Memoirs of an Aesthete [Main ed.] 0571247660, 9780571247660

Table of contents :
list of ILLUSTRATIONS
I.
II.
III.
IV.
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VI.
VII.
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XIII.
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XVII.
INDEX
illustrations

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HAROLD ACTON

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Faber Finds

Harold Acton Memoirs of an Aesthete

ff

MEMOIRS OF AN AESTHETE HAROLD ACTON

ff FABER & FABER

This edition first published in 2.008 by Faber and Faber Ltd 3 Queen Square, London wcrN 3Au Printed by Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt All rights reserved © Harold Acton Estate, r948

The right of Harold Acton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act r988 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN

978-o-57r-2.4766--o

IN MEMORY OF

MY BROTHER WILLIAM

ILLUSTRATIONS The author aged nine William Acton in I 91 5 Villa La Pietra The author in 1922 A view of the garden at Villa La Pietra Central hall of 2, Kung Hsien Hutung Moon Gate in 2, Kung Hsien Hutung Birthday group in Peiping Prince P'u Ju painting Rockery in the Kung Wang Fu Gateway of I 8th century Jesuit design at Kung Wung Fu Portrait of the author as a Lohan The author by Cecil Beaton

I HALF my friends disapprove of the title I have chosen for this book without having read it. 'What! an aesthete? One of those scruffy long-haired fellows in peculiar garb, lisping about art for art's sake? No, no. You'll prejudice all your readers in advance. Old Oscar screwed the last nail in the aesthete's coffin.' Other titles have occurred to me: they burgeon every morning before breakfast and wither every night when I go to bed. 'My Quilted Coat', for instance, from Po Chii-i's poem The Cranes, translated by Arthur Waley, the ideal translator from Chinese: 'The western wind has blown but a few days; Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough. On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes; In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.' The western wind has been blowing on me with a vengeance since my return to Europe in 1939 and I am beginning to feel the first cold, a cold such as I never experienced in Peking, where the temperature in winter would easily drop below zero. For the genius of the Chinese people kept me warm, and here I have not been able to find a substitute. Though I shiver and cough I refuse to be a pessimist. We had a culture which war has interrupted, and it was nourished by a few people like myself, citizens of the world. During the war we were forced into hibernation. Many of us are hibernating still. We citizens of the world are neither famous nor spectacular. But there is a slow fire burning within us, and it is time for our latent energies to swell forth anew. It is time for us to reassert ourselves. And it is our duty to remind our fellow creatures of what they are fast forgetting, that true culture is universal. I

Over two thousand years ago Confucius talked of T'ien hsia wei kung, 'the Universe for everybody'; such an aspiration will only be realized by North, South, East and West speaking mind to mind and body to body, a mutual exchange of ideas between the nations-ideas without national boundaries. Peace on earth and goodwill toward men will only be brought about by individuals like myself. Yet as I look around me I can see that I am quite a rare person. Politicians everywhere, booming and thumping! All the more reason for me to raise my gentle voice. The most convenient way to avoid being shouted down is to write my memoirs. This does not mean that I shall undress in public. On the contrary, I shall dress up in all the dear old clothes that continue to fit me, and as the western wind is still blowing I shall don my Chinese quilted coat. When the wind dies down I may undress a little: I hold many other memoirs in reserve. The label of aesthete has clung to me since I left school. I am aware of its ludicrous connotations in England, owing to the late Victorian movement which parodied and falsified its mean: ing. But I was born in the twentieth century, which is closer to the ninth than the nineteenth, and I belong to no special movement. It is undeniable, however, that I love beauty. For me beauty is the vital principle pervading the universe-glistening in stars, glowing in flowers, moving with clouds, flowing with water, permeating nature and mankind. By contemplating the myriad manifestations of this vital principle we expand into something greater than we were born. Art is the mirror that reflects these expansions, sometimes for a moment, sometimes for perpetuity. Without apologies then, and without being a laudator temporis Actoni, let me glory in the name of aesthete, for I am one in the proper sense of that word. Let me fling it in the teeth of the Philistines! Certain portents are auspicious. I have met many in the services who took a deeper interest in the fine arts than their forebears of the Kaiser's war, and they were not ashamed to admit it. A hopeful sign was the success of Sadler's Wells Ballet even during the buzz-bomb period, for ballet is a synthesis of all the arts. By the time this book is out the word aesthete may have become a popular favourite. Few can deny the influence of early environment, and it was 2

in a house just outside Florence that I first opened my eyes in 1904.

The villa of La Pietra stands in the middle of Montughi Hill, and its name is derived from a stone pillar, which indicated the distance of one mile from the old city gate of San Gallo. In Italian, villa signifies not house alone, but house and pleasure grounds combined; the garden is an architectural extension of the house. Ours had a varied history before my parents bought it. In the fourteenth century the estate belonged to the Macinghi family, eight of whom were priors of the Republic. The most eminent of these was Zanobi Neri di Cione, who was elected for the post of gonfalonier.' For some unknown reason, probably because he was over-partial to the Albizzi family, he incurred the epmity of Rosso de' Ricci, a captain of the Guelf party. Jo disqualify him from office Rosso moved that he be 'admonished' or deprived of civil rights, at a party meeting. The proposal was thrice rejected, and the chairman declined to have it put to the meeting again, but Rosso declared that he would put it a hundred times if necessary, and being still unsuccessful he contrived that the matter should be referred to the Richiesti. 2 That body was called together at two o'clock in the morning, and he kept it sitting until, from sheer exhaustion, the members present consented to issue the admonition. Thus deprived of his civil rights in 1371, Zanobi took refuge in Naples, where the King, Charles of Durazzo, gave him an honourable reception and appointed him his agent in dealings with the Florentine Republic. Eventually he returned to Florence loaded with riches and was reinstated as a citizen. His grandsons Ruggiero and Francesco sold the villa now called La Pietra, with the adjacent buildings and podere or farm, to the Sassetti family on April 7, 1460. According to an ancient chronicle of the Sassetti, they were descended from early Saxon kings. We know that they belonged to the Ghibelline party, but no records of them can be traced in Florence prior to 1105. Their coat of arms was an azure band 1 Chief of the Signory and most important personage in the State. A standard (gonfalone) of the people (a red cross on a white field) was given into his charge, and r,ooo armed citizens-the number was eventually increased to 4,000-were placed under his command. 2 An extraordinary council to which every citizen who had held high office was summoned.

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with gold stripes on a silver background. A sling with several stones (sassetti) is represented on their escutcheon. Francesco di Tommaso Sassetti, who built La Pietra as a typical country house of the Renaissance, a hollow square with a central cortile or open courtyard-in the Macinghi's time it was probably a castellated farm-house-owned considerable property in the town. He married twice, into the Strozzi and Pazzi families, and by his second wife he became the father of Francesco, the financial genius of the family. Born in 1420, this Francesco won such a reputation for business ability that he was sent to Avignon in 1440 as Cosimo de' Medici's banking partner. Later Lorenzo de' Medici entrusted him with all his affairs in France, where he had an establishment at Lyons. After his return to Florence in 1468 he married Nera dei Corsi and had ten children. He entertained lavishly, amassed a large library of manuscripts, and cultivated the friendship of Marsilio Ficino and other famous scholars. He spent over 12,000 florins on his Montughi villa, of which Ugolino Verino wrote in his De Illustratione Urbis Florentiae: 'Montuguas Saxetti si videris aedes Regis opus credes ... ' (If you saw the Montughi villa of Sassetti You would think it the work of a king ... ) In 1481 he commissioned Domenico Ghirlandajo to paint the frescoes in the Sassetti Chapel in Santa Trinita where he was buried. These represent episodes in the life of S. Francis and contain portraits of Lorenzo the Magnificent and other notable Florentines, as well as of the donor Francesco Sassetti and his wife kneeling on either side of the altar. They are among the finest of Ghirlandajo's works, as even Berenson, who had no high opinion of him, admitted: 'Occasionally in portraits his talent, here at its highest, rises above mediocrity, in one instance, the fresco of Sassetti in Santa Trinita, becoming almost genius.' There is another portrait of him by the same hand in the Jules Bache Collection, New York. 1 Francesco is depicted full face, a dean-shaven middle aged man with a prominent nose, a typical Florentine patrician of the Renaissance, wearing a brown skullcap, a crimson gown trimmed with fur, and a black girdle with 'For a coloured reproduction of this, see Life, July 28, 1937.

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heavy purse attached. His son Teodoro looks up at him in profile on the right, a cherub with curly gold hair, a scarlet cap and a brocaded tunic. The background evokes his travels abroad, for there is an inland harbour with towers, ships, distant hills and a church with a spire on the left. Ghirlandajo's portrait of the bottle-nosed old man with the child in the Louvre is strikingly similar. Francesco died in 1491, and his son Teodoro and grandson Federigo sold La Pietra to Giuliano di Piero di Gino Capponi by a deed of sale dated August 19, 1546. Filippo Sassetti, whose picturesque letters from India between 1583 and 1588 were published posthumously, was a grandson of this Teodoro. Born in 1540, he studied at Pisa university and went to Goa, where he became attached to the country and learnt the langlltlge. His letters are full of scientific observations, but he never· lost his Tuscan sense of humour. Intellectually he was a~ precursor of the Cimento Academicians. For the next three centuries La Pietra belonged to the Capponi family. Giuliano was the son of the famous Piero who in 1494 resisted Charles VIII of France's threat to 'sound his trumpets' with: 'If you sound your trumpets we will ring our bells.' The villa owes its dignified Baroque exterior to Luigi Capponi who, born in 1583, became a cardinal in 1608. While Urban VIII was Pontiff, Luigi was sent as Papal Legate to the Romagna, but he was so disgusted by the latter's corruption and the Pope's nepotism that he resigned from this office. Under Innocent X he was in charge of the Vatican Library. The Cardinal lived at La Pietra from 1650 until his death in 1659. During this period the villa was rebuilt and redecorated, and the Cardinal's hat still surmounts the Capponi coat of arms behind the house. The architects employed were probably Fontana and Ruggeri, who built the Capponi palace in Via Gino Capponi. As it stands, the villa might be called an architectural palimpsest. In the fifteenth century it had been a typical Renaissance country house, and in spite of Cardinal Capponi's alterations most of the early building was left intact. The Sassetti coat of arms remains on many corbels of the vaulted ceilings, and high narrow windows, as in the large and small libraries, evoke the original aspect of these lofty rooms, which belong to the early Renaissance in form and in spirit. It was not until recently that the central open courtyard, where a marble fountain plays, was

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rooted over with a skylight, and a circular staircase was installed in lieu of a narrow Gothic one. As well as the Baroque exterior, the Cardinal built handsome lodges at the outer gate, from which a long avenue of cypresses leads to the north-west facade of the villa, the central portion of which was raised to accommodate a spacious ballroom. The walled orchard to the north-east of the house with its large stanzone, or lemon house, was redecorated at the same time with elaborate patterns of seventeenthcentury rocaille and mosaics of shells and pebbles in garlands and festoons. That the Cardinal's architects merely overlaid the original structure and adapted their designs to it is shown on the various doorways, where Baroque pediments have been imposed on fifteenth-century lintels, and on the drawing-room ceiling, where plaster relief decorations with scrolls and medallions were applied without changing the ancient vaulting. The stuccoed walls of the exterior are of a variable light grey-brown colour, the shutters green, and the windows of cool grey pietra serena. The original garden, laid out on a steep hill-side, was almost destroyed in the nineteenth century when so-called 'English gardens' were all the rage, and it is ironical that my father, an Englishman, should have restored and reconstructed it on pure Tuscan lines. The process of 'tuscanization' began just before my birth, and my father refined upon the traces of the former garden and its retaining walls, with all the creative ingenuity of a Cinquecento architect. Most visitors are unaware of this, so homogeneous is the total impression. The main plan consists of a series of broad terraces, each like a separate garden, levelled from the slope descending behind the house. The first is a long platform with a grey stone balustrade for statues at regular intervals, flanked by stairs on either side, which run down to the central terrace, enclosed by low walls and clipped hedges with niches for other statues. In the centre of this and the lowest terrace are ancient fountains with circular basins, surrounded by stone benches and geometrical plots of grass hemmed in by clipped hedges of box. A mossy staircase paved with coloured pebbles descends to the long alley between, with a colonnade roofed in by creepers on the right. Both terraces are planted mainly with evergreens. A peristyle of Corinthian columns screens the lowest terrace from the adjacent vineyard and a statue of Hercules stands vigorously in the centre with a pair of venerable cypresses behind him. Many paths 6

running parallel with the hill-side lead to stone arches and circular plots enclosed by hedges and statues. The whole garden is essentially green; other colours are incidental. Sunlight and shade are as carefully distributed as are the fountains, terraces and statues, and in no other private Florentine garden have I seen statues of such individual strength and grace, from the lone Mantuan colossus by Marinali to the Venetian figures which have stepped on to the open-air theatre as for one of Goldoni's comedies. The wings of this little theatre are evergreen, also the globed footlights. The statues, collected by my father for many years, deserve a separate monograph; there are over a hundred of them, exclusive of what Nollekens called 'bustos'. It is a garden for all times and seasons, independent of flowers. The central axis faces Vallombrosa; Fiesole and San qominico loom on the extreme left. Thus I did not have to look far to discover beauty, nor was there any need for me to rove beyond our garden gates. Yet I have looked far and wandered farther-to China and beyond. Having returned to Florence after five years of enforced exile and revisited the haunts of my childhood, it seems as if I had set out for the isle of Cythera from the isle of Cythera itself. Since La Pietra is situated on the main road from Florence to Bologna over the Futa Pass, it has escaped devastation by special providence. The nuns of the neighbouring Carmelite convent believe that we owe this miracle to the intercession of S. Teresa Margherita Redi of Arezzo, whose mortal remains are to be seen through a glass coffin in their chapel, in an excellent state of preservation, a ring still circling one of her delicate fingers. The troops that occupied our villa during the war have emptied its wine-cellar but have, on the whole, respected its works of art. Perhaps Bacchus also helped to protect a place formerly visited by another Redi, the author of that dithyrambic poem 'Bacchus in Tuscany'. A few portable objects have been removed, all the cups of a fine Ginori set without the saucers, a rare Venetian Harlequin clock, a silk Persian rug; but these are trifles compared with what remains. At one time several windows were manned with machine-guns, yet both house and garden have come almost unscathed through sniping and shelling. One statue has been decapitated and others have lost limbs from shrapnel. A surgeon 7

sculptor is already at work on these casualties. Our gardeners scrupulously saved the fragments. During the 'emergency' the local contadini crowded for refuge in our solid cellars, and their eyes still start out of their sockets as with eloquent gestures they describe the harrowing days they lived through in August, 1944. 'Yes, we others were right in the front line. There was a real bloody battle going on in the garden. One day the Tedeschi were making whoopee in the house, and the next day they were skulking out in the podere; that was when the smiling Inglesi arrived with chocolate and cigarettes. What a celebration we had then! The Scoppio de! Carro' was nothing to it. White bread all over the town for several days. Just think of it, white bread! An escaping German was shot near the garage. How that German bled! The blood is still there, Signorino, if you would care to see it." It is hard to connect war with so tranquil a site, and I like to think that some of our men were able to rest here between the endless slogging of that obstinate, bitter campaign. The benign spirit of the place must have refreshed them. One young English lieutenant would sit out in the garden all day, as in a dream, before he went over the Futa to meet his death. Perhaps it is as well that I did not serve in Italy, though I regretted it at the time. For six months the City of Flowers was the 'waiting' headquarters and the bottleneck of Allied Army and civilian personnel. They had fallen behind schedule and therefore overflowed each other while standing by for the breakthrough into the north. There is still a plethora of military placards in English. Tabloid histories ably compiled by the education officers of MTOUSA are affixed to the city's monuments, and innumerable signposts point the way to Pro Stations. Never before have the soldiers of so many races, from Sikhs to Maoris, and so many convoys of lorries, crowded its medieval streets. The Lung' Arno is cruelly scarred: the Huns have left permanent gaps and cicatrices. Of the historic bridges only the Ponte Vecchio is standing; of those palaces built directly over the river's edge, supported on arches and machicolations, so picturesquely various in height and colour that they were known as 'little Venice' to the cosmopolitan painters and etchers who tried to depict them, nothing but rubble remains. The Duomo and ' 'The crack of the chariot.' On Easter Saturday a wagon with fireworks is taken in front of the cathedral and lighted by means of a contrivance.

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the fragile-seeming Campanile are as solid as ever, and the bells ring out as in Piero Capponi's time, clear and bold and as if in calm defiance of delirious man. Even so must they have sounded above the Nazi bugles. Yes, the heart of the old city is beating. From our villa its systole and diastole reach you faintly muffled as through a veil of mist. And through a veil of mist the images of my childhood quiver and settle into shape. Two wars have obliterated many of them, as they have obliterated that era of passportless security which appears, to those who have known it, as the swan-song of a golden age. The character of Florentine society had scarcely changed since the eighteenth century: it was still an international colony of dilettanti. Englishmen in particular, like Horace Walpole, were 'fond of Florence to a degree' and regarded it as infioiitely the most agreeable of all the places they had seen sj_nce ·London. Until the advent of Mussolini, Florence reciprocated this affection. 'Ville toute anglaise,' observed the Goncourts in 18 56, 'where the palaces are almost the same dismal black as the city of London, and where everything seems to smile upon the English, and chiefly the Tuscan Monitor, which only concerns itself with the affairs of Great Britain.' In front of Santa Croce they exclaim: 'the Westminster Abbey of Tuscany!' Nearly all the old Florentine families had Anglo-Saxon ramifications, and a large proportion of Florentine palaces and villas were inhabited by Englishmen half the year round. That the Englishman's home is his castle was especially true of the Villa Medici at Fiesole, of Vincigliata, Villa Palmieri and countless other country seats whose romantic records were published by Mrs. Janet Ross and require to be brought up to date. Queen Victoria set the seal of royal approbation on this tradition by staying twice at the Villa Palmieri. Not only in the Via Tornabuoni, but from Signa to Vallombrosa you could come across unmistakable representatives of Albion. They took root among the vineyards and became a part of the landscape. Their eccentricities flourished in the clear Tuscan light. An atmosphere of Ouida lingered, and the Guelfs and Ghibellines had been replaced by rival schools of art-historians. Between Berenson, Horne, Loeser and Perkins one never knew what fresh crisis had arisen. It must have been a difficult time for hostesses. As a child I had more friends among the grown-ups and preferred them to my contemporaries. I cannot remember thinking .9

of myself as a child, for I was as embarrassed by children then as I am now and winced when I was referred to as one of the species. With the exception of the fascinating Braggiotti family, I did not know what to say to them. By any standards the Braggiottis were exceptional. The parents were musical vegetarians of tangled origin, Turkish and New England on the father's side, French and German on the mother's; they believed in and practised a Rousseau-istic return to Nature and produced a prodigious progeny on a diet of nuts, fruit and vegetables, apart from which they trained pupils for the operatic stage. They lived not far from us on Montughi Hill and their nerve-centre was a vast music-room where someone was always melodizing. Their garden twittered with tame birds, monkeys and other pets. At home the children ran around with no clothes on, and as they were singularly handsome it happened to suit them. Their zest for life was enviable even at that early age. Self-expression was encouraged so that they sang, danced or played a musical instrument in public as easily as they removed their garments, without the slightest taint of affectation. Whenever they paid us a visit my brother and I were overjoyed, for it was like the arrival of a brilliant circus: the eight Braggiotti children were gifted with so many talents, and they wakened the Pagan in us. We forgot our few inhibitions and were soon Red Indians on the warpath together, running amok with frantic yells, getting deliciously bruised and scratched in shrubberies, discovering hidden treasures, sharing excitements altogether too primitive for the approval of our English nurse. We confabulated in a glorious lingua franca of our own. Bertha, the eldest, already seemed warmly maternal in her early 'teens, and we would all discuss the thrilling mysteries of love and procreation and our anxiety to have as many babies as soon as possible. Francesca's every gesture was so graceful off the stage that I never really liked to see her on it. Spontaneous grace is lost among sophisticated footlights. Besides, I was jealous; I did not want to share her beauty with outsiders. No eyes were so starry-apart from the Madonna's-no lips so perfectly curved. Martha was a tiny sylph too delicate for this world. But they were all well-favoured. At the age of five or six I had made up my mind that Francesca was my sweetheart and invented little poems for her. Her golden face would light up like IO

alabaster over a flame. She had an extraordinary radiance and has it still, as the wife of the film actor politician John Lodge. Unfortunately measles, whooping cough and other childish ailments would frequently assail this delightful family and segregate them for months that seemed years. At one time they all caught mange from their pet donkey. These epidemics and our nurse's objections kept us more and more apart. But I dreamt of Francesca and often thought how nice it would be to share her illnesses: if she and I could have a long spell of scarlet fever together, I could devote myself hand and foot to her without fear of rivals. Until my brother and I were of an age to attend a day school our acquaintance was limited. So self-contained did we feel behind our massive gates that we had little incentive fO go to town. We spent a lot of time in the garden, the resources of which were interminable. Acute as the senses are in childhood, one is less dependent on their evidence. One's playmates are more immaterial than material. Blake, more than other poets, retained this precious faculty of double vision: 'With my inward eyes, 'tis an Old Man grey, With my outward, a Thistle across my way.' I was distinctly anthropomorphic and peopled the trees with spirits of good and evil. There was always some new corner to explore, a hackneyed phrase but I can find no apter. There was the pomario, or walled orchard, with a sprawling stanzone at one end which served as the winter quarters of our oranges and lemons and smelt sweetly of their blossoms and of gardenia. The juiciest peaches clustered by the rocaille walls, haunted by emerald lizards, and Californian tomatoes hung heavily, softening and reddening in the sun, which saturated this spot more than any other. In the warm ~ater of the central fountain frogs forgot to leap into hiding under the flat lily leaves and stared upwards as if hypnotized while thirsty dragonflies flashed past for a quick sip and bloated goldfish mouthed at insects drunk with honeysuckle. In the green dusk a ragged bat or two zigzagged low with a shrill twitter, and glow-worms lit up aquarium depths of aromatic herbs. A sudden rush of ideas that seemed altogether new, a crystalline alacrity of mind, was fanned by the evening breeze: II

the mellow walls absorbed one's secrets and the marble busts smiled down benevolently. Perhaps one was drugged by the mint and rosemary and verbena which floated to the nostrils, by the incense of so many dreaming flowers. Nearby the big white maremmani had their kennels. They were supposed to be watchdogs, but they were so amiable that I could never take them seriously as such. They would jump all over me and knock me down from sheer exuberance, then plaster me with apologetic licks that were sticky and smelt of bread and milk. At night I heard them scampering about the garden like fleecy ghosts: when they barked, it was generally at the moon. Most of them disliked being watchdogs and longed to come indoors; they were inclined to suffer from the heat. The podere seemed endless. 'Farm' is a poor equivalent, as it is a vineyard and olive plantation combined. Olive trees alternate with rows of vines; fruit trees and vegetables are subsidiary, dipping into a broad hollow, climbing towards the villa on one side and towards the Bologna road on the other. The olives, pruned like chalices, were centuries old, increasing in fertility with age, and they filled the valley with a silvery smoke. We share this podere with a family of contadini (of this, again, 'farmers' is a feeble translation) who live by the front gate, and my affection for Tuscans is mainly due to these people with their innate courtesy and salty mother-wit, their picturesque fluency of expression. The contadini are the true aristocrats of the Tuscan soil, untainted by Fascism or any other ism. In the podere one could pick up rich proverbs as well as fruit. In May narcissi, blue irises and daffodils grew in greater profusion there than in our own garden, but September was the season of its glamour, when grapes festooned the whole expanse, dropping to the cracked earth in heavy purple clusters, and figs of many kinds oozed beads of ripeness. The contadini were busy at the vintage all day and white oxen stood patiently to bear away the spoil. For the contadini this was the climax of the year, and they gave vent to their joy in songs that were sunshine vocable, hymns to the sun. Even our day nursery and night nursery, though they contained the only modern furniture in the house, were full of phantoms. Gradually, as we grew older and less destructive, this modern furniture was expelled, and with the final exit of the toy-cupboard and the cuckoo-clock the rooms reverted to the 12

eighteenth century. The fireplace with its mauve marble mantelpiece is the only landmark left. Though I have enjoyed many a comfortable blaze since those that crackled in it so long ago, none have afforded me such manifold delights: culinary-for there we roasted popcorn from America, round pebbles which we rattled above the logs in a sort of sieve until they exploded into soft white plum blossoms that melted in the mouth; visual -for we beautified the flames by sprinkling a coppery powder on them so that they danced like Loie Fullers in variegated limelight. But who remembers Loie Fuller? She created a brief sensation and vanished like those flames. The magical powder was known as driftwood, and whoever has seen real driftwood burn will imagine its effect. But of all the stages of a log-fire's beauty, surely none ~urpasses the sunset glow of its impending dissolution. When that stage was reached I had usually gone to bed, but beguiled by its final flickers through the doorway, I would creep forth and feast my eyes on that miniature smouldering Pompeii. For I was always something of a Zoroastrian. To toys that would amuse me now I was indifferent: most of them remained in the cupboard until we had a party. The few that held my interest were: a little theatre, the formal scenes of which were pricked along the outlines so that they produced a cheerful illumination when lit from behind, and a cardboard lake which revolved when wound up with a key. Paper fish could be caught in this lake while a tune tinkled out from a musical box beneath it. Long after I had got bored with fishing, the tune would tinkle pathetically on. A musical box running down could be poignantly sad, perhaps because it generally meant that the party was as over. One returned with cheeks still flushed to an empty room, to replace sticky inanimate toys in a gloomy cupboard. My pleasure in toys was largely vicarious. I enjoyed acting as their impresario, and my greatest successes were obtained with diminutive water flowers that came in ornate seed packets from Japan. Dropped into a bowl of water they would open into lilies and trailing weeds and transform the bowl into a living pond. Of all my memories, none can evoke my nursery days so completely. According to their appreciation of these flowers I judged my friends. Those who were indifferent to them must be indifferent to me, and vice versa.

