Quartet are about to publish a reprint, with a special afterword, of a classic account of Pre-Raphaelite history, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood by Dr Jan Marsh who incidentally is curating a major exhibition of this uniquely English art movement this Autumn at the National Portrait Gallery. We published this account way back in1985 and it received some splendid reviews and has been unavailable for quite a few years.
It’s re-issue reminded me of my interview with a man who provided a fascinating link with the late nineteenth century Aesthetic movement and the modern age. Harold Acton was born in 1904, wrote nearly thirty books and lived for many years in a magnificent Renaissance villa in Tuscany.
He had the reputation befitting a grand aesthete. I found him easy-going and charm itself. Our interview took place in Florence over dinner at his home, La Pietra, which was like a domestic museum full of countless objets d’art and priceless paintings collected by his family over the years. I had visited him there many times, mostly for tea or dinner, when he would engage in affectionate gossip about his great friend Tony Lambton, or regale me with the latest scandals making the rounds in the small circle of Florentine society, taking especial delight in any sexual peccadilloes. He considered me an amusing dinner companion – a welcome change from certain other guests, who tended to be academic and whom he labelled stuffy and boring. He often cancelled a dinner date with them in preference for spending an evening of banter with me. Here it is:
REMEMBERING HAROLD…
The current gossip about the dispute around Harold Acton’s reminds me of the often greatly pleasurable times my wife and I spent with Harold in his amazing villa. La Pietra, a Renaissance villa was like a domestic museum full of countless objets d’art and priceless paintings collected by his family over the years. I had visited him there many times, mostly for tea or dinner, when he would engage in affectionate gossip about his great friend Tony Lambton (I had recently published Lambton’s novel and a collection of short stories), or regale me with the latest scandals making the rounds in the small circle of Florentine society, taking especial delight in any sexual peccadilloes. He considered me an amusing dinner companion – a welcome change from certain other guests, who tended to be academic and whom he labelled stuffy and boring. He often cancelled a dinner date with them in preference for spending an evening of banter with me. As a student at Oxford, Harold had been well known for flouting convention and mixing in male undergraduate circles where bisexuality was in vogue. His close friends included Auberon Waugh’s father, Evelyn, who reputedly used him as a model for some of the more outrageous characters in his novels.
I used to tease Harold about girls and enquire if he had ever slept with one. He would put on a show of being greatly shocked at this sudden intrusion into his private life before rolling his eyes and smiling an enigmatic smile. Then he would tap me coyly on the hand as if chastising me for being such a ‘naughty boy’. This only encouraged me to urge him on, and on one occasion he told me about an intimate encounter with a young Chinese girl during the time when he lived in China, teaching English at Peking National University in the 1930s. He described the silky skin of her naked body with obvious relish, but that was as far as he ever went. The mystery of whether he actually slept with any girl remained unsolved.
During one of our conversations, he expressed his regret at the way Oxford University had turned down his offer to bequeath them La Pietra with its collection of priceless art works, forty thousand rare books and fifty-seven acres of grounds in his will. They felt they could not have afforded the cost of repairs and restoration. Instead, after he died in 1994, La Pietra went to New York University as a study and conference centre. Although he had an American mother, he would have preferred the legacy to have gone to a British institution. In the years after his death, the estate became the subject of a long-running counter-claim from the descendants of Harold’s illegitimate half-sister, with a judge giving authority for the exhumation of his father’s body from the family grave in Florence.
Happily, it seems there has been no need to disturb Harold’s remains, though his father’s were reported as confirming the DNA link, and now the dispute seems to be bubbling away once again. Harold entertained well, but he had one curious phobia about electricity consumption. When I needed to visit the cloakroom he would escort me to switch on the light and linger in the vicinity to make sure it was switched off again after I emerged. It was part of his economy drive to maintain his lifestyle without compromising it with waste.
