Memories of an Aesthete

DAVID KUBIAK is a Professor of Classics at Wabash College in Crawfordsvilles, Indiana.

Dis manibus
Sororis Sebastiani
quae viam monstravit

Evelyn Waugh’s celebrated novel Brideshead
Revisited was recently committed
to film once again, bravely (and very badly)
in the face of the definitive BBC production
of three decades ago. When I first saw
news of the movie, my mind turned immediately
to the book’s fi gure of mantic wit,
Anthony Blanche, since in 1981 I spent an
afternoon in Florence with the man who
inspired the character, Waugh’s old Oxford
companion Harold (after 1974 Sir Harold)
Mario Mitchell Acton, writer, traveler, artcollector,
arbiter elegantiae to his generation,
and throughout his long life faithful and
garrulous friend of many people more significant culturally than himself. The story
I tell here is derived from extensive notes
written out immediately after our conversation.
Various complications have prevented
its publication before this point, but
now seems the time to recall my own brush
with the irretrievably lost world of Charles
and Sebastian: “My theme is memory, that
winged host. . . .”

I

When Harold Acton died in 1994 at age
89, Anthony Powell writing in the New
York Times called him “the last of the old
crowd,” with Powell himself, who was
94 at his death in 2000, the absolute last.
“The old crowd” meant artists and intellectuals,
both real and soi-disants, who
were at Oxford and often Eton together
in the 1920’s: writers like Waugh, Graham
Greene, Robert Byron, Cyril Connolly,
John Betjeman, and Peter Quennell; the
art historian Kenneth Clark and Virgilian
scholar Roger Mynors; Brian Howard,
suffering under the peculiarly English
curse of never again being as brilliant as
he was at seventeen; and a whole host of
decorative plutocrats in the style of Lady
Curzon’s sons Alfred and Hugh Duggan.
Aesthetic mentor to some of these
men in their university years and rising
above them all in visibility was Harold
Acton. His father Arthur was mysterious
in his origins but had succeeded in attaching
himself to the Shropshire-Neapolitan
branch of the Acton family and in marrying
an American banking heiress, Hortense
Mitchell. They met while the elder Acton
was working for Stanford White in Chicago
designing imitation Italian palazzi
for American industrialists; with his wife’s
fortune he bought a real one, the magnificent Villa La Pietra outside Florence,
an ancestral home of the Capponi family
since the sixteenth century. Arthur Acton
could now devote himself entirely to the
adornment of the Villa, particularly the
restoration of its anachronistic British gardens
to their original Italian Renaissance
form. Two sons were born, Harold in 1904
and in 1906 William, who died, likely a
suicide, in 1945. The children were raised
in princely opulence surrounded by their
father’s ever-expanding art collections, but
deprived of any fixed sense of identity, with
conflicting ties to English cultural traditions,
a series of indulgent Italian nannies,
and brash American relatives strewn from
New York to Hawaii, where Dillingham
Boulevard in Honolulu is named for one of
them. It was a childhood that encouraged
histrionic self-invention.¹

According to custom, at the age of ten
Harold was sent to an English boarding
school, the fashionable Wixenford, losing
a home filled with sunlight and Botticelli
and suddenly thrust into a foreign land
of rainy mists and rugby. Kenneth Clark
was there at the same time, and describes
the place with sardonic neatness: “A few
of the preparatory schools may have been
interested in educating their pupils, but
Wixenford . . . had no such pretensions,”²
thus making it the perfect place for Harold
to meet that part of English society
he was to combat in the first part of his
life and cultivate in the last, the Philistine
sons of the upper classes, whom he tried
to civilize along Continental lines. Here
too he first made use of what became a
habitual defense mechanism, the tendency
to take what the other boys mocked about
him and make it into a weapon of counterattack.
If his speech seemed odd he
consciously affected an Italian accent and
sang bawdy Neapolitan songs; when his
schoolmates showed each other pictures
of their mothers he brought out a reproduction
of Giovanni Boldini’s portrait of
the Marchesa Casati posed with a greyhound;
and after England entered World
War I he published an article in the school
paper suggesting that the quickest way
to victory was for British troops to wear
uniforms designed by Bakst of the Ballet
Russe and to commission battle marches
from Stravinsky.