Our windows looked over a shaded parterre culminating in an arch with a statue of Bacchus. Not far away Daphne was turning into a tree in Apollo's grasp. Our nurse disapproved of most of the garden statues and kept dinning into my ears that they were shameful. This was definitely a case of 'putting ideas' into an innocent head, for I could see nothing wrong except with Daphne. How could she be so unkind? I hoped Francesca would not play the same trick on me. 'But why are they shameful, Nurse?' 'Because they're showing what they shouldn't. You don't show your "little thing" in public, do you? If you did, the police would soon be after you.' 'But these are only statues.' 'It doesn't matter. They're indecent, that's what they are. They ought to be removed. In England such things would never be allowed. Fancy naked men and women exhibiting themselves all over a London park!' I was tired of hearing about what wasn't allowed in England. I had never been there, and it sounded so forbidding that I had no wish to go. All the same, by harping continuously on the impropriety of the statues my nurse persuaded me to speak to my parents on the subject. Doubtless they scented the source of my remarks, for they gave me a lecture on primary aesthetics which made a profound impression on me. In future I looked with admiration on the beauty of the human form. My nurse must have been astonished when I came back to her with a dissertation on the nobility of the nude. She was the first of the many Philistines I have encountered, chock-full of excellent intentions. The poor woman suffered from a goitre and projecting teeth, and her bulging eyes were like the blessed Mary Magdalen's as described by Crashaw: 'Two weeping baths, two fiery motions, Portable and compendious oceans.' She had fits of weeping and sang hymns that filled me with gloom, and the same gloom returns to me whenever I hear them over the radio. I would find her sobbing alone, and though shy and awed by the spectacle of a grown-up's grief I would muster courage to ask her what was the matter; did, did it hurt much, was she in pain? 14

'No, it's only that nobody loves me,' she would answer. 'I haven't a friend in the world.' 'But of course you have friends,' I hastened to assure her. 'Jesus loves you and I love you.' And I believe I was quite sincere. My disposition was affectionate and in spite of her goitre and rabbity teeth her appearance did not repel me as I fear it would to-day. Perhaps children are less critical in this respect. Eventually I managed to cheer her, but these sobbing scenes were repeated so often that I began to suspect that she secretly revelled in them and caught myself reacting mechanically in consequence. This 'nobody loves me' business had a bad influence on me, for as children are imitative I came to try it on myself, and in vacant moments got into the habit of wallowing in an unreasonable self-pity and 1a retrospective ultra-sensitiveness to the remarks of my ~lders. Before she left us to have her goitre removed in Switzerland, she wept and sang hymns for days on end and made me very miserable. The news of her death was my first approach to conscious grief. Her successor, who became known as the Policeman, was a more interesting character. She was a perambulating compendium of English pet prejudices, economical in her sympathies but lavish with her dislikes. From the first she had made up her mind to dislike Italy and the Italians, 'dirty dagoes' as she called them, and in her quiet way more by her grim expression than by caustic comment, she became the terror of our servants. She had also, however, a mellow sense of humour and saw the comic side of everybody. I have often wished I had been able to take notes of her verbal vignettes, which had the Cockney flavour of Phil May. Eventually she condescended to make friends with my mother's maid, who considered herself a vastly superior person, but their friendship seemed to have more downs than ups. After my brother and I had retired to bed, the two women would sit for hours discussing household affairs in a weird conglomeration of English and Italian, punctuated by Rabelaisian chuckles. The maid did most of the talking, and the nurse would interpose: 'Go on! you don't mean to say so!' Sometimes they would flare up into a quarrel, and for weeks at a time they would not be on speaking terms. But evidently those palavers under the lamp were irresistible; like a couple of moths they would drift back into suspicious amity. There were subterranean intrigues between the other servants, and I remember

15

hearing that one of our maids had consulted a witch to put a curse on a faithless footman. The witch had written the curse on a scrap of paper and forced it down the belly of a toad which had then been walled up alive. Servants who had been dismissed sent anonymous letters denouncing whoever they suspected of having caused their dismissal: under their agreeable manners they were jealous and vindictive. My life was diversified by visits to picture galleries, and at the age of six Botticelli was my favourite painter, and I would ransack all the picture-postcard shops for reproductions of his works. No picture delighted me more than the 'Primavera', and I hated Savonarola when I heard that he had stopped Botticelli from painting; on the other hand I idolized Lorenzo the Magnificent who had been the artist's patron, and thus began my interest in the Medici. Herbert Horne, who wrote the fullest biography of Botticelli, was living in the austere Palazzo Gondi, stinting himself of every comfort to form the precious collection which he bequeathed to the city. But I can only remember that he was supposed to have a double row of teeth, and as he rarely opened his blood-red lips I scrutinized him in vain. My nurse detested trailing round the stone floors of picture galleries, which she said smelt of unwashed feet and garlic, yet she was tolerant of my 'keenness on art'-at least, from her point of view, this fad kept me out of mischief. I cared little for books unless they were illustrated, and in a sense Rackham and Dulac were my favourite authors, for owing to them I read stories which I would not have read otherwise. Dulac introduced me to Hans Andersen, Rackham to Rip Van Winkle and Walter Crane to 'Tanglewood Tales', all of which had a profound influence on me. To this day Hans Andersen's story of the little mermaid moves me like a symphony, and 'The Emperor's Nightingale' awakened an interest in things Chinese which developed into an obsession. The power of these tales was less in the telling than in their capacity to stir the imagination. Perhaps stories should not be too well told. Poe's strength may lie in his vagueness, the indefinite atmosphere of his faded tapestry. Were his local colour as precise as Flaubert's, for instance, we would lose the pleasure of completing the structure and filling in the details for ourselves. The mermaid who sacrifices her tongue and flashing tail for the love of a mortal, in

16

exchange for feet that are a torture to her, and the nightingale which returns to save the emperor of China on his bed of sickness, have been a lasting source of inspiration to me. Yet I dare not re-read Hans Andersen for fear that his boreal evanescence may dissolve in a uniform flat light. It was only with some effort that I could recognize my old friend Rip Van Winkle on re-reading Washington Irving some time ago. Was it because I missed the gnarled trees of Rackham's edition? The story had remained more vivid in recollection. On returning to certain places after a comparatively short absence, I have often felt like Rip Van Winkle. My predilection for fairy stories persisted. To counteract it I was presented with a bulky volume of the Boy's Own Paper which I could never bring myself to read. It loomed ~rom my bookcase like an ugly threat. It assumed the significance of a memento mori. I would have to meet such creatures one of these days, and enter into their games and learn their jargon, but not yet, I prayed, not yet. . . . And I would luxuriate all the more in 'The Sleeping Princess' and waft myself into Edmund Dulac's illustrations. From these musings by my bookcase I was occasionally summoned to see guests in the drawing-room. Their interest in me could not have been more than perfunctory, but my interest in them was immense. I observed every detail of their dress and behaviour and would later regale my nurse and mother's maid with descriptions that sent them into fits of laughter. Either nurse or the maid completed the picture with backstairs information, avid as both of them were for Florentine gossip, and I discovered far more about the private lives of Madame Telle and Monsieur Chose than these people suspected when they asked me, so condescendingly, about my lessons. That the one was having an intrigue with the other's chauffeur, for instance . . . . They need not have bothered to notice me, for I was content to watch and listen to them. Every summer we were wont to travel before the heat became too intense, and my earliest memories of any place outside Italy are of America. Mention Chicago to me and gangsters would not enter my head. Chicago has always been a symbol of security in my life, mental and physical. It was the hospitable home of my maternal grandparents, two beings of biblical stature, as gentle as they were righteous. My grandfather,

William Mitchell, had taken an active part in Chicago's growth, having founded the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank and a large family, ramifications of which spread to Hawaii, Spain, and, in our case, Italy. He had the stately dignity of an American of the eighteenth century, and we all looked up to him with veneration. Nobody could have been more remote from the vulgar conception of a Chicagoan. During the torrid months we assembled under his roof at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. I was taken to the heart of this robust clan and somewhat lost my bearings among so many kind cousins whose outlook contrasted strangely with my own. The difference in the tempo of their lives was striking even then. The children were always on the run; they never sat and mused as I did. And they had more initiative. Being with them heightened my sense of vitality. It was as if the elixir of life were coursing through their veins instead of mere sluggish blood. Everybody was determined to enjoy himself to the utmost and I was whirled along to share in all this reckless expenditure of physical energy. Our playhouse in the lush park was a fantastic antlered Norwegian building which had been transported from the Chicago World's Fair, but we were generally to be found out of doors, improvising camp-fires by the lake or puffing across its surface on the romantic 'double-decker'. The anniversary of American Independence just preceded mine, so the days were blended for me in boisterous celebration; the flavours of all the good things I had eaten became spiritualized when I could hold no more and manifested themselves in fireworks. Oh, flavours of corn on the cob, marshmallows, molasses, sarsaparilla, wintergreen, transformed into catherine-wheels and rockets with flying hair! My palate will never forget you, though you visit me only among the super-realist advertisements of American magazines. The taste of certain melons always brings fireworks before my eyes as a result of that day. Those Lake Geneva interludes floated away too soon and lost reality after our return to Florence. Now and then we would meet our American cousins in Europe, but they moved too fast for us: it was never easy to catch up with them. They would send us sumptuous boxes of candy and gramophone records of early ragtime that were like draughts of coca-kola. One beautiful cousin did stay on, but that was for her honeymoon and we

18

saw little of her. In 19rn half Honolulu migrated to Florence for Louise's marriage to Walter Dillingham, which was celebrated at La Pietra. Bliss was it then to be alive, for the hats that ladies wore were as if birds of paradise had nested in their hair. They posed for a group photograph in the garden, converting it into a vast exotic aviary. My brother and I were pages dressed in white, and I wept uncontrollably, for I had hoped to marry Louise myself. On my cousins' return to Honolulu they built another La Pietra. Only Florence was real to me: all other places flickered past like a film in 'glorious technicolour', Les Grandes Dalles and Paris in 19rn, Etretat in 19rr, Bad Homburg, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Binz on the island of Riigen, and Berlin in 1912. From Binz I bore away a chunk of transparen.t amber which assumed the properties of a lifelong talisman, and from Etretat a rudimentary acquaintance with French, the first language that made me conscious of speech as a polished instrument of precise expression. Italian and English I had spoken spontaneously without forethought or afterthought, but with every French sentence I felt I was cutting a cameo. It was an ecstatic moment when the cameo was well cut. To speak in French one must have something worth saying, and I began to pay more attention to what I said, not to utter any random thought that crossed my mind. Every sentence seemed to have greater importance than in English: it was rather formidable. It forced me to think clearly. In Florence I continued to study French with Mademoiselle Horny, an old crone with parchment cheeks and coal-black eyes, whose ceremonious manners and respectful attitude to language gave me a foretaste of French civilization. When the world seems dark I pick up the fables of La Fontaine and see the light again. That man should have fashioned at least one perfect medium of expression and words that convey the exact sense and shade of what they intend to convey, is immensely reassuring. After wading through a muddy English newspaper it is invigorating to take a clean plunge into, say, the crystalline 'Figaro'. Apart from their endearing virtues, their starry logic and their sunny common sense, I could love the French people for their language alone, a language that responds to the subtlest of emotions and that becomes rarefied into the purest colours and 19

perfumes when a poet uses it. These wonderful lines of Rimbaud summarize what French means to me: C'est le repos eclaire, ni fi.evre, ni langueur, sur le lit OU sur le pre. C'est l'ami ni ardent ni faible. L'ami. C'est l'aimee ni tourmentante ni tourmentee. L'aimee. L 'air et le monde point cherches. La vie. In clumsier words, it offers me enlightened repose without fever or faintness, whether I'm in bed or in a meadow, a rest that is lucid and soothing to the nerves. It is the friend neither passionate nor weak and the beloved neither tormenting nor tormented. It is air and the world unsought. And it is life. I have never felt the same about English or Italian. Mademoiselle Horny earned my lasting gratitude. She initiated me into idioms that were a joy to roll on the tongue, and her dictations, fragments of Hugo, Musser and Lamartine, were the first poems I learnt by heart and recited to myself with rapture in the moonlight. When I went to a day school I discovered other poets, above all Shelley, whose lines foamed on inside me after I had read them, the foam spreading and transfiguring me into wind, wave, stream and river. I knew then what it was to be at one with nature and lived among caverns and cascades without shutting my eyes. Miss Penrose, the exceptionally intelligent headmistress, took classes in art history which enthralled me, and I went to look at Cimabue and Giotto with increased interest and understanding and carefully made notes on the pictures I saw. My first letters to my mother were hardly more than catalogues of artists' names. I had then, and I still retain, a marked preference for the Italian primitives. With the simplest means they achieved the most powerful effects, and the types they portrayed appealed to me physically, particularly the long slanting eyes. And they could convey rhythmic movement without a boring insistence on anatomy. I must admit that strength, swiftness, grace and, in a word, significance of line attracted me more than so-called 'tactile values'. My collection of picture postcards increased, and I embarked on an extensive correspondence by postcard, an early training in disillusion. A few which were never posted enable me to trace my bygone friendships and infatuations. Selecting the 20

picture to illustrate my emotion of the moment, I sent bevies of nude Venuses, Apollos and cupids to one little girl friend, whose father complained to mine that this must cease. Having given so much time and thought to my tender missives I was indignant and discouraged. The girl's father was just a Philistine, a boor, and I vowed revenge. As a result of his meddling the girl and I became self-conscious when we met; a barbed wire of awkward shyness had shot up between us. I tried to console myself with the recollection of Dante and Beatrice: after all I had enjoyed more frequent opportunities than Dante and I had made more of them. I had been allowed intimate glimpses, her papa did not know how intimate . . . . We had gone as far as we could at a garden-party. Furtively I slipped one final postcard into the letter-box. It represented Leda and the swan, and { wrote: 'How I would love to be your swan, my darlin_g.' The next time I saw my beloved she cut me dead, and from her blush and lowered eyelids I knew that she had done it on purpose. Silly little thing! I had seen what I had seen and she couldn't take that vision away from me. Sadly I reflected that this would never have happened with the sensible Braggiottis: it served me right for being promiscuous. I confided the story of this abortive love affair to my nurse but she told me not to be soppy, so I found an outlet in the following effusion written in blood-red ink: My love is like a lily cast away. Its petals once in sunlight's rich array Are withered now for ever-let them be! No love, alas, no love e'ermore for me. I've had my touch of love, My touch of love hath flown. It soared away as a dove And I am left alone. When fond I postcards sent to her she smiled And did her worst to mock me then and riled, And she did then her cruel love bestow Upon another-ah! the bitter blow ... But I forbear to quote the rest. It suffices to show my precocious romanticism. The editors of Vogue were not far wrong when, on nominating me to the 'Hall of Fame', they referred to me as 21

having 'lisped in numbers'. Such lispings were a solace to me, if scant pleasure to others. My brother thought this ridiculous but he was two years younger than I: two years were then an enormous gulf, and I could hardly expect him to sympathize with my infatuations, whose objects became ever more distant and elusive. On the other hand he often astonished me by his accomplished flights of gallantry. He had paid such bold court to the Marquise de G---, a famous coquette, that she particularly requested to see him on her visits. She would invite him on to her lap with a 'Viens ici, mon bijou. Me trouves-tu belle aujourd'hui?' After examining her critically, he would announce very solemnly: 'Vous etes tres jolie.' 'Jolie ,a ne suffit pas,' she would say with a pout. 'Suis-je belle, oui on non?' 'Vous etes, vous etes-ravissante,' he brought out with a flourish. 'Et tu m'aimes vraiment? Tu m'aimes d'amour?' 'Naturellement. Je voudrais vous epouser.' 'Tu es un enfant adorable, mais a-do-rable. Quel petit angel' she would croon and sigh with pleasure. The Marquise had a Nattier complexion, but she was at least forty. I found it difficult to believe that my brother, aged six, was entirely sincere. Nobody could have prompted him, however, least of all poor Mademoiselle Horny, whom he teased unmercifully. The Marquise never deigned to flirt with me: could it be that I was not the lady's man I fancied myself? Three postcards from the three O'Connor girls in California seemed to reassure me, but 'love and kisses' were easy enough to write. My brother's effortless conquests began to undermine my faith in the efficacy of postcards. His skill with pencil and brush was even more amazing. Both of us had been dabbling in chalks and water-colours since we could remember, and my own messes seemed to me extremely significant in the beginning: incapable of self-criticism, I was convinced that I had painted what I had set out to paint, even when the result was quite different. Nearly all my drawings had some literary idea behind them: that was the trouble, I continued to see my idea instead of the painting, whereas nobody else could. My brother, on the other hand, painted for the mere pleasure of form and colour: his motive was purely aesthetic. Consequently his earliest, most 22

immature water-colours had a directness and unity that were strikingly successful. My own efforts faded into insignificance beside them and I realized this without understanding the cause. But I persevered in the illusion that I was by temperament a painter. I gave more thought to painting in general than to any other subject and the poetry that I enjoyed was visual rather than intellectual. I took a secret and voluptuous delight in wandering off alone to the Villa Lemmi and dreaming Botticelli's frescoes back on the walls, and there I saw Giovanna Tornabuoni with Venus and the Graces more clearly than ever in the Louvre where they did not rightly belong. My father had painted intermittently ever since he had been an art student in Paris, and his studio was my first library and dream shop. This lofty attic was packed with the paral?hernalia which stimulated and multiplied my pictorial fancies; easels, palettes, portfolios of drawings and canvases stackect against the walls, a mannequin with movable joints, odd fragments of coloured stuff on a divan, and tables piled with art magazines, monographs and catalogues, among which I was allowed to browse to my heart's content. From these I gleaned considerable knowledge of painting in other countries and of schools not represented in the Florentine galleries. They opened my eyes to new planets and helped me to observe nature more critically. The result was not altogether fortunate, for when I travelled I viewed the country to a great extent through other people's eyes, clear, sharp, well-trained eyes it is true, but neither my own nor backed by personal experience: thus I contemplated it at second hand and became, temporarily, a passive medium for painters dead and gone. I saw France with the eyes of the French Impressionists, Spain through those of Velasquez and Goya, England through those of Constable and Crome, etc. Italy was the only country I saw entirely with my own eyes, and I took pride in being a Florentine by birth. Sargent, who· was also born in Florence, complained that he could not paint there. The creative artist striving for self-expression must end by feeling oppressed by so much beauty, weighed down, like Atlas, with the whole world of art on his shoulders. Where taste is uniformly exquisite, where one is surrounded by masterpieces, one loses initiative in a cloud of wonder. All one's efforts appear to be dwarfed. One asks oneself: what's the use? why not surrender to the joy of contemplation? It is wiser for

the creative artist to saturate himself and then take his impressions elsewhere, to neutral territory. The magazines in my father's studio superimposed a series of images on my daily life which became an integral part of it. Of the minor artists, Beardsley and Bakst recurred with the greatest emphasis. In Beardsley I found one of the most exciting illustrators, whose work was admirable for the purity of its line and pattern, though permeated by a literature and music far from pure. His drawings affected my taste in poetry by leading me towards the eighteenth century, but his real affinity was to Poe. The overripe metaphors and delirious interjections of Poe's most characteristic tales are transposed into black and white designs. The eye wanders from object to object, and rests upon 'convolute censers' and 'trembling draperies', and who else but Beardsley could illustrate this sentence: 'Issuing from the flame of each lamp (for there were many) there flowed unbrokenly into my ears a strain of melodious monotone'? Beardsley's art has been compared with that of Japan, but it is far more individual than any black and white print I have seen there. Those cadaverous tall torches of women, dying upright in pools of their own wax, or black blood congealing like wax; those dry lips parted hungrily to plunge into some forbidden fruit, and of forbidden fruit what an abundance oozing and dripping and bursting with excess of seed!-they are Beardsley's own inimitable creation. He endows a plump breast or a platter of pomegranates with a separate symbolic life which was sombre and mysterious to me, but I was aware of its perverse beauty. In the hands of his imitators such intricacy became meaningless, mere empty frills. Bakst also suffered from his imitators. At that time he was producing his richest work, an orchestration of colour as close to the music he was interpreting as it was humanly possible to approach. If Rimsky-Korsak off had colour, it was Bakst who set it down for the eye in 'Scheherazade'. That setting remains final, the perfect background for this particular orgy. And he set down with equal perfection the more diaphanous tints of Debussy and the early Victorian shot silks of Schumann. It is the fashion to sneer at him now, but for over a century nobody in the west had given us such costumes or stage-settings, a series of studied harmonies in which he towered above his peers. Another generation may give him his due. I can only record

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my gratitude for the magnificent revelations I owed to him then, before I had read Vathek or the Arabian Nights. As the years galloped by one shadow darkened and overspread me, the shadow of school. This would not be like dear Miss Penrose's where there were more girls than boys and gentle mistresses instead of masters. What it would be like I could barely imagine: I supposed it would be like joining the army. It would be farewell to love, and farewell to Florence. My nurse did everything possible to build up my morale, but I could ill conceal that I dreaded the prospect. 'You'll get all namby-pamby if you stay much longer among all those girls. You don't want to grow up into a dago, do you? It's high time you became a proper Englishman.' To smooth the way for this eventuality my brotht!f and I were taken to England for the summer. Why ~Cromer was chosen I do not know: my nurse may have suggested it. Certain it is that she expanded like a peony there: at last no mosquitoes, no stenches (as in that awful Venice with dead cats in the canals), no men relieving nature in the streets, no dagoes anywhere! Gone were her host of petty irritations. After a substantial English breakfast-porridge and cream and kippers, for a change, and Oxford marmalade-we would saunter to the beach in front, of the hotel. For a while my nurse's enthusiasm was contagious. The beach had one asset: it was amply stocked with sea-shells and among the shingle and seaweed I also picked up pieces of cornelian for our grotto. But the principal charm of Cromer for me was a derelict church tower on the edge of a high cliff with poppies blazing all the way up to it which I was told would send me to sleep. It looked haunted by a demon or poltergeist, and sure enough it has since slipped into the sea. We had heard glowing accounts of a Lady Battersea's garden and went there for a charity bazaar. The flowers were superb, the. lawns like carpets, yet I was disappointed. Evidently flowers alone made a garden in England. This was my first sight of herbaceous borders, a riot of colour which I failed to appreciate: they seemed to be stacked higgledy-piggledy, like counters at a country fair. One wandered beside them, attracted by a lupin here, a lobelia there, feeling more of a bee than a human being. It was appropriate enough for a bazaar, a thing of gaudy shreds and patches, but what would become of it in winter when the bazaar was over? Italian fountains and balustrades were just as

beautiful when they were festooned with icicles, and snow accentuated the architectural design, trimming the box hedges and topiary work with ermine and creating a finer contrast for the cypresses and pines. The same snow would transform this English garden into a wilderness. I noticed that the ladies at the bazaar were very like the garden; their dresses imitated the herbaceous borders and exceeded them in variety of colour. But I made no friends among them. Our nurse believed firmly in keeping ourselves to ourselves. The few concerts we attended on the pier were all the place had to offer as an excuse for music. I could hardly repress my laughter, for the women looked like laundresses and sang like peacocks and the men were like weary sextons with walrus moustaches. A Florentine audience would have booed and flung rotten fruit at them, and I noticed then, as I have noticed since, how polite an English audience can be: here they actually applauded. Was it due to compassion, or were they just uncritical? German bands in braided scarlet uniforms provided another kind of noise, so did the Salvation Army, whose 'Onward Christian Soldiers' beat the others hollow. Miss Violet Vanbrugh, whom my nurse informed me was a famous actress, was staying in the same hotel, and as she partook of a light supper before her performance I had a chance of staring at her in the dining-room. I had been told that most actresses were naughty and I wondered how naughty Miss Vanbrugh was. Immensely tall, sedate, angular, sharp-nosed, and dressed like another herbaceous border, she ate her supper haughtily, like a deaconess. I could not imagine her burying her head in roses like Lyda Borelli or languishing on a sofa like Francesca Bertini; any ordinary sofa would be too short. Perhaps she brought her own furniture with her. Nor could I imagine the hero embracing her: unless he were equally tall he would have to climb on to a chair. 'Nurse, do take me to the play. Please!' But nurse refused, and my curiosity about Miss Vanbrugh was never assuaged. The charm of Cromer soon wore thin. We went boating on the Norfolk Broads; we went to Fakenham and East Dereham and visited Blickling Hall, and though I enjoyed the water-colour prettiness and picturesqueness of these places, the architecture struck me as cramped; the tameness of the landscape cloyed after Tuscany, where the face of nature seems moulded by

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passion and the magic of moonlight is mixed with the light of day. Here nobody sang. I missed the full-throated singing of the contadini, the leisurely prodigality of life. I missed so much that I began to feel unhappy. A few days in London acted as a local anresthetic; half-doped I went to the tailor's and haberdasher's to be fitted out for school. I saw the National Gallery through a respectful haze which lifted once or twice, as before the Piero della Francescas. The clear stream winding by the sharply outlined trees of the 'Baptism', the sun and shadow of the cattleshed in the 'Nativity', with its tufts of grass and the bird on the sloping roof-these transported me to the road that leads to Siena, and with a pang of homesickness I stepped into the sooty solemnity of Trafalgar ~~re. , The strange new sinking feeling never left me for long, even at The Marriage Market, a melodious musical com~dy of which I remember a scene on a gleaming yacht called the S.S. Mariposa, with a lovely Hungarian, Sari Patras, as the ultra-feminine leading lady. The tunes of Lehar and Strauss accompanied me everywhere; all the music in London seemed to have been imported from Vienna and Budapest. The long-haired violinists were having their last fling before the arrival of the saxophone. I knew two other boys who were also going to Wixenford, and of these Francis Stonor was a comparative veteran slightly older than myself. Nurse had taken my brother back to Florence, and since I was alone I was kindly invited to see Francis's collection of stamps in Montagu Square. To me he appeared impressively independent, a sophisticated Londoner, with rooms of his own like a flat at the top of the house. He was suave, well-groomed, a trifle condescending, and I was rather awed by him. Had the fact slipped out that my nurse had but recently left me? I was uncomfortably aware of my ignorance of the world, and that my answers to his probing questions had not been satisfactory; my interests in poetry and painting should have been concealed. The stamps were neatly arranged in special albums. While turning the pages he told me that some were very valuable, that one Mauritius stamp which he hoped to procure was worth at least a thousand pounds, and that the King had the finest collection in the world. 'That's an unusual one,' I remarked, for want of something better to say. 'It's very common,' he retorted, 'in

fact it's American, brand new.' With every remark I 'put my foot into it' deeper. The stamps that he pointed out to me with pride were devoid of beauty and I had no other standard of appreciation. They looked well enough on an envelope, I thought, these mechanically produced little lopped-off heads in profile, but after they had served their purpose, basta! How could one bear to look at such things again and again? It seemed strange that a king should collect stamps when he had so much else to choose from. But Francis should know; his Uncle Harry was the King's equerry. I thought of the Cabinet of Gems in the Uffizi, the amber chalices, the busts carved of agate and emerald with diamond eyes, miracle after miracle of human workmanship, and glanced again at these printed squares of gummed paper. No, it was incomprehensible, but I could hardly say so to my new friend, who had shown me his treasures as a special favour and even presented me with a few by way of encouragement. When I asked him about school he said it wasn't bad. What about the games? Oh, they could be lots of fun. I dared not make a nuisance of myself by asking too many questions. I noted that he was reserved, that he spoke understatements, unlike the Braggiottis. Though I was not reserved I must learn to do the same.

