In the fifteenth century the adjective “pretty” joined the English language (derived from the Old Teutonic noun pratti or pratta, meaning trick or wile). At first everyone thought the world of pretty. To be a pretty fellow was to be clever, apt, skillful; a pretty soldier was gallant and brave; a pretty thing was ingenious and artful. It was not until the sixteenth century that something started to go wrong with the idea of prettiness. Although women and children could still take pleasure in being called pretty, a pretty man had degenerated into a fop with a tendency to slyness. Pretty objects continued to be admired until 1875 when the phrase “pretty-pretty” was coined. That did it. For the truly clever, apt, and skillful, the adjective pretty could only be used in the pejorative sense, as I discovered thirty years ago while being shown around King’s College by E. M. Forster. As we approached the celebrated chapel (magnificent, superb, a bit much), I said, “Pretty.” Forster thought I meant the chapel when, actually, I was referring to a youthful couple in the damp middle distance. A ruthless moralist, Forster publicized my use of the dread word. Told in Fitzrovia and published in the streets of Dacca, the daughters of the Philistines rejoiced; the daughters of the uncircumcised triumphed. For a time, my mighty shield was vilely cast away.
In the last thirty years the adjective pretty has been pretty much abandoned, while the notion of beauty has become so complex that only the dullest of the daughters of the uncircumcised dares use it. Santayana was the last aesthetician to describe beauty without self-consciousness; and that was in 1896. As a result, we now live in a relativist’s world where one man’s beauty is another man’s beast. This means that physical ugliness tends to be highly prized on the ground that it would be not only cruel, but provocative for, let us say, a popular performer to look better than the plainest member of the audience. This is democracy at its most endearing; and only a beauty or a Beaton would have it otherwise.
Sir Cecil Beaton’s latest volume of diaries has now been published in the seventy-fourth year of a life devoted to the idea of beauty in people, clothes, decor, landscape, and manners. To the extent that Sir Cecil falls short of beauty in his life and work, he is merely pretty. But that is not such a bad thing. Quite the contrary. Sir Cecil…no, I think we had better call him Beaton, in honor of his own creation as opposed to the Queen’s. Beaton is the oldest if not the last of a long line of minor artists who have given a good deal of pleasure to a good many people. He is a celebrated photographer. Unfortunately, I cannot judge his pictures because all photographs tend to look alike to me in their busy flatness. For half a century photography has been the “art form” of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages? I was pleased to note in Beaton’s pages that Picasso thought the same.
It is as a designer for the theatre that Beaton is at his best. But then clothes and sets are in the round, not flat upon the page. Beaton is absolutely stage-struck, and so wonderfully striking in his stage effects. There is no sense of strain in his theatre work except, perhaps, when he acts. Years ago I saw him in a play by (I think) Wilde. Like an elegant lizard just fed twenty milligrams of Valium, Beaton moved slowly about the stage. The tongue flicked; the lips moved; no word was audible.
Now we have Beaton’s written words; and they are most vivid: contents of diaries kept from 1963 to 1974. The mood is often grim. He does not like getting old. He has also not learned that, after fifty, you must never look into a mirror whose little tricks you don’t already know in advance. The same goes for eyes. At the Rothschild place in Mouton, he takes a good look at himself in a strange mirror. He is rewarded for his recklessness:
I was really an alarming sight—wild white hair on end, most of the pate quite bald: chins sagging with a scraggly tissued neck: pale weak eyes without their former warmth. But this could not be me!
More somber details are noted. Finally, “How could I make the effort to dress myself up in picturesque clothes and try to be attractive to a group of highly critical people?” I am sure that he managed.
The Parting Years is a haphazard collection of pages taken at what seems to be random from a number of diaries. No attempt has been made to link one thing to another. He arrives in New York to design a production of La Traviata. Alfred Lunt is the director. It is all very exciting. But, for the reader, the curtain never goes up. How did the production go? Who sang? There are numerous odd lacunae:
Oliver Lyttleton, whose desire to amuse has increased with the years to the extent that he is a real bore, made one funny joke. The evening was a great success.
But what was the joke? On second thoughts, perhaps that is Beaton’s strategy. In Orlando, Virginia Woolf never allowed us to hear the brilliant dialogue of Alexander Pope.
Beaton is a good travel-writer. He has a sharp eye for those horrors of travel that delight the sedentary reader far more than set descriptions of beautiful or even pretty places. South America in general and Poland in particular do not get high marks. The first is too steep; the second too flat. But Beaton is quite as strict with things English. The cathedrals get a thorough going-over. “Exeter Cathedral, more squat than Salisbury, but original and successful, with a frieze of carvings on the façade.” Next term if Exeter C. joins wholeheartedly in house-games there is no reason why that squatness can’t be trimmed down. On the other hand, poor “Wells Cathedral did not look its best. It has a certain character but is not really impressive as a creative expression of devotion.” Wells C. might do better at a different school.
