CONVERSATION PIECE

Diana Mosley remembers the eccentricity

and wit of the writer Harold Acton and his brother William

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 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, to be republished next week, 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 had been the acknowledged leader of what came to be known as the Brideshead generation. He 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. First came The Last Medici, a colourful description of the life of Gian Gastoni, the decadent last member of the great Florentine family. He also wrote a novel, Hum Drum. Like all his fiction, it was a failure.

This was a bitter surprise to him. 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 Hum Drum coincided with that of Evelyn Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall. This was a disaster for Harold, the critics hailing Evelyn as a new master while bestowing no praise on Hum Drum. At Oxford, Evelyn had been one of Harold's disciples and admirers, and within a couple of years he had surpassed him, and was on the way to becoming one of the most famous novelists of the 20th century.

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 he 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 well-received histories of the Bourbons of Naples, he was revered as an historian, as well as as a host and a wit. He and Nancy shared old friends, as well as an old enemy, Violet Trefusis. Their enmity was a great link: Violet was Harold's neighbour in Florence, and Nancy's in Paris. In his memoir there is a delightful photograph of her.

Harold changed nothing at La Pietra. The walls were covered with his father's collection of Italian pictures. Except for them and the villa itself, everything was redolent of 1900, red velvet armchairs with antimacassars. His mother's bedroom, the size of a large ballroom, where I slept when I stayed with him, had 18 oil paintings of the Madonna and Child on the walls, as well as a large Della Robbia china representation of the same subject.

A great joy for the last 20 years of Harold's life was that Lord Lamb ton became a neighbour. They were made for each other, with the same malicious sense of humour. There were screams of laughter from Harold's dining-room when this fantastically amusing man was a guest. It is sad that conversation is so ephemeral, and brilliant talk so rare. Never can two wits have been more closely attuned, more uninhibited, than they. Both were bibliophiles, art connoisseurs and gardeners.

Harold Acton never changed. I first met him in 1928, and saw him on and off until a couple of years before he died. He never seemed young or old; simply himself. He made a few television appearances, and was an instant star: the beauty of his surroundings, his exquisite courtesy to one and all, and his verbal dexterity.

Harold had no heir, and he hoped to bequeath his estate in Florence to Christ Church or to Eton. Both refused to accept it, incredible as it may seem. He therefore left it to an American university, whose fortunate undergraduates go to La Pietra to study Italian art.