After Wixenford inevitably came
Eton, where Harold’s precocious talents
were developed further, and where he
met another Anglo-American with an
assumed aristocratic name. This was Brian
Howard, for whom Waugh appropriated
the description of Lord Byron as “mad,
bad, and dangerous to know,” and who
was the origin of Ambrose Silk’s character
in Put Out More Flags. His undisciplined
excesses culminated in an early death in
1958, but at Eton, Brian and Harold collaborated
on a number of avant-garde
projects, chiefl y a single issue of a magazine
called the Eton Candle, which contained
essays and poetry attacking Georgian
values in literature and proclaiming
the spirit of the 1890’s reborn. It was a
triumph for a pair of schoolboys. There
were two London printings, a favorable
review in the TLS (favorable reviews on
the whole did not mark Sir Harold’s literary
output), and the excited patronage of
the Sitwells, then approaching the zenith
of their artistic influence. When they
arrived at Oxford, Howard almost at once
dropped art in favor of a mindless social
life with the equestrian set. Harold began
a new literary paper, the Oxford Broom,
arranged successful appearances by Gertrude
Stein and Edith Sitwell, and put out
two books of verse. Otherwise the public
activities of Acton and his friends comprised
a series of exhibitionistic gestures,
still remembered today because they
appear in the autobiographies of all their
contemporaries and were transmuted by
Evelyn Waugh into scenes for his most
famous book.

II

Surprisingly, it was my sixth-grade nun who
was instrumental in guiding me towards
the world of the Bright Young Things; her
name no one writing on Waugh would
have the nerve to invent: Sister Sebastian.
One day she took me aside and said that
although I was still too young to appreciate
it, in the future she felt sure I would like
very much a book called Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh (“He’s English, but one
of us”). Her remark of course had precisely
its intended effect, which was to set me off
to the library in search of this mature work.
I found it, and as has been the case for so
many others, it sparked a lasting enthusiasm
for Waugh both as a writer and curmudgeonly
personality.

Despite Sir Harold’s bristling at the idea
and efforts by Waugh himself to dismiss the
identification, there is no doubt that in the
first part of Brideshead the extravagant character
of Anthony Blanche at Oxford is an
extended theme and variation on Harold
Acton’s university persona. No other undergraduate
recited poetry through a megaphone
into the Christ Church meadow;
Peter Quennell recalls Acton once declaiming
all three hundred twenty-six lines of
Swinburne’s threnody Anactoria at a luncheon
party.³ No other undergraduate was
forced to barricade his rooms against bands
of drunken hearties bent on destroying their
eccentric classmate’s art collection. Most
telling is the fact that no one at Oxford represented
the force of artistic liberation for
Waugh more seriously than Harold Acton,
who remembered his protégé in the first
volume of his autobiography Memoirs of an
Aesthete as “a prancing faun.”⁴ In 1964, by
which time Waugh had long since ceased to
prance, he admitted the debt. I quote from
his brief autobiography A Little Learning on
his friendship with Acton, juxtaposing in
square brackets remarks Waugh has Charles
Ryder make about Anthony Blanche:

He was always the leader; I not
always, the follower. His conspectus
was enormously larger than mine . .
. . Harold brought with him the air
of connoisseurs of Florence and the
innovators of Paris, of Berenson and
of Gertrude Stein, Magnasco and T.
S. Eliot. . . . I was certainly a little
dazzled by his manifest superiorities
of experience. [” . . . he dined with
Proust and Gide and was on closer
terms with Cocteau and Diaghilev;
Firbank sent him his novels with
fervent inscriptions. . . . At times we
all seemed children beside him. . . .”]
. . . he was vividly alive to every literary
fashion, exuberantly appreciative,
punctilious, light and funny and
energetic. [” . . . there was a bluster
and zest in Anthony which the rest of
us had shed somewhere in our more
leisured adolescence. . . .”]⁵

By the time I started my academic career
at Wabash College in 1979 more than fifty
years separated Sir Harold from his Oxford
days with the “prancing faun,” and fifteen
had passed since Waugh’s death. He had
long been installed as grand seigneur of La
Pietra, authored two volumes of memoirs
and several rarified monographs on Italian
history, and become a proud intimate
of members of the English royal family,
especially the late Princess Margaret, who
probably secured the knighthood for him.
The man who had scorned Georgian convention
at Oxford was now an inveterate
defender of old European social and artistic
values. When in 1981 I had the chance our
faculty is given to devise a Freshman Tutorial
course outside my own professional
field of Classical Studies I had the title right
off. The class would be called Evelyn Waugh
and His Friends, and it occurred to me that I
might arrange a conversation with the most
important friend of all.

One of my teachers in graduate school
at Harvard was Mason Hammond (1903–
2002), Pope Professor of the Latin Language
and Literature. He had known
Harold Acton for many years, first meeting
him after World War II when he was
charged with recovering works of Italian
art looted by Nazis. In 1980 I approached
Mr. Hammond for a letter of introduction,
which he said he would be happy to compose.
By the next year negotiations had
proceeded, and I received more information
on January 4:

He is around eighty and in reasonable
health and, being half American (his
mother came from Chicago), he is
well disposed towards Americans. . . .
Sir Harold has great charm and intelligence;
you may find him old but
not, I believe, as of nearly a year ago,
with any mental falling off. . . . From
this point you can write him directly
about what it is you want to discuss.

