A clef
Alastair Forbes
This little collection of nouvelles Floren- tines plus ou moms a clef, is, like its delightful and distinguished author, some- thing of a curiosity. Its 'gentle reader', alternatively and with surely just as absurd archaism addressed as 'The patient reader', is informed by Harold Acton that, in at- tempting to encapsulate within these ten tales the atmosphere of the Piccolo Mondo Antico Anglo-Americano in which he grew up, he found himself 'yielding to the per- suasion of younger friends'. I should not be surprised to learn that, foremost amongst the latter, had been the no longer coroneted Milord Inglese who nurses his Byronic repute a short drive down the road to Rome. In his rather absent-mindedly Anglicised ex-Chigi Villa Cetinale just out- side Siena, the ever hospitable Tony Lamb- ton, rightly a great admirer of Acton's scin- tillating conversation and grandseigneurial style, was not long ago disappointed to find his own stab at a roman a clef failing to secure any London readers beyond a few privileged publishers and their hired libel devils. His unusual anti-heroine, a picares- quely portrayed top people's solicitor, was too-swiftly suspected in Law Society circles of being strangely like the Master of University College Oxford in drag.
I seem to recall that this sadly never ex- ploded Lambton squib had on the side also lightly lampooned a genuine female, a writer of popular historical studies uncom- monly reminiscent of the unnamed and even unpseudonymed 'buxom woman in magenta trousers and a turban to match' who appears in this volume's 'A Morning at Upshott's'. This is a thin little piece set without peradventure of doubt within Heywood Hill, Curzon Street's world- renowned bookshop , rendezvous where,
since the death of another eminent and celibate Anglo-Tuscan, Osbert Sitwell, Ac- ton rates as the star visiting customer; and where his latest books are always most like- ly to hit their best sales figures. Already furious at the absence from the bow- window display of her just published Charlotte Corday, the magenta-hued authoress is further enraged by the sight of a review-copy-flogging Cyril Connolly (here appearing as Cecil Cuthbertson alias The Mogul because 'he could boast of three wives and several concubines') who has wit- tily described her in his Sunday Monitor space as 'the Marie Corelli of biographers'. So, she exits, cursing him as an envious `twerp' (sic) whose Damocles (read The Un- quiet Grave) — 'a bundle of quotations strung together with platitudes' — proves his sterility. The owner-manager, a rather shadowy triune Hill-Buchanan-Smith amalgam, mutters, 'Good riddance. That harpy has plagued me for years. What upset her?' The Connolly character is then picked up by the chatelaine of `Pilbury Towers' apparently a feeble attempt at dear Lady D'Avigdor-Goldsmid of Somerhill — and swept in salivating excitement off to a greedy freebie lunch- and week-end. Throughout this soporific documentary glimpse of a Mayfair morning, there hovers the figure •of a famous novelist, 'a jaunty little man in a grey bowler hat', otherwise barely recognisable as Evelyn Waugh, yet equally unrecognisable as anyone else, who throws his bullying and teasing weight literally all over the little shop, the while spouting, like the rest of the customers, much wholly unlifelike dialogue.