Beaton is too much the stoic to strike too often the valetudinarian note. But when he does, the effect is chilling. He looks at himself with the same cold eye that he turns upon slovenly Wells Cathedral.
I don’t really feel that I am ever going to come into my own, to justify myself and my existence by some last great gesture. I am likewise certain that nothing I have done is likely to live long after me.
This is no doubt true. Yet one cannot help but admire a man in his seventies who still makes a living by his wits in the world of theatre and fashion where Americans with hearts of stone and egos of brass dominate (“I put up with Americans willingly only when I am on business bent”).
Beaton never ceases to be interested in seeing new places, meeting new talent. He checks out The Rolling Stones at the beginning of their fame. He takes up the town’s new artist, David Hockney. Meanwhile, he continues to make the rounds of the old from Picasso to Coward. He almost always has something shrewd to say—except of famous hostesses. They get elaborate bread-and-butter-letter eulogies best left unpublished. Beaton is most generous with the young. But then, it is always easier to prefer the young to one’s contemporaries. Witness:
April 11, 1966: So Evelyn Waugh is in his coffin. Died of snobbery. Did not wish to be considered a man of letters; it did not satisfy him to be thought a master of letters: it did not satisfy him to be thought a master of English prose. He wanted to be a duke…
Beaton and Waugh had known each other at school. Each was a social climber; and each was on to the other. Yet Beaton appears to have got a good deal of pleasure out of his nimble run up the ladder, as opposed to Waugh, who huffed and puffed and “would suddenly seem to be possessed by a devil and do thoroughly fiendish things.” It is a pity that there is no present-day writer able to do for this pretty couple what Max Beerbohm did for a similar pair in “Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton.”
As might be expected, the book is full of obituaries. Outliving contemporaries is always a joy, up to a point. Beaton usually gets the point. Of the Duke of Windsor, he “had never shown any affection for or interest in me.” Beaton also notes that the Duke “was inclined to be silly.” That is putting it mildly. The Duke’s stupidity was of a perfection seldom encountered outside institutions. Of James Pope-Hennessy, he “had ‘quality,’ was intelligent, and intellectual and serious and yet good company.” Beaton is a bit wary of intellectuals. He is better at describing figures like Chanel. He is also good on performers, noting the odd but illuminating detail. Alan Bates
has invented an original sense of humor. It takes a while to realize what he is up to….He has grown his hair very shaggily long. This is obviously to compensate for the width of the neck which has now become almost inhumanly large.
Much of The Parting Years will be mysterious to those not intimately acquainted with the theatre and High Bohemia. Even those who have some knowledge of the terrain will get lost from time to time. First names appear without last names. And last names without first names. It is often hard to figure out just who is who. There is one most intriguing encounter, set in New York. I quote the scene in its entirety. “Truman came back with me to the hotel. We talked over whiskies and sodas until I realized that by English time it was 7.30 in the morning.” That’s all. What, one wonders, did Beaton and the former president have to say to one another? News of the Queen? Of course. But that wouldn’t go on until 1:30 a.m. (Eastern Standard Time). Lady Juliet Duff’s failing health? Yes. But one illness is much like another. Music? That must be it. The thirty-third president loved to play the piano. They talked of Horowitz. Of young Van Cliburn who played at Potsdam for Truman and (“Uncle Joe”) Stalin. But then, surely, Truman must have mentioned President Johnson. What did he say? For once, Beaton is too discreet, unlike his earlier diaries.
I was in Switzerland when Beaton’s revelations about his “affair” with Greta Garbo were published in a German magazine. The only comment that I heard her make was glum: “And people think that I am pair-annoyed.” But it is the nature of the dandy to flaunt brilliant plumes. In this, Beaton resembles the kingfisher, a bird that flies
so quickly that by the time one says “Look!” they have gone. This most brilliant metallic bird is said to have such an unpleasant smell for other birds that it is solitary and safe.
The Greek word for kingfisher is “halcyon”—born of the sea. For two weeks at the winter solstice the kingfisher’s nest is supposed to float on a tranquil sea until the eggs are hatched. Twice Beaton uses the word “halcyon” to describe days in summer. But halcyon can refer only to calm and peaceful winter days, of the sort that this bright kingfisher deserves for the pleasure that he has given to all those who for so many years have watched (“Look!”) his swift, pretty flight.
New Statesman
MARCH 17, 1978