I don’t know what Professor Hammond
wrote to La Pietra on my behalf, but I
imagine Sir Harold did not expect that I
would be sent a copy of the response he
received dated February 4, 1981:

I hope that a meeting with your
friend David Kubiak here in June
can be arranged, when I shall try to
answer his questions about Evelyn
Waugh. This can be done more easily
viva voce, hazards of my health
permitting. By the way I continue to
receive many similar requests, since
E.W. dedicated his first novel to me.
No doubt Mr Kubiak will come fully
armed with the data, E.W.’s Letters,
diaries, Christopher Sykes’s biography,
etc. He sounds like a good
scholar, but in this case a strong sense
of humor is important.

I duly sent a letter to Florence outlining
my reasons for wanting to see him, and
was encouraged when I received from Sir
Harold a note beautifully hand-written in
black ink on thin blue airmail paper dated
16 February inviting me to call when I was
in Italy that June. The peculiar backward
turning d’s of his calligraphy in particular
caught my eye, and suggested the direction
in which his life was by then unavoidably
oriented. Knowing that he was, as Waugh
makes Anthony Blanche, Roman Catholic,
I had said in my own written explanation
to him that my special interest was
in Waugh’s idiosyncratic religious faith, an
aspect of his life still a subject of debate by
possessive Catholic voices on the one side
and hostile literary ones on the other. He
began talking about the subject in his invitation:
“Evelyn Waugh’s conversion saved
him from dangerous depression and prolonged
his life and work. While I saw it as a
blessing I seldom discussed it with him. He
was essentially a romantic, and hated the
changes introduced by Pope John, which
revived his latent depression. . . .”

We had arranged that I would telephone
from Venice to make precise the final
details, which I did from a room in the
Palazzo Gritti, a hotel I thought fittingly
grand for the mood of the trip, and a memorable
introduction to Italy for a colleague
and friend who was traveling with me and
had never been in Europe before. When I
made the call, the voice that greeted me
on the other line was already familiar from
the many descriptions I had read—exotically
musical, and with the slightest hint of
an Italian accent, more I thought in intonation
than pronunciation. Our exchange
began with an apology from Sir Harold
for his not being able to extend a dinner
invitation. I would willingly have given up
a meal for the brilliant sentence I had in
its stead, which could have been plucked
directly from one of Waugh’s novels: “My
cook has deserted me, and my butler’s wife
shrinks from preparing meals for a crowd.”
We settled on cocktails for this crowd of
two the following Monday, and when that
was done almost immediately he appended
as a footnote another fragment of literary
dialogue: “You know my desk holds
a positive sea of letters from absurd people
who have taken a sudden interest in my
friend Evelyn. Professor Hammond assures
me you are not likely to be one of them.”
I replied that my interest in Waugh was
far from sudden, and I could only hope he
would not find me absurd. Some kind of
test appeared to have been passed, and at
once the tone turned cordial again, suffi-
ciently so that I reminded him I was traveling
with a colleague who would like to
come with me for our talk. “And what is
your colleague’s field?” “Chemistry,” I
said. That revelation produced an audible
sigh over the receiver, followed by “The
poor man will undoubtedly be bored to
tears, but do bring him along.” There was
the echo of another voice: “And I will tell
you two things: one, that it will not make
the slightest difference to Sebastian’s feeling
for me and, secondly, my dear—and I
beg you to remember this though I have
plainly bored you into a condition of coma
. . . .” For someone who objected to people
seeing the connection, in my first conversation
with him Sir Harold had already
begun to sound a great deal like Anthony
Blanche.

III

The next week my chemical colleague
and I drove from Florence up the old Via
Bolognese to number 120. Two rampant
lions surmounted the iron portal of the
Villa, and the house itself could barely be
seen at the end of a long double row of
cypresses. After some preliminary discussions
with the porter, a direct descendant
of the Sacristan in Tosca, I finally convinced
him that we were indeed expected,
and the gate was opened. As we slowly left
behind the anarchy of Italian city life and
the only sounds were of singing birds and
leaves swishing in the breeze it was hard
not to succumb to the enchantment of the
place felt by many before us. We reached
and mounted the massive stone staircase;
I pulled the bell at the Villa’s front door.
The butler met us, and placed my card on a
silver tray. Then we were led down a long
corridor filled with early Tuscan painting
and into the enormous gran salone of the
house, the space where countless artists
and members of the beau monde had been
guests through the whole of the twentieth
century amidst a décor that remained
firmly of the seventeenth.