II I SUPPOSE everyone is miserable during his first days at school, and I have seldom been more so. It was not because I was a stranger in strange surroundings: that has never disturbed me. It was because the curtain had been rung down prematurely on a first act of absorbing personal interest, that of my own mental development. From Florence, in whose culture and l\istory I had quite forgotten my age and limitations, I had come to a private school near Wokingham, Berkshire, where I was reduced to the status of a child among children. The very word 'games' was anathema to me. From now on I would have to indulge in them day after day. My spirit rebelled and remained perverse until Oxford set me free. This constant rebellion thickened my hide and made me inwardly, if not outwardly, pugnacious. Too late, alas, I regret that I thus deprived myself of much innocent pleasure. In many respects I was an un-English production but in one I was singularly English: I was adaptable. My pronunciation provoked mockery: I exaggerated it. As my simplest remarks were greeted with hoots of laughter I cultivated an appropriate sense of humour. I had a small repertory of Italian songs which were in frequent demand and mollified potential bullies. Gradually I entered a circle of lifelong friends. It was natural that I should gravitate at first towards the few Americans and boys of foreign extraction who shared a continen~ tal outlook. My friendship with two of these, Billie Leeds and Buzzie Harjes, was based on our common admiration for Boldini, who had painted portraits of their mothers. We discussed Boldini with high seriousness, and considered him far superior to the painters of other boys' mothers. Among my private treasures I had a photograph of his portrait of Marchesa Casati with a greyhound, which acted as a wonderful antidote to an afternoon of cricket. Other potent antidotes, kept very secret, were a lump of amber and a phial of attar of roses. These

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talismans wafted me to that sphere of fantasy, now more than ever remote, in which syrens swam up to embrace me somewhere in the neighbourhood of Sorrento, and Chinese nightingales sang to me in a lacquered pavilion. Except for a collection of bound editions of the Illustrated London News, so old that I excavated it for traces of Constantin Guys, I could find nothing in the school library to tempt me. Henty, Ballantyne and Captain Marryat, whose novels filled the shelves, looked as unappetizing to me as the Boys' Own Paper, and I fear I may have missed another great experience. Some special skill they must have possessed, besides an insight into what fires a boy's imagination. But that imagination, once kindled, has energy enough to make up for the deficiencies of such literature; in describing the books they were reading my friends made them sound twice as exciting. I dared not bring Hans Andersen along with me. A slim volume of Elizabethan lyrics restored my equanimity in moments of depression, also a few copies of La Vie Parisienne, until they were discovered and confiscated. We were fortunate in our masters. From Mr. Morton, the head, to Mr. Wheeler, who took charge of the new boys, they were extraordinarily genial, free from flabbiness and cant. Mr. Wheeler had been at Wixenford long before the others, before it had been founded, one felt: there was something monumental about that ponderous figure with swarthy features and a white moustache faintly stained by nicotine. He was like Father Time. One suspected that he must have set out on his career as a planter in one of the tropics and that he had been forced by failing health to return to England. Some disappointment had marked his features, which were melancholy in repose, but his black eyes brightened at schoolboy repartee, however mild. He presided over one of the long tables in the dining-room, and he was generous in offering me saccharine, which he took for his diabetes, and the tops of his hard-boiled eggs, which assumed an inexplicable distinction, as if he were offering a spoonful of caviar. As another favour, not always appreciated, he would read to us a few pages of his vade mecum, a little book of Coincidences, all of which he assured us were absolutely authentic. Coincidences which happen to others are seldom exciting, but he seemed to find them inexhaustibly so. Mr. Wheeler also had an unusual collection of old tobacco-jar lids with pictures of the Prince Consort, the Crystal Palace and other Victorian scenes 30

and figures in pleasantly subdued tones, from which I built up my first panorama of that placid age. Snappy old Mademoiselle, who tried to teach French, was a sorry substitute for Mademoiselle Horny. Nicknamed Haggie, her expression was always worried. She must have hated the boys. They plagued her in consequence, and her threats to give them all stripes did little to restore order to her unruly classes. I felt that she wept in secret and hankered after her native Grisons, but my attempts at sympathy were rebuffed. Evidently she was prejudiced against the entire sex. The system of rewards and punishments was regulated by the issue of pink and blue slips of paper known as stars and stripes. A certain number of stripes would incur a swishing, and would also deprive one of a special holiday during the suml1'er term, when the headmaster's private grounds were open i:o nonstripers, who could roam at pleasure and enjoy a feast of ice-cream. Most of the stripes could be traced to Haggie. The music master, Mr. Hume, and the drawing master, Mr. Thompson, were the most important in my eyes as the only 'Open Sesames' to the world I valued. How I clutched at every straw that helped me towards that world! How infinitely prized was the slenderest thread of contact with the arts! The music master was like a red full moon which only withheld its beams from those who sang flat. Under his tutelage we shouted folk-songs, old ballads and chanties from 'Gaudeamus', rollicking and convivial. He was a tireless organizer of musical plays and concerts, and the transformation of suety schoolboys into emotional actors and virtuosi of unexpected range was as fascinating a spectacle as the unfolding of those tiny Japanese water flowers in my nursery at home. The pleasure derived from school concerts was more psychological than musical. Raff's 'Cavatina', Rubinstein's 'Melody in F', Ahn Carse's 'Romance', Moskowski's 'Serenata', a 'Chanson Triste', and the inevitable 'Humoresque', always encored, are fair samples of what we heard. Knowing the performer, you identified yourself with him by sheer sympathy, you shared his state of nerves. The feebler the talent, the greater the strain. You mesmerized him with your moral support. Your heart went out to him, fluttering almost visibly over the heads of the audience. His wrestling match with piano or violin; his grim determination to rise above or even keep pace

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with his accompanist; the tenseness of his expression; his beatified relief when it was over-all this was intensely dramatic, particularly if the performer was your friend. Drawing masters can hardly fail to be agreeable, and our 'Tompy' infused so much interest into the portrayal of cubes that it is a wonder we did not all become lifelong cubists. From cubes, however, we proceeded to copy lithographs of crumbling churches, lychgates, castles, and cottages embowered in fuzzy trees, far easier than cubes, since they only involved a knack of shading with soft pencils, gradations of zigzags for trees and light whorls with copious smears of the 'injy-bunjy' for clouds. A few sheep or a mottled cow might be added to enhance the general fuzziness in which many took a perverse delight. Shading became a mania; some even introduced cones of blottingpaper to aid pencil and rubber in their effects which aimed, presumably, at producing the ideal Christmas card. All lines tended towards a misty evaporation. Tompy's own dexterity was like that of a conjurer: pencil poised like a wand, you could not guess what rabbit he would send scuttling on to the paper, and in a trice it might turn into a camel or a zebra. He could knock off a recognizable sketch of almost anything at lightning speed. He specialized in animals dressed as human beings: several albums of these had been published by Raphael Tuck (the combination of Raphael with such a surname amused me) and I seem to remember cats playing tennis and an elephant catching a train. All this bore little relation to art as I understood it, yet I enjoyed these lessons more than any others. Tompy had the virtue of making us all feel talented. On the other hand, no mathematical master could stimulate my imagination, except indirectly. During those dreariest of hours when I had to do sums my face must have been a blank, for I was often accused of wool-gathering. Questions would have to be repeated before they reached my brain, and while I was at school this was my only cause of trouble. My thoughts would wander back to Italy. Otherwise school routine left little time for introspection. After evening prayers we trooped briskly up to bed, as the name of each dormitory was called out by Mr. Morton. Conversation, forbidden after lights out, was desultory. Some lavatory badinage might be exchanged; one or two might compete in making rude noises; but we soon fell asleep after the 32

matron's cheery good night. Rowdiness was exceptional and summarily dealt with. On Sunday afternoons the school chaplain took us for country walks and it was a signal honour to be invited to walk beside him. He was an etiolated version of Old Bill, with a moustache that had a magnetic way with soup. Perhaps he caught me smiling as he was lapping up his mulligatawny, for he did not take kindly to me. He attempted to foist the nickname 'Freak' upon me, but as I had already been nicknamed 'Bambino', his attempt was abortive. All the while he was secretly wooing the matron, a tiny body, all starched collar, cuffs and apron, with an enormous helmet of hair, and he surprised us all by going off and marrying her without a word. The sprightly Miss Frogley who succeeded her could make even castor oil palatable;,she was like a romantic elder sister. · Great friendships were sealed and unsealed on those Sunday walks. I was less self-conscious than others and boldly asked anyone I liked the look of to share my company. Very few had previous engagements and I was quite immoral about seeing that these were broken if necessary. In the beginning I wasted my time on a few duds, but imagination will always beckon to imagination and it did not take me long to discover affinities. Then what rich confidences flowed and overflowed, what private ambitions were intermingled with family histories, apocryphal and picaresque! Sagas were spun which vied with each other in fantasy and died of its sheer excess. I described, for instance, my seduction by an American negress: her velvet skin, water-melon mouth, ivory teeth and tongue like liquid coral. I described her suffocating hugs, sharp bites and polypus kisses, her umbilical resonant voice as she called me her honey, and her embrace like that of a warm dark jellyfish. And afterwards, how she would give me a heart-shaped lump of ice to cool me off. That ice had a flavour of verbena, and the chill of it paralysed me in a voluptuous way . . . . Even now I am uncertain about my trysts with the black washerwoman. She became so real to me that I dreamt of her at night, and the dream was apt to recur after pillow-fighting in the dormitory. I also made a lot of publicity for the Braggiotti family, embroidering on their charms so lavishly that they became famous throughout the school. Everybody longed to meet them, even the prudes whom we called 'pi'. 33

During those Sunday walks I planned a magazine of art and fashion with Billy Clonmore, and a museum with Mark OgilvieGrant. There were already a few glass cases in which specimens of flint and coal continued despondently to collect the indifferent dust; perhaps there were a few stuffed owls and trout as well. Mark and I were dissatisfied with this state of affairs: Wixenford deserved something better. So we decided to found a museum of our own. Long lists of our exhibits were compiled in advance. Mark, as a Scottish natural historian, promised to secure a collection of cairngorms, capercailzie's eggs, Highland dirks, blood-stained tartans and ancient recipes for haggis, while I, as a Florentine unnatural historian, was to contribute samples of Medici poisons, a chastity belt, amulets against the evil eye (we would need these at exams), rare coins, thumbscrews and miscellaneous articles of the Italian Renaissance; I might even persuade my father to lend us some of his primitives. Of the magazine a first number was issued and circulated in a precious handmade edition. It contained stanzas written in gold ink, a leading article on the Bulls of Bashan, some naturalistic notes by Mark, and illustrations which owed more to the Vie Parisienne than to dear old Tompy. The museum took longer to materialize, but in our minds it assumed Babylonian dimensions. For our humble preliminary exhibits, such as a sheep's skull, a four-leaved clover and a few beetles picked up on our walks, we inscribed a number of imposing labels in florid pedantic style, erudite in inverse ratio to the insignificance of the object. Alas, they have slipped my memory. I wish I could do justice to them now. They had the authentic scholarly note, coupled with an unscholarly imagination. I don't think Kenneth Clark was on our board of directors but I am sure that he gave us his blessing. Certainly in his case the child was father to the man, and one did not have to be a phrenologist or a clairvoyant to foresee that K. had a distinguished career ahead of him. He walked with benign assurance in our midst, an embryo archbishop or Cabinet Minister. Since those days, however, he seems to have grown much younger. Each of us was allotted a desk in the big schoolroom at the beginning of term. Though battered, ink-stained and slashed by generations of penknives, it was strictly private, a symbol of hearth and home. In a sociable mood one would pay calls at various desks, and it was extraordinary how a small area of 34

wood could become impregnated with its owner s personality. From Mark's I expected a tartaned couple to jump out and dance the Highland Fling: it became a corner of Castle Grant. The photographs of La Pietra which mine contained converted it into a corner of Italy. How I yearned for the apparition of a cypress! As the term wore on my yearning became pathological. I wrote hymns to cypresses and tried to draw them on every available sheet of paper. 'OH Cypress, beauteous Cypress, Pray listen to my call! I love thee, beauteous Cypress, Thou art my seneschal .. .' i

I was not sure of the meaning of seneschal, but instinct ·told me that that was the right word. My letters home and my exercise books were sprawling with cypresses. And when at long last the term was over, the glimpse of my first cypress quivering with dark yet intimate mystery in the Ligurian sunshine, filled me with an ecstasy like the kiss of the beloved after an age of separation. Oh the gay rhythm of the train as we disembogued from a dark tunnel into the sudden summer of white casinos among the palms and orange trees! The rattling window-pane of my compartment was misted over with my tense breathing. I kept wiping it with my handkerchief and gazing, rapt, at every passing village, house, tree, as if to print it for ever on my soul. From Pisa on I hardly uttered. Here in December the sky was still bright blue. How beautifully proportioned were these yellow farmhouses among the vineyards. Even the humblest villages had buildings which could be dignified as architecture. Finally I paid no more attention to the warning: 'e pericoloso sporgersi.' Opening the window with a jerk I leaned out and drank the Tuscan air in great gulps like a draught of wine. Then the train stopped at a little station, Empoli, and the melody of the Italian language poured its sweetness into my ears. Everybody seemed to be twice as alive as in England. There was a chorus of gay chatter from the platform. Beside the brilliant bacchantes dancing a can-can on the walls, advertisements for Cinzano, the young women of flesh and blood looked demure in their dark shawls. Young men, cloaks dangling from 35

their shoulders, loitered in leisurely groups, their eyes full of mischief. These had not come for any purpose so material as the catching of a train: they had come simply to see and be seen, to enjoy vicariously the bustle and excitement. To and fro the carabinieri flaunted slowly in couples, a little aloof from the others and proud as turkeycocks. Surely they had nothing more serious to do in life than saunter self-importantly on railway platforms. This decorative duty, and the cultivation of their flamboyant moustaches, must be their be-all and end-all. At each station the train seemed slightly more reluctant to depart. There was always another passenger loaded with bundles, another tender farewell to be prolonged by one last smacking kiss. Then an absurd toy bugle would blow, a flag would be waved-'Partenza!' Very gingerly we crawled away from the waving, retreating crowd, leaving another compact little universe behind us. And a tinny bell could be heard tinkling away in the stationmaster's office, where two wiseacres sat back with their legs on the table, puffing imperviously at powerful Toscano cigars. An unshaven ticket collector shuffled in to scrutinize my ticket through spectacles that had slipped down his bulbous nose. 'Per la Citta dei Fiori,' he said sententiously. An operatic aria was wafted down the corridor with a strong whiff of garlic. The excitement of returning to Florence was so great that I could not sleep on the night of my arrival. The maremmani were baying at the moon: I opened my window and called to them and they trotted up to the terrace below me, wagging their tails. For a second the whole garden seemed to stir in a gesture of greeting: the statues flickered from silver to quicksilver and a wave of tenderness rustled through the ancient ilexes. My brother was fast asleep. Another two years before he too would realize what separation from all this meant .... The next week went by in a fever of rediscovery. Perhaps I was too promiscuous in my appreciations. I felt as though I could never absorb enough, and crammed my brain with images instead of selecting one and concentrating on that. Conscious as never before of the flight of time, I tried to 'load every rift with ore'. The desire to paint contended with the desire to write poetry: in the middle of an attempt to capture the contours of a cypress, so firm yet full of highlights, a couplet would

insinuate itself and insist on being committed to paper, with deleterious results both to picture and poem, since Western painting, unlike Chinese, does not flow from calligraphy. The solution, as to so many problems in my life, would have been simplified had I been Chinese. In the beginning of 1914 the Russian Ballet was at its zenith and its influence was felt all over Europe. The great galas of colour organized by Diaghileff were being imitated even in private entertainments: fancy-dress balls and tableaux vivants became sumptuous and spectacular to a degree unrealized since. Owing to 'Scheherazade', what was vaguely called Persia had become the Utopia of stage-managers and dress designers. Like the Illyria of the Elizabethans, it had no precise frontiers. It was a gaudy compound of Baghdad and Ispahan, Haroun-alRaschid and the great Mogul; it was a straggling continent of infinite poetic licence, a gorgeous Near East that got-nearer every day. 'Persian' balls were well in the vanguard, then came Venetian, Egyptian and Russian balls, with pierrots and black dominoes in the rear. In some cases, as for the Marchesa Casati, Bakst himself designed the costumes. In Italy, especially in Rome, Venice and Capri, this fabulous beauty devised the most exotic spectacles with herself as their dazzling cynosure. She was the D'Annunzian Muse incarnate. Wisely, she seldom uttered: ordinary sentiments from the lips of so chimerical a creature were inconceivable: they would have struck a discord. The companions of her choice were albino blackbirds, mauve monkeys, a leopard, a boa constrictor, and, among Englishmen, Lord Berners. Even now that we have become so blast\ I am sure that the traffic of Piccadilly Circus would stop for such an apparition. All the artists strove to paint this tall, graceful femme fatale with the enormous crystal-gazing eyes, but of their cumulative efforts only Boldini's approached success. Marchesa Casati was to society what Ida Rubenstein was to the stage; both acted the legends they created. Florence did not lag behind other cities in fancy-dress entertainments, and those who took part in them travelled from considerable distances for the event. For one party given that year at the Villa Schifanoia, Persian and Venetian costumes were combined: the Shah was sending an embassy to the Doge. My parents went in costumes designed by Poiret from Persian miniatures, and my brother, in an overwhelming turban and

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puffed-out satin trousers designed by Brunelleschi, acted as a Moorish page to the Doge's spouse. In the meantime Marinetti was flinging the first manifestoes of Futurism to a cynical public. The Futurists were violent, above all in their methods of publicity: they asserted the importance of being modern-in the Eternal City, the beauty of the machine-a stone's throw from S. Peter's, the splendour of speed-by the banks of the sluggish Tiber. Technically they were clever journalists, and their painters owed much to Diaghileff's ballet, without acknowledging it. One of the shrillest was named Balla, which provided him with an effective pun. All the pictures on his walls were attached to springs, the floor itself had an elastic resilience, so that when he set the studio a-frisking he could say without exaggeration: 'Nella casa di Balla tutto balla'-(in Dance's house everything dances). The paintings were full of gay whirligigs, meticulous cones and cubes of brilliant colour. It was natural for Italian artists to revolt against an omnipresent past, though the revolt was little more than a youthful gesture. Their iconoclasm was half-hearted, for Carra returned to Giotto, Chirico to classical Greece, and Papini to Jesus Christ. Marinetti and his most fervent followers were eventually absorbed and neutralized by Fascism. All this fretful violence seemed prophetic in relation to the first world war as did Surrealism in relation to the second. For the time being it expressed itself most practically in loud colour-schemes which added a parrot-bright sheen to the surface of life. The slow rhythm of the tango compelled everyone to dance. Professional tango-partners set the pace and created the style, like mannequins at a fashion parade. They ran to type and, while they danced, appeared to be in a vile temper, as if they would knife each other at any moment: sinuous and supple women with clinging gowns, men with lacquered blue-black hair, almond eyes, and side-whiskered bluish cheeks. A veneer of urbanity covered primeval passions. In Florence there was a succession of tango-teas to which I went as a fervid onlooker. Under that South American rhythm a whole generation of Florentines danced its way into entanglements which were often snapped at the altar. Many of them have retained that tango aroma in middle age. Donna Cora Caetani, with her sunken pools of eyes, still carries the same air of languid desperation as when she was the willowy Cora Antinori.

At those tango-teas you saw Rudolf Valentinos by the dozen, and it was diverting to watch them, so conscious of their mastery of adventurous sidesteps, twining and twisting in and out of those gliding, dragging measures with a sharp click at the end, as when a peacock clicks open the fan of its tail, their impassive virility contrasting piquantly with a flashing wristwatch, a sparkle of rings and a silk handkerchief reeking of Coty. The amateurs mimicked the professionals. For the summer they migrated to Viareggio, the Lido and St. Moritz, devoutly gregarious. While in Florence they haunted the Via Tornabuoni, the social hub of the town. By midday the famous tea-rooms of Doney and Giacosa on either side of the street were compact with young men oozing infinite leisure: super lounge-lizards, buttonholed, brilliantined and bespatted, all their goodi, in the shop window, they spilled on to the pavement to inspect each passing ankle and compare notes in voices loud enough to be overheard. A lady shopper would have to run the gauntlet of these self-elected experts, who registered approval and disapproval in unequivocal terms. From one group she would fall into another. Never a more serious thought, unless of a duel when honour was at stake, came to furrow those sleek brows. Themselves niggardly clients, they acted as decoys, enticing wealthier fowl they could pluck and keep on plucking. It was from the ranks of these unemployed Narcissi that Mussolini was to draw his most rabid supporters. From Narcissus to general nuisance was an easy step. The appeal of the blackshirt uniform with its theatrical regalia was immediate and irresistible, and in the beginning Fascism demanded few sacrifices. As members of the party they found themselves entitled to all sorts of privileges and perquisites. But the prime attraction was the uniform, the right to cut a dashing figure without entailing risks. I anticipate, however ... My juvenile visits to Doney's were aureoled with Ouida-esque romance. Ouida, in fact, had been one of the teashop's best patrons in her day. The cakes, of which Gateau Elena was most memorable, flavoured with orange-peel, apricot and almond, and ornate as a Margravine's boudoir, the chocolate pralines and fondants and marrons glaces, the ices which tasted of genuine fruit -all these were ambrosial and nowhere have I tasted finer. And gossip was so much more amusing when it was almost within earshot of both subject and object. The So-and-sos were 39

lovers: it was a well-known, established liaison; and our informant swore that she had seen them together not half an hour ago. Yet here they were greeting each other as if they had not met for ages, and with exaggerated formality: 'Quelle bonne surprise! Bonjour, mon cher Comte. Je vous croyais toujours a Nice .. .' And that young man sipping vermouth with the dowager was as said to be 'queer'. What did they mean exactly? One was continually hearing that certain men in Florence were queer, not that it made much difference to their popularity: on the contrary! the queerer the dearer. But wherein did this queerness reside? I must find out. In trying to solve this problem I stared at the young man until he flushed with embarrassment. 'But I can't see anything queer about him,' I exclaimed, and was told to mind my own business, which led to further cogitation. Thinking him over, I came to the conclusion that he was prettier than a man was supposed to be; and that might have something to do with it. But how could he help having curly hair and a pink and white complexion? If he shaved his head and wore a beard he might look more manly, of course, but wouldn't that be rather affected? So the comedy went on before my riveted eyes. My parents welcomed half Florence to the villa, as well as itinerant museum directors and art critics who came to view the collection, and as I grew older I helped to show these visitors round the house, studying their mannerisms and adding to my store of miscellaneous knowledge. There was a considerable Russian colony at that time, but only their church with the glittering onions off the Viale Milton remains to evoke their vanished opulence. They were lavish in all things, and the frequent visits of their imperial Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses provided them with excuses for the ever-renewed shattering of champagne glasses. At one party, just when the guests were ushered in to supper, the vast table groaning with zakouski and Venetian glass filled with champagne, collapsed with a resounding crash. The host apologized profusely, and within ten minutes another table was laid in the same spot, with a new set of Venetian glass, more zakouski and magnums of champagne. The collapse of the first one had been a practical joke. To me the most strikingly Russian of the Russians was Contessa Lysina Rucellai. She had been married twice previously, to Baron Pilar and to Prince Woronzoff-Schouvaloff, and was proud of being a thoroughbred Cossack. Tall, red-haired,

magnificent even in old age when I had more opportumties of seeing her, she was a remarkable survival of an extinct regime, witty, salacious and spacious even in her tiny boudoir crammed with preposterous stuffed pets and gew-gaws. And since she preferred conversation to bridge, unlike most Florentines, her anecdotes floated above the general current like galleons of pungent spices on the Volga. Her father had been a Cossack general, and she maintained that she had been born in the middle of a ballroom under a huge chandelier, surrounded by Cossack officers, thirty of whom had acted as her godfathers. As nothing had been prepared for her reception, the new-born babe was washed in a bowl of champagne. Several of her nurses died of a cholera epidemic, and she was nourished between-times with the aid of a han1kerchief soaked in milk. 'Luckily,' she said, 'our village priest set off witli a party of peasants on a pilgrimage to the shrine of S. Elizabeth, whose anniversary it was. On the road they met some gipsies with a young woman suckling an infant in their midst. The good priest immediately ordered his moujiks to seize mother and child and take them home as a present for my mamma. Mamma was delighted; like all Cossacks she adored originality. The gipsy didn't die like the other nurses; she gave me lots of milk and called me Lysina, for I was baptized Elizabeth in honour of the Saint, thanks to whose anniversary I had been saved. In due course we married her off and she had six strapping sons who called me their little sister. So you must make allowances for my being a bit unusual ... ' And one would even make allowances for the garlic she exhaled, for she fancied that garlic preserved eternal youth. Her anecdotes were all of a fantastic nature. Looking at her, you had to believe them. She was fantastic all of a piece, and what she left unsaid her malicious eyes declared. Only Russia could have produced her. On one occasion she announced that she was giving a ball for a Princess of Schleswig-Holstein who had recently come to Florence. The guests were kept waiting a long time and when the Princess arrived, they saw a hideous old hag staring at them insolently through her lorgnettes. She was dressed in Second Empire style with a long train and a lace head-dress over her bunched white hair. The notabilities of Florence were presented

to her, and all the men kissed her hand, but the noble Teuton preserved a frigid silence. Turning her back on all the ladies, she walked through the rooms examining the pictures. Suddenly a shrill cry rent the air. Everybody rushed towards the Princess, who was having convulsions on the floor, displaying long white knickers and cotton stockings none too clean. She kept shouting, to everyone's dismay: 'A bed, a bed!' Several young gallants, in spite of her kicking like a mule, managed to move her to the hostess's couch. There, after a final kick and several somersaults, the dame dropped her disguise. It had been Marchese Carlino Torrigiani, whose father, in ignorance, had previously kissed his hand. The Florentines have always loved a hoax, none more than Contessa Rucellai, who was Florentine only by marriage. As she grew older her thoughts reverted more often to Russia and the bygone luxuries of Petersburg. Her anecdotes became a blend of Hans Andersen and Rabelais, and evoked a country like that of 'Coq d'Or'. During my holidays I took a great interest in all these people and their affairs. Though I hardly came into their lives, they came into mine. My particular friend and confidante was Comtesse d'Orsay, a daughter of the Sicilian Duke of Villarosa. Considering my age, she was very indulgent to me. Hers was one of the few salons of artists and writers at this time when bridge and tango-teas were all the rage. She was na"ively proud of being nicknamed the Duchess of Taormina, both because she was a Sicilian and because that city was a favourite resort of the over-refined who paid her homage. D'Annunzio was often to be seen and, more important, heard in her apartment. Harold Nicolson describes one of these occasions in Some People. D'Annunzio recited his poems while Nicolson 'crouched back among the cushions, conscious of an emotional pressure I had not yet experienced'. But in comparing the poet's voice to a silver bell and his head to an egg, he leaves a rough caricature. That voice was more than metallic; it was intensely human, almost bisexual, since its virility alternated with feminine sweetness. His intonation seemed the fine flower of the Italian Renaissance. Pico della Mirandola must have had such accents, and Cesare Borgia such resonance. That voice made D' Annunzio the idol of Young Italy even when the poet was a shrivelled old man with a glass eye. Italian mobs can be the noisiest in the world, yet literally you could have heard a pin drop when

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D' Annunzio's eloquence took wing in a densely packed public square, and that was before the introduction of loudspeakers. As for the egg, quite bald though D'Annunzio became, it did not affect his success as a Lothario. Wherever he went the women were at his feet. At a time when his morals were being attacked by jealous journalists, he thought it advisable to go masked to a costume ball given by Contessa Rucellai. Knowing that the poet was an added attraction, the hostess had betrayed his identity to a few ladies. 'He was sitting beside me,' she said, 'and immediately all the beauties flew up like a swarm of bees. He remained impassive, but remarked: "Please take note. Yet I am accused of running after them!"' D'Annunzio lived the Florentine chapter of his legen~ at the Villa Capponcina, Settignano, not far from whtre Berenson presided over the history of art. To Comtesse d'Orsay, as to most Italians, he was the greatest living poet. It had seemed impossible to extract richer harmonies from the Italian lyre, yet D'Annunzio invented melodies and forms that were new, instilled life into words long dead or dying, and brought fresh words to life. He lived by generous impulse where others lived by calculation and had a film hero fame before Hollywood was heard of. My friend Natalie Barney maintains that he flattered women into believing that they were Queens of Sheba, but that in reality, like most Italians, he only loved them from the waist down. Be this as it may, his cult for the collective feminine was repaid with double interest. He had a special gift for transforming prosaic things by introducing a poetic note into them, and this gift was often extended to his dealings with women. He invented romantic names for them, enveloping them in an ephemeral radiance. Thus Francesca d'Orsay was 'la Basilissa Irene', as if she had sailed from Byzantium, and her dark sister Duchessa Massari 'la Reginetta Carbonilla', or little Queen Coal; Pizzetti was altogether too common a name for a composer, so D'Annunzio called him Ildebrando da Parma, from his birthplace; Lysina Rucellai he archaized as Monna Lisa degli Oricellari. And when he took to flying, he invented the word velivolo for aeroplane. I have often lamented our indifference to fine words in England. They are clipped, half swallowed and vomited as if they were something to be ashamed of. To begin with, a clear pronunciation is branded as foreign and 43

unhealthy. Persons like myself, who articulate clearly and give syllables their proper values, may hope in vain for employment by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Paraphrased in English D'Annunzio's sentences, so buoyant and limpid in the original, become leaden and verbose. 'Ah, he is quite unique!' sighed Comtesse d'Orsay in reply to my questions. 'One morning Cecile de Tormay (the Hungarian writer) and I had an appointment with him at the Etruscan Museum. There is a big statue of Ariadne in the garden and he said to Cecile: "Look at her closely and she will inspire you to write a story." And Cecile was inspired at once. We stopped at every sarcophagus while the poet recreated its history and pointed out its hidden qualities. Listening to that wonderful voice, one wanted to shut one's eyes. The jewelled phrases that expressed his rapid thought came to him spontaneously in the course of conversation. When we had been saturated in Etruscan antiquities, he accompanied us to the car. He had had it filled with red roses so that we did not know where to sit. That was typical of him. 'His villa was like a garden within and without. In his company you forgot about time. Quietly the sand in his hourglasses ran out but he said it was just an old habit; the sand did not mark time for us: our time should be infinite. . . . And he would take us to the top of his villa where he had converted an old dovecote into a library. This was a rare privilege as few guests were ever admitted. He would show us all his books with precious bindings, explaining his preferences, always smiling as he spoke, enjoying our enjoyment and anxious to prolong it. Knowing my weakness for Turkish delight flavoured with roses and pistachio nuts, he had it sent to me from Cairo, and he would always place a box of it beside me. He dined at a polished refectory table such as you see in old paintings of the Last Supper, and at dessert the servant poured over our hands a scented water called L'Acqua Nunzia, prepared by the poet himself. Whenever we parted he gave me a souvenir, a book or a pretty bibelot, and flowers as well. I never knew a man so generous.' Comtesse d'Orsay also told me about his stables and greyhound kennels and his favourite mare Amaranta, which he described as a true woman, with all of a woman's caprices. He enjoyed asserting his mastery over Amaranta after an obstinate clash of wills.