Acton must have been, if not the first swell, at least the first Anglo-American swell, in Waugh's life. That Brideshead telly film gave Anthony Blanche, (the character in fact based on the first Jewish American swell Waugh was to come across, Brian HoWard), the almost exact lineaments of Acton, as he appeared, megaphone in hand, in Waugh's typically accomplished pen and ink drawing of him as 'The Last of the Poets'. Peter Quennell has somewhere described Acton's Oxford attachment to Waugh as 'romantic yet fatherly', though I suppose rather few fathers could be found addressing their offspring as 'Fame d'un apres-midi ou de plusieurs'. What is certain is that Waugh was, in the early part of their friendship, in the habit of seeking Acton's advice about his own work. It is a great pity that Acton, unlike Nancy Mitford, the great friend they both cherished (who was, some years ago, touchingly memorialised by him), never seems to have sought literary advice from Waugh who .once wrote to Nancy, 'I'm glad you are coming to England to polish up your English . . . You may fall into poor Harold's pit of having no English'. After telling Acton that he `longed to see more of the Medici book', he felt obliged to note in his diary that it was `full of pompous little cliches and involved illiterate passages. Now and then a characteristic gay flash but deadly dull for the most part'. • The interest in writing, for Waugh, lay much less in the investigation of character than in 'an exercise in the use of language, a subject in which he did not feel able to give his aesthete chum even a pass mark; deeming him virtually unable to write either for Harrogate toffee or Doney's cream puffs. 'It is drama, speech and events', he said, 'that interest me'. To a remarkably perceptive interviewer, Maureen Cleave, Sir Harold recently admitted that he 'could never have been a good novelist because I don't know enough about people . . . Never to have had any really close intimacies, that has been my life', lacunae hardly likely to be lesser handicaps for an aspiring nouvelliste, even when he restricts his themes to such Florentine faits divers and their protagonists as he himself has seen plain unfolding; what you might call every- day tales of undistressed gentlefolk.
Having to swallow these ten trifles at a go was, for me, to drown in a sort of WO inglese in which likenesses of the once- known and living seemed the only scraps of crystallised angelica, cherries and macaroons one could actually bite. Sir Harold seems somewhat ambivalent about that mischievous mythomaniac and `Woman of French Letters', as Violet Trefusis gigglingly liked to call herself as she wiped foodstains off her Legion d'Hon- neur. She becomes Muriel tout court in the account of the dotty codicil-chopping and changing she indeed unconscionably in- dulged in, while, a clown-powdered and painted skeleton on the chaise-longue that had long seen no hurly-burly, she measured out the end of her life in coffee-spoons.
To Maureen Cleave he lately said she was `a ghastly woman. I hated her'. But, in the agreeable prologue that sets the scene for his stories, he expresses the hope that he has `not been unfair to dear old Muriel, for she had a strain of poetic fantasy which is becoming rare. There are even moments when I miss her'. I do not think Mr David Pryce-Jones, despite a sometimes too thin skin and too low flash point, is likely to complain of Acton's quite anodyne cameo of his rich maternal grandmother, the late Mrs Frank Wooster (here alias Mrs Gabriel Disher), the unexpected success of whose impassioned attempt to obtain, at least locally, the posthumous canonisation on the widest possible oecumenical scale, of her never noticeably saintly second hus- band, with whom she claimed to be in cons- tant celestial contact, has remained a stand- by for chuckles over the Vin Santo and the vodka.
I doubt if any amount of editing could have brought these stories within miles of the Henry James for whom their author feels 'veneration', but to one who does not have the chance to compare manuscript drafts in the Bodleian, they do not appear to have had any editing at all, and very little proof-correcting either. Surely MY' Hamish Hamilton, himself about to be carried off into Florentine exile and retirement by his Italian wife, could have drawn his old friend's attention to some of the more ludicrous passages.
TTY this, for instance. 'He leaned over her with ravenous lips. Spontaneously her bare arms drew his face down to hers and it was a repetition of the old, old story. The pressure of Ugo's lips opened a hidden crater of bubbling lava. Ugo took advan- tage of the eruption to undress Flora with frantic fingers and Flora, half-swooning, submitted to his volcanic embraces . . . He sucked her nipples and nibbled her armpits. "Stop it, you little tiger!" she cried. But he
only stopped her mouth with his own while massaging her mound of Venus. "You are all mine!" he whispered triumphantly.'
Surely somebody in Long Acre should at this stage have sent him back to his Decameron drawing-board. I know that in Weidenfeld's already widely advertised Henry Root's World of Knowledge, the ir- repressibly facetious author has put his en- try for Acton, Sir Harold next to that for Activity, Heightened Sexual; but this is really ridiculous.
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