Since I had in a way recognized his voice
on the telephone, after seeing so many
photographs I imagined I would be prepared
to meet Sir Harold in the flesh. But
this time I found myself nonplussed. When
he made his entrance from the library he
was to be sure impeccably dressed in a very
English manner, but right off I noticed his
curious pear-shaped torso and large head
and hands, which despite his height did
not seem quite in proportion to the rest of
his body. Most un-English was the conspicuous
jade ring he wore, a memento of
happy time spent in China in the 1930’s,
effective for use as a punctuation mark in
conversation and for inscribing dramatic
arcs in the air as he talked. But it was his
manner of walking that anyone who did
not see it would find difficult to believe.
His trunk was tilted slightly to one side,
and he did not so much walk as flutter,
each movement of the feet accompanied
by a discreet waving of his arms in counter-
motion. The effect was of someone
swimming through the air just a bit above
the ground: the “Eton slump” as refined
by his study of Taoism under the tutelage
of a dispossessed Manchu prince.

After introductions were made we were
settled in an island of furniture arranged
at one end of the room. A bar of sorts
had been prepared with diminutive bottles
of gin and tonic, and Sir Harold gave
peremptory instructions: “My butler will
make you a fi rst drink; after that you may
help yourselves. I’m afraid we are all still
rather in a state of shock. A Titian was stolen
last week, and such things cannot be
insured in Italy.” I had no idea what the
appropriate response to a statement like
that was apart from “I’m very sorry,” and
reverted to my earlier plan for how our
talk might begin. Some reminder of Mrs.
Acton’s native Chicago would be good, I
surmised, and so brought along with me a
box of Marshall Field’s signature Frango
mints. I had miscalculated. “Chocolates
in the June heat of Florence? Clearly they
will all have melted.” The box was unceremoniously
hurled to the end of a long
table, but the mention of Chicago did turn
out to be wise, since it allowed Sir Harold’s
famous stream of anecdote to begin, and
the more he talked the happier he seemed.
“Mrs. Field was a great beauty, you know;
I remember a grand dinner party in Lake
Forest with my Mitchell cousins where all
the men sat enraptured.” He then inquired
about Wabash College, and appeared to
understand the idea of the American liberal
arts school: “Too much specialization is not
a good thing; scholars today have lost track
of the great sweep of history.” I suspected
this attitude was due in no small part to
the professional reception of his own historical
monographs, but I continued with
a Wabash story I thought he would enjoy,
since it involved a poet whom he knew.

In 1907 Ezra Pound came to the Modern
Language Department at Wabash, a
college at that time stringently Presbyterian
in character. Pound had already alienated
the administration by his foppish dress
and a general demeanor considered unsuitable
for professors, when an opportunity
to be rid of him presented itself. An abandoned
chorus girl from an itinerant burlesque
troupe was taken in for the night
by Pound, quite chastely. But when his
landlady discovered her in his rooms the
next morning the matter was reported to
the president of Wabash, and Ezra Pound
was summarily dismissed. Justice was an
important virtue to these upright Christians,
however, and they felt it their duty
to pay him the year’s salary stipulated in
his contract, which Pound took; he immediately
left for Europe, making Wabash
College partly responsible for the course
of modern English poetry. “[Venice] is,
after all, an excellent place to come to
from Crawfordsville, Indiana,” Pound
later wrote.⁶ “Oh my!” Sir Harold shot
back fortissimo, and then leaning towards
us said in a confidential and mischievous
tone, “I imagine you could get away with
much worse today, couldn’t you?” My
anecdote prompted one of his own. “How
well I remember the last time I saw Ezra.
It was in this very room, towards the end
when he had stopped talking altogether.
After an hour of absolute stony silence tea
was brought in, and as his cup was about
to be filled he looked up, and uttered a
single word—’gin.'” The “light and funny
and energetic” Harold Acton that Waugh
found so congenial was progressively
revealing himself quite unchanged.

Evidently pleased to know something
about my academic home, Sir Harold then
inquired about the progress of our Italian
giro. When told we had been in Mantova
he talked not about the frescoes of Mantegna
in the Palazzo Ducale, but rather
asked if we had been to the Palazzo del Te.
“The work of Giulio Romano there is one
of the great achievements of Italian painting.”
Later I did see the Sala dei Giganti
and understood. To him the Renaissance
perfection of Mantegna was probably a lit
tle boring; Romano’s wild mannerist jumble
of huge figures falling down from the
ceiling along the walls better harmonized
with his own spirit, which always took the
greatest pleasure in comical grotesquerie.

