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

Italian inflections, amused the listener, quite apart from his inspired and malicious wit. William had the same voice. Harold wrote many books, but for some reason they never came up to the expectation of those who had been held in thrall by his conversation.
    His memoir of my sister Nancy must be reckoned one of his best books. They had been friends for more than 40 years, ever since he left Oxford. He was born in 1904, and he and his brothers were educated at Eton and Christ Church, but they always seemed Florentine to us. Towards the end of his life he was host at his beautiful villa, La Pietra, to all the world. Everyone visiting Florence expected to be invited by him, and he angelically submitted to being one of the ‘sights’ on no account to be missed.
    At school and at Oxford Harold was a poet, and dressed rather extravagantly; his contemporaries looked up to him as a perfectly civilised cosmopolitan paragon. To his friends he was, and remained for his whole life, a source of endless amusement and laughter, as well as a connoisseur of art and literature.
    After Harold left Oxford, he and William lived for a time in a huge, ugly house in Lancaster Gate, where William bought and sold rococo furniture. Harold settled down to his writing. At the age of 24, he was already a shining fixed star in the London literary and social world, an ornament of Emerald Cunard’s luncheons in Grosvenor Square, where his presence ensured fireworks and clever repartee such as Emerald loved to orchestrate.
    Unluckily, the publication of Harold’s novel
Hum Drum
coincided with that of Evelyn Waugh’s first novel,
Decline and Fall
. This was a disaster for Harold, the critics hailing Evelyn. Harold went away to Peking, William to Florence. They left a very sad gap.
    Years later, in his
Memoirs of an Aesthete
, Harold wrote spitefully about Evelyn Waugh, Brian Howard, Robert Byron and Cyril Connolly. He pictures himself as having been the only civilised man among a bunch of backward and boorish Englishmen. Nobody seems to have minded; the attack never reached its target. Harold once described Evelyn Waugh in a letter to me as ‘our irascible friend’. Which is fair enough, because he did become irascible as years went by.
    It is a great mystery why Harold Acton, so witty and with such a penetrating understanding , was never able to get his talents down on paper, but it is a fact. In Peking he felt completely at home. He loved everything Chinese and translated Chinese plays, hoping they would be a success on the London stage, which they never were.
    He came back to England for the war, and once when I asked him if he would ever return to his eastern paradise, he said no, every one of his friends there was dead. All were mandarins, killed by the communists.
    In his
Memoirs of an Aesthete
Harold pays tribute to William and his talent for painting and drawing. He did vast portraits of his friends, all wonderfully like them, but in an old-fashioned style that ensured the portraits were underrated. His method of painting was to ask his model to allow her head to be photographed from every angle. Then William made rather beautiful pencil drawings, the studies for his paintings. The only other painter I knew who used photographers was Sickert; the results were very different. But fashion is all-powerful, and doubtless William’s amazing facility was a disadvantage. His pictures are not works of art, but they are a faithful record of a whole generation of English women.
    The last time I saw William was in the summer of 1940. France was falling, the British army had made its way home via the Channel ports, gloom was on every face. I ran into William by chance in Piccadilly, and we sat for a few moments to talk. ‘What are you doing now?’ I asked. ‘I’m learning Urdu,’ was his reply. He lived in a world of his own, and so, in a way, did Harold.
    After the war Harold inherited La Pietra, and a new phase of his life began. He wrote