere of its own, uncompromisingly Italianate.

Harold always received guests in the same cramped corner of one of the reception rooms with a view on to the garden at the back of the house. Spindly uncomfortable chairs formed a tight semi-circle, and Hortense, Harold’s mother, used to perch on one of them, a dolllike presence in a black dress set off by a necklace of prodigious pearls. At that first meeting, I knew already that she had given orders to lock up all entrances to the house at nine o’clock at night, so if Harold was not yet home, he would have to climb in through a window as though still an Oxford undergraduate caught by college rules. I also knew that she habitually had one cocktail too many. Supposedly she had once failed to notice a guest committing some frightful social solecism, because, as Harold said in a much-quoted sentence, “Mother was far too far gone on one of her own concoctions.”

Harold himself might have stepped straight out of a novel by Ronald Firbank. His upper body swayed and teetered as if the balls of his feet were unbalancing him or he were altogether unaccustomed to walking. Half-closed brown eyes had a gleam of mockery in them, though it was impossible to decide whether this was directed at himself or at you. A permanent twist of a smile and exceptional shiny baldness gave his head the air of a helmet, or in another image, a giant puffball. In a measured sibilant voice, sounding like a foreigner who has learned the English language a bit too perfectly, he might resort to long-lost idiom, for instance saying of someone, “He gives me the pip,” or flattering an overweight lady that she was “light as thistle-down.” When he told the well-worn story of Brian Howard accosting an exhausted officer returning in 1940 from the collapse in France with the words, “Dun-kerkie didn’t work-ie,” he was almost singing rather than speaking. A producer in New York once proposed that I interview Harold for the sake of preserving this vocabulary and the extraordinary register of his voice. Harold refused on the grounds that the film’s hidden intention was to laugh at him.

I had the impression that in China he had felt himself to be a free spirit, which was why Norman Douglas, another original, had advised him to leave “the frowzy and fidgety little hole called Europe.” In the Thirties, my parents-in-law, Harold and Nancy Caccia, had been at the British Embassy in Peking and could describe how at some cultural event this other Harold had once sat on a platform, struck a pose with hand on brow and recited a poem including the line, “I smack the wax hermaphrodite with lilies white and cool.” Occasionally he made remarks obscurely implying that in China he had encountered romance. “No, I shall not be visiting Positano,” he once said to me, “I might be filled with youthful lust.” When Selina Hastings was researching her biography of Nancy Mitford, he had provided her with some material. In the draft she sent him was some remark about Harold “and his bugger friends.” Infuriated, he threatened to sue unless this was cut out, saying, “What do these young women know about my private life?”

His style on paper was at least as mannered as his speech. The images in his poems are forced, the words strained and sometimes outlandish. Within a few pages of The Indian Ass, his first book of poems, for instance, among many words that dissipate all sense are vavicel, bakkaris, lappered morphews, ruin-glooms. No other English writer could have written “Narcissus to His Sponge” (from This Chaos, 1930) a poem that begins “This golden sponge, like porous apricot” [porous?] and concludes with the unsurpassable couplet, “Mark this humble square of soap, O poet and abandon hope.”

In his view, he had played his part in an aesthetic movement along with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Nancy Cunard, Caresse and Harry Crosby, Countee Cullen and Thornton Wilder. World events have long since overtaken the interwar years and driven the fun of it into oblivion. Published in 1928, Harold’s novel Humdrum was once a high-water mark of the period, only to become, he confesses, “a book which makes me blush.” Reviewing More Memoirs of an Aesthete, I risked a phrase about how yesterday’s literary experiments become today’s hardened arteries. For a long time afterwards he quoted it back to me, with that sly ambiguous smile.

La Pietra imposed the obligations of a great house, a way of life that Harold was determined to live up to. Whatever the weather, he wore a suit with a waistcoat, and I never saw him without a tie. He became a living legend. Tourists would ring up asking which restaurants in Florence he recommended. He held lunch parties in a dining room whose collection of statues, one of them reputedly a Donatello, had the appeal of a museum. John Calmann, my Oxford contemporary and a publisher then negotiating the reprint of Harold’s book about the later Medicis, told me that on a visit he had counted no less than eighteen knives and forks, glasses, plates and whatnots, laid at the place on the table where that evening Harold was dining by himself. Violet Trefusis, a grey eminence in Florentine society, one day asked why the statues in the garden were encased in what looked like plastic nappies. A feline Harold took her up, explaining in detail that their private parts were being refigured by experts in Sweden familiar with the proper proportions of gentlemen.

Joan Haslip wrote biographies for the general reader and entertained friends in her house in Bellosguardo as extravagantly as she would have done before the war. A typically feline throwaway of Harold’s was, “Joan’s books are so fresh because every subject comes fresh to her.” When in old age she ran out of money, Harold in an equally typical gesture gave her a picture by Foujita, which she sold for eighteen thousand pounds.

Escorting a very famous film star around the house, Harold spotted that she was a kleptomaniac, slipping whatever she could into her handbag. “And now, my dear,” he said inimitably at the conclusion of the tour, “we shall restore the missing trinkets.” Every summer, Princess Margaret invited herself to stay. The state bedroom was on the first floor with a Vasari hanging over the bed. A demanding guest, she once said as she was leaving that Harold would now dance and sing for joy. “Oh no, ma’am,” he answered, “much too tired.” After dining with Anne-Sophie and Michael Grant near Lucca, I was driving Harold home on a minor road with nobody and nothing in sight when the engine suddenly cut out and the car came to a stop. Histrionically he said, “Shall I whistle and clap my hands?”

I had only to push in the choke, the flooded engine started, and we drove back in the misty night.