Then another subject: Had we eaten
well while in Florence, since it was so
easy not to? Today I find it what Agatha
Runcible would call “shy-making” to
admit my naïve satisfaction when our having
dined the night before at the restaurant
Omero in the hills above the city met
with approval: “It is a very beautiful place;
you are not ordinary tourists if you know
it.” Any previous faux pas must have been
forgiven, since we had been paid the most
sought-after compliment of every foreign
visitor to Florence for two centuries, and
by the person who more than anyone else
in the city was entitled to set the criteria
for it. Years later in Rome, the sommelier
at La Pergola must have wondered why one
night the American diner laughed out loud
when after I ordered the ’97 Gaja Sperss
from the wine list he quietly remarked:
“Ah, Signore, quando Lei è entrato qui ho
capito che non era come gli altri” (“Oh
Sir, when you came in I knew that you
were not like the others.”) That I had once
been told already, and on rather higher
authority.

Now seemed the point to begin to
inquire about Waugh, which would be
tricky, not only because of Sir Harold’s
resentment at being thought the pattern
for Anthony Blanche, but because the then
recent publication of Waugh’s Diaries and
Letters exposed some very unflattering
opinions about his talents as a writer. In
1932 Waugh says of Acton’s first historical
work on the later Medici, where the
author’s stated purpose was to “raise a
Baroque monument of prose”:

It is most unsatisfactory and I am
afraid will do him no more good
than his novel—full of pompous little
clichés and involved, illiterate passages.
Now and then a characteristic
gay flash, but deadly dull for the most
part. There are long citations from
Reresby, Evelyn and contemporary
travelers. Also endless descriptions of
fetes and processions.⁷

The last observation is shrewd in its
identifying the defect that undermines all
of Acton’s writing and makes it difficult to
finish any of his books: his assumption that
the substance of a thing, whether physical
or historical or emotional, could be conveyed
to readers simply by recounting in
bone-crushing detail all its accidents. Even
worse than his treatment of the Medici
book was Waugh’s outright duplicity
about The Last Bourbons of Naples in 1961.
He writes to Harold: “I am keeping your
book on the Bourbons for my sea voyage.
A work of that kind, so rich and learned,
must be studied with proper respect.”⁸ The
Diaries record a different attitude: “Dinner
at the Garrick to celebrate the publication
of Harold Acton’s second volume of Neapolitan
History. Dinner, chosen by John
Sutro, excellent; the book, unreadable.”⁹
Vintage Waugh, certainly, but the repercussions
for his friend when he read these
barbs, and realized that the English literary
world was reading them as well, cannot
have been pleasant—not least because
after bits of the Diaries first appeared, he
himself in his memoir of Nancy Mitford
had referred to certain excerpts that surprised
him, and then posed a rhetorical
question, which the next year and to his
public embarrassment he found answered:
“What posthumous teases and shocks were
still in store for Evelyn’s friends?”¹⁰

I brought news I thought might be a
deft way to start. Part of the summer had
been spent in Oxford visiting a former student,
then a Junior Fellow at New College,
and I learned from him that the Bullingdon
Club, punningly satirized as the Bollinger
by Waugh at the start of Decline and
Fall—“At the last dinner, three years ago,
a fox had been brought in in a cage and
stoned to death with champagne bottles.
What an evening that had been!”—the
Bullingdon had been banished by the
University authorities five miles beyond
the city limits for incorrigible rowdiness.
“I am most gratified to hear it,” Sir Harold
replied; “you may know that they were not
very pleasant to me as an undergraduate.”
Indeed not. It was the Club’s unpleasantness
that is the subject of Anthony Blanche’s
virtuoso narrative to Charles Ryder about
an incident that ended in the members
forcing Antoine to “sport” in the Mercury
Fountain at Christ Church: “They
had been having one of their ridiculous
club dinners. And they were all wearing
coloured tail-coats—a sort of livery. ‘My
dears,’ I said to them, ‘you look like a lot
of most disorderly footmen.'”¹¹

Mention of the Bullingdon led naturally
to the old question of how much the
world that Evelyn Waugh wrote about
actually existed. In response Sir Harold
returned to the basic romanticism in
Waugh’s character he had spoken of earlier
in his letter: “His gift was in observing
and then transforming experience. There
are several scenes in Brideshead drawn from
occasions when both of us were present.
I was surprised when things that were to
me unremarkable at the time had become
in the book the stuff of high romance.”
This perception squares well with what
Lady Pansy Lamb said in a letter to Waugh
after the publication of Brideshead: “But all
the richness of your invention, the magical
embroideries you fling around your characters
cannot make me nostalgic about the
world I knew in the 1920’s. . . . Nobody
was brilliant, beautiful, and rich and the
owner of a wonderful house, though some
were one or the other. . . .” ¹² What as a
friend Sir Harold called the romanticism
of Waugh is of course the same characteristic
that his enemies identified as snobbery
and social-climbing. He admitted the
existence of this opinion, but predictably
did not believe the charge valid, rejecting
it with what might be thought itself a very
snobbish explanation, which he also used
in claiming to be amazed at any curiosity
about himself: “Evelyn and I lived in a particular
time and place and had the friends
of that time and place. I have never understood
the desire to see in this fact any great
significance or design.” He was willing to
add that “Evelyn’s supposed snobbery was
part of his comedy. He objected to my
joining the R.A.F. during the war on the
grounds that it was the most déclassé branch
of the services and had ugly uniforms. And
as for courting the powerful, he grew far
too misanthropic early on to pursue social
ambition with any seriousness.”