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No doubt my friend idealized him as most women did. D' Annunzio's genius was too flamboyantly emphatic to be assimilated beyond the Alps. His essence was untranslatable; how render the grace of such gallantries as when he addresses two ladies as 'care piccole tormentatrici e consolatrici inconsapevolt' (dear little unconscious tormentresses and consolers) or when he refers to Comtesse d'Orsay's apartment as 'ii bet cofano che serve di casa alla sua preziosita' (the fine casket which serves to house your preciousness)? I grew up under D' Annunzio's spell: quite ordinary sentiments as expressed by him assumed for me a strange significance: he invested words with a depth which they probably did not possess. Nor was this due to youthful hero worship. Even now his poems give me a tingling sensation. 1 His taste was somewhat meretricious, but of_ how many creative men is the taste impeccable? What Americans call 'perfectionists' are nearly always sterile. Safe enough within the orbit of the Renaissance, outside it D' Annunzio inclined towards art nouveau, which lingers in the smoky opalescent glassware of Lalique. I feel safe in prophesying that the arts and crafts of this period, muddled as they were with misty literature and mistier music, will be revived by a future generation as the Early Victorian have been in my day. But it is not fair to associate D' Annunzio with art nouveau, which we forget was modern once, as the name implies. I remember an affected bas-relief of Comtesse d'Orsay, a vague profile, high tilted chin and low decollete, in the Lalique style, for which D' Annunzio had composed the motto: 'E dietro ii mio sorriso io mi nascondo' (and behind my smile I hide myself). Francesca d'Orsay was very proud of that device: perhaps she really fancied that she could hide behind a smile transparently sybilline. Though she preferred speaking and writing in French, Comtesse d'Orsay remained a typical Sicilian, impulsive, superstitious, with a determined will under apparent soft passivity. She had more shrewdness than intellect; she saw everything emotionally; and her vague desire for beauty was indiscriminate. She tried hard to become a novelist, but her real talent was for the syncopation of friends. As a result of his extravagance D' Annunzio had to take flight from his creditors, and his sanctuary at Settignano was put up for auction in his absence. According to modern standards the 45

rooms were over-decorated: there was a Russian salad of brocade hangings, stained glass windows, hieratic busts and statues in a 'dim, religious light'. The bathroom was like a scent shop. Above the poet's couch was the Salimbeni motto: 'Per non dormire' (that ye sleep not) and over an ancient lavabo without sign of water was the inscription: 'Ottima e l'acqua' (most excellent is water). My father secured a fine lectern at the sale. According to Comtesse d'Orsay, the poet was wont to compose standing up, with his manuscript on this lectern. He wrote at a prodigious speed, sometimes for fifty-six hours at a stretch, covering page after page regardless of dawns and sunsets. It must have been at this time that Jacques-Emile Blanche used to visit us, and my father and I sat for a lively oil-sketch in a frescoed eighteenth-century salotto that appealed to his French taste. In spite of their Latin bonds the French and Italians are clearly demarcated, the former swayed more by intellect, the latter by emotion. An Anglophile Frenchman like Jacques Blanche appeared ill at ease in Florence, where passions are flaunted in the market-place. An unusual Englishman, like Gordon Craig, with his flowing hair and velveteen clothes, driving his school, a bevy of Kate Greenaway girls, round the city in a Dickensian stage-coach, seemed less of an anachronism, perhaps because he fell into a recognized tradition. Among temperamental Italians the so-called impassive Englishman could always go one better, hence the hackneyed saying: Inglese Italianizzato, diavolo incarnate (Englishman Italianate, devil incarnate). Blanche was trying to paint Mrs. Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia and was finding her a difficult subject. After two attempts he remained dissatisfied and no wonder, for the model was an enigma in search of enigmas. Mrs. Dodge had come from Buffalo to absorb Florentine impressions, which begot a herd of buffalo memoirs a couple of decades later. Some of these memoirs possess considerable 'period' interest, for they show how a typical group of Anglo-American dilettanti felt and behaved in those carefree pre-war years. Gertrude Stein, who was staying at her brother Leo's villa, produced an admirably succinct word portrait of Mrs. Dodge at the same period. It begins: 'The days are wonderful and the nights are wonderful and the life is pleasant.' But the last paragraph is the most revealing: not only does it complete the portrait, it carries all there is to be said about Mrs. Dodge at the

Villa Curonia to a triumphant finish which bears Miss Stein's authentic signature: 'There is all there is when there has all there has where there is what there is. That is what is done when there is done what is done and the union is won and the division is the explicit visit. There is not all of any visit.' Feeling that she had not had 'all of any visit', in other words weary of Florence, which failed to provide her with the answer to the enigma that disquieted her hectic ego, or, in lieu of it, the sufficient thrill, Mrs. Dodge remarried twice again and drifted to New Mexico, where she played a provocative role in the latter life of D. H. Lawrence. All this is set down in that masterpiece of unconscious comedy With Lorenzo in Taos. As Jacques Blanche put it: 'But for Lawrence we should not have known that Mabel was a writer of memoirs unmarred by ~eticence. In the arms of a Mexican Indian, Tony Luhan, she found the answer to the enigma, and at Taos the primeval country for which her soul thirsted-or so it seems.' I regret that I was not old enough to associate with these people on even terms: I was no more to them than a receptacle for perfunctory questions and pats on the pate. But what I saw and heard of them was to nourish my imagination for many years. In fits of exasperation at school I often thought of serving up an English composition in the style of Gertrude Stein, but her style was not easy to imitate, or was my own personality already too strong?

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III MY education at home and at school was doomed to frequent interruption. When the first world war exploded I happened to be in England with my brother and his nurse. The bewilderment was general: everybody had been so long at peace that no other state could be realized. My own selfish dread, for I did not understand the real issues, was the prospect of being cut off from Italy. After the first wave of panic, an extraordinary optimism filled the air: the average person was positive that it would all blow over within a month. But when my brother returned to Florence and I to Wixenford, the dreariness began to close in on me and accumulate by inches, like a slowly enveloping quicksand. Belgian refugees came to stay with the masters who had private houses, and they told harrowing stories of German barbarism. Everywhere the severe-eyed, heavily moustachioed Kitchener pointed at your conscience with the reminder: 'Your King and Country need you!' And one by one the younger masters joined up; almost everybody except ourselves was in some sort of uniform. The pervasion of khaki began, and with it a new brand of humour, a new vocabulary of jingo jauntiness and songs to match, from all of which I shrank inwardly. Since war had to be fought, why could it not be fought with inspiring words and music, and with rapiers of wit as well as with machines? In an article I wrote for our hand-produced magazine, numerate a un, I proposed that the War Office should employ Bakst to design uniforms. We should have patriotic marches by Stravinsky and chants by Debussy, and a choir of Grenadier Guards like the Don Cossacks. It was a pity that England had no poet-orator like D' Annunzio. But the British public, even the minute sub-section of it at Wixenford, was thoroughly satisfied with Kipling and 'Keep the home fires burning', and in wartime uniforms had to be inconspicuous.

My article, like my subsequent efforts in a similar vein, was a weak little shriek in the wilderness. The permeating ugliness, the bleak banality, the mushy-slushy sentiment and humour hemming one in on all sides, alarmed and depressed me far more than any fear of guns and Zeppelins and sudden death. It was the artist's duty to raise our spirits, I said, mistakenly using plural for singular, for most people's spirits were high: should they chance to droop they were soon raised by a Kirchner girl, a Bairnsfather cartoon, or 'It's a long way to Tipperary'. Only one artist was distinguishable in all that jostling crowd of demagogues and mediocrities, a little man with a mobile moustache, baggy trousers, billy-cock hat and cane. Charlie Chaplin cheered us in our darkest days. The routine of school life was little modified by $.e war: much older masters, such as retired clergymen, and everi one or two women, replaced those who were called up; bl~e paper was pinned over electric light bulbs as a mild form of dim-out against 'Zepps'; football and cricket matches against other private schools. Farnborough, Heatherdown and Lambrook continued to provide local entertainment; and our concerts were enriched by Prince Charles-Theodore of Belgium's performances on the violin. The emigrant Prince made the plight of Belgium very poignant to me and I felt a great sympathy for this flaxen figure from a Memling altar-piece. He had had lessons from Ysaye, and he could also produce neat sketches of sailing ships at sea which expressed the homesickness he otherwise concealed under a polished reserve. My homesickness vanished when I thought of what he must be suffering without a word of complaint, and of the cities of Belgium in ruins. Mark Ogilvie-Grant and I continued to collect exhibits for our museum: to our small assortment of crystals, corals, birds' eggs and sea-shells we now added objects of a more topical interest, fragments of a very different kind of shell, and bullets picked up at the front. It had fallen far short of our grandiose original plan, but that it enjoyed a certain prestige was proved by the many spontaneous offers of items, including a wisp of precocious pubic hair. I wrote dozens of poems in green and purple ink and spent a great deal of time copying them meticulously into exercise books and illustrating them with stiff little drawings. This I continued to do for several years, presenting the volumes at Christmas to 49

my mother. Looking at those juvenilia, of which I was then so proud as to recite them at the first opportunity to whomever would lend an ear, I can recapture my state of mind while I wrote them and at the same time see how feebly they reflect that state of mind. And I remember how delightful it was to believe in my own genius, how this conviction fortified me against rebuffs and disappointments and steered me blithely throughout all my schooldays until my first poems were published and reviewed in the newspapers. And I understand, rather sadly, that this genius was youth, just youth. The salient contrast with the last war was that I could travel between Italy and England. The journeys were rough; channel steamers and trains were crowded beyond capacity, and the passport, of which one had never heard before, suddenly became almost as vital as one's mortal soul: one could not move, officially one did not exist, without a passport. I remember the wearisome days of waiting in pushing, scrambling, ill-tempered queues outside the French and Italian consulates, the quantities of forms to be filled in, the tired and testy consular officials snorting: 'Holidays! do you call that a valid reason for travelling in times like these?' I forget if I replied' 'The best of all reasons', but that was what I felt. More wounded soldiers were visible than in the last war, but those on leave had greater opportunities of enjoyment. Both in London and Paris the theatres were thriving, food seemed to be ample in the restaurants, and there was no general black-out. Italy remained a nervous neutral with tacit Allied sympathies. D'Annunzio returned from his French exile to inflame those sympathies with his oratory: the great lover took on a new lease of life as a man of action. He addressed the Roman populace from the balcony of the Hotel Regina, where he was staying, and many of his phrases were used later by Mussolini. 'I know that it is not me you salute, but the spirit that guides me, the love that possesses me, the idea that I serve.... No, we are not, neither do we wish to be a museum, an hotel, a holiday resort, a horizon repainted with Prussian blue for international honeymoons, a delectable market for buying and selling, swindling and bartering. Our Genius calls upon us to set our mark on the inchoate mass of the new world. The same breath has returned to our skies which inspired those prodigious lines in which Dante evokes the flight of the Roman eagle, oh citizens, the

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flight of your eagle. Let Roman might and Roman disdain overturn the benches of the money-changers and counterfeiters. Let Rome recover her Caesarean boldness in the forum. The die is cast. Thrown is the die on the red table of the world. 'And he ended with an exhortation to sweep away the filth and drive corruption down the sewer: 'Spazzate tutte le /ordure! Ricacciate nella Cloaca tutte le putredini!' 'War with Austria!' shouted the mob. 'Death to Giolitti! Long live Italy and Dante! Long live D'Annunzio!' Giolitti narrowly escaped being torn to pieces. On May 24, r9r5, Italy entered the war. What other country ever went to war with thunders of applause to poets quick and dead? The city of Dante remained placid: most of the Florentines heaved sighs of relief. Already in March they had org~mized a revue for the Red Cross at the Pergola Theatre in~ which sympathy for the Allies was pronounced. My mother and brother both took part in it, and it was far more than the title announced, A Bit of Colour, for Umberto Brunelleschi had designed the costumes and settings as he had been doing successfully for the Folies Bergeres in Paris. But the charm of the performance was due to a blend of cosmopolitan parochialism and unselfconscious elegance peculiarly Florentine. In the first act Dionysus, a nymph, a satyr, various clouds, a modern dandy, the Muses of Maeterlinck and D'Annunzio, a bibulous old cab-driver and a personification of the Ponte Vecchio appeared, quite inconsequentially, and Dionysus in sky-blue tails explained that he was bound for the Folies Bergeres to hear Neapolitan songs, which he proceeded to sing. The Muses were sulky because of their poets' silence. Botticelli's figures had escaped from the Uffizi to look for their foreign admirers who had been scattered by the war. The Ponte Vecchio complained of the Arno's frequent floods. Then Dionysus proposed to take D' Annunzio's Muse to a livelier place, to the realm of Fashion of which Donna Cora Caetani (then Antinori) was undisputed Queen. Between tea and champagne, Cupid was kept very busy. And so the revue sparkled along full of fish with a local flavour, like the graceful Arno. Apparently there was no shortage of petrol, for we motored constantly to Rome and Naples and other cities, enjoying them in greater freedom since tourists were scarce; seeing Capri as 5r

Norman Douglas described it in South Wind, with Baron Fersen, Dr. Munthe and many strange Russians, long-bearded and ringleted like biblical figures in oleographs; stopping at Ravello and Sorrento, where Marion Crawford spun endless novels with an edifying moral tone unlike that of the local society. To dwell on such tours would give me a pretext to revisit enchanted ground since desecrated and destroyed. But these chosen corners of earth have been so over-written and overrun that I shall resist the temptation. As you travelled south the people's vivacity increased to a point of perpetual motion and all the animals seemed to be affected correspondingly: donkeys and mules seemed to gallop; mongrel dogs chased each other in amorous frenzy, and vigorous vermin hopped in every sunbeam. No Balla was required to make things dance, for in Naples the sunlight had this effect on every kind of inanimate object, so that at times even churches leapt into a tarantella. To describe Naples in spring before it had been affected by either world war is like trying to paint a diamond. Who can depict that crystallized flash of light, of which a single facet produces a rainbow of a thousand other facets? Not only the miraculous blue of the sea between Vesuvius and Capri, Posilipo and Ischia, not only the miraculous liquefaction of San Gennaro's blood, but things not miraculous at all, the flavour of pizza, with its pungent blend of anchovy, tomato, melted cheese and peppers, such 'sea-fruit' as vongole, served with macaroni of tougher texture than elsewhere, and the brilliant wicked-looking sea-urchins-so many flavours and gesticulations in nature as in art, and the music all along the bay, in the restaurants by the tame waves and among the fishing nets, a throbbing of mandolines and sobbing of high-pitched tenors, a music of ardent, unsatisfied longing, will always make Naples a voluptuous carnival to the full-blooded writer. In Tuscany, though it had been the best governed of the separate States, there was no trace of the old order and no Tuscan would have dreamt of advocating its restoration. But in Naples, where the Bourbon rule had been the reverse of progressive, an affection for the old order lingered and the mere name of Acton, which belonged to its past history, endeared me to many descendants of the Sanfedisti. These complained that the taxes had risen as never before since the Bourbons' departure and that Naples had been reduced to the state of a Cinderella, all her interests 52

sacrificed to those of the industrial north. And if we turn to Stendhal and other foreign observers of Naples in the past, we see that such complaints are not merely the result of boredom. for the Bourbons identified themselves with the Neapolitans, sharing their dialect and their superstitions, whereas the worthy Grand Dukes of Tuscany after the Medici were complete aliens. The war had driven many royal refugees to Florence. Prince Alexis Karageorgevitch and his Serbian entourage settled in our Villa Sassetti, and Prince Paul also stayed a while, charming everyone with his courtesy and appreciation of Florentine art. Later came various members of the Greek royal family. Our other villas we lent to British convalescent officers, who flirted and danced with those Florentine girls who were not too closely chaperoned. On the whole they did not know what to .p1ake of Florentine society: the tone of conversation was more highly seasoned than they had experienced in other places, -and in some cases they jumped to conclusions which had awkward results. For the morals of ladies with a repertoire of smutty stories are usually irreproachable. Limericks that would scandalize a Casanova are often the Puritan's only sexual outlet. Travel to school in England seemed rash after the sinking of the Sussex, so my brother and I remained at home, painting and writing and studying our elders. We spent the summer of 1916 at St. Moritz, surrounded by gregarious cliques of Italians, devouring succulent cakes with our hot chocolate at Hanselmann's and climbing the more amenable mountains with the vivacious Mercati children. The Neapolitan novelist Matilde Serao hovered about the Palace Hotel like a great black cat, weaving improbable romances about every couple, transposing Neapolitan passions to this Engadine setting. A school near Geneva having been recommended to my parents, they decided to send us there until travel to England became safer. This was a remarkable institution, an educational melting-pot for boys of all ages and nationalities. We were housed in separate buildings, roughly according to age, but all congregated in one dining-room for meals. Among our schoolmates were Greeks, Serbs, Egyptians, Belgians, Brazilians and a few Americans, but no English. Of the Brazilians, two brothers were known as 'les Negres', but they were more simian than negroid. In and out of class they cackled and quarrelled, calling each other 'dirty nigger' at the 53

slightest provocation and tearing out handfuls of each other's matted hair, but one could perceive that this was really a display of brotherly devotion. Their bickering would begin as they queued up for morning coffee. As soon as the hot milk was brought in they would spring forward to swallow the thick layer of skin that had collected on. its surface. This would generally entail a bleeding nose or lip or a black eye. Murderously the brothers would pounce on the coveted prey, and with what gusto would the victor scoop all the skin and hoist it into his mouth, sucking it through blubbery lips as if it were macaroni, his liquid eyes gleaming with triumph! On one occasion the vanquished Pedro succeeded in snatching and guzzling it just before it reached his brother's mouth; on another the 'cream', as they called it, fell to the floor and they scrambled for it with their tongues out, butting into each other like rams. These daily scenes transferred me to the jungle, and since I had always abhorred the skin of boiled milk, I looked on at them with horrified fascination. The teachers, poor seedy ushers from another age, made hardly any pretence at keeping order. Their teaching must have been an alternative for starvation. One had apoplectic fits; another was a dipsomaniac with bloodshot eyes and trembling hands; another could not control his false teeth which fell out whenever he tried a sibilant; another, dodderingly senile, would frequently burst into tears; another emitted a corpse-like odour: each was more grotesque than the last. The only exception was Herr Hafmann, a benevolent bearded meerschaumsmoking German, and the other boys did their best to embarrass this simple man with jokes about Germany losing the war while my brother and I were in his class. We were quite as embarrassed as Herr Hafmann. The older boys from sixteen upwards did much as they pleased, entertained lady friends in the bedrooms and spent most of their time in the city. They appeared to regard the school as a boarding house. I was invited to one or two parties where caresses were exchanged freely in my presence and I was offered cigarettes and liqueurs, but I was too young to benefit from the laxity of morals to any appreciable extent. Conversation was more Rabelaisian than I had heard before, and one Danish boy was a precocious exhibitionist, yet here again the times were out of joint: the conversation and exhibitions passed over 54

my head without affecting me. I just thought my companions odd. I was too absorbed in the new books I was discovering, in Bernard Shaw's plays and the works of Oscar Wilde. These I borrowed from a seventeen-year-old American who took a kind interest in my literary efforts. Perhaps twelve is the best age to read Dorian Gray: I devoured the book like strawberries. 'Laissez-faire' as this academy seemed, it did enable me 'to gratify the wanderings of an unripe taste for vague and multifarious reading', which I could not have done at Wixenford. But while I was reading English, I was speaking little but French. We were entirely cut off from the war, and as we could not return to Florence for the holidays that year dragged very slowly. Often we would ride so close to the French frontier as to be able to pick the grapes from French vineyards. '1 I continued to write verse and stories which e~ressed little more than a nostalgia for Italy. All my stories had an Italian setting. A characteristic specimen begins: "'I am going to the ball to-night, Mario," said the last rose of the Bellanozzia family, that family whose name rings in the heart of every Venetian citizen. There was a pause and then a sigh as the Contessina stepped out of the gondola . . .' Mario, the young gondolier, entertains a hopeless passion for the little Countess and emigrates to America when her nuptials are celebrated in San Marco. My sympathies are all with the gondolier, whom I identified with myself. The last rose symbolized perfection blossoming in a rarefied atmosphere, aloof and indifferent to the sentiments it inspired. As usual these compositions were carefully copied into exercise books with coloured illustrations pasted in, and one day somebody came into my room and destroyed them in my absence. The act was incomprehensible since I had no apparent enemies. It was doubtful whether anyone could have guessed the secret importance I attached to these efforts. I never discovered the culprit, but from that moment I took a violent dislike to the school, forgetting the charms of the scenery and the relative advantages I could enjoy there. Eventually my brother and I travelled back to Florence with Sister Veronica, one of the blue sisters of mercy who had a thriving convalescent home in our Villa Natalia. The discomforts of the journey were obliterated by Sister Veronica's good nature. Her Irish cheerfulness was indomitable.

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Customs officials in wartime were trying enough when sober: at Domodossola we found them drunk, and the alcohol had made them cantankerous. They insisted on opening all our luggage, then hiccupping and belching they started to poke about in every bag, running grimy fingers through the Sister's clean linen, turning now and again to spit with a clucking sound, always a little nearer. Evidently nuns were suspect in their eyes, for they proceeded merrily to break all her medicine bottles, one by one, after assuring themselves that they contained no liquor. Sister Veronica was then escorted by a burly woman to be searched, and they set to work on our bags. Happening to fish up a little address book, one customs official handed it to another and, heads together, they scrutinized it with pot-valiant solemnity, scratching their pates and frowning portentously. I could see that they were looking at it upside down. 'What's this?' they growled at me in unison. 'An address book,' I answered mildly. 'An address book!' the senior repeated several times in tones of incredulous scorn. 'What the devil should a boy of your age want an address book for? Surely your own address should be sufficient. And in any case it will have to be sufficient.' With this he tore out all the leaves and blew his nose in them. By now our train was puffing out of the station. 'Is that our train?' I asked, hoping perhaps to be told it was only shunting. This struck them as a huge joke and they exploded with wheezy laughter. 'Ma sicuro! sure that's your train. See? Going-going-gone! And you won't catch another till tomorrow. Serves you right for keeping address books!' Not in the least flustered, Sister Veronica chuckled as if we were at a pantomime, though her medicines would be hard to replace. We had to spend the night in a local hotel. The walls were thin as matchboard and my brother and I were next door to an Italian honeymoon couple who kept us awake with their billings and cooings. A crescendo would always follow a diminuendo. 'Baciami ancora. Stringi, piu forte, ancora piu forte!' Would they never get tired? In desperation I battered on the wall: 'Zitti!' (Shut up!) But nothing made the slightest difference. Curious how little patience one has at that age with lovers. Whenever I saw two figures locked together, stumbling along our back lane, the Via dei Bruni, stopping and getting involved

and then tottering on out of breath, I used to wonder how people could be so foolish. Would love affect me that way? And now that I know the answer, I envy them. My brother and I did a realistic imitation of the honeymoon couple for the benefit of Sister Veronica, who laughed till the tears ran down her apple cheeks. This was one of the last summers we were to spend in Florence for several years, and as if I had a premonition of it I was unable to concentrate on anything in particular, but rushed about with a pocket camera taking photographs of secret corners that had a magical significance I could not have explained. One could see Serge de Diaghileff reciting Pushkin in the Boboli Gardens, an autocratic Russian bear with a court of minions to wait upon his whims. He was going thrOf-igh one of his straitened periods. Impoverished Italy was no place for a foreign ballet company in time of war, but nothing deterred the supreme impresario: he was making preparations for The Good-humoured Ladies, the most Italian in spirit of his productions. He came to our villa with Bakst, short, neat, affable, and business-like with a reddish moustache and pince-nez. So intense was my admiration for Bakst's work that I was navidy disappointed by his lack of personal distinction. It was almost impossible to see the connexion between this apparently matter of fact little man and the sumptuous orgy he had conjured in Scheherazade. Since then I have been content to admire artists at a distance. As for Diaghileff, his manner was intimidating to a boy of twelve. Bakst singled out my brother's paintings for special praise and invited us to visit him in Paris. He was very enthusiastic about Tuscan gardens and was making a careful study of the Villa Gamberaia. This belonged to two retired ladies, Princess Ghika and Miss Blood, who cultivated their garden as Voltaire proposes in Candide, without heeding the outer world. The villa, a mellow Tuscan country house of modest proportions with projecting eaves, stands on a high ridge above the village of Settignano with an unrivalled view of the valley of the Arno, and the garden is a perfect example of magnum in parvo, a great effect on a small scale. Between the house and a high retaining wall crowned with statues and old stone vases, a long bowling green runs towards a balustrade at one end with hills and valleys melting into the 57

distance, and in the opposite direction towards a grotto for sculptured lovers in a framework of shells and coloured pebbles, guarded by a grove of the slimmest, blackest cypresses. To the south there is an oblong water garden with four symmetrical tanks of water-lilies and a fountain with a boy bestriding a dolphin in the middle. Owing to this profusion of water there is a greater variety of flowers than in most Tuscan gardens. A tall clipped hedge screens the garden along its length and a circular arcade rounds it off with stone benches between arches of yew. Here are sheltered walks on so many different levels and with so many surprising effects that even the opium smoker must forget his pipe. Behind the wall flanking the bowling green there is a mysterious terraced wood and a grotto garden which is surely the most beautiful of its kind, a rococo jewel of formal rockery surmounted by a balustrade with busts, and vases, and with balustraded flights of steps topped by stone obelisks, leading to a lemon garden and another grove of ilexes and cypresses where you may rest from the summer glare. All this may sound vast but it does not occupy much space. The whole plan is highly concentrated, fastidious and versatile. I write in the present tense, for Gamberaia is still alive to me though the Germans have nearly destroyed it. The house is just a blackened shell. . . . And I wonder what happened to the water-colours Bakst painted in the garden. During the first world war Florence remained a city of ivory towers, where art historians could pursue their investigations without disturbance. Van Marie, Mason-Perkins, Venturi, Siren, they came and went; we would show them round our villa, listening to their comments and attributions, as they paused before each picture that held their fancy. Often they had some distinguished collector in tow. Each sought affinities to the special subject of his researches; each brought a new searchlight to focus on certain pictures: no two visits were alike. You could never foretell what would strike their fancy next, and they had curious ways of betraying their excitement when they had spotted a master all others except themselves had overlooked: some would break out in beads of perspiration. They would profess to know who had painted the picture but keep their secret lest some other should anticipate their discovery in print; they were jealously possessive of their attributions. At this time hairs were being split finer and finer, and the

most obscure of the Tuscan masters were finding biographers at Yale and Harvard. Richard Offner went into raptures about Mariotto di Nardo, and Siren made a special study of Cola di Petrucciola. You could hardly see the wood for the trees. Never had there been such a boom in Italian primitives, and in their feverish excitement over some new quarry the art doctors tended to lose all sense of proportion. Rivals became exceedingly bitter, and a dry little footnote to an article in some quiet magazine was apt to contain unexpected ammunition. In most cases their language was extraordinarily vague and they worked a limited vocabulary to death; 'texture', 'surface', 'functional line', etc., even Berenson's 'tactile values', recurred with embarrassing frequency, and they would eke out their jaded jargon with gestures appropriate, perhaps, to a 4tin language, but incompatible with English. It was almost' painful to witness the strain involved, to watch so many elephants giving laborious birth to wriggling ineffectual little mice. But it was comic in retrospect. No doubt they were endeavouring to sift and clarify their own impressions prior to concocting another article, but why do it aloud? I suppose they needed a private rehearsal, and I was a competent listener. It is given to singularly few to discourse lucidly on art, to transpose pictorial values into words. Besides scholarly research and critical acumen the art critic must possess the qualities of a medium, and these require exceptional powers of concentration. When the medium has complete control he makes us share his own experience: often a mere sentence will suffice; not many words are needed so long as they are exact. Professor J. D. Beazley, the great authority on Greek vases, rarely utters, but his few utterances are pregnantly to the point. He is a purist, concerned with the object and not with his own emotions and their literary form. After hearing so many of our Florentine phrase-mongers one turns to him as to a spring of healing water. On the other hand there is much to be said for the generous emotionalist who longs to share his sensations and convert us to his way of seeing. Though he is apt to foist his own vision on us, he stimulates comparison and discussion. But the danger of this type of critic is that he is swept away by his arguments towards a philosophy which has nothing to do with beauty. The picture contemplated is only a loom for weaving a web of theories. In that web the picture is lost, quite shrouded from

