The Pursuit of Laughter by Diana Mitford (Mosley) Read Free Book Online Page A

loved hearing this over and over again. ‘What happened to your whiff, Harold?’ ‘My deear, it was shuttered to uttoms’, said Harold.
    He often dined with us, and sometimes a fellow guest was Lytton Strachey, who wrote to Carrington (28 May 1930): ‘Once more Harold Acton figured—I felt myself falling under his sway little by little.’ Nearly everyone fell under his sway.
    Harold was the only person who succeeded in being friends with Nancy Cunard without forfeiting the friendship of her mother, Emerald. Nancy and her black lover were often to be seen at Lancaster Gate when visiting London, but if Emerald knew of it she never allowed it to affect relations with Harold, an ornament of her luncheons at Grosvenor Square. As a rule she waited until her guests were assembled before rushing in herself, but one day we were all, including Emerald, waiting for a late comer. WhenDavid Cecil was shown into a room where perhaps a dozen people were chatting, there was a moment’s silence while he crept awkwardly towards his hostess, broken by Harold’s slowly enunciated words: ‘The Stricken Deer’. David Cecil had just published a biography of Cowper thus entitled.
    Although at his English schools Harold, with his cosmopolitan background, Italianate accent and refusal to join in anything childish, must have seemed a strange phenomenon, he was apparently never bullied or harried. He must have had a very strong character, which in some unusual way kept him entirely immune. We were told that even at his private school barbarity did not prevail, and he recited his poems to astonished children of ten or eleven, provoking a rude reaction. Perhaps his sharp tongue made them a little afraid of him, and his extreme politeness disarmed. He was always ready with a harsh but courteous snub if somebody tried to be rude. A hostile, rather mannish woman whose car had broken down near the house where we were all dining, said to him aggressively: ‘You’re not the kind of young man one can imagine doing things under a car!’ Harold, slowly rolling his eyes, replied, ‘It all depends who with’.
    In 1920 his novel,
Hum Drum
, came out. It was a grave disappointment to his admirers . By a piece of bad luck it appeared at the same time as Evelyn Waugh’s brilliant
Decline and Fall
. They were reviewed together; nobody praised
Hum Drum
. As Harold and Evelyn had been at Oxford together, very much in the position of master and disciple, it was a painful episode. As if to underline it, Evelyn had dedicated his novel to Harold. On and off for the rest of his life Harold wrote fiction, but his talent lay elsewhere. His genius was in the brilliant charm and radiance of his personality, unequalled in his generation .
    Although
The Last Medici
had a succès d’estime, Harold was deeply hurt, and decided to withdraw from London and go to live in China, the land of his dreams. He had become a notable figure in London, as he had been at Oxford. His departure was mourned by his many friends, and it was probably hastened by anxieties about William. He took him home to his parents in Florence, a nightmare journey with William threatening suicide.
    Harold came back to England in the war and joined the Air Force. He resumed his friendships, and once went for a journey with Evelyn Waugh, ‘our irascible friend’ as he described him in a letter to me. But he found him too difficult, too rude. He himself never changed. He stayed with me in France, and I with him at La Pietra. It is for others to describe him there; I am one of the few who remember the fantastic and admirable Harold of long ago.
    Evening Standard
(1994)

Conversation Piece
    When the Prince and Princess of Wales visited Harold Acton, the Princess was reported as having said she had never in her life met anyone like him. She was absolutely right. The only person remotely like Harold was his brother William, who died long ago.
    Harold was a brilliant talker, whose idiosyncratic voice, with