I was surprised at his insistence on what
a poor conversationalist Waugh became
after Oxford, and how this quality only
grew more pronounced over the years:
“At parties he would sit by himself on a
sofa glaring at the other guests and saying
hardly a civil word to anyone the whole
evening. But he took in everything, and
the next day could recite in minute detail
conversations he had overheard. He was
emphatically not a talker, but a supremely
astute observer.” The question of Waugh’s
increasing isolation in middle age also led
to a comment on his medicating himself
for chronic insomnia, which probably
brought on the Pinfold hallucinations of
1954: “He had a theatrical hatred for anything
up-to-date—have you seen pictures
of that ear trumpet he used?—and at night
would down poisonous Edwardian sleeping
potions like Veronal (procured from
Lord knows where), followed by enormous
tumblers full of whiskey and crème de menthe
to mask the smell. People sitting near him
sometimes warned the hostess that there
must be a gas leak in the house.” I recognized
this story from the second volume
of his autobiography,¹³ but there the details
are different, the last line, delivered totally
deadpan, absent altogether, and the overall
impact of the literary version much less
amusing. Writing notoriously destroys an
oral tradition, and like a Homeric bard, the
composer must have judged the audience
at hand and then made subtle adjustments
in the selections from the massive store of
anecdote he had ready for any occasion.

At this good-humored juncture I
thought it safe to return to an earlier
period and pursue my interest in Waugh’s
Catholicism and what if any part Harold’s
aesthetic credo might have played in it.
While he had said of his friend’s conversion
that “I seldom discussed it with him,”
there was nonetheless a suggestive line in
a congratulatory note Waugh wrote after
the publication of Acton’s first volume of
memoirs in 1948: “My sympathies still
stand where you grounded them, with
Frith [the painter William] and the Pope
of Rome.” ¹⁴ Although Sir Harold was
christened a Roman Catholic, his mother’s
family and an establishment English
prep school weakened the affiliation. But
he described to us an act of religious rebellion
when he reached his public school: “I
asserted myself at Eton,” he said, “and told
the authorities I could no longer in conscience
attend chapel, but wished access
to the services of the Roman Catholic
Church in which I had been baptized. You
are what you are, you know.” His cultural
and historical commitment to the Church
remained unchanged throughout his life.
Standing first on a petition submitted to
Rome in 1971 by the British cultural élite
requesting that the traditional Latin rite of
the Mass not be abrogated in England was
the name of Harold Acton. The effort was
ultimately successful, and resulted in what
was dubbed the “Agatha Christie Indult,”
because Pope Paul VI was a fan of the
mysteries and recognized her among the
signatories.

Today it will seem a paradox that for
English aesthetes beginning with Firbank
and Wilde the Church represented not submission
to external authority but freedom
from Anglo-Saxon convention and the possibility
of embracing the aggressive anti-
Manichaeism of southern Mediterranean
Catholic civilization, where the splendors
of the old Roman liturgy and the sensuality
of much Italian sacred art confirmed rather
than repressed lives lived in pursuit of the
beautiful. “The Protestant Faith has much
misery to answer for” is Acton’s expression
of this posture in his memoirs.¹⁵ Waugh,
on the other hand, never tired of repeating
that his conversion had to do with nothing
except the intellectual embrace of truth.
Writing to Lord David Cecil in 1949 he is
forthright: “I can’t think of a single saint
who attached much importance to art.”¹⁶
But the aesthete’s Alice-in-Wonderland
Catholicism was an undoubted influence
on his own writing. It belongs to Sebastian
in Brideshead:

“But, my dear Sebastian, you can’t

seriously believe it all.”

“Can’t I?”
“I mean about Christmas and the

star and the three kings and
the ox and the ass.”

“Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely

idea.”

“But you can’t believe things because

they’re a lovely idea.”

“But I do. That’s how I believe.”

That’s how Harold Acton believed as
well.