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view. On Roger Fry's magic carpet of argument, for instance, the listener is also swept into an abstract realm where, balanced on a precarious tight-rope, he has an illusion of exquisite lucidity. But it is illusion. When he examines the picture in the spellbinder's absence he will hardly recognize it. In its stead he had seen something different, perhaps a work of art. A number of art-critics are fakirs who can perform remarkable rope-tricks. Foremost of these, I think, was Roger Fry, for under the persuasive glow of his Bengal lights almost any amoeba could assume visionary shapes. Such fakirs have great virtues as m1ss10naries among the Philistines. But there are fakers as well as fakirs, and these have done infinite harm with their falsifications. In Florence one encountered all varieties of art-critic, from faker to pure scholar. Those who philosophized most loudly and persistently about beauty seldom had intrinsic taste; they were far too engrossed in their own ideas. The truest lovers tended to be silent. Personally I enjoyed meeting all types: one could laugh where one could not learn, and one seldom learnt nothing after looking at pictures together. Even the most silent would eventually distil a pearl; as for the declamatory, one could often enjoy the performance for its own sake. What I find hard to forgive is the arrogance so many art-critics assume on the strength of a little knowledge, as if they belonged to a superior race with finer instincts and identified themselves with the great masters they have elected to interpret. Why this should be, I have never understood, but it is particularly noticeable in England. A great masterpiece, the perfect flowering of an individual genius, should inspire one with awe, and even with humility. How Michelangelo towers above us! What is the secret of such great harmony and strength? But our young Mr. Critic, having published a monograph or two with some university press, struts about as if he, and only he, possessed that secret. It is as if familiarity with masterpieces had bred contempt. The same arrogance under a slightly different form will write, like D. H. Lawrence: 'Michelangelo's David continued to smirk and trail his foot self-consciously, the incarnation of the modern selfconscious young man, and very objectionable.' The finest connoisseurs I have known, and I have known many, were entirely free from such airs. Charles Loeser, whose

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aesthetic insight was as deep as his knowledge of the fine arts was broad, was diffident to a fault. Under a crinkled forehead, his vitreous eyes were always open questioningly, and he would question every objet d'art until it vouchsafed an answer, weighing and stroking and breathing his devotion into it. When he showed you his collection he never laid down categorically: 'That is by So-and-so.' He would pause and wait for the painting or sculpture to reveal itself before venturing into speech with a: 'Well, perhaps it is of such and such a school -that is quite possible-but look at the drawing of those hands, particularly the right hand supporting the Infant's foot. Where else have you seen those long, flexible, pointed fingers with the tiny nails?' And slowly, gently, he would lead you towards its origins, evoking the studio in which it had been paif!ted, the artist's antecedents, environment, state of mind, Ul).til you were encouraged to give it a name, a date, and correlate it with other pictures of a definite period. And when you could hold yourself in no longer, he would smile quizzically: 'There may be something in what you say.' After pointing the direction he maintained a defensive reserve: nothing was ever final. With the Philistines who had been sent with letters of introduction to see his collection just because it was famous, he could be mischievously perverse, especially if they were puffed with social pretentions. He would confront them with a very primitive Madonna or a carving of extreme simplicity, whose virtues were not immediately perceptible to the untrained eye, and on this he would expatiate to the exclusion of all else, not without humour, revelling in the comic undercurrents of the situation, the abyss yawning between his visitors, the object, himself as go-between, and myself as a youthful spectator from several angles. The presence of a Philistine often inspired Carlo to flights of whimsical improvisation that surprised even himself, perhaps because Philistines rarely swam into his ken, perhaps because this specimen had physical charm or reminded him of some Renaissance portrait. A certain obtuseness seemed to act as a stimulus. Characteristics of the Tuscan that infuriate many foreigners appealed especially to him. Thus he was fond of relating that once he had ordered a square table to be made and the carpenter had brought him a round one. 'But I ordered a square table!' Carlo expostulated. And the carpenter retorted with a shrug:

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'Ma cosa vole, Signore, e riuscito tondo!' ('But what will you, sir, it materialized into a round one.') His delight in Tuscany extended to minute details that few others would notice. He used to say that whenever he could not make up his mind about buying a Madonna-and his doubts increased as he grew olderhe would show it to his cook. If she decided without any demur that it was really and truly the Madonna, her decision was final and he would purchase it. Perhaps he kept her as an authority on Madonnas rather than as a cook, for he preferred to dine in a humble trattoria. He would also enjoy experimenting on the sensibilities of the most unlikely people with his Cezannes. He was one of the earliest collectors of that painter, and his Provern;al landscapes, still-lifes and nudes were among the finest examples of Cezanne in existence. The music-room he built was as much for them as for his wife and the Lener Quartet. Magnificent as was his entire collection, his taste in furniture was austere to an uncomfortable degree: all his rooms had a monastic atmosphere. Long after he married and had a daughter, one continued to think of him as a bachelor. He was solitary by nature and one could imagine him prowling the streets by night like a werewolf, for he maintained that architecture could best be observed by night. It is lamentable that with his consummate knowledge of Italian art, he has left hardly any writings. Of German-Jewish-American extraction, he was indifferent to conventional honours and social success. His taste, like Herbert Home's, was fastidiously selective and exclusive. Art interested him far more than human beings. When the Lener Quartet turned up in Florence as penniless refugees, Carlo built them a house next to his and financed them until they were established as one of the best quartets in the world; nor was he content until he had found a Stradivarius for Lener to play. And Carlo demanded no gratitude for this: sufficient that it pleased his wife. Were I to single out the talent which Carlo possessed to a supreme degree, I should say that it was his ability to interpret a great master's drawing. Some special refinement in his nature seemed to attract him to what was unfinished. So often, as with Ingres, the charm of the original sketch is lost in the painted picture. In direct contact with the artist's budding idea, Carlo became like a prophet, foretelling the future design. He made

one visualize the master's intention, and as his imagination caught fire from the first divine spark of a suggestive outline, he rose to rare heights of creative criticism. At this period I began to see more of him and to enjoy his eccentricities. He had a lordly habit of giving things away in sudden bursts of generosity. Later he would reclaim them from the embarrassed rec1p1ent. 'Why, that's mine!' he would exclaim in a tone of nai:ve surprise. 'I wonder how it got here.' And without more ado he would carry it away. As he grew older he became increasingly preoccupied with fakes; he detected forgeries everywhere; hardly anything was above his suspicion. He often spoke of writing a study on this fascinating subject and I expected it to attain a Pirandellian form: from his conversation it sounded like a 'Six Characters in Searlih of an Author' among works of criticism, a revolutionary reversal of current attributions, but like too many of Carlo's plans it never was consummated. In summer we lived behind closed green shutters and the house was kept cool by the stone floors and the fountain playing in the covered central court, while outside the chirping of the crickets rose and fell in feverish monotones. The morning began in a haze of heat. This shimmering haze was like an hallucination over the valley: it floated above reality; and all day long the senses were sharpened rather than dulled by it, until the bats came squeaking into the dusk like the shrivelled souls of witches who had lost their broomsticks. At night when the statues slowly exhaled all the heat-waves they had absorbed, there was a multiple illumination of the atmosphere. You could see the statues breathing. The stars seemed incredibly near, and below the lights of the city spread as from a starfish in long tentacular rays, glowing serpentine along the river and upward through the mists, climbing along the undulating hill-sides and collecting in small coronets here and there, at Fiesole, at San Domenico, and dimly suggesting the more distant Vallombrosa; nearer were the fireflies lighting up stretches of the terrace, half waking it from its dark flowerdrugged dream, then letting it sleep on. The fireflies migrated from terrace to terrace like a ballet company, but some got left behind; these may have been more earthly than the rest, for they flew near the ground, like tiny homunculi with lanterns. Were they searching for something or for each other in a game of

hide and seek? Two of them pirouetted in circles, then appeared to catch each other and fly under the roses. Were they friends or lovers, I wondered; were they chasing a philosophical or a physical idea? Yet another firefly was wandering by itself. From its itinerary it must have been a poet, hovering a while among the water-lilies, then pensive by the box hedge, while the couple were disporting themselves; for a short distance, as if envious, it followed the pair. Perhaps it longed for a companion. Then, changing its mind, it began to soar, higher, far above the rest, as if to reach the star in the cedar tree. I met very few to whom I could talk about poetry. There was one English bard in Florence at that time, Herbert Trench, but his writings left me cold: physically he was burly and beetlebrowed, a country squire seduced from his shooting by the Muses. Geoffrey Scott was also said to write verse, but he always came with his partner Cecil Pinsent to discuss some architectural problem with my father. Pinsent and Scott were building and adapting Tuscan villas for foreigners. With one person, however, I could discuss poetry without fear of being patronized and condescended to, and this was Reginald Turner, one of the kindest and wittiest of men. Reggie was small, quietly dressed, with a sallow complexion, thick purplish lips and perpetually blinking eyes. Not prepossessing at a first glimpse, but his features were intensely mobile and this highly expressive mobility counteracted his ugliness and made you forget it. His wit had the lightest butterfly touch and fluttered its wings from what he left unsaid as well as from what he said. Max Beerbohm, his closest friend since they were together at Oxford, has described him best as 'Comus' in an essay on laughter. Without knowing anything of Reggie's devotion to Oscar Wilde, I mentioned my admiration for Wilde's writings and, to his evident astonishment, recited 'The Harlot's House'. For a moment Reggie's eyes stopped blinking: he grew deeply serious and contemplative. 'Oscar was a great man-a very great man,' he said in a full earnest undertone vibrant with emotion, and then fell silent as if he had said too much. For years Reggie was a constant visitor to La Pietra, and so protean and many-faceted was his humour, that he could be the most entertaining of companions. He had not fossilized in the eighteen-nineties though his talent for decorating and snipping incidents into silhouettes made him appear a perfect product of

that period; alert and curious, he read the modems conscientiously, mistaking several geese for swans; and lie exerted himself to entertain people with whom he had nothing m common. Everywhere he brought fresh gales of laughter. Paradoxically, this glittering Punchinello had produced a dozen novels or so of unrelieved dullness. Not a glimmer of that wit, or even of that psychological insight, had crept into his published works. All his brilliance deserted him as soon as lie picked up a pen. But if Reggie was a disappointed author he never betrayed it. He hinted modestly that he had published various books and had been a critic on the Daily Telegraph, and he possessed a framed portrait of himself, surrounded by writing paraphernalia at a business-like desk, 'The Novelist in his Study'. Perh:ws, like Stendhal, he would win posthumous appreciation, towards 1980. 'Some writers' first editions are rare,' he said, 'my second editions are rarer.' He had retired to Florence to talk and ruminate and watch other meteors rise, occasionally returning to London to visit such of his more famous contemporaries as Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, who made more of him than the illiterate bridge and poker players he frequented in Florence. About Wilde he was reticent, but one had a feeling that not only had Wilde played an immense role in his life, he still continued to overshadow it. His flexible rubber features were well adapted to mimicry, and his voice descended to the depths of an imaginary corpulence, his gestures became sculptured and hieratic and his fingers sprouted scarab rings when he repeated Oscar's sayings. It was as if Oscar's spirit had taken possession of him: the effect was uncanny. Reggie had spent much time with Oscar during his hectic Indian summer triumphs and subsequent downfall, and he had watched beside his gruesome death-bed. But his memory of Oscar's gaiety was uppermost, for even his last hours were lit by humour, as when he called for champagne and remarked that he was dying as he had lived, 'beyond his means'. This much may be gathered from Wilde's biographers, none of whom, I felt, was as qualified as Reggie to bring that complex and elaborate figure to life and conjure his 'quick changes from grave to gay, from pathos to mockery, from philosophy to fun'. So brilliantly did he continue to extemporize in the light-comedyverging-on-farce tradition, that it is a thousand pities he left no

monument. Perhaps, after the failure of so many novels, he distrusted his literary abilities; perhaps he was restrained by remnants of Victorian reserve. Like Wilde he was conventional at bottom. His apartment on the Viale Milton was a rich repository of Wilde's letters, photographs and rare editions, as well as of Max's drawings, which he bequeathed to Pino Orioli, the bookseller. Orioli died during the war m Portugal and Reggie's apartment was completely destroyed. In Geneva I had unlearnt all I had learnt at Wixenford to equip me for passing an entrance examination to a public school. My name had been 'put down' for Hugh de Havilland's house at Eton, and it was imperative that I should pick up a sufficient smattering of Latin and arithmetic to pass muster. Back to England I went regretfully in September, the vintage season when Florence is most delectable, to cram my head with the requisite data. Another appalling journey, which ended at a dreary village in Kent. I had hoped that the crammer would be some scholarly and retiring clergyman who would initiate me into the beauties of Virgil, but my information had been incorrect. He was only the son of a clergyman and his interest in Latin ended with Julius Caesar, so that when I left him I knew no more of Virgil than when I arrived, precisely four words. But what magical words! Per amica silentia lunae-'the friendly silences of the moon'-they haunt me still. It would have been wiser to return to Wixenford, for Lawnwood was just another private school on a meaner scale. As I did not expect to remain long I resolved to make the best of it. The crammer had all the mannerisms of a self-righteous Protestant clerical without the finishing touch: lanky, raw-boned with bushy eyebrows and a drooping Viking moustache, he wore a stiff turned-down collar too large for his neck, allowing his prominent Adam's apple free play among wisps of golden hair. His voice was throaty and unctuous and he oozed hypocrisy. At the sight of A House of Pomegranates he shuddered and grew pale, and he asked me with affected gravity what other unhealthy books I had brought. I showed him Bernard Shaw's Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant and Ernest Dowson's poems, which he confiscated without deigning to divulge the reason for this arbitrary act. But from that moment he looked at me as if I were a juvenile delinquent or, to use his own favourite expression, a moral leper. 'At Lawnwood we pride ourselves on

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being mens sana in corpore sano,' he was wont to assert, 'healthy minds in healthy bodies'-pronounced buddies. Perhaps that was why he always inspected the dormitories when we were in our portable tubs; he would feel us to see if we were dry and would apply the towel himself, more jovial on such occasions. Here I was lost: I could find nobody to confide in. During this phase of the war one could not expect good food, but the food at Lawnwood was so unpalatable that I smuggled as much of it as possible into my handkerchief and threw it down the lavatory later. Goaded by repulsion for the hairy brawn and knobbly porridge, my sleight of hand became so dexterous that I whisked whole platefuls into my pocket without being detected. The blotched oily margarine that accompanied our meals flavoured my entire stay at this institution, whqe faded photographs of Greek sculpture on the walls filled me· with a prejudice against Greek art which it took me years to snake off. The matron, a plain and practical woman with, apparently, no nonsense about her, could not conceal her contempt for the crammer's unctuous ways, his unblushing favouritism and his clerical cant. In me she thought she had sensed a kindred soul. Perhaps she had got wind of my confiscated literature, for she asked me one day, rather guiltily, if I had read Ethel M. Dell. This authoress was her secret passion. She had just finished The Way of an Eagle, which she described as one of the most powerful things in English literature, full of magnificent character drawing; such a manly hero but with nothing at all ordinary about him and the style was beautiful, there was only one word for it, 'lofty'. As I seemed so fond of reading she would like to know what I thought of the book but not a word to the others, mind, and as a special treat she lent it to me done up in a brown cloth wrapper. I made several attempts to plunge into it. Was the water too dense and too deep for a feeble swimmer? No, I decided, the stuff was plain preposterous. How could that sensible-seeming woman believe in the reality of these ham actors who expressed themselves in such bombastic language? As for the style, it had the consistency of our brawn and porridge. But we all have a bit of nonsense about us, I reflected, and this must be hers. So as not to hurt her feelings I had to be as adroit in pretending to have read the book as I was in smuggling repulsive foodstuffs away from the dinner-table. My conscience pricked me nevertheless: I have never been so ashamed of lying,

in spite of the soundest mental reservations. But the matron was my only friend in the place, and I could not afford to lose her on account of Ethel M. Dell. My joy on passing the entrance exam was unbounded, for at Lawnwood I had sunk to my lowest ebb. I was more than unhappy; I was suffocating under a khaki fog of dejection which was only lifted by the ever more frequent abstraction of my mind. Surely Purgatory was on this earth. At the risk of appearing half-witted I trained myself to be inwardly deaf and blind and developed a technique of imperviousness to my environment. I learnt to turn my consciousness off like a tap. Unfortunately I could not do this all the time. This early training in mental abstraction which was forced upon me in. self-defence, was to prove invaluable to me later on. Many people have considered me vague: how right they were! Far from being among the crammer's favourites, our dislike was mutual and intense. No doubt he tried to do his duty by me but he could not help himself: ever since he had found A Book of Pomegranates in my possession he regarded me as a monster and he showed it. Until the war ended I spent my holidays as a paying guest, at first with the crammer's brother, the rector of a parish near Brighton. My host was a kind old bachelor who lived with his spinster sister, entirely taken up with his parish duties. Sometimes we made pilgrimages to local beauty spots, but I noticed that these churches and castles, of more recent date than most of our Tuscan buildings, were invariably in an advanced state of decay, some hardly more than heaps of stones overgrown with weeds and bramble. I visited the ruins of what was said to be the first Benedictine priory in England, destroyed, of course, by Cromwell, and the neighbouring Lewes museum full of prehistoric flints, and the ruins of a pre-Norman castle at Bramber which had been entered in Domesday Book: all our picnics were indigestions of ruins. The right place for ruins, I decided, was in a romantic painting: at best they were the rough material for a composition. Nothing I saw had the charm of an Hubert Robert. From these rambles and scrambles among the rubble and bramble of Bramber, I returned with an increased respect for the Brighton Pavilion which the rector so disliked. Life at the rectory was so dull that I resorted to giving lessons in English literature to Hetty and Mabel, the housemaid and

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cook. These were high-spirited children of Nature glowing with country health, and I spent as much time as possible with them in the kitchen. Mabel wrote some pretty poems on domestic themes. I wish I had kept copies of them, for they were fresh as daisies. Several were addressed to new-born infants; there was one on Sympathy, another on Midnight Fancies, and a good many were entitled 'A Parting Token'. Mabel was engaged to a soldier at the front, from his photograph a handsome fellow, and she was only waiting for the day of his return to get married. 'What will you do after that?' I asked her. 'I'll give the rector notice of course. I shall only cook for my boy. He'll need some fattening after all he's been through. We'll settle down in a cottage and have lots of babies. 1He's as keen on babies as I am.' 'But what if he loses a leg or maybe both legs?' asked Hetty rather morbidly. 'Would you marry him then?' 'I'd marry him no matter what happened to him,' said Mabel, flushing fiercely. 'What, even if his face got smashed in?' 'I'd love him all the more,' said Mabel wistfully. 'Oh, my, you must be gone on him,' observed the more cynical Hetty. 'I've never been that gone on any man.' 'You don't know what you've missed,' retorted Mabel. I was impressed by Mabel's sincerity. Hetty disliked the very thought of babies, 'nasty little squawkers', she called them. But the girls were great friends, though they seemed to disagree on every topic. Perhaps they were also bored by life at the rectory, for Hetty as well as Mabel appeared to enjoy our readings from the romantic poets. 'Isabella, or the Pot of Basil' was among their favourites, and this led me to talk of Boccaccio and of Florence ... Eventually my brother came over from Italy to join me, but the contrast between Florence and the Sussex rectory was too extreme for him to suffer such an existence patiently. He exploded in all sorts of ways, with the happy result that we spent subsequent holidays with a lady in South Kensington. r

IV THOUGH small and bare, at least a room of my own, I reflected gratefully on arriving at H. de H.'s, a square Georgian red-brick house which had belonged to the notorious flogger Dr. Keate. There would be no fagging for the first fortnight, so I should have time to reconnoitre and find my bearings. I found several old friends at m'tutors but even more outside, since there were some forty Wixenford boys dispersed through the various houses. Funny things had happened to them in the interval: their voices were cracking; they were sprouting down on their upper lips; they had taken to safety-razors and other grown-up gadgets. A few had already become 'uppers', and as it was considered demeaning for an 'upper' to consort with a 'lower', these kept a frigid distance and even cut me, with one or two democratic exceptions like Billy Clonmore. It gave me a shock to see Billie Leeds, already a young man about town, smoking cigarettes in his room, which he could do under the camouflage of asthma. My fagmaster was easily satisfied. One could not go far wrong with the preparation of boiled eggs, of which there seemed to be no scarcity. He also had an incomprehensible relish for fried bread. Once I had served him these delicacies I could sit down to my own tea with Roger Spence and relax in light conversation. During my whole stay at Eton tea was the predominant meal. We chose our own messmates and took turns in supplying a variety of extras. Many had hampers sent from Scotland and Ireland; my parents sent me sweet corn and Berkshire bacon from America, and white truffles from Florence, an acquired taste which few others shared. Apart from these we had orders at one of the 'sockshops', Rowland's or Little Brown's. After an afternoon of football these teas were gargantuan; we stuffed ourselves on sausages and chips, eggs fried and scrambled, and the narrow passages, where we played passage football after lock-up in winter, reeked with

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the stench of sizzling lard. The other meals were more perfunctory. My first half began on the first of May. Lock-up was at seven-thirty but I often had to go out for Musical Society practice. As this was said to be a bore, I had been advised to sing as badly as possible for the preliminary voice test. In spite of an effort at cacophony I was enrolled, and before a month had passed I was supposed to be singing in a choral version of Santa Lucia in English at a school concert. Banal as the words may be under a cold analysis, no other song calls up the bay of Naples with such instant easy magic:

Sul mare luccica L'astro d'argento. Placida el'onda, Prospero eii vento. Venite all' agile Barchetta mia, Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia. 0 dolce Napoli, 0 suol beato, Ove sorridere Volle ii creato: Tu sei l'impero Dell'armonia, Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia. So powerful were the associations of this melody that my eyes smarted. It angered me to hear it piped into an anthem for boy scouts by a cohort of trivial trebles. While others sang the English version I intoned the Italian, which passed unnoticed in the vocal rally. We also shrilled 'Oh, can ye sew cushions', an appeal more appropriate, since our chairs were called 'hard arses'. To me the most significant number was a solo performance by Edward Sackville-West. He was older than I but he appeared minute at the grand piano, where he proceeded to pound through 'L'lle Joyeuse'. To hear Debussy at all was to banish the spiritual loneliness that had oppressed me since I left Italy. It was like a promise of intellectual freedom, and I left the concert in a mood of rare elation. 71

The furniture of my room was perforce both limited and standardized. There was little choice in the Eton shops, of which the majority were tailors, hosiers, bootshops and the 'sockshops' that catered to our voracious appetites. A reproduction of Whistler's 'Nocturne in Blue and Silver', a ghostly barge sliding under a ghostly bridge, was hanging beside my ungainly 'burry' or desk and cupboard combined, and I had assembled a few objects which became infinitely more precious in this crude setting and helped to make my room an oasis in the desert of hunting-prints, an oasis from which I had to fly whenever a member of the library shouted 'Boy'. One associates a library with scholars, but in this case it was a clique of athletes who ruled the house and were entitled to inflict corporal punishment on lowers who had given them offence. A few were tempted to abuse these powers and developed into lifelong flagellants: I was to encounter some curious specimens of these in later life. In the meantime I was left in comparative peace and, in spite of compulsory games, this was Paradise after Lawnwood H. de Havilland's was one of the mellower houses standing apart a little way back from the corner of Keate's Lane. At the left end of the lane rose the stained grey walls of Antechapel, whence the fifteenth-century Provost Waynflete continued to preside over hosts of 'little victims' from his Gothic niche. At a first glimpse the prickly lines of the chapel roof reminded me of Milan Cathedral. Like an old galleon stranded in green fields, it was best seen from the river. The subdued tones of the rambling college buildings embosomed in lush elms had an obvious charm which must have affected even the indifferent. Eton's past history was there, and though the boys hurried by, concerned with the immediate present, all this mellowness was continually sinking into them, a beneficent influence. Running in and out of School Yard day after day, Lupton's Tower was taken for granted; so were the cool cloisters in June, when you paused to quench your thirst at the venerable pump. But quietly this background was casting a potent spell. Few boys could have told you much about its history; rushing to answer their names at 'absence' in School Yard, they scarcely noticed the statue of the founder, nor, except a few Catholics like myself, were many aware that Eton was the College of Our Lady. The fifteenth century frescoes had not yet been

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uncovered. For such knowledge as I could glean I was indebted to a little old lady who painted water-colours. At all times and seasons, in summer under an umbrella, in winter with mittened hands, Miss Nora Davison could be seen, year after year, depicting some aspect of Eron from a camp-stool. Trying to reproduce the effect of sunrise on Lupton's Tower on a bitter morning when we were on our way to early school, trying to reproduce the effect of sunset on the same tower long after our lock-up, it was never too early or too late for Miss Davison to pursue the rigours of her art with a Spartan selfsacrifice you would hardly suspect from the finished products. What perseverance! With the possible exception of the Baroque Chapel on the way to rafts, there was scarcely a nook or cranny of Eron which had not been represented at some 1 time by Miss Davison's tireless brush. · At the end of the half, and sometimes in the middle, her latest water-colours would be exhibited at Spottiswoode's bookshop, and the boys would wander from picture to picture, scrutinizing the buildings of Eron more critically than they had done before. Thus, apart from being an Eton institution, Miss Davison taught many an Etonian to look at architecture. While she painted she was often surrounded by an inquisitive group of lower boys. On my way to football I would envy her, but on my way back to tea I would feel sorry for her still sitting in the cold like patience on a camp-stool. To whatever she painted she imparted a personal picturesqueness, even to those forbidding structures of loud pink brick whose barrack-like lines no amount of ivy could tame. With the candour of youth I once asked her how she could bear to paint one particular eyesore of the worst period, circa 1900. 'It was a commission, so I must do what I can with it,' she replied with cheerful resignation. 'If I had to live five years in such a building I would jolly well want to forget it,' I said inconsiderately, not realizing that happy years spent under its roof might have lent it some enchantment. Not having been privileged to meet the Provost or any of the learned elders whose solemn deportment in their flowing robes was so agreeably reminiscent of a more dignified age, I gladly availed myself of Miss Davison's invitation to visit the College Library. There one stepped into the sanctum of bygone Eton, and Miss Davison's eyes sparkled as she conducted me round, pointing out the various treasures. I thought I could

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recognize Carlo Loeser in a portrait of Sir Henry Wotton, despite the beard: he had the same whimsical smile, and one could imagine his discoursing in similar vein on Italian buongustai. Had not Wotton said that an ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country? He had been ambassador to Venice before coming as Provost to Eton-in both places he must have indulged his love of angling-and he had bequeathed a number of rare Italian manuscripts and books to the library. Evidently an amiable character as well as a delicate poet; apart from his beautiful lines on the Queen of Bohemia that begin 'You meaner beauties of the night', he wrote the memorable couplet on the death of Sir Albertus and Lady Morton: He first deceas'd-she, for a little, try'd To live without him, lik'd it not and dy'd. I could see that had Miss Davison been able to paint what she pleased, she would have concentrated on the sunlight streaming through stained-glass oriel windows on to the woodwork of the College Hall, for she almost skipped with joy when she came to it. 'I hope to do that one day,' she said, but alas, she had to consider her commissions. Hers was a technique peculiarly suited to the English scene, and water-colour is par excellence an English medium. The light of Italy is too strong for it and the clear lines of Palladian architecture overpower it, but it thrives on autumnal tints in the misty Thames valley and on mottled Gothic shreds and Georgian patches. Among the confusing mass of school buildings it was not easy for a new boy to find his way. Between classes one had to race with a pile of books from one schoolroom to another, often a considerable distance apart. In one case I could not find my destination until I had poked my head into a number of divisions, and then it was by chance. I arrived much flustered, at least ten minutes late. I was still hot and panting from my run as the master looked me up and down through steel-rimmed spectacles, measuring my discomfiture with ironic gusto. 'And what brings you here at this time?' he asked in a tone that was deceptively mild. I stuttered my predicament to an accompaniment of muffled chortling and guffawing.

