Beaton unbeaten
Alastair Forbes
The Parting Years: Diaries 1963-74 Cecil Beaton (Weidenfeld £5.95)
This is the sixth selection from the diaries kept by Sir Cecil Beaton for more than half a century up till 1974, when he had to relinquish the habit for a sad and sufficient reason of which a sharp warning shot can already be heard fired across his handsome and all too hastily heightening brow on holiday in August 1972: 'lately a blight hat been put on my existence by my not being able to read or write without being punished with a nervous head pain that stretches ovei my left eye, over the head and down the nape of my neck.' As the puritanically dressed poetess Marianne Moore (the subject, along with her aged mother, of two of his very best Photographic portrait studies, both to be found in that marvellous album of a decade !Igo, The Best of Beaton) had once put it, 'You're a great example to us all. You're so modest. You exact the most of yourself.' He continued to follow his punishing schedule 'both hemispheres: 'I have to make a certain amount of money to go on living in the Way I do (two houses a great burden). So I mnaVe to jump at an opportunity to do a big 'ew York production, but as bad luck has it, this always happens in the summer so that the garden I've longed for all winter and spring has to be abandoned, and my tranquillity upset.' The garden which took him twenty years of painstaking art and work to °, reate about his lovely Wiltshire house, !tself hard-earned, is central to his life and 'ts happiness, his feet never more joyfully on the ground than when bare in the dewy Pass beyond its heavily rose-laden Caroline °rick walls, though now he can really Pleasurably curl the toes only of his left foot.
For one morning in 1974, on a day when ge had been expecting some friends to lun cheon (among them Cyril Connolly, the
Slose chum with whom in unhappy schoolu,,aYs at St Cyprian's in Eastbourne he had ,urst discussed painting and who a lifetime %Later had teasingly but affectionately named flan Rip van Withit), there occurred that cerebrovascular accident of which the recurring pain had been the unmistakable 14irbinger. Meanwhile, at the National °Vital for Nervous Diseases in Holborn, W.,,hat that lady of wholly unspurious gen ulity., the late Mrs Beaton mere, would have a°t Incorrectly called her son's 'apoplexy' and his fellow scenic designer, Mrs Gladys Falthrop, would, in her own inimitable fash have euphemised as a 'wee, stroky lung% had become the subject of some pretty poor prognoses. It looked for a while as if this jolliest Jack-of-all-artistic-trades was due to be laid in the long box. After all, he was pushing the biblical seventy, the stroke was a massive one, the hemiplegia, aphasia, apraxia and all the other prettilynamed normal uncle-tom-wobbly-and-all accompaniments of such an appalling accident to the brain, were present in force. There was nothing numbskull about the neurologist sawbones' gloomy headshakings. They did not know their patient, who had not survived decades of scornful philistine bullying in peace-time and experiences as terrifying as any wartime can provide, including that of having been the last to jump from the blazing cabin of an aircraft that had crashed on takeoff (so that Duff Cooper, holder of a Military Cross won leading his Grenadier Guardsmen far over trenches' top in the war before, could claim, coram Evelyn Waugh et alio public°, without fear of contradiction, that 'Cecil has guts'), simply in order feebly to refuse a contest between his formidable willpower and his damaged and recalcitrant cortical communication cords. So battle was joined and the decks were cleared for what was obviously to be a long and hard struggle and one which he might never have been able to survive so triumphantly had he not had at his side Eileen Hose, his friend and secretary whom he had qualified twenty years before as 'the greatest blessing. . a delightful, sensitive companion, cheerful, efficient and staunch. . she brings the sunshine into the house.' And so she has and so she still does, as I can testify.
Even the most perfect stroke patient encounters despair in the daily slog of physioand speech-therapy, and aside from that, loss of control over the lacrimal glands can cause an easily unnervable bystander mistakenly to believe tears to be evidence of a patient's defeatism when they can in reality be proof of a still healthily functioning emotional system. I once had a distant cousin who, in similar plight, refused ever to set foot again in the Paris Jockey Club and sat silent in his apartment ever after, when he had heard himself saying 'Fire the gun please' instead of 'Ring the bell please'. We shall probably never know whether it was nominal aphasia or a Freudian or even Gielgudian slip which made Cecil Beaton recently take leave of a hostess with a 'Well, goodbye, it really has been absolute H-h-hell seeing you again'. For old Rip Van is, mercifully, once more With it, though I almost added 'with a vengeance'.
Though his London house has long since been sold and much needed fresh windfall capital has been raised from the sale of his various collections of what he believed at the time to be mere ephemera but now knows to have been important and marketable history, Sir Cecil is again amazingly mobile and in gratifying demand as a cherished guest of honour, and not only by his publisher whose blurb-writer was hardly up to date when writing, for this book's jacket, 'Until his recent illness, Sir Cecil was an enthusiastic traveller, gardener, diarist and art collector.' I wish I could have travelled even half as many earth-girdling miles in the past few months as he has, or commuted as often from Salisbury to London and back. 'Suicides', he chanced to write eight years before his stroke, 'should take a trip before their irrevocable decision . . . arrival in a foreign country can break the tension and interrupt a weakening of the wish to carry on the ever more exhausting fight.' So, happy no longer to have to hear the only half-joking 'Do come down soon and don't forget.to bring a fatal dose with you,' I treasure the carefully written communications from his left hand (much more legible than his old overflowing scribble from the right whose uselessness he was long so reluctant to admit before turning all his fantastic energy to the left which now draws, paints and even photographs, as well as writes): 'I look forward to your visit. We shall laugh a lot,' and laugh a lot we always do.