In Brideshead Anthony Blanche appears
as a Catholic much absorbed with social
observation; I wanted to find out more
from Sir Harold about a link between the
Church and charges of pretension against
Waugh made possible by the religious sociology
of England. Had Waugh been anxious
to cultivate the great “old Catholic”
families he was to write about in his later
novels, in particular, as Burke’s Peerage
describes them, “the noble and illustrious
Howards”? “We knew Edmund Howard
[the Hon.] the best, but Evelyn was not
really close to any of them,” Sir Harold said,
adding that no matter how much Waugh
was supposed to have dearly loved a duke,
he could not imagine these people inspiring
any sustained attention from a writer
who demanded witty friends: “The Howards
are great aristocrats, and frighteningly
pious—but not too bright, you know. The
last Duke of Norfolk presided as Earl Marshall
over Queen Elizabeth’s coronation,
and anyone who knew him thought it was
only divine pleasure at the family faith that
got His Grace through the ceremony, since
it was not at all clear that the poor man
could tell his right hand from his left.”
Again a familiar voice. Here is Anthony
Blanche to Charles about Sebastian Flyte:
” . . . he isn’t very well endowed in the Top
Storey. We couldn’t claim that for him,
could we, much as we love him?”

By now my colleague and I had helped
ourselves to three gin and tonics, and I
began to feel that we had imposed on our
host long enough, especially since I knew
he had recently been in London for treatment
of a kidney problem. Scarcely had
I started a next sentence thanking him
for his kindness when I was interrupted:
“But you must see the garden before you
leave!” The one thing I had promised
myself not to do—because I thought it
must be another of the insider’s ways of
demonstrating that he was not an ordinary
tourist in Florence—was to inflict on an
older man the thousandth circuit of his
renowned property, and I doubly promised
myself not to do so when he told us
that the week before he had shepherded a
group of Smith alumnae through it. But
far from seeming relieved, there was a look
of crestfallen childlike disappointment on
his face at the idea of our not coming outside,
which quickly changed to pleasure
when I said that if he did not find it tiring,
it would be a privilege to walk with
him. In the event we had trouble keeping
up. Then 76, he considerably accelerated
the “Eton-Taoist slump” as he pointed out
and recited the history of the continually
photographed terraces and fountains, the
statuary brought by his father from areas
around Venice where the stone was most
resistant to bad weather, and the outdoor
theater, with its footlights of sheared box,
where another “great beauty,” Nastassja
Kinsky, had recently been filmed for her
latest movie. All of it, we were informed,
“tended by a single Polish gardener,” his
father’s old retainer Mariano Ambrosiewicz,
amazingly then still alive.

I had been warned that this tour was
given so often visitors tended to feel like
students trailing after a museum docent,
but at the end of the garden, on the side
that faces towards Fiesole and the church
of San Dominico, there was an unexpected
improvisation. In the spot where we were
standing the air was so heavily perfumed I
found it diffi cult to breathe, and my colleague,
who had sat for the whole afternoon
more or less silent, suddenly blurted
out: “What is that smell?” This was the
place where the knighted landlord of La
Pietra chose to let down his guard. Sir
Harold smiled and answered, “That, my
dear professor, is the odor of jasmine.” I
will always be grateful for my friend’s
blunt question, because the flowers’ scent
led Sir Harold to a complex reminiscence
which I have not read exactly this way in
any of his own books or found anywhere
quoted by others: “When I was a boy I
remember seeing Ronald Firbank tripping
through the streets of Florence,” he told
us, in a sincerely wistful tone of voice we
had not heard earlier, “his arms full of lilies,
which he tried to give to people who
didn’t really want them.” For a moment
none of us said anything, but simply stood
looking out over the countryside. My
thoughts ran to a place at the beginning
of Memoirs of an Aesthete, where the reader
is told about a pre-pubescent infatuation
Harold conceived for a girl, who cut him
dead after being sent a postcard showing
Leda and the swan with a message suggesting
her boyish suitor’s longing “to be
your swan, my darling.” An early battle
with the Philistines lost, but productive of
a juvenile poem, which began:

My love is like a lily cast away.
Its petals once in sunlight’s rich

array

Are withered now for ever—let

them be!

No love, alas, no love e’ermore

for me.¹⁷

Was the simile suggested by Harold actually
having seen Ronald Firbank? Or was
the scene transferred to Firbank long ago
as a way of distancing the personal experience
of rejection? In either case, whoever
appreciated the intertextuality of the two
stories heard Sir Harold making a reference
to himself and to the emotional disappointments
of his life. A Proustian irony, I
thought, as my colleague and I expressed
our thanks and said goodbye, that this final
moment of vulnerability was prompted not
by me, but by the scientist Sir Harold had
predicted would be bored to tears.