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'So you call yourself Acton. I shall call you "Dregs". You look like dregs to me. Sit down there.' I sat on one of the nearest empty benches. The spinsterish voice was raised in exasperation: 'I didn't say there. Can't you use your eyes? I pointed to the last row at the back where you belong, as far away from me as possible. Yes, go right to the back, where you are out of my sight. I'll have a word with you later.' This was my first introduction to French as taught at Eton. It was my misfortune to be 'up to' this crotchety person for several halves, and since my first tardy arrival in his division I could never succeed in mollifying him. As for me, I could do nothing correctly in his eyes. Though I was nearly always top in French at Trials, the examination at the end of the half, he wrote, virulent reports about me. Since French was the one subject in 'which I excelled, I could not understand his attitude towards me. I had no trouble with any other master. If the public-school system licked boys into shape, no two shapes were alike. English individualism triumphed. The 'beaks' or masters, were as entertaining in their diversity as the boys. I supposed that some houses offered more scope for self-expression than others. Since Mr. Lubbock's wife was the concert pianist Irene Scharrer, one imagined that his house was a nest of singing birds. Mr. Goodhart was a composer and there were some promising poets and actors at his house: I remember a superlative performance of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus given by Goodhart's dramatic society, with Eric Dance in the title role, a born actor lost to the stage through parental disapproval of the theatre, David Cecil as a nervously saturnine Mephistopheles, and Hugh Lygon as a cherubic Helen of Troy. The spirit of the production was truly Elizabethan. Pale and thin to the verge of transparency, the very type of ethereal young poet, David Cecil had won the Hervey English Verse prize for which I competed in vain, and had published musical poems in The Spectator. Though an upper at another house, he was a friend in need who was polite about my struggling aspirations. Among the young masters was one who stood out a mile. Walking along the Eton High like a somnambulist, or like a juvenile giraffe that had escaped from a zoo, he wore a conspicuous orange scarf which trailed behind him. One could not visualize him keeping boys in order and I never discovered 75

what he taught, but I had many an occasion to observe him, since he was staying with my classical tutor, the Rev. C. 0. Bevan. Were I to draw his caricature, I should portray him dangling over a dangling shoe-lace, which seemed his most characteristic posture. His eyes, of which one was opaque, roved distantly, and he always looked uncomfortable. This was Aldous Huxley, the author of a book of poems in Spottiswoode's window. Each time I went into the shop I read one of these poems and finally bought the volume. It contained a translation of 'L'apres-midi d'un faune' which deserves to be better known, and an amusing description of a poet manque, of which I remember: 'There's straw in my tempestuous hair And I'm not a poet, but never despair! I'll madly live the poems I shall never write.' When I was annoyed with my new friend Brian Howard, I quoted these lines as applicable to himself. I do not think Huxley had yet published any prose, but his experiences at this time were obviously incorporated in the beginning of Antic Hay. I was to meet him later in Florence when his reputation as a novelist had become established. However, I was deeply, if indirectly, indebted to him at Eron. Stopping David Cecil as he was hurrying along the High with two volumes of Donne, I elicited from him that Mr. Huxley had recommended him to read this poet. My curiosity whetted, I took the same advice. Most of us are Aeolian harps at that age, only too responsive to a favourable breeze. After the languors of Swinburne, to whose sensuous alliterations one is particularly susceptible in a school environment, if only as a reaction from a starved vocabulary, the deep diapason of Donne, ranging from earthly to unearthly harmonies, was singularly bracing. With what enchantment I read those poems, even when I did not fully fathom them! I did not understand the word metaphysical by which Donne was generally described. My conception of the universe was more sensuous than philosophical, but through the subtle technique of stresses corresponding to the various currents of Donne's moods I could follow his passion where I could not follow his argument. This virile chameleon made me abandon the poets of the 'nineties, though I retained a

sentimental affection for them, as for an arm-chair in which one had had pleasant reveries. Donne was more vivid, vigorous, complex and modern than they, and he led me to other seventeenth-century poets, to Andrew Marvell, whose name was a perfect preparation for his poetry. Mozart and Marvell gave me a similar delight. Four lines run ever beneath the surface of both, and when I first read them they seemed to light up my own hidden depths in a flash: 'My love is of a birth as rare As 'tis for object strange and high; It was begotten by Despair Upon Impossibility.' l

I had not known despair and I was no pessimist, x.et these lines became for me a luminous incantation. They explained the otherwise inexplicable. Thus, from one poet to another, I wove a web of many strands as a background to my Eton life. That the strands were of enduring quality I owe to Aldous Huxley. Determined to avoid long afternoons of cricket, I had passed a swimming test in flannels at the St. George's Baths, which entitled me to be a wet-instead of a dry-bob. The prospect of floating down the Thames was more attractive than that of standing in a field. I pictured myself paddling among the swans. If I could not sing, the water nymphs would sing to me .... But on the first afternoon I went down to rafts, lo, tied by the dinghies, was the corpse of a drowned man. The features had melted into grey-green putty as if nibbled by fishes, and the hair that partly obscured them had been turned to watercress. He must have been drowned for ages. Was this an omen? I could not flinch at this juncture, whatever fate had in store for me. Very nervously, with a parched throat-the corpse loomed horribly near me-I stepped into my slender whiff, which wobbled frantically from side to side, as old Froggy the boatman pushed me off into what seemed a maelstrom. I had by no means mastered the trick of feathering the oars; the current was against me and I put too much energy into my strokes. The whiff continued to wobble and water rushed in; and even when I did succeed in feathering, I splashed myself liberally. After this unintentional cooling of my ardour I began 77

to skim smoothly along: if only those tiresome fours and riggers would not monopolize the river, and now a whole eight appeared to be bearing down upon me! I got furious looks and language from many a cocky little cox, conscientiously though I tried to keep out of their way. When I had learned to relax all seemed to go well, and I began to enjoy the view of Windsor Castle. A queer conglomeration, quite barbaric. The flag was flying from the round tower: that must mean that the King and Queen were there. I must visit St. George's Chapel. I must also get that reproduction of a Canaletto drawing for my room, but I would have to save up for it-at least three weeks' pocket money. Funny that a Venetian should come over and do pictures of the Thames. Ruminating after this fashion, I found I had reached the bridge. A raucous bellow: 'Look out, you--' Crikey, what a narrow shave! The current here was decidedly stronger. Another four; more riggers; all crowding together to turn below the bridge, all converging upon my flimsy craft, and the arches had become so narrow that they seemed to shrink. I stopped to make way for an expert, but as soon as the oars were still, the whiff started to quiver like an aspen beyond my control. Under the shadow of the arch I gave a mighty pull and was tipped right into the Thames, while my whiff, bobbing and dancing away from me, as if delighted to be free, was swept downstream towards the lock to be shattered to splinters. The drowned man was still tethered to the raft as I landed abashed and dripping, and I felt sure that he winked at me through his watercress hair. After a quick change I ran to Rowland's, to soothe my jaded nerves with a strawberry mess. In Rowland's I generally found Francis Laking, who would waddle up and demand in his comic lisp: 'Thock me thomething, do!' And he would brook no denial. He was the stage-struck enfant terrible of m'tutor's, a pasty-faced, cowslip-haired urchin whose room was filled with photographs of Delysia, Gaby Deslys, Mistinguett and other leading ladies of the footlights from across the Channel. Already he sang and tap-danced like a professional, exaggerating the feminine coquetries of Delysia's repertoire, producing the effect of a voluminous bust and still more voluminous hips with a jut of the behind and a cupping of hands, and g1vmg as high and abandoned a kick to his battered top-hat as the most

accomplished can-can dancer. His performances were often in demand, especially such naughty songs of the moment as 'Since Winnie went window cleaning,' accompanied by the sauciest of winks, leers and poutings, but he could also be limp and languishing in 'The Apache Rag' ('fling me over here, fling me over there!'); he could be winsome in 'Isn't there any little thing that I can do for you?' and he could parody the cigarette-husky appeal of Teddie Gerrard with such lascivious innuendoes that the toughs in the house library went hot all over. He revelled in his own impudence, and once in the middle of tea gave a startling imitation of a woman in the pangs of labour. The masters could do nothing with him, and he reduced our dame to outraged silence with enviable ease. Before he left Eton he had joined the entourage of Miss Tallulah B-tnkhead, and having succeeded to the baronetcy, was very sharp with the attendants in Rowland's who failed to call him Sir Francis: 'Where have you been brought up, girl? Thir Franthith if you pleathe!' More subtly disarming was Brian Howard, who had entered with me for the wet-bob swimming test at St. George's baths. His big brown eyes with their long curved lashes were brazen with self-assurance; already his personality seemed chiselled and polished, and his vocabulary was as ornate as his diction. Like myself he was half-American, and here I must resist a temptation to digress on a fascinating topic: England's intellectual debt to America. Nearly all the remarkable Englishmen of the last fifty years have a strong seasoning of Yankee blood. Great is the temptation to dwell on Winston Churchill and develop a theme which has not yet received proper attention. Where would the modern poetaster be without T. S. Eliot? But I shall forbear: perhaps we have suffered too much from racial theorists. 'I am said to be the image of Max Beerbohm when he was beautiful as well as brilliant,' my new friend Brian confided to me, and he did bear a close resemblance to Sir William Rothenstein's early lithograph of Sir Max. At the age of thirteen he was definitely a dandy. During a walk to the Copper Horse I proposed that we should sit under an oak tree, but he demurred with a quotation from 'Intentions', which he must have known by heart. 'Nature is so uncomfortable,' he sighed. 'Grass is hard and lumpy and 79

damp, and full of dreadful black insects.' Our friendship was an endless series of bickerings, but his company was so stimulating that it soon became a necessity to both of us. Brian could be very old and very young at the same time and his mischievousness was far more than the ebullience of youth. When one got the better of him in argument he would resort to crude mockery and personal invective, which often turned to violence. Once I had to push him into a shop window in self-defence. He had an intuitive gift for the malice that could stab and fester beneath the skin. Scarcely anybody was spared the shafts of his ridicule. For some reason he approved of my poems, though he pretended to despise rhymed verse. His own free verse was diapered with felicitous phrases but I never thought it quite worthy of him: too great a facility was his drawback, and his line drawings were equally clever and unsatisfying. Apart from these talents Brian detected talent in the most unlikely people. 'My dear,' he would say, 'I've discovered a person who has something, just something a little bit unusual, under a pimply and rather catastrophic exterior. Of course I may be mistaken and there is a faint risk that he may develop into a bore, but what do you think, my dear, he has a passion for campanology.' 'Really, Brian? And is that interesting?' 'Why, it is the art of ringing bells, my dear. He knows everything, simply everything there is to know about it. I'm trying to persuade him to write a causerie on the subject. It could be extremely suggestive. I think I shall send it with a covering letter to The Eton Chronicle, explaining to the editor why I think it so very important. It struck me that every house should build its own belfry, then it could be distinguished both musically and architecturally. I'm afraid m'tutor is bound to choose Lutyens; I suppose it can't be helped, though one hears that he has made some tolerable designs for New Delhi. You, of course, will want to erect a Florentine campanile over Keate's House. Having originated the scheme, I shall insist on being Chairman of the Bell Committee. I shall choose m'tutor's bells .. .' 'At Carrier's I suppose. And of platinum inlaid with cabochon rubies.' Brian frowned and flickered his eyelashes. 'Now don't be facetious, dear, it doesn't happen to suit you. I am in earnest. I was thinking of something rather less obvious. I should see to it, of course, that the bells had elegant shapes, but

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it is the tunes more than the shapes that matter. The carillons, rny dear. I should commission Rimsky-Korsakoff ... ' 'But he's with the angels, Brian.' 'Will you stop interrupting! It impedes the flow of my ideas. I can see that you're getting into one of your mosquito rnoods. Of course Rimsky's dead, we all know that. I meant Granados. It would be nice to have a Malaguena or a Seguedilla to soothe one at lock-up time with memories of Spain, bullfights and matadors with enormous shoulders and no hipsI can't think why hips were invented-and sunlit patios with Moorish fountains'-(Brian had never been out of England). 'There again I can see an endless argument with m'tutor, even though he is a trifle more cultured than the average beak. He's bound to plump for Elgar or Vaughan-Williams. AI\d when the belfries are completed, there are bound to be bats, symbolically speaking .. .' ~ Thus Brian would extract fantasy from a casual meeting and elaborate it into a scheme over which he became so serious that he would flare up and insult one if one were not in a sufficiently receptive mood. During the process he would lay down laws of his own about the arts; he was always intensely dogmatic. For the time being one was persuaded that he would really carry out his latest notion, that we should be reading about the vital urgency of belfries in the next number of the Chronicle; but some newer, more practical idea was bound to intervene. Beginning with an impromptu suggestion as light as thistledown, he developed his conceits aloud without hummings or hawings. And there was often sound sense and acute criticism running along the margin of his arguments and a sensitiveness to beauty underneath them. As lower boys of different houses were not allowed to visit each other's rooms, most of the discussions on which we built a foundation for our flexible friendships were evolved in the open air. Brian and I spent much precious leisure at Dyson's the jeweller's, where one could hire a gramophone in a back room and play one's own records. Though I have heard much reasoned abuse of the gramophone from such eminent musicians as Sir Thomas Beecham, though I am aware of the remoteness of even the finest recordings from the original performance, I have always been grateful for their evocations, and at that age I would have been starved for music without them. Surely a good

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gramophone record is preferable to a poor performance. Often a record from Petroushka or Sylphides would warm me like a sunbath on a bleak November day and supply me with the vitamins that were lacking in other food. Many of my records were from the Russian Ballet, and Brian and I would leap into riotous dances in that room at Dyson's. Far more than football was this an outlet for our animal spirits, and whoever burst in upon us would think we were mad as March hares. Without having seen Massine's performance of the miller's dance in The Three-cornered Hat, Brian would stamp his heels and snap his fingers to de Falla's rhythm and produce a creditable equivalent. Our snatched half-hours with the gramophone at Dyson's became a more revitalizing tonic to our morale as the half wore on, pathetic as they may sound to-day, when Etonians probably have their own radios and tune in on the world's best concerts. We had to make the utmost of such occasions, fleeting and rare, as the routine of games and 'construings' impinged on us and the vigilance of the house library hemmed us in. To be caught slacking was tantamount to a crime. In one sense I was an escapist: I took every opportunity to escape into the universe of art. I may have missed the raptures reserved for the successful athlete, but I had lasting compensations. The athlete's heyday is short and sweet: many a champion footballer and rowing man among my contemporaries is now in some doctor's clutches, a victim to heartaches of the wrong kind. He can only look back to memories of bygone triumphs, while I look forward, if not to triumphs, to fresh discoveries. My life, uneventful from a mundane point of view, is wonderfully adventurous from my own, though like Monkey Sun in the Chinese legend, I may find that I have got no farther than Buddha's fingers. My Eton friends and I were voluptuaries of the imagination: our real life was austere enough with its early school, perpetual games, and, teas apart, our indifferent gobbled food; austere even in classes, for there was little to stimulate the mind unless the seed had been sewn at one's preparatory school. Food was a subject best avoided, but Brian and I would compete in making each other's mouths water with culinary disquisitions. My favourite dishes were not easy to conjure in

words for those who had never tasted them: the refinements of pasta are peculiarly parochial. Nobody unacquainted with Italy may know the succulence of ravioli al sugo or indeed of any of the varieties of macaroni. To the average Englishman macaroni is a sloppy and insipid substitute for more substantial fare. The word sounds like comic opera in his ears: he refuses to take it seriously. In England I have seen it served cold as hors-d'oeuvre and hot as a savoury: a few slices of macaroni, which should never be sliced, on a diminutive square of fried toast, sprinkled with tomato ketchup and cayenne pepper. Italian friends refuse to believe me when I tell them that I have seen it served as a milky sweet, an attempt to interbreed it with the rice pudding and tapioca families. Brian was unmoved by my apotheosis of pasta. 1When I came to describe the delights of Neapolitan pizza and sanguinaccio, an exhilarating mixture of pig's blood and creamy chocolate, he began to pull grimaces. Nor did my panini tartufati, rolls buttered with white truffle paste, which I prized above any strawberry mess, appeal to the palates of my friends. After a bite they would drop it in horror, comparing the flavour to a leak of gas. But my evocation of Doney's marrons glaces was more successful. Brian affirmed that Rumpelmeyer's were the finest in the world. This I strenuously denied. Doney's were of classical proportions, neither too large nor too small; they were neither too brittle nor too compact in texture; they just opened their luscious chapped lips and let their somnolent juices ooze within you, and the frosting of sugar melted gently down your throat, warming the red corpuscles so that they played gay tarantellas while you masticated, and even for some time after. Brian was forced to yield on this point. 'Perhaps,' he demurred, 'since you are more eloquent on this subject than on others of greater import there may be something in what you say . . .' And we tried to console ourselves for our descent into reality with acid drops from a paper bag. One day Brian motioned to me in a mysterious manner at absence. 'My dear, if you will just pop into Dyson's, I'll offer you a very special marron glace.' 'Why in Dyson's?' 'Follow me.' He slithered into the shop and leapt up the stairs licking his lips. Seeing that I looked mystified as he proceeded to wind the

old gramophone, he explained: 'We'll play an overture· beforehand. I think a genuine marron glace deserves one, don't you?' He put on a gramophone record that puzzled me even more. It was a man's voice, sinister and caressing, speaking in a foreign accent none too clear, for the record was scratched. 'What on earth .. .' 'Hush. Be patient and listen. Now: it's coming, it's coming.' I approached the gramophone horn and heard: 'You shall have marrons glaces .. .' 'Isn't it divine,' said Brian. 'Sir Herbert Tree as Svengali.' And he turned the needle back to the same passage again and again. No wonder the record was scratched. 'I feel I'm eating a marron glace every time he pronounces it, don't you? Whenever I have a craving for one I come to Dyson's and simply feast off the record.' I had to concede that Sir Herbert had almost materialized the unprocurable sweetmeat. During my second half at Eton I wrote home: 'I am overwhelmed by the news of Peace, but can it possibly last?' A state of war had come to seem as normal as recurrent thunder and lightning, and throughout the ensuing years I never felt that peace was permanent. The armistice did not convince me, but at least it meant a breathing spell from slaughter. We were given a whole holiday and the school marched down the High Street waving flags and cheering until every throat was hoarse. All the windows had hung out Union Jacks, and we did our best to emulate them with our lungs. Mechanically I accompanied the cheering and flag-waving, but I should have preferred to pray, in solitude. I was moving not only in a crowd but in a cloud. Then, during an organ recital at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, the cloud was swept away. The notes of the organ swelled upwards and flew like invisible wings: long pent-up spirits of joy were suddenly released and shook the dusty banners above our heads. The mellow chapel trembled as if Samson were in our midst and his muscles were straining to the utmost in a paean of victory. Surely the roof would come tottering down . . . yet one was not afraid. This was victory! And instead of falling the roof had been raised by those spirits of joy. It had floated into the empyrean.

Great Heaven was above us, serene, and we could see the highest stars as never before. The flags and the bunting withered after that vision. Only organs can celebrate victory as it should be celebrated. My first thought, when I could think at all clearly amid the incoherence of excitement, was: when shall I return to Florence? I had waited so long that there were times when I suffered from claustrophobia and sought relief in solitary runs to Datchet and beyond, racing through ploughed-up fields and leaping over ditches, getting wilder and ever more out of breath and losing my way, fancying myself pursued by a pack of bloodhounds, returning to m'tutors, dazed, soaked, scratched and exhausted, to let myself evaporate in a steaming bath. Yet a while I was forced to be patient. 1 The Russian Ballet was to be seen in London, ~nd that was a temporary compensation. At Eton it was tantalizing to be so near and yet so far from it. I followed every performance from a distance, and cut out every picture I could find of Karsavina, Tchernicheva, Massine, in the illustrated papers. It is ironical that at this halcyon period when the dancers were at the height of their accomplishment, when artists, musicians and choreographers devoted their best energies to ballet after an age of enforced hibernation, no fitter theatre could be found for Diaghileff's company than a grotesque music-hall. Through the traffic jams of thoroughfares decorated in honour of President Wilson's arrival, I made my way to this extraordinary temple. One had to sit through the antics of jugglers, trickcyclists and acrobats, before the curtain rose on a single ballet. Then the contrast with what had preceded it was so extreme as to be miraculous. It was-and the image returns to me before any unusual aesthetic experience, for no other seems so aptlike a perfect lotus springing from a swamp. As each petal of the lotus opened, as Massine and Karsavina danced in their splendour, no mortal eye was sharp enough to seize every detail of the vision, every fleeting finesse of pose and gesture and expression; there were too many images to absorb all at once in so short a fraction of time. Though my nerves were sensitized to every vibration, I gazed in a fever, with bated breath and a beating pulse, adrift in time and space. Could anything on any stage be more beautiful? One's surroundings vanished. Later one might notice that the costumes

had faded and the stage settings had lost their freshness, but so powerful were the images superimposed by the dancers that it did not matter. The smoke of the warring camp in Prince Igor filled one's nostrils, a pungence like that of peat and cameldung, and through this acrid incense of the steppe, iron-sinewed archers leapt in rhythmical frenzy beating the ground with their taut bows, and the soft Polovtsi women stung their longthwarted desires with an aching sweetness. It was the relaxed atmosphere of after-battle with the sun bleeding into twilight: after the holocaust, fresh dews of life. The world had not changed, and art was universal. After months and years in the trenches our Tommies had returned to release the same pent-up passions. But how art could transform and ennoble them! As my first ballet after the war, Prince Igor struck me as historically significant. It was a microcosmic image of the immediate aftermath of the world conflict, except that 'microcosmic' suggests smallness and there was nothing small about these passions unleashed on the open steppe. The next number on the programme was a ventriloquist. I left hurriedly while the lenses of my eyes still reflected the lines and colours of Prince Igor, while Borodine's shimmering orchestration still resounded in my head. Dazzled, blind to the London traffic, I returned to South Kensington and attempted to write before the recent revelation was dispelled. Lines were jotted down without much sequence, an inventory of images for a poem that never lived up to its first impulse. Time at school was expanded and prolonged, many of the days became interminable. But now I could not keep pace with the galloping hours. I went to the ballet as often as I could. In that catacomb of the London Coliseum Diaghileff could raise the dead. The antique rites of Frazer's Golden Bough were restored and the theatre was filled with a new audience as different as night from day, expectant and self-conscious. Somewhere at the back, a bear wrapped in Russian gloom, Diaghileff sat biting his nails, remote and lonely among his satellites. We had to thank him, the magician, for this enchantment and for more to come. Nijinsky, alas, was not there. My brother and I were staying in Evelyn Gardens with a statuesque Edwardian dame. Miss C. might have been taken for a clairvoyante: her elaborate clothes seemed the vestments of an occult priestess, her necklaces were like Rosicrucian rosaries

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and her eyes appeared to be searching the bottomless infinite. All sorts of indefinite things had become the Infinite for her. She thought that she had said good-bye to the illusions of life but there was always an extra illusion. No doubt it was hard to keep one's balance on a sphere of such slippery composition. Miss C. would slide sedately along the parquet floors of theosophy to stumble into Christian Science. After a platonic affair with Mrs. Eddy, she would fall back into the arms of Mme Blavatsky. An illustrated book by Dr. Besant and Mr. Leadbeater on the shapes and colours of human thoughts had prompted her to embroider a series of mystical panels in silk which embellished her front hall: peacock blue was the prevalent tint. All shades of blue denoted religious emotions, some of them very precise; thus 'pallid grey-blue' represented 'fetish 1worship tinged with fear'. Yell ow denoted intellect, ora~e pride or ambition, green sympathy, red anger, black malice, grey depression, and so on. In Dr. Besant's and Mr. Leadbeater's book there were pictures of intellectual aspirations, of listening to Wagner, and even to Gounod. These thought-forms were subject to three definite principles: r. Quality of thought determines colour. 2. Nature of thought determines form. 3. Definiteness of thought determines clearness of outline. Apparently Miss C.'s thoughts were indefinite, for the outlines were anything but clear. Every knick-knack on her crowded tables contained some spiritual message. The atmosphere would have been oppressive but for Miss C.'s latent sense of fun. Seeing that my brother and I were ill-equipped for etheric visions, she entered with zest into our amusements on a lower plane, joining our excursions to art galleries, to the Caledonian Market and the Charing Cross Road, from which we would return laden with Whistler pamphlets, old engravings of Florence, Chinese embroideries and Indian gods on talc. As others had hobbies, I had my Whistleriana. Miss C. took me to his White House; and my interest in all that concerned the Butterfly went to such lengths that we saw a play called Nurse Benson because I had heard that the leading actress, Marie Lohr, was the daughter of Mr. Leyland for whom Whistler had painted the Peacock Room. It was Whistler who first showed me the hallucinations of which London is capable. I saw the Thames through his Nocturnes, and though there were statements in his Ten O'clock with which I could not agree, for

instance that there was no such thing as nationality in art, and that you might as well speak of English mathematics as of English art, the grace of his prose and the sparkle of the epigrams made me admire his writings as much as his painting. At that time I would have agreed with Sargent that if a piece of canvas were cut out of a picture by Whistler one would find it a thing of beauty in itself, owing to the texture and substance into which it had been transformed by his brush. What really attracted me to his painting, as I was to realize later, was its Chinese quality: the art of selection, the tones so subdued and eloquent, the economy of line. After I had studied the art of China I forgot Whistler, but he helped to enrich my holidays in London. Chelsea had sadly changed since Whistler painted it, yet his palette still prevailed there. Our kind hostess also took us to visit Sargent and Wilson Steer: both large full-blooded men, equally shy and reserved. In a scintillating room with bay windows overlooking the Thames, the loose bulk of Wilson Steer was surrounded by fragile Chelsea porcelain, small figurines, old lustre, cups and saucers and delicate glass; his manner was so awkwardly self-deprecating as he showed his recent landscapes that one was afraid he would stumble among the shepherdesses. One wanted to prop him up with little speeches. I found myself trying to put him at ease, but his shyness was invincible. He seemed a scrupulous observer of nature, more at home with clouds and trees than with human beings. In other respects, a finicky bachelor. He might expand with a few painter cronies, but words failed him with an inquisitive boy of fourteen. And I was embarrassingly inquisitive. No amount of shyness would deter me from firing off leading questions, and pronouncing my opinions with conviction. At that age I should have been a professional interviewer. In Sargent's big studio one was closer to the cosmopolitan Italy of damask and old gold, where everything is in a major key, for huge halls and colonnades. His servant had been a Venetian gondolier. It was like visiting one of the lesser old masters, what our Florentine critics would call a retardataire. Physically, he had the high colour and robustness of a Franz Hals. Sargent was then preoccupied with his decorative panels, yet how little Tintoretto, whom he considered one of the supreme masters of painting, had taught him in this respect! In colour, to begin with, there was a yawnmg abyss between the sea-and

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air-steeped Venetian and these gummy compositions, so stilted and academic. No doubt he had had a surfeit of duchesses and generals: one could only regret it. In his efforts to escape from official art he became more drearily official, whereas in his finest portraits he approached Hals. His advice to a fellow-painter was: 'Begin with Franz Hals, copy and study Franz Hals, after that go to Madrid and copy Velasquez, leave Velasquez till you have got all you can out of Franz Hals.' Unfortunately the illconcocted pigments he used have affected his canvases so that beside a Hals most of them look much older. And even if we do not care for them, they portray the society of Sargent's time, its fashions and its moods. The representative figures of both continents were fixed on his canvases in their most characteristic attitudes, smooth and deliberate in their outlook on t~e world, 'a world that thought well of itself and its equipment, an atmosphere that was at least on the surface untroubled and serene'. From the twinkle of his grey-blue eyes he seemed to be amused by our remarks. I told him that I was copying his magnificent profile of Madame Gautreau and I do not think he was altogether displeased. 'She was the most unpaintable beauty I ever tried to paint,' he said, 'her skin was plastered over with bright lavender.' At Eton there was a full-length portrait by him of the former headmaster Dr. Warre, a giant in sweeping robes, now hopelessly paralyzed. With that portrait in mind, not one of Sargent's best achievements but obviously a photographic likeness, it was painful to see Dr. Warre being wheeled along to watch the sports. While Wilson Steer and Sargent appealed to that precocious period sense I have mentioned before, I viewed them as a vanishing species. As painters they were better endowed than most of their English contemporaries; but in landscape as in portraiture they had said their limited say. Impressionism had suffered the same sea-change as Tuscan Chianti in crossing the Channel, and we had nobody with Degas's science or Manet's cool assurance. Perhaps Post-Impressionism was better attuned to the English temperament: that remained to be seen. Roger Fry stood in the same relation to English PostImpressionists as William Morris to the Pre-Raphaelites. At Fry's Omega Workshops in Fitzroy Square there was a painstaking revival of primitive forms: Fry's proteges were struggling

to liberate art from industrialism and its machine-made horrors, but the results fell lamentably short of their ideals. The patterns a Polynesian produced intuitively in the calm of a coral atoll were refurbished in Bloomsbury amid much soul-stirring and high-flown discourse. After such wealth of argument one was led to expect something more original. Pots vaguely reminiscent of Shang or Aztec wares were the products of scholarly amateurs who had studied archaeology in the British Museum. Roger Fry would persuade himself and his listeners that these were of deep significance; and so the Bloomsbury School came into being. One hears little of that school to-day. Some of its alumni have joined the lesser old masters with Sargent and Wilson-Steer, but their influence on popular taste was considerable. From Heal's in the Tottenham Court Road, the movement splayed out into the provinces; from tables to tea-cups one noted an improvement in colour and shape; and their simpler furniture looked cheerful and better adapted to modern conditions. In Florence I had enjoyed some of the finest Cezannes. Charles Loeser's music-room was full of them, sharp sunlit hills of Provence alive with olives, and from these one could gaze out of the window and see the same olives on the Tuscan hills, bathed in the same pure light, while the Lener Quartet played Haydn and Mozart. The music and the landscapes inside and outside that room became one: they merged into each other without any interruption. Every time I saw Loeser's Cezannes, their austere perfection sank into me deeper and I left them more dissatisfied with my own efforts at self-expression. By these standards much modern art seemed meretricious. The Bloomsbury School was prone to slavish imitation of Cezanne; his landscapes painted in the dry light of Provence were imitated in the damp light of the Cotswolds, so that the effect was little more than a pastiche. Even so it was restful after the Royal Academy, and one was at once refreshed by the clean colours that pervaded its exhibitions. It was pleasant to loiter there talking to a friend, with the pictures as a suggestive background. The same could not be said of the Royal Academy where most pictures had the quality of linoleum. Intent on so much that was happening outside Eton, I did not throw myself into the life there as I should have done to extract the utmost pleasure and profit. When nineteen Old

