SHARED OPINION
The duchess, a swimming-pool and a question of taste
FRANK JOHNSON
We fans of the late James Lees-Milne's diaries are enjoying an unexpected bonus. Murray has just published a posthumous vol- ume. It ends in 1981. He died in 1999, so with luck there are more to come. Not that he would have liked his readers describing themselves as 'fans'. 'Fan' is not a James Lees-Milne sort of word. If he were still alive, we could perhaps in due course read some entry along the lines of: 'Opened The Specta- tor to see someone calling himself a "fan" of mine, as if one were a football team. . . . '
I met him only once. He came to lunch in Canary Wharf at the Sunday Telegraph where I was then working. I cannot explain why. Why he was invited to lunch, I mean, not why I was working there. It was when Sir Pere- grine Worsthorne was editor, which may explain the invitation. I cannot imagine that he was to the taste of the average newspaper editor. I remained largely silent; first because I just wanted to listen to him, but also because I was terrified of committing some solecism, and thus, because of it, appearing in his next published volume along the lines of: For some unaccountable reason, invited to lunch at the Sunday Times, or possibly the other one. Interminable journey to hideous up-ended glass-and-concrete cigar near Southend-on-Sea. Food largely consisting of fungus called broccoli. I mentioned Caravag- gio. Journalist next to me replied that, though he liked what he called `Eyetie tuck', he drew the line at their cheeses. Caravaggio didn't have much of a taste to him. Give him English Cheddar any day. If it were French, or `Eyetie', it would be world-famous, he assured me, I assumed he was the art critic.
Lees-Milne, then, was someone safer to read than to know, or, rather, to be known to. On finishing the volume of his diaries immediately before this one, I made a rather politically correct complaint to an acquain- tance of his about Lees-Milne's complaining of the smell of people of a certain skin colour (not white). The acquaintance replied, 'Well, he was an aesthete.'
Aesthetes, it seems, are allowed to say and write things which would ensure that the rest of us were persecuted by, or banished from, liberal society. On balance, it is fair that they should enjoy this exemption from conform- ing to liberalism's remorseless demands. We do not imagine that people who buy the Lees-Milne diaries are the sort likely to be inflamed by them into joining, or voting for, the National Front. But, in order to qualify for the exemption, an aesthete has to be in the aesthetes' premier division. Any old queen, with a knowledge of Palladio, moan- ing about smelly minicab drivers — which I seem to remember occasioned Lees-Milne's remark — will not do. Lees-Milne was one of the few writers capable of making the sub- ject of architecture readable. Sacheverell Sitwell could do it. So could John Summer- son, Osbert Lancaster, Nigel Nicolson on country houses, John Betjeman, and now Betjeman's daughter, Candida Lycett Green. Considering the number of books published all the time on architecture, that is not many. Who else is there, living or dead? Pevsner gives us the information, but he can- not be read for pleasure.
At the first mention of Robert Byron's trial in this new Lees-Milne volume, the editor in a footnote identified him as: `Travel writer, Byzantinist and aesthete (1905-41)'. Aesthetes, then, are a category, like travel writers and Byzantinists. But they are also a trial. They keep us up to the mark. For that reason, the trial must be endured. But if there is one thing more of a trial than meeting, or still more staying the weekend with, an aesthete, it must be being one. Life is a perpetual assault on ear and eye. Here is Lees-Milne in the new volume, visiting Cambridge in 1979:
No breakfast in Hall these days, but a squalid makeshift place where one fetches a tray, as at a railway station, and sliding it along a bar takes Weetabix, horrid soggy toast and a too- sweet marmalade in a tiny plastic pill-box, and a brown beverage masquerading as coffee.
On to Oxford two days later: . . . the Magdalen Gaudy, the first time I have ever attended such a thing. It was both boring and interesting.. . . Took my luggage to the room allotted me . . horrid. Broken-down furniture, dirty carpets, sofa legs propped up by lamp, naked bulb hanging from ceiling. No wash basin. No amenities. No scout, of course. To wash and pee, was obliged to descend three flights of stairs. . .. Here two
cracked wash basins, a leaking urinal and baths too squalid to even be considered.
But Magdalen has not finished with our aesthete yet. 'Dinner in Hall went on for three hours. This was the worst part because I had boring neighbours. . . . ' What, worse than a leaking urinal and baths too squalid to even be considered? Apparently, yes. One of the neighbours was 'a parson, the other a don, botanist, both nice but dull. They undoubtedly thought the same of me. . . . Then two of the worst speeches . . . one by Greenham RA, the other by the President. I could have done much better.'
But he is not a snob. Real aesthetes never are. They cannot be, since they put sight and sound above lineage. Thus, again in 1979, he visits Boughton (Northampton- shire). The duchess who presides there 'has ghastly taste; has put a small pool in the grass court outside the great hall, with raised cement curb'.
I cannot see what is wrong with that. Was it the pool per se, or just the cement curb? But Lees-Milne is able to make it sound as if the duchess had put a mahogany cocktail bar in the great hall, with stools covered by leopard skin. That is why Lees-Milne is such a guileful writer.
Perhaps it is a condition of all the best diarists that they be aesthetes. Harold Nicolson was. So, in a way, was Chips Channon. Alan Clark was more of an aes- thete than he let on, while affecting to despise them. He was the son of one. But, since diarists supply the feel of an age, this means that the feeling of mast ages is sup- plied mainly by aesthetes. Would that other walks of life produced good diarists, so that we could judge an age through non-aesthet- ic eyes. Senior politicians, for example, most of whose published diaries are sus- pect; or rock musicians (the great houses are said constantly now to entertain them); or criminals. The diaries of the newly- deceased Reggie Kray would have been enlightening as to method and motivation: Motored over to Barbara Windsor's for lun- cheon. 'Mad' Frankie Fraser stayed only for drinks. I assume he had what he considered a more socially advantageous engagement. Barbara as exquisite a hostess as ever. Jellied eels and winkles as good as any in Whitechapel. Jack 'The Hat' McVitie pre- sent. A frightful bore. I could have murdered him.' Editor's scholarly footnote: 'In fact, not long afterwards, RK did.
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