IV

Kenneth Clark claims that “Lives devoted
to beauty usually end badly,”¹⁸ and since
Harold Acton’s death—in the bosom of
the Roman Church, of course—it has
been easy for articles about him to finish in
a minor key, with Anthony Powell’s obituary
establishing that mode by emphasizing
that “he had no great individual talent.”
Forgetful of the lively and comic friend of
Evelyn Waugh who was still to be found in
1981, writers tend to prefer some version
of what Isaiah Berlin said about Waugh’s
brother-in-law Auberon Herbert:

The universe of his imagination,
the semi-feudal, nostalgic, historical
romance which he lived out so movingly,
so gallantly and painfully, had
become second nature to him, and
perhaps, despite moments of penetrating
self-awareness—the bitter
moments when reality broke through
the fantasy—had become one with
his basic character and nature.¹⁹

Admittedly, various posthumous developments
have made a gloomy conclusion
seem right. Once they were examined by
Sir Harold’s legatee, New York University,
the Acton art collection turned out
to be made up chiefly of minor works of
the Scuola di X type rather than important
historical pieces. Then in a scene straight
from The Loved One, Arthur Acton’s
body was exhumed in 2003 to provide
a DNA sample for a suit brought against
the $500,000,000 estate by the children of
his putative illegitimate daughter Lianna
Beacci. Results were positive, and legal
action continues.

It is unfortunate that we retain a decided
tendency inherited from the ancient biographical
tradition always to emphasize
the darker side of people’s lives when summing
up their identity. Underlying sadness
or frustration is taken as the reality
masked by false contentment and hypocritical
decorum. But surely the whole
man is the true man. Harold Acton’s flamboyant
and then guarded presentation of
himself to the world, which most men as
rich and well-connected as he was would
not have bothered to contrive, the personality
which brought artistic enlightenment
and amusement and support to friends old
and new, this fi gure should not, I think, be
viewed as a counterfeit like the phantom
Helen who went to Troy while the real
woman of flesh and blood was languishing
in Egypt waiting to be rescued. Some
future biographer will no doubt suppose
that he or she will be acting as savior of
the genuine Harold Acton when a sixhundred-
page, heavily annotated book is
ultimately published, but I cannot believe
that book will bring to light anything that
was not abundantly clear to its protagonist.
He knew he was not an important writer,
that his name would always be linked to
Waugh’s Anthony Blanche, that the Villa
La Pietra was as much his greatest burden
as his greatest pride. Facts of this sort do
not lead me to any dour last judgment.
Now whenever I remember the few hours
I spent with Sir Harold, what comes to
mind is a small poem of Cavafy, an author
whom he much admired. During his last
days, dying in the great house where he
was born and had determined to stay, I
would like to imagine these verses came
back to Harold Acton as well, assuring
him that he had after all achieved in his
life what from boyhood on he wanted for
it most deeply:

I do not question whether I am

happy or not.

But one thing I have always gladly

in mind;

that in the great addition—their

addition that I abhor—

that has so many numbers, I am

not one

of the many units there. I was

not counted

in the total sum. And this joy

suffices me.

NOTES

1. On Acton’s family and early life see Harold Acton,
   Memoirs of an Aesthete (London: Methuen, 1948).
   Autobiographical details are critically examined by
   Martin Green, Children of the Sun: A Study of “Decadence”
   in England After 1918 (New York: Basic Books,
   1976), and especially by J. Lord, “The Cost of the
   Villa,” in Some Remarkable Men: Further Memoirs (New
   York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996).

2. Kenneth
   Clark, Another Part of the Wood: A Self-Portrait (New
   York, Evanston, San Francisco, London: Harper &
   Row, 1975), 33.

3. Peter Quennell, The Marble Foot:
   An Autobiography, 1905–1938 (London: Collins,
   1976), 128.

4. Acton, Memoirs, 126.
5. Evelyn Waugh,
   A Little Learning: The First Volume of an Autobiography
   (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1964),
   197; Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (Boston: Little,
   Brown and Co., 1979), 46.

6. Ezra Pound, Indiscretions;
   or, Une Revue de Deux Mondes (Paris: Three
   Moutnains Press, 1923), 11.

7. The Diaries of Evelyn
   Waugh, ed. Michael Davie (Boston and Toronto: Little,
   Brown and Co., 1976), 311–12.

8. The Letters of
   Evelyn Waugh, ed. Mark Amory (New Haven, CT and
   New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1980), 579.

9. Davie,
   Diaries, 781.

10. Harold Acton, Nancy Mitford: A Memoir
    (New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London:
    Hamish Hamilton, 1975), 236.

11. Waugh, Brideshead,
    49.

12. Amory, Letters, 199, n. 2.
13. Harold Acton,
    More Memoirs of an Aesthete (London: Methuen, 1970),
    312.

14. Amory, Letters, 277.
15. Acton, Memoirs, 123.
16. Amory, Letters, 303.
17. Acton, Memoirs, 20–21.
18. Clark, Self-Portrait, 179.
19. Isaiah Berlin, Personal
    Impressions (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 133.