'Frivolity is fine. I am good at throwing in a witty phrase, at getting a laugh,' confides Sir Cecil at one stage to his dear diary, but seems to prefer to keep that particular gift for private conversation and stick instead to letting his printed petites histoires build themselves up into a sort of coral reef of contemporary history which, taking this book and its five fascinating predecessors, all I believe still available in print, together they most assuredly do.
As volume follows volume, it is Diana Cooper and not the wayward Greta Garbo (nor the rather more priggish young Berkeley Art Historian, Kinmont Hoitsma — 'a little more than Kin, the West Coast Kind' — who for a year succeeded her and shared the author's life) who seems to become their central figure. 'She puts friendship above everything, that is her gift of gifts. No catastrophe so black that she wouldn't tackle it . . . shame doesn't upset her. . . what bravery she shows, always pulling her weight, never complaining'. There comes a sort of throw-away double drop of both name and relationship when 'Stephen [Tennant] reminisced about Harry Cust ("My father", said Diana)'. It is true that this is by now an old and open secret, never perhaps better underlined than by the witty American friend who once wrote to me about 'the portrait, labelled Harry Cust, of Diana Cooper wearing a thick blonde moustache'. Later still Beaton adds, 'Suddenly I felt a brute, that I had secretly judged her for showing off, for not listening, for criticising the food, for being deaf'. Such apparent contradictions help to make a diary convincing.
'You do spread your friendships thin,' James Pope-Hennessy once bitchily taunted the author, but the truth is that Beaton, at times by his own admission a strong hater and by others' observation a slow forgiver, is as full of curiosity about people as about everything else and much happier to bestow affection and praise than the opposite. This emerges from most of his entries, not least those concerning the strongly contrasting personalities of many of his closest friends. Incidentally, there are no indexes to any of his diary anthologies, because at the outset his modesty really convinced him that their presence would prevent anybody from buying them, unless they were first to find themselves men tioned, and favourably. But librarians should nevertheless stock them and his torians study them, index or no index.
Where else, for instance, will they discover that the late Patrick Plunket, for one of Queen Elizabeth II's rare Windsor Castle balls had 'the gardeners grow vast quantities of green zinnias, tobacco plants and alchemilla mollis to fill the golden candelabra . . . and had arranged for a whole syringa tree in flower to be cut down and put into a great malachite pot in the supperroom'?
Or that his addle-pated 'neighbour up the valley — Anthony Eden' had considered the 1967 Middle Eastern war a 'wonderful present' for his (own) seventieth birthday while his wife got 'stewed' on champagne and old kummel, having 'never thought Anthony would live long enough to see himself proved right' (sic)? Or that in 1973, George Weidenfeld, hot from enseamed beds in Israel, the South of France and Venice, should have declared that Nixon's unpopularity had turned and that he would survive to be a popular President'?
The portrait of the author on the jacket is a drawing by David Hockney made, if! am not mistaken, in about 1970 and by no means his best work: he did better of Beaton's house at about the same time. I rather wish the publishers had used instead the painting Patrick Procktor exhibited at the Redfern Gallery of Beaton after his stroke, still looking immensely distinguished and picturesque as he indeed does, but perhaps that can appear on the wrapper of the next book that I confidently expect either from the author's fine left hand or his thoughtful chuckling dictation. Yet Hockney did catch aright Beaton's eyes which, as Picasso told him, 'are those of a painter, like Chardin or Fragonard, but not of a photographer' (all the same he felt suffocated at Mougins by a surfeit of 'tortured buttocks and graffitiesque "twats" ' and perhaps relieved later at not having to obey Picasso's parting command to 'come back in twenty years'). The Diaries have lots of jolly Hockney stories, the fellow being clearly a real card as well as a kind friend, and none better than that of Hockney's father who, seeing a reproduction of the famous Leonardo cartoon, remarked, 'Oh yes, I've done that; it's called "Light and Shade": Lincoln Kirstein tells Beaton that the modern American art scene is just 'A Fart with out a Smell' while Andy Warhol exclaimed 'Isn't the art scene today revolting? Oh, I wish I could think of ways of making it worse!'
The author has never been a political animal but it is good at the end of this book to read that, after visits to Prague, just before the Spring of '68 broke, and to the Berlin Wall six sad years later, he wrote that his 'greatest hope is that one day during MY lifetime the Soviets will crack, that the subjugated satellite countries will regain the5 freedom'. One of the reasons I continue to love and admire Cecil Beaton is his proven ability to accomplish as well as to believe as many as six impossible things at a time, before or after breakfast.
Previous page
