STUART PRESTON, who died at ninety, an expatriate president of Paris, is a name that one encounters not infrequently in the diaries and memoirs of noted society and literary figures, both French and English, of the 1940s and '50s. By the 1960s he was largely forgotten in the smart circles that he had frequented. It was not because people in the least disliked him or even disapproved of him; he was always kind and amiable and asked nothing of life but to be accepted by charming people who lived charmingly. He was certainly an elegant guest who fit comfortably and easily into the elegant homes where he was welcome. Why then was he more or less dropped by so many of the great ladies who had picked him up?
I think it was because they ultimately feared not that other people might associate them with Stuart, i.e. think they were like him—they were mostly too independent to care what others thought—but that they might begin to think so themselves. In other words, that his superficiality might be somehow catching. It was not a thing really dangerous, but it might be well to avoid, like a friend's head cold. Or it may be that they just tired of poor Stuart. Snobbishness can become tiresome, and a love of ancient titles and historic homes, however disguised (as in Proust) as a passion for history, always contains an element of snobbishness.
It was, however, undeniable that some of Stuart's most famous friends came to treat him with a bit of a sneer. Once when I reproached Nancy Mitford for a nasty remark she made about him, telling her I had thought Stuart was such a friend of hers, she had retorted: "Friend? Never forget, my dear, that we're a nation of warriors and don't number among our close friends young men who spent the war having tea with Sibyl Colefax." And Evelyn Waugh records in his journal of a New York meeting with Stuart: "Bald and waxy eyed. I suspect he drinks."
Despite what Nancy said about the war it was that great conflict that brought Stuart his greatest success. He came to London as an obscure American sergeant in the intelligence force, surely no social recommendation to a congregation of warriors accustomed to meet only commissioned officers, and was stationed there for several years with apparently very little to do. An English friend arranged to make him the guest of honor at a grand dinner celebrating the centennial of Henry James, casting him as the "Passionate Pilgrim," and somehow it took on. Stuart became the rage, known throughout the swellest London society as the "Sarge." He appears as "The Loot," an uncomplimentary picture of him in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy.
He was a lifelong friend of mine and my family's, and I have never known quite how to assess his remarkable popularity and its equally remarkable collapse, his appeal to all sorts of brilliant men and women and his fading from the scene, always in good humor. He had been very handsome; the poet Stephen Spender called him the handsomest man he had ever known, but he lost his looks with age and baldness. He was gay, but very discreetly so. In all the years I knew him, we never discussed the matter.
A death notice gives an idea of his vogue.
His high moment of fame came when he was confined to a hospital with jaundice in March 1943. "The whole of London congregates around the Sergeant's bed," wrote Lees-Milne. "Like Louis XIV he holds levees. Instead of meeting now at Heywood Hill's shop, the intelligentsia and society congregate in public ward No. 3 in St. George's Hospital. When a visitor arrived late to see George VI, the King said: 'Never mind. I expect you've been to St. George's Hospital to see the Sergeant.'"
Stuart stemmed on the paternal side from obscure but respectable old New York stock, but his maternal grandfather was an Irish emigrant who became an important judge and millionaire and launched his vast tribe into society. The fortune ultimately disappeared in multiple divisions, but Stuart's small portion sufficed for him to live decently as a prudent bachelor. For some years he worked as a junior art editor, reviewing the minor shows perceptively, but never importantly. He tried to write books, but his attention span was too brief. His forte was the mot juste, the brief apercu. If you went to a gallery with him, and he was the perfect companion for this, and he brought something to your attention, it was apt to be funny or significant. I recall his nudging me to read this conscientious ticket under a vase in the collection of the duke of Wellington: "1817: Given to the first duke by Louis XVIII, King of France and Navarre. 1854: Smashed by Bridget Murphy, housemaid. 1855: Repaired by..."
Stuart died loved by those who appreciated what he had to offer, less so by the majority who always wanted more. Yet he resented nothing. His acceptance of life was perfectly cheerful.