Etonian generals came down on a ceremonial visit I went with all the other boys to give them an ovation in School Yard. Generals Plumer and Rawlinson made speeches-or was it Byng? -brave men who had helped to make history, but they had also helped to show that civilization was as brittle as a human life. The war crisis was over temporarily: other crises more insoluble had arisen. The transition from war to peace had just begun, a twilight of pitfalls not least of which were apathy and oblivion. Thousands of young painters and poets were dead: in France and Belgium incalculable beauty had perished. In the wilderness of war's paradoxes many thinkers had lost their way. Apparent truths had died like flies. The virtues of the Teuton had proved more disastrous than other people's vices'1 Science itself had been helpless. Instead of saving Europe, it had been concentrated on Europe's destruction: some of the finest intellects had been devoted to annihilation. A great deal of barbed wire had been left behind, and it was for my generation to clear it away. The most serious of us were Hamlets confronted by countless ghosts, caught in the toils of a tragic inheritance. Not a few of us felt: 'O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!' Ultimately we were to fail, like Hamlet, and leave a stage strewn with corpses. The confusion kindled much excitement in the meantime. Creative minds were in a ferment on both sides of the Atlantic; the arts which had been chloroformed awoke and asserted themselves so aggressively that the Philistines were made to tremble. The excitement even spread to Eton. Those of us who painted and wrote verse grew bolder: we felt we had a mission and chafed at the restraints of a life regulated by games and the winning of colours. I was still uncertain whether to devote myself to painting or to writing; but one art helped another, and painting taught me to observe. Fortunately I was allowed to take up extra drawing in the evenings. Mr. Evans the drawing master had a house next door to m'tutors, and his studio soon became the centre of living culture at Eton. Within the class was a nucleus of boys who cared

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passionately for the visual arts. From cnt1c1zmg each other's work we criticized the work of the great .masters: from within we worked without and acted on the surrounding protoplasm, tinting it with many dyes. Some, like Oliver Messel, went from Eton to the Slade; others, like myself, took to painting in words at one of the universities. All of us, reactionaries and revolutionaries, owed a great deal to Mr. Evans's tactful encouragement. As our nucleus gathered strength, it called itself the Eton Society of Arts and held open discussions as well as exhibitions. At these discussions Brian Howard became director of ceremonies and Robert Byron distinguished himself for his provocative tirades. Saturated in Ruskin, Robert was automatically in opposition to myself, and we did not bury the hatchet until we met at Oxford. At Eton he supported whatever was retrograde, yet so meteoric was the development of his taste, and so rapid were his powers of assimilation, that within a few years he was being quoted as an authority on Byzantine art. Our other members were less forceful and vitriolic. Oliver Messel was painting minutely in the pre-Raphaelite manner; Alan Clutton-Brock was interested in mural decoration: he painted in oils on a surface of handmade marble paper, and sometimes in brilliant gouache which he varnished over. He was perhaps more interested in his process of marbling paper than in his painting. His method was to mix ordinary oilpaint with paraffin and pour the mixture into a bowl of water. Then, while the oily paint was floating on the water and could be stirred into any pattern, he put a sheet of paper on top of it. The paint came off clean on the paper and quickly dried. He presented me with several sheets which had the same quality as the work of the early Surrealists. Chinese influence was paramount in his decorations, and I remember his telling me that his aim was to produce the effect of some improbable country in which anything might happen. His writings were influenced by Lord Dunsany. Like Cyril Connolly, who puffed cynically on our fringe, he was in College, and was therefore less handicapped by the athletic fetish than 'Oppidans' like ourselves. Other associates, Anthony Powell and Henry York, participated discreetly without committing themselves to extremes. Henry had started a novel called Blindness, of which he never spoke, about an Etonian adolescent going blind and adjusting

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himself to his loss of sight. He was aloof and unpredictable like his writings but one felt instinctively that he was a pure artist. Among the fiction of the 'thirties his novels stand apart. He could write about factory life or the idle rich with scientific impartiality, and to maintain his aloofness he wrote under the confusing pseudonym of Green. There are Greens of so many shades writing novels that one wishes he had selected another colour. Anthony Powell was concerned with book illustrations, Regency costume and Lovat Fraser. This nursery of talent flourished so gaily that I have never been able to agree with the current platitude about our public schools standardizing character and suppressing originality. None of us begrudged the laurels of the physically gifted; often it was the other way round. The athletes resented o1'r gaiety and feared our repartee. What right had we, who did not take their triumphs seriously, to our irrepressible exub;rance? They vented their spite spasmodically. At m'tutors we were suddenly summoned to the library and cross-examined on our knowledge of house colours. I was 'tanned' for failing to satisfy these examiners. Since Mr. de Havilland had retired and been replaced by Mr. McNeile, a great stickler for athletics and the O.T.C., it was less easy for me to avoid the uncongenial. The frequent drills and field days made one feel that the war was still on. In summer I had to go down to the river every afternoon to be 'tubbed' for the second house-four, and at the end of the half there was a strenuous week of camp at Mytchett, near Aldershot, where I took to smoking as a disinfectant. My sense of freedom dwindled.

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V A LONG time had elapsed since my last visit to America, but my bonds with that country were too strong to be weakened by absence. Perhaps I was nearest to it when I was farthest. I felt just as American as I felt English, and of all the poets with messages Walt Whitman meant most to me. Other poets aged me, but Walt was the great rejuvenator. He was my hygiene: he gave me a deeper thirst for life. To rediscover the huge organ of Manhattan with all its pipes swelling in a symphony of democracy, to be dwarfed by that already classical forest of Attic temples, Gothic cathedrals, and flat iron facades with thousands of twinkling windows, is a recurrent necessity to those with Yankee blood in their veins. Not for long: a month or two will repair the ravages due to absence. Without realizing it, we are perpetually burning up our superior vitality, and Europe is an insatiable mistress. To refuel our system, we must return to our Alma Mater across the Atlantic, so perennially young and healthy. With tugs cawing like rooks and sirens screaming like seagulls to announce us, we glided through the river fauna of Manhattan. The bellow of the city reached us by degrees; buildings detached themselves from the haze in which they had been floating: in a few minutes they would soar above our heads. A heavily whiskered tug nosed its way towards us with a dapper pilot puffing his pipe on the bridge. Soon we were almost tobogganning into the customs tunnel, but I had not even genius to declare. It was the right time to be in America, but I was not the right age. At sixteen one is embarrassing and embarrassed. The budding senses trip over each other: one is idealistic about everything and nothing, and one is constantly made to look foolish by inconsiderate elders. Above all one yearns for embraces which are seldom, if ever, received--certainly not in America, the accomplished allumeuse, or as we say, tease. Sex frothed

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lightly over the surface, ice-cream and molasses. Sixteen-yearolds were supposed to find satisfaction in 'necking' or 'petting' parties, which sounded messy and a bit humiliating. My desire for knowledge was more strictly in the biblical sense. Happily J was soon enveloped in the warmth of sociable cousins with cars of their own and infinite mobility. Here was the antithesis of that English reserve as if everyone were acting in a comedy of manners. I was among cheerful extroverts unconcerned with the past: they lived in the present and for the present. They made a cult of the contemporary. Vivacious Kathleen Sheriff, with whom I had taken lessons in French at Etretat, had her own crowd of boy and girl friends who must have consumed as much petrol in casual visits as a fighter-bomber. Their only bogie was the traffic-cop who tried to curb their speef ng, for their motors had homicidal instincts. The rhythm of jazz was in their ears from morning till night; not the nostalgic jazz of the 'thirties, but a carefree ragtime which compelled arms to hug and legs to kick loose, in a steady breeze of unquestioned optimism. While in England my pronunciation was said to be foreign; here my cousins remarked upon my English accent. To them it sounded like affectation, but it was too late to mend; my efforts at slang were disastrous and unconvincing. From the moment I arrived I was taken in hand and given a violent push, as it were, so that the new life sped by as on a scenic railway. In the heart of New York were collections of Italian primitives to remind one strangely of the planet one had left behind. During the last twenty years private individuals had imported European masterpieces of incalculable value. These collections, formed with expert advice, were to be presented to the American public: Mr. Frick's, housed in a five-million-dollar mansion on Fifth Avenue, was to be administered after his death by a board of trustees with a fifteen-million-dollar fund for maintenance and new acquisitions. Thus 'the plain citizen', in the words of an American journal, was enabled 'to enjoy forty million dollars' worth of art in the quiet atmosphere of a rich man's home'. Mr. Mellon's collection was valued at fifty million dollars and Mr. Bache's at a mere twenty million, and Lord Duveen, the prince of art dealers, had been careful that his clients should purchase only 'recognized masterpieces'. The Italian paintings 95

had been authenticated by Bernard Berenson, which lent them an added interest from our point of view. For Berenson was the omniscient sage of Settignano, whose intellect was so clear that others dimmed beside it. The emigration of European masterpieces was on so vast a scale that one could foresee a future in which Europeans would have to go to American to study art; and when this source dried up there was the whole of the Far East to be tapped, a formidable prospect. The museums were arranged with greater sophistication than in Europe, and with greater consideration for colour, light and space. We were re-introduced to the virtuosity of American cooking, to the savours of clam chowder, soft-shell crabs, lobster Newburg, corn chicken, alligator pears; we saw Ziegfeld Follies that showed the physical results of that cooking and comedies that were like elevators whizzing one up and down skyscrapers. But there was never time for silent contemplation. My grandmother had taken a house near the sea at Magnolia, Massachusetts, but we were seldom inside it. Motoring thither from New York, we stopped at the homes of various friends en route, large porticoed and petticoated edifices in the Colonial style furnished in a uniform taste, the fusion of architects and decorators who had disposed of lavish materials with a free hand-impressive monuments to a life of leisure that was all but inexistent. While the level of taste was higher than in Europe-(whether Louis Quinze, High Renaissance or Adam, there was seldom a false note)-they were more like country clubs than private houses. The owners having chosen a certain type of residence had left the details to some fashionable firm. The final product represented bank balance rather than personality. Shift a chair and you would kill the decorative scheme. Everything had to remain just so, in a frozen position, like a stage setting. The advance in design since my early visits to Lake Geneva was noticeable all over the country. An American type of architecture had been evolved from the best European models, Italian, French and Georgian, and blended with the home Colonial. Country houses of recent construction nestled into the landscape as if they had been there for generations, balanced and symmetrical without being cold and hard, informally formal rather than picturesque. While few motives were unfamiliar, there was usually a freshness in the plan. Such architects as

Charles A. Platt had made a careful study of the colour and quality of wall surfaces in Italy and France, which was reflected in their treatment of brick and stone and stucco. So judiciously had they infused American Colonial mansions with Italian sentiment that I thought them superior to their contemporaries in Europe. The most grandiose of the properties I saw was Mrs. Richard Crane's Castle Hill, near Ipswich, where a wide terrace leads to a long alley of statues reminiscent of Versailles and a sloping ramp of lush lawn rolls a mile to the sea. At the fishing town of Gloucester there was a remarkable house furnished in American Colonial style by Mr. Harry Sleeper, who had assembled a mass of objects undistinguished in themselves and arranged them with such skill that they exhaled a charm comparable to Hawthorne's prose. To me this was more interesting than the palaces transported stone by stone from Venice. I returned to Europe with a vision of too many mansions and a memory of abounding hospitality. 'The war to end war' had left no outward scars on the land of opportunity. On the return journey I spun verses in the manner of Pope and a fanciful story about Madame du Barry, reactions from skyscrapers. Brian Howard was determined to publish an illustrated magazine and had asked me to collaborate. With the talent of the Eron Arts Society at our disposal it was bound to be readable; and we were to be bolstered by an Old Etonian Supplement. Aided by Roger Spence as business editor, the publication was paid for in advance. It was to have a solid binding, good paper and spacious margins; the print was to emulate that of Max Beerbohm's early works: altogether a fastidious production for a public school. Brian was indefatigable as editor-impresario. Many of his swans turned out to be geese. Contributions that had sounded promising were unprintable, and some shied from contributing at the last moment, in sudden terror of endangering their future careers. In those days literary activity at school was still regarded with disfavour. Even Cyril Connolly hung back. Robert Byron submitted a parody of the vers fibres in vogue, on the little fingers of a hand by Lely. 'Robert has developed into a poet, my dear, an English Apollinaire. You'll be amazed,' said Brian. And he congratulated Robert on being 'One of us'. Robert hooted with laughter and told him it was a joke. Brian was indignant at what he called 'an act of treachery', but he 97

never lost heart. He concentrated on an overwhelming editorial in defence of free verse, the only natural form for the modern poet, since Brian could manage it with facility. This did not deter him from accepting my poems in rhyme. Ultimately we monopolized the magazine between us. Under the influence of a special kind of macabre Brian became very prolific. While others walked to Windsor on Sunday afternoons, Brian and I walked conscientiously to Slough, feeling rather like the Goncourts, in search of 'copy'. The masonry of Slough suggested all sorts of atrocities. As for the Sundayfied people of middle age, Brian was quick to detect streaks of queer cruelty and fetishism under ordinary exteriors: their very ordinariness was suspicious to Brian. He saw witches in charwomen, and in many semi-detached Victorian villas he visualized appalling scenes of sadism; corpulent women in bangs and bustles suffocating pale little girls by inches. He would pause before a neoGothic structure with leprous walls and ask, with a startled air: 'Did you hear anything peculiar?' Or when we came to a monkey-puzzle tree: 'Stop! I'm sure I heard a whimper.' Thus our walks in the purlieus of Slough enhanced our sense of the macabre. Behind facades of dingy respectability we were convinced that human toads were staring balefully through stained-glass windows, having cast a spell on the other inmates; retired solicitors were gorging themselves on sausages of freshly minced corpse at high tea. The squalor of Slough assumed the charm of certain paintings by Sickert. Faded wallpapers of puffy brown roses, heavy mahogany furniture, monumental cruets, suggested systematic poisoning and bouts of flagellation. Many an old couple walking home from church seemed incarnations of damned souls; and flowers in window-boxes flowers of evil. But Brian could seldom communicate these fancies in writing: he tried to by means of staccato sentences which were persuasive only when he read them aloud. His voice supplemented the inadequate words, so that having heard them I can recapture their mood. I never shared Brian's admiration for the free verse of Ford Madox Hueffer, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, F. S. Flint and the American Imagists. Perhaps one had to know the writers personally to appreciate them. The only younger poets I admired unreservedly were the Sitwells and T. S. Eliot. Edith Sitwell, in particular, had the

hardness and clarity preached but never practised by Brian's Imagists. Her work was a visual development of Marvell's lines: 'He hangs in shades the orange bright Like golden lamps in a green night.' Technically she had been influenced by the French poets I most venerated, Rimbaud and Verlaine, and then by the Russian Ballet, but always she created a hard clear atmosphere of her own. Her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell had qualities of vivid light and colour entirely lacking in the English verse commended by contemporary critics. Their imagery was all the more bracing after the faded pastels of the Georgians, as effete a gang of poetasters as ever won praise from a misguided public. T. S. Eliot, who had not yet written The Waste Land,~ possessed a French crispness and an Elizabethan spice which immediately set him apart from the emasculate copyists of A. E. Housman. Few shared my opinions at Eron or later at Oxford, where I did more than anyone else to celebrate the achievements of Eliot and the Sitwells. A later generation came round to my point of view. Edith Sitwell had accepted one of Brian's poems for Wheels and her encouragement was extended to myself. But Brian was as nervous of appearing in print under her aegis as many Etonians were of appearing under Brian's-had not Wheels been compared to The Yellow Book?-so Barouches Noires, in which the ghosts of lovers drowned in a lake exchanged hats in black barouches, was published under the pseudonym Charles Orange. Another of Brian's products, entitled 'Nausea', had appeared in The New Age-Sartre's Nausee in parvo: 'The meat is sodden (so is the bread) and unattractive; The greens are colding and give one the vertigo, Or ever the dull spoon digs at them.' Intoned by the author in a flat exhausted voice, it was successfully depressing. Bleak rain, which had 'made repulsive the foods'; the dripping of dirty water from 'the nasty old summer-house with its uncertain roof of dispirited thatch': these were among Brian's favourite images. The plopping of water into a barrel provoked a general hysteria in which 'Mabelle of the waving hands' advanced menacingly out of the foliage. What she did

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with her waving hands was left, with three dots, to the imagination. Brian was more at ease with the grotesque than when he attempted in all sincerity to invoke the young writers and artists killed in the war: 'Anyhow, you were glorious ... And we will do our best to do what you would have done. Oh, we will fight for your ideals-we, who were too young to be murdered with you ... And-we haven't forgotten you! We haven't forgotten!' My own first published poem appeared in The New Witness. (What a plethora of weeklies called themselves new in the 'twenties!) Perhaps because it was but a simple cry of religious emotion, I received letters from various readers telling me how much it had meant to them. To Brian it meant as little as his 'Symbole' to me: 'You are as a sugared fountain, Oh white one! And your pale breath is the soul Of inaudible music .. .' I suspected that this was the symbol of an ice-cream soda counter. The Spectator and other journals also accepted my poems, the thought of which compensated me for being cursed at bayonet practice in the O.T.C. Those poems, written after lock-up or during extra mathematics, were hardly recognizable in print. I re-read them incredulously, flushed and trembling. Yes, print had given them an air of immortality. They could never be taken away from me now: I was more than married to them, an agreeable form of marriage, since one could forget one's mate for months together and rediscover her with the bloom of fresh acquaintance. But my writings could not be otherwise than sporadic under the circumstances. My ambition was to write something more sustained. Ideas for poems came to me at all times, but many fell by the wayside and withered. I wrote a mere fraction of what was fermenting inside me. Never since have I been so full of afflatus: I could have written all day. Doubtless it was due to the surge of adolescence. I was conscious of being a poet m my own right, whatever 100

others might think of me. It was a happiness only marred by the interference of irksome duties. Life is always interrupting Art, and eventually one has to accept that fact. My brother, being a good athlete, was happier. He had abundant physical energy and flung himself with gusto into steeplechases and other sports. His quickness of understanding overrode his patchy education. Everything came to him in flashes, and he lived tumultuously, without inhibitions, in frank enjoyment of all Eton had to offer. Not for him the pleasures of the contemplative life: he was altogether too restless. Whatever he disliked he dismissed as a joke. He was a born painter, inclined to what was explicit and affirmative, but his interests were too copious to concentrate solely on painting. His work was clean and decorative, concerned with the reflection of light, and he ha~ painted still lifes in oils that had already found purchasers. The exhibitions in Mr. Evans's studio aroused a great deal of interest and there were so many competitors for the Gunther Memorial Prize that Mr. Evans invited Roger Fry to judge them. At first there was a tendency to snigger at the gaunt bespectacled figure with the spidery gestures and the mop of grey hair, but as soon as he spoke the boys listened with rapt attention. He opened a long-closed window and let in a gust of ozone. To begin with he remarked how difficult it was to find one's aim in painting. Most people were interested merely in technical skill, by which little or nothing could be achieved. Ideas and clarity of vision were of primary importance: children of six with these gifts would succeed, and adults who lacked them would fail, whatever their technical skill. To those who had not attended the meetings of the Eton Arts Society this sounded revolutionary, and they were astounded when he allotted the prize for still life to Edward James for the most ingenuous painting in the room. Little James blushed scarlet as Roger Fry grew eloquent about the sensitiveness of his drawing and its decorative unity: here was none of that dreadful technical skill which ruined most Academy pictures! As Roger Fry had encouraged discussion there was keen controversy; however puzzled, the boys enjoyed it as he stepped from picture to picture, with thoughtful comments. 'Now that pheasant is praiseworthy. The painter has seen the possibilities of his subject, but by overworking it the thing has become dirty and tired. And this: it's accomplished, I grant you, but too finicky-there's IOI

not enough space in it . . .' Clutton-Brock won the prize for the interior, and Fry remarked with satisfaction that there were few examples of the mud and red plush baronial hall, reminiscent of Christmas numbers. The prize for the scene from Macbeth went to my brother, in whose painting Fry discerned 'fine structural and architectural invention and colour as well as a feeling for scenic effect'. Bakst had admired the same qualities in my brother's work. The tourists flocked to Florence as before the war, not because it was 'the school of virtu and of the purity of the Italian language', but because Florentine society was expansive without being expensive. Night clubs had been opened where people of all ages danced the fox-trot to antiquated tunes, and I frittered away much time at Frosini's, Raiola's and other haunts, dancing and exchanging gossip. Our smaller villas were let to Americans who gave frequent parties. Somerset Maugham often came to stay with another neighbour Colonel Bartlett, and Reggie Turner brought Hugh Walpole, Rebecca West, Max Beerbohm and other celebrities to the villa. They talked of everything but literature and they, too, were fascinated by Florentine gossip, for every other member of the foreign colony had had a purple past. Though the purple had faded, there was a piquancy in knowing that the suave Lord X had had to flee from the London police because he was 'a Greek born out of due time', and that the motherly Mrs. Y had been the power behind a throne. Exambassadors and their wives continued to claim the privileges they had enjoyed in their heyday, and since they invariably took the seat of honour, this complicated the problems of hostesses, especially when an acting ambassador was present. How they clung to their title of 'Excellency'! If they were not placed on their hostess's right, their resentment was heard from the housetops. They must have been drawn to Florence by the knowledge that their pretentions would be respected. Titles roll naturally on the Italian tongue, and almost every foreigner was addressed as Excellency as a matter of course. On an envelope any plain Mister would be dubbed a Sir Most Illustrious, Most Highly Esteemed, Most Worthy or Most Distinguished. Often an exalted military rank was accorded him, or a title of nobility, of which he had never seen the patent. My American uncle Guy Mitchell was entitled to the rank of Commendatore, since 102

it was given to him in recognition of his services to Italy during the war. Unlike the retired ambassadors he was too modest to make use of it. The only change in the foreign community had been caused by the Russian Revolution. With few exceptions our Russian friends were ruined. They faced the catastrophe with their accustomed fatalism; those who had never had any sense of economy were now forced to sell their villas and art collections. The Cossack Countess Rucellai could no longer entertain on a lavish scale. 'But I'm grateful to the Bolsheviks for ruining me,' she said, 'since they have helped me to discover my real friends, those who stuck to me after the debacle.' But the Contessa's gratitude was limited. She loved to tell stories about Bolsheviks 'reduced to vermicelli' by loyal ~ossacks. 'It is a comfort to chat about old times,' she said, 'saddening though they be. Amongst other relatives, I lost t~o nieces in the Revolution. The eldest was stripped and crucified in front of her father's palace, and her younger sister was hung up naked by her feet with her long gold hair falling over a red-hot furnace. As soon as I was told of these atrocities, by a special grace I also heard of an act of divine justice. Some cousins of mine were waiting at the station of Ekatierinodar in the Caucasus, and noticing an unusually long train with a big special saloon, they asked the railway officials about it. "It belongs to Maroussia," they answered proudly, explaining that she was a girl of twentytwo, a wonderful shot. She had distinguished herself by shooting into the eyes of hundreds of officers condemned to death. Just then a troop of Cossacks appeared and dragged the infamous creature off the train. They made short work of her. She was reduced to vermicelli by their swords. Her saloon had all the luxuries of a Paris apartment. This incident reminded me of when my brother was Governor in the South. He used to receive petitioners from ten to twelve in the morning. One day a young man walked in with his cap on. The Cossack who announced him whisked off his cap so briskly that a knot of hair fell with it. It was a woman. The Cossacks searched her and found a neat little bomb, intended for my poor brother. Naturally they asked what was to be done with her. As he wished to avoid a fuss, he answered in a single word: "Annihilate!" Of course she was sliced to slivers. We called the Bolsheviks Nihilists in those days.' 103

The pre-war faithful were to be found every evening in her boudoir, one of the smallest rooms in the Palazzo Rucellai. There, under the glass eyes of her stuffed Pomeranians, the most amusing talk in Florence was to be heard, and when our hostess was launched on her Volga of anecdote I listened enthralled. Now that she was cut off from Russia her thoughts returned nostalgically to former splendours. She described a castle of ice on the frozen Neva, below the Imperial Winter Palace. At night this transparent building was illuminated, and there was skating in its halls and corridors. The dining-hall had a carved ice chimney in which trunks of fir-trees were blazing. The Contessa described cotillons on horseback in the Imperial stables at which the Czar bestowed gifts on each knight and amazon, who bowed with their horses. Then there were hectic parties on the islands facing the Winter Palace on the Neva. After every ball, the guests flew to these islands by troika over the ice, between canyons of snow. Their thief attraction was the gipsy cabarets. You sat at long tables heaped with appetizing dishes, while gipsy beauties in crimson shawls formed a circle with their guitars. The men stood in black uniforms, a fierce wall of protective virility behind their womenfolk; only one held a guitar, and he was the 'tabor', or chieftain of the tribe. When their passionate voices rang out, everybody became demented. Champagne was poured for the musicians and their hands were filled with gold. Under the intoxication of those barbaric melodies the whole of the Diplomatic Corps burst into tears. Sobbing ambassadors would throw handfuls of roubles into the singers' laps. But these tribes were renowned for their domestic virtues. According to Contessa Lysina, you could not mention love to a gipsy woman without marrying her, after which you had to pay heavy damages to the community for the loss of a songstress. Many Russian nobles married gipsies on these terms, but the marriages were seldom successful. A Cossack ancestor of the Contessa's, for instance, had formed the habit of whipping his gipsy wife regularly every night. She lashed back at him with interest in the morning, and in one of these conjugal pow-wows, both rolled into the river for good and all. 'No Europeans have the virility of our Cossacks,' she would add, scrutinizing a tired young man through her lorgnette, 'we can do without sleep. We carouse and make love as long as there is any breath 104

in us. What we call parties you call orgies. You simply can't Jive up to them.' Though she was at least seventy, she set Florentine matrons a good example by whirling into every waltz within earshot. Seeing her marmalade coiffure in the centre of a laughing circle, you could be sure that some fun was brewing. She drew me like a magnet; Her anecdotes were enriched by being related in French with a sonorous Russian accent. Enormities that from other lips would send shivers of shock down your spine had a provocative charm from hers. Unfortunately the Bolsheviks had given her such a scare that she imagined they were ready to pop out on every side of her. Even Reggie Turner had begun to fox-trot, vying with Willie Maugham and his dashing secretary Gerald Ha'tton. At one the-dansant, a tiny French novelist, Monsieur Andre Germain, embarrassed Reggie by seizing his hand and clinging to it while he piped in a shrill octave: 'Ai-je bien l'honneur de parler avec le grand ami d'Oscar Wilde? Monsieur, permettez-moi de vous embrasser.' And before the permission was granted he had kissed him on both cheeks. Reggie was never allowed to slip demurely into middle age. He was continually being embarrassed. One day as he was walking down the Via Tornabuoni, Ronald Firbank, whose mere voice made Reggie wince, rushed upon him from a flower-shop and covered him from head to foot with lilies. Though Firbank led an isolated life, maintaining no more than a jerky acquaintance with a few choice relics of the 'nineties who did not know what to make of him, nobody has conveyed the aroma of Florentine gossip better than he. He endeared himself to the waiters at Betti's by his handsome tips. Having carefully ordered fruit that was out of season, he would sit and contemplate it like an El Greco Saint in ecstasy. Muscat grapes in mid-winter he would dangle against the light, eyeing the clusters caressingly as he sipped glass after glass of wine. At the food he merely picked and jabbed as if it repelled him. Reggie cared as little for Firbank as for his writings. He complained that his laugh made him uncomfortable, and laughter had never made Reggie uncomfortable before. He had courted it all his life. Besides, Firbank sprawled over the furniture and his head was apt to fall on the dinner-table with grisly effect. Reggie infinitely preferred P. G. Wodehouse. But in spite of his efforts to keep up to date he never escaped from the 'nineties altogether. 105

One of the phantoms from his past was Mrs. Ada Leverson, who had been a devoted friend of Wilde before and after his imprisonment. Wilde having christened her the Gilded Sphinx of Golden Memory, she remained 'the Sphinx' to her intimates. Now, as Reggie said, she saw the universe in terms of Sitwell. When she could not see Osbert and Sacheverell, she fell back on Reggie. For her Florence had the advantage of being near to Montegufoni, a huge villa which had been purchased by Sir George, the father of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell. Mrs. Leverson. 'tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky' on the subject of the fascinating trio. In their absence, it was a comfort to be near Sir George-not that Sir George reciprocated her sentiments in any way. As the Sphinx was staying alone at a dismal hotel, Reggie felt obliged to spend part of every day with her. But he began to grumble about her Sitwell obsession; she could talk of little else, and Reggie had not been cast for the role of listener. Try as he might to deflect her from this all-engrossing trail, the Sphinx would swerve straight back to it. Reggie blinked in exasperation as he described these sessions. He appealed to me: 'Look here, my boy, I've heard enough about the Sitwells. As you admire them, you had better meet her.' I found a torso under a large low hat, muffled up to the neck in a cloak, huddled before a glass of vermouth at Casone's. She extended a tiny hand. The Sphinx muttered a few indistinct words of welcome and immediately asked me if I knew the 'Sitwell boys'. I replied that I all but knew them. She smiled serenely, closing her eyes, and said that she hoped they would soon be in Florence. She had just received a letter from Osbert and dived into the depths of a shapeless bag for it. An expression of anguish crossed her face as she rummaged, fishing out a comb, a lipstick, a cracked mirror and various feminine oddments which she dropped with a clatter on the marble-topped table. 'Don't tell me I've lost it!' she wailed. After further rummaging she found a crumpled envelope and handed it to me with a triumphant chuckle. 'That's from the dear boy.' It proved to be empty. 'No letter inside! This is dreadful.' The search began again. At last, entangled in a green crepe de Chine kerchief, the loose fragments of a letter fell out, much stained with rouge and inks pots. 'You see,' she said to Reggie as if he had contradicted her, 'he sends me his love. And he may be here

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on Tuesday. Dear Osbert! What Heaven it will be to see them all again.' But in the meantime I had to return to Eton. As soon as I left Florence the people I had looked forward to meeting would arrive. Osbert and Sacheverell were wintering at Amalfi, for they preferred the less-exploited South, which offered themes better attuned to their taste for the Baroque. In Florence there was a plethora of writers, and you were bound to meet them in the Via Tornabuoni; D. H. Lawrence with his Rubens frau and his string bag after marketing; Norman Douglas chewing the cud of a Toscano; Ronald Firbank capering into a flower-shop; Aldous Huxley who maintained that in Florence 'every prospect pleases, but only man is vile'; Scott-Moncrieff, who kept up a doggerel offensive against the Sitwells in The New Witness: dining at Betti's, scandal-mongering in Orioli's bookshop, drink1ng vermouth at Casone's, there was no avoiding one of~these in the city, but Sir George's fortress-villa at Montegufoni was a considerable distance away, on the high road to Volterra, and one could easily lose oneself in that maze of buildings. The powerful Acciajoli had built it in the fourteenth century, and successive generations had left their mark on various parts of it, so that while a mediaeval watch-tower resembling that of the Palazzo Vecchio rose severely from its navel, the front was seventeenth-century Tuscan baroque with a clock in its forehead. A great stone staircase led to a shell grotto, but the place had long been occupied by families of indifferent peasants. Sir George had decided to restore its pristine splendour. Only one room betrayed Osbert's and Sachie's propensities, a small 'den' frescoed by Gino Severini with figures from the Commedia dell' Arte. Sitting beside the Sphinx, I observed that her profile resembled that of Sarah Bernhardt as depicted by Bastien-Lepage. She purred when I told her so. Her eyes had a naughty nautical focus. She seemed to be scanning a distant horizon for a glimpse of the Sitwells. She paid little attention to Reggie's badinage, perhaps because she was deaf, though she refused to acknowledge her deafness and looked annoyed if one shouted. When the Sphinx rose, she was half the height one had expected; she gave the impression of walking on her knees. At Eton it was snowing, and we were spared early school by an epidemic of 'flu. I entered my name for Responsions in March, and persuaded my parents to let me leave Eron whether 107

I passed or failed. I was now eighteen, and in a house so preoccupied with athletics I felt I was wasting my time. My last half was enlivened by the production of The Eton Candle, which was largely the joint enterprise of Brian and myself. My brother had done some posters to herald the magazine as if it were the Russian Ballet. The finest of these, a lady in yellow with long gold fingernails, was rejected by Brian, as he said it was too like a cover for Vogue. The Eton Candle, which our enemies called The Eton Scandal, was sold out on the day of publication. The reviews were very flattering. It was natural that we should pay most attention to Edith Sitwell's and, according to her, we augured well for the next generation of English writers. 'Here,' she wrote, 'we find none of the wrong ideals of false simplicity which disfigure a certain section of the older generation, and very little of the "eighteen-ninety" taint of affectedness which is so often to be found in young writers. Mr. Howard,' she continued after a sympathetic analysis of the contents, 'has a real sense of form ... and if he does not succumb to his own natural facility, he has a very distinguished career ahead of him. That is my convinced opinion. . Another young poet of promise is Harold Acton. I like the lines in his Coiffeur Choregraphique which run: "Till down upon my head Niagara Falls Descend with all the heat of music halls." But his prose seems to me to show even more achievement than his verse. "In the summer, during the long hot mornings when the sunshine spots would dance little gavottes . . . " Is not that charming?' In the same review, Miss Sitwell drew attention to the poems in Public School Verse of Peter Quennell, 'a young poet of the most extraordinary promise'. The Eton Chronicle admitted, somewhat grudgingly: 'If we hoped for something more new and exciting it was scarcely to be expected when nothing like it has ever before been done at Eton. Those who think Howard is a charlatan, or The Eton Candle a great joke, are, we are certain, quite wrong.' As for me, I was 'often a real poet' and showed 'a real command of metre and rhyme'. It would be insincere to deny that these 108

first reviews fell like manna. I longed for opportumt1es to write more, and the medium I thought of was poetry, never prose. One sequel to The Eton Candle was an appreciative letter from Mr. Thomas Balston of Duckworth's, which led to the publication of Aquarium, my first book of poems. Though Responsions meant sitting over examination papers from nine-thirty to twelve and from two to seven, my visit to Oxford was like a holiday. The weather remained cold, but everything else was warming. Christ Church was love at first sight. For once I was treated as an intelligent adult. Mr. Dundas, the Senior Censor, was sympathetic and hospitable, with a clear-eyed humorous Scottish twinkle and a reserved clipped speech with classical innuendoes. He was both Pagan scholar and Presbyterian squire, and he could be rug~ed and polished simultaneously. I was within a stone's thr9w of Italian primitives, which were related to several in my father's collection. And in the Ashmolean there was a Paolo Uccello of singular beauty representing a stag-hunt in a forest. The vermilion huntsmen lit up the deep green foliage like running tongues of flame. It thrilled me to approach this scene from the opalescent mist of Oxford. There was a moving Baptism of Christ by Giovanni di Paolo and a triptych of Cimabue's school-in short, as I wandered through the building I met many old friends from Florence and Siena. Billy Clonmore dined and wined me at the Carlton Club, and I left for my last fortnight of Eton in a buoyant mood. Within a few days I heard that I had passed. I gave a farewell tea-party at which more port wine than tea was consumed and our metaphors effervesced in extravagant speeches of mutual admiration. We were all geniuses for half an hour or so. My sole ambition was to write poetry and more poetry. I was blind to the fact that in England the poet had scant chance of survival: his power and his glory were over. My belief in my vocation was pathetic: I was deaf to reason; I would not compromise. My parents would have liked me to enter the diplomatic service, but in spite of the argument that some diplomats had found leisure for writing-was not our ambassador Sir Rennell Rodd a poet?-! was too obstinate to be persuaded. Later I realized that my parents had been right. Apart from my gift of tongues, I would have made an ideal ambassador. 109

Italy was agitated by post-war labour troubles and the weak government had lost control. Trains were held up by Communists; there was an epidemic of strikes; hand grenades exploded in the streets of Florence; one began to see troops of blackshirts and hear the inane 'Giovinezza'. The dandies of the Via Tornabuoni swaggered along in an astonishing variety of improvised uniforms. The profile of Mussolini began to inflict itself on many an innocent wall. The average Italian had always been historically minded. He was proud of Italy's past and resigned about her present. The peninsula had never been really unified: a Piemontese official sent to the south regarded himself as exiled to the Colonies. Unity remained a rhetorical ideal. 'In some dim way,' as a former British Consul at Leghorn had written, 'the Tuscan believed that the Englishman contributed vitally to that Union of Italy which he believed, still more dimly, had in some way contributed to his good.' Now there was a perceptible change. This belief in the Englishman's contribution to Italy vanished, and pride curdled into arrogance. Service was less willing; and the old type of domestic, who considered himself a member of the family, was dying out. Anarchy on the one hand, Fascism on the other, had sown poisonous seeds in the minds of these amiable people, seeds beginning to sprout in insolence and distrust. As foreigners we kept aloof. My father continued to improve the garden and his collection of paintings, undisturbed. But one heard ugly tales of repression and persecution and there was a new tendency to lower one's voice when politics were discussed: Mussolini was referred to as Mr. Smith or Brown. Spy-mania became endemic. The sweet bells of Florence rang out, yet for once I was not loath to return to England. On arriving at Oxford for matriculation in May, I felt I had left one capital of romance for another. The change of valley was the more exciting because here youth reigned, instead of age; and I was more interested in dreaming youth than in dreaming spires. Oxford was still full of the demobilized who were making up for time lost in the army, and had not yet sloughed their military skins. Was it for this reason that the small clique preoccupied with the arts felt they had to distinguish themselves by long hair and chintz neckties? Lunching with Billy Clonmore, I met what he described as IIO

'an aesthete' and was disconcerted. A pressed fern from the pages of the Yellow Book, his disjointed fragments of drawled conversation were as dull as his jaundiced eyes. Had he taken an active interest in the 'nineties, I might have excused his jaded mannerisms. But what interest he could muster in life was limited to his sickly appearance. Sensing my indifference, if not my antipathy, he showed me, in an offhand conceited way, some etchings he had picked up in Vienna. They were timidly prurient, meretriciously art-and-crafty. My gorge rose, my indignation whetted by the creature's pretension to taste, and I was goaded to crude rudeness. 'Your etchings are the messes of a miserable masturbator,' I told him. There was already sufficient prejudice against art in England, and I feared that this type-for he was a type-was darvaging a cause I cherished. He was sterile to the core. His long hair and his ebony cane only stressed his lack of personality. If others could not bear the sight of him-which was evident as we were walking down the Broad-neither could I. Better the moustache stained with nicotine! Billy said he wasn't such a bad soul. 'I wouldn't mind so much,' I expostulated, 'if he were a bad soul, if he had anything so positive as a vice.' I left Billy's luncheon bursting with resolutions. I made up my mind that if that eunuch represented Oxford aestheticism something would have to be done about it soon. Now that the war was over, those who loved beauty had a mission, many missions. We should combat ugliness; we should create clarity where there was confusion; we should overcome mass indifference; and we should exterminate false prophets. Since reading Aldous Huxley's poems at Eton, I had read Leda, Limbo and Crome Yellow with increased enjoyment: I had even dared to disagree with Rebecca West, who had written of Crome Yellow that his talent, 'brilliant but narrow-chested, had exhausted itself in comments on the more trivial aspects of the contemporary world'. Like Peacock and Anatole France, Aldous Huxley argued through the mouths of marionettes in a country house, and the argument was seldom dull. Mr. Wimbush, Mr. Scogan, Mr. Barbecue-Smith, were easily recognizable, like the roles of the Commedia dell' Arte, and the country house was reputed to be Garsington Manor. I had met the lady of Garsington in Florence, a tall preIII

Raphaelite figure in indigo with russet locks, to whom Rossetti might have written canzonets. But instead of Rossetti, the stars that glowed upon Lady Ottoline Morrell were D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell and the satellites of Roger Fry. Garsington had been the haven of literary conscientious objectors during the war. An Italian gate and avenue of ilexes led up to the house, an Elizabethan structure in stone which had once been a monastery. Behind it a bank sloped down to a pond with a sculptured group in the middle and statues along the side. The house and garden had Italianate distinction, and on being invited to tea there I was instantly reminded of Crome Yellow. Lytton Strachey was standing beside the hostess, dressed, for all her high stature, in a Kate Greenaway costume of heliotrope silk with white stockings, and I thought: What a fabulous couple! They should be painted together, hand in hand, like Van Eyke's portrait of John Arnolfini and his wife in the National Gallery. Lytton Strachey's beard and Lady Ottoline's hair seemed to have caught fire from the afternoon sun. Lytton's tortoise-rimmed spectacles enhanced his air of a magnificent owl, gentle and wise yet perplexed when one addressed him. I wished I were a Reinhardt to persuade them to act Macbeth, if only to hear Lady Ottoline hiss at Lytton: 'Give me the daggers!' So startling was her resemblance to Lady Macbeth as the afternoon wore on, that I grew a little nervous. Apropos of nothing in particular, she observed in a tone of menace: 'I'm sure Mr. Acton is an admirer of Belloc.' As all the guests were familiar with each other-I was not yet an undergraduate like David Cecil and 'Puffin' Asquith, and a freshman only in the sense that I was eighteen with nothing stale about me and new poems in my pocket-I was left to shift, a l'anglaise, to my own devices. While Princess Bibesco appeared to be charging somebody like the Light Brigade, I crept indoors to examine the pictures by Conder, Pryde, Henry Lamb and Augustus John. John had done scant justice to the beauty of Marchesa Casati, but in Lady Ottoline he had found a model after his own Romany heart. The scarlet drawing-room glowed with Chinese paintings on glass. Hardly had I walked into it when the others followed, as if it had started to rain. Mr. Morrell, Lady Ottoline's husband, wore riding-breeches-I forget if he carried a whip. He looked like a country squire with poetic leanings, since his hair was II2

long and he had a flowing tie. To my surprise he seated himself at a pianola and peddled away at a version of Scheherazade. To me this was one of the most memorable of Diaghileff's ballets: the heavy calm before the storm in the harem: the thunder and lightning of negroes in rose and amber; the fierce orgy of clamorous caresses; the final panic and bloody retribution: death in long-drawn spasms to piercing violins. RimskyKorsakoff had painted the tragedy; Bakst had hung it with emerald curtains and silver lamps and carpeted it with rugs from Bokhara and silken cushions; Nijinsky and Karsavina had made it live. For many a young artist Sheherazade had been an inspiration equivalent to Gothic architecture for the Romantics or Quattrocento frescoes for the pre-Raphaelites. But 1 now I put my hands to my ears and fled, as discreetly as I could. The pianola may have its virtues, but none were apparent in this excruciating travesty. My afternoon was spoiled. I walked the six miles back to Oxford in a rage. Lady Ottoline must have remembered this against me, for on a future occasion when somebody offered me a lift in his car, she tried to dissuade him with the assurance that: 'Mr. Acton prefers to hike.' Once the pianola was forgotten, I recalled fragments of a jigsaw puzzle that titivated my curiosity. Lady Ottoline and Lytton Strachey aureoled against the terrace, like two early saints in a window of Chartres Cathedral-this rare composition had been worth the trudge. The air and the tone of this quaint small polity had been utterly new to me, escaping definition, something, at any rate, that struck me as peculiarly English. My third lingering memory of that Oxford visit, is of dining at High Table in Christ Church Hall with Mr. Dundas. Apart from the excellent simple fare, the conversation had an aroma of ripe scholarship, of the Humanities, removing one to the Augustan Age. Learning was no hindrance to living richly if not dangerously. Conversation could take any turn without tumbling into banality. Mr. Masterman, a champion tennis-player, was as expert in serving crisp apophthegms across a net of amusing sophistries. Professor Lindemann (now Lord Cherwell) maintained the tradition of Machiavelli. Had he also, I wondered, a 'Mandragola' up his sleeve? The Dean bore a superficial resemblance to Tenniel's Mad Hatter; which led me to ruminate on Lewis Carroll. If High Table were as amusing in his day, he rr3

did not have to go far for inspiration. . . . But he was said to have been a melancholy mathematician who could only expand in the society of little girls like his own Alice. Nearby, sipping champagne from a tankard in a pregnant silence as on some lonely Grecian isle, was the pale and pensive Professor Beazley, the fount of all our knowledge of Greek vases. I was charmed by the general courtesy of phrases and attitudes. What a fallacy that the victor in the academic lists is frustrated and impotent on the battlefield of life! In an emergency it was to men like Professor Lindemann that the politicians turned. Instead of dozing over the debris of dinner there was a recuperative intermission which one wished were imitated by other hosts. You pick up your napkin and proceed to the Senior Common Room, a more intimate chamber, there to replenish your ideas with port or madeira, accompanied by fruit and nuts and, if necessary, clear the brain with pinches of snuff. Instead of returning to Eton, where the years of my youth had left only the sediment of a few poems behind them, I went to attend courses in French and German at Strasbourg University. My good friend Roger Spence was already there. Until I found lodgings, I stayed at the Maison Rouge, revelling in the pink foie-gras and the amber Alsatian wines. The storks perched above the chimney-pots, the massive black head-dresses of the massive uncorseted women, the tinkling dog-carts, the flowermarket, had remained quite faithful to Hansi's picture-books. The Cathedral was signed Ruskin all over, and I thought it fussy but harmless until a woman came hurtling down from the spire and crashed not far from my feet. After that the spire seemed rather sinister. In the evenings I sat on the terrace of the Orangerie, listening to such music as Berlioz's Overture to Benvenuto Cellini, Chabrier's 'Bourree Fantasque' and Charpentier's 'Napoli', in a setting of foliage lit by electric bulbs while my bock grew tepid and mosquitoes nipped my ankles. The blowsy women in freckled muslin and the fair fat bearded men had often been painted by Renoir. So well did the musical programmes suit the setting, that I betook myself there every evening, regardless of mosquitoes, to write my 'Conversazione of Musical Instruments', which was to create a furore when I recited it at Oxford. I found lodgings on Quai Dietrich with the buxom French widow of a Russian officer. The only other lodger was a JapII4

anese lieutenant who was studying military tactics. As he enjoyed the favours of the buxom widow I used to call him Lieutenant Butterfly. 'Your story is Puccini's opera the other way round,' I said. He giggled without conviction. 'I have a wife and children at home,' he told me, 'and several sweethearts as well.' In his homesick moods he boasted about the superior amenities of life in Nippon. These moods coincided with hangovers. 'With French officers one is forced to drink,' he complained. 'When they are drunk they tell me all their secrets. If it were good sake I wouldn't have such headaches afterwards. But their headaches are worse than mine.' And he giggled so merrily that I asked him what he meant. Why were their headaches worse? 'As soon as I come home I tickle my throat with a feather. So I only have a tiny headache while they 1 have a headache as big as a balloon. Madame gets angry because she has to clean up the mess. But that is what women are for, isn't it so? Then I can go off to manreuvres with a clear head.' While he was absent on these manreuvres Madame would hover sociably outside my bedroom, but I excused myself from engagements on the score of work to prepare, the 'work' being Proust's latest volumes, Sodome et Gomorrhe. The bedroom in which I read and wrote with the fever of one trying to catch time by the forelock, overlooked a crowded, echoing courtyard. As it was summer, everybody gravitated towards the open windows. People in various stages of undress leaned on their ledges like blessed damosels, and exchanged remarks from one floor to another; canaries twittered; geraniums were watered; the apprentices of a bakery mooned like Pierrots powdered with flour, and an aged satyr exposed himself so persistently and with such simian grimaces and beckonings that the police had to interfere in the interests of a fictitious modesty. I could have written a romance about the diversity of life in that courtyard-I may do so yet-in the meantime I was too preoccupied with my poems and with questions of style. When the lights were turned on in the dusk, the courtyard glowed with the charm of a living theatre. For me this was a prolific period: I tried to write French as well as English, and I read more French literature than I had ever read at school. And every evening I listened to French music in the Orangerie. rr5

From the courtyard at Quai Dietrich to the communism de luxe of the Palace Hotel, St. Moritz, was a contrast of the kind that explains my work. Here the dominating figure was Sir Hall Caine, the author of several extremely pretentious bestsellers. Sir Hall was the popular conception of a Great English Novelist personified; never relaxing, seldom smiling, and always on exhibition. Seeing his black sombrero and cloak in the cobbled streets one was reminded of a vanished school of actors. And when the sombrero was doffed there was Shakespeare's lofty brow, furrowed in philosophic thought. So often had he asked the hotel orchestra to play Handel's Largo, that they played it automatically as soon as he entered the lounge-an entrance perfectly timed, deliberate and majestic with a pause on the threshold, so that we had the opportunity to observe: here comes a genius, or something very like one. Handel's Largo had become his 'signature tune'. How far, I wondered, was he his own dupe? At moments he seemed Malvolio, at others an old Landseer lion. He had been a friend of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in his youth; perhaps that accounted for it. He told me that they had been a lifelong inspiration. I was avid for anecdotes, but he spoke in oracular generalizations. I learnt nothing new about Rossetti from him. The lofty manner descended like a cloud upon his words; all the inspiration he spoke of seemed to have gone into his cloak and sombrero. Cackling across the room was a writer of a very different sort, the most prolific of Neapolitan novelist-journalists, Matilde Serao, whose All 'Erta Sentinella and II Paese di Cuccagna are as fresh and graphic to-day as when they were written half a century ago. The poor of Naples are just as poor, if not poorer, and just as superstitious. I doubt if Hall Caine ever wrote a story as fine as, say, 'Terno Secco' in All 'Erta Sentinella. Nobody has left so masterly a description of the miracle of San Gennaro as Matilde Serao in II Paese di Cuccagna: how well she evokes the clamour against the saint because the miracle of the liquefaction of his blood is too slow to materialize: 'Faccia verde! Faccia gialluta! Santo malamente! Fa ii miracolo! San Gennaro, faccia d'oro, non ci fa aspettare piu!' ('Green face! Jaundice face! Saint by subterfuge! Do the miracle! Saint Januarius, face of gold, don't keep us waiting any longer!') Stout, strident and slatternly, gesticulating as in a crowd at

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Santa Lucia, she sat in a black bunch arguing against the pseudoclassical medlies of the orchestra with her friend and colleague Scarfoglio; from her expression the argument was more entertaining than Sir Hall Caine's obiter dicta. After dinner he often joined Princess Karageorgevitch's party in which we were included. The Princess had published a booklet about her war experiences in Serbia and was interested in questions of literary style. And I remember Sir Hall telling her, in his oracular way: 'The style is the man-or the woman.' Charles Loeser appeared in St. Moritz for a day or two, but away from Florence he gasped like a fish out of water. He found mountains sorry substitutes for towers-towers were a necessity to him-and he complained that in the Engadine there was nothing to look at. The whole landscape had come out 9f a box of toys. Soon tiring of any soil in which I may take no root, I too was impatient to return to Florence for the vintage. Nothing is so monotonous as existence in an hotel where everybody is on parade. Most people spend their time dressing and undressingfor tennis, for golf, for an afternoon walk, as many changes of costume as for a Christmas pantomime. It amused me to see the masses of luggage piled in the little station, the mountains of Revelation and Vuitton trunks it was necessary to take to the mountains. The simple life had to be fastidiously apparelled. Motoring back to Florence through so many little towns whose activities had scarcely changed since the eighteenth century, compact polities of traditional ideas, where architecture flowers in unexpected side-streets, in a baroque portico or a painted fai;:ade; where immaculate officers suck sunset-coloured beverages through straws in the open cafes and beggars sprawl on the steps of official buildings, I should have liked to linger in each of them. Everywhere were baroque or renaissance villas crumbling to decay: in my reveries I restored them and filled them with charming friends. Each town was a separate opera. To enter Tuscany in September is to enter Arcadia. The countryside is dedicated to the vine, and the city is half asleep, the palaces empty. The clients of Doney's have gone to Viareggio or Forte dei Mar mi. I welcomed this serenity before the adventure of Oxford.

VI MOST freshmen at 'The House' coveted rooms in Tom Quad, Peckwater or Canterbury, but a room with a balcony overlooking Christ Church Meadow appealed more to me. Externally, Meadow Buildings are grimly Victorian Gothic and internally they are sombre, but I painted my rooms lemon yellow and filled them with Victorian bric-a-brae-artificial flowers and fruit and lumps of glass, a collection of paperweights imprisoning bubbles that never broke and flowers that never faded. Back to mahogany was my battle-cry. The war had severed us from the eighteen-nineties, and it was puerile now to cultivate a preference for rouge to roses, to prolong the languors of a period that had culminated in foolish destruction. Down with the followers of Bunthorne! Elsewhere the poet and the artist were widening their fields of observation, but the contents of 'Oxford Poetry' were indistinguishable from those of 'Georgian Poetry', and the same yokelish themes and images recurred ad nauseam. I was determined to clear the ground of linnetinfested thickets, to crush chalcedonies and chrysoprases, to devastate the descendants of Enoch Soames (who had exchanged ale for absinthe but were radically unaltered despite their pastoral patter) with mockery and, if need be, with violence. The eighteen-nineties, which I could appreciate for their own sake and as a distant phase, became intolerable when I beheld them on every side of me as a faint but flickering tradition. The despised Early Victorians seemed to offer one solution. The Early Victorian Era, trying to recover from the Napoleonic War, was closer to us than the 'nineties, that 'Twilight of the Gods' succeeded by the Age of Muddle. We wanted Dawns, not Twilights. We must blow the bugles and beat the drums and wake the Sleeping Beauty. As an outward manifestation of my attitude I filled my rooms with Early Victorian objects, I bought a grey bowler, wore a

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stock and let my side-whiskers flourish. Instead of the waspwaisted suits with pagoda shoulders and tight trousers affected by the dandies, I wore jackets with broad lapels and broad pleated trousers. The latter got broader and broader. Eventually they were imitated elsewhere and were generally referred to as 'Oxford bags'. Robert Byron, who had attacked me at Eton, now found himself in sympathy with me. He was a greater enthusiast than I, for he believed that never had Britain been more resplendent than between 1846 and 1865. The vision of a 'largelimbed, high-coloured Victorian England, seated in honour and plenty' was constantly before him. But there was no necessity for us to be solemn in order to be serious. We made humour one of our symbols. I had started sweeping away fin-de-siecle cobwebs with a paper called The Oxford Broom. Alfred Nicholson, a 1 Quaker relative of Mrs. Bernard Berenson, assisted me; he being American and I half-American, we swept in happy harmony together, gathering fresh energy with every sweep. Whatever might be said against our contributions, nobody could complain that they lacked vigour. Our editorials assailed the prevalent insipidities. If few people cared for them, everybody read them. The type and format were bold, without any taint of preciosity. I have not re-read those pages, which did not pretend to be other than ephemeral and act as a dose of salts. The pseudo-aesthetes writhed among their willow-pattern teacups, and hastened to change their wardrobes. Aquarium, my first volume of poems, was published during my second term, and its red, black and yellow striped cover met me everywhere like a challenge. For a book of poems it had a prompt success. Since I was free from false modesty, as from everything false, and possessed a resonant voice, I never faltered when I was asked to read them, but shouted them lustily down a megaphone. Nor would I tolerate interruptions. The megaphone could also be brandished as a weapon. How many copies of Aquarium did I autograph with tender dedications! Where are they now, those witnesses of youthful passion? I think I know the answer. Not long ago I came across a copy in Charing Cross Road and purchased it-for threepence. Sic transit gloria . . . At least it had been well-thumbed and nicely battered. The fly-leaf was torn out. Had it compromised the owner? My thoughts returned to the bygone 119

loves to whom I had given copies, to blue eyes, green eyes, eyes like black diamonds, to gentle struggles and showers of burning kisses. Could this have belonged to--? Perish the notion! Some of my inscriptions would have been embarrassing to explain. Nearly all my loves are married, and parents of children I have no desire to meet. Why distress the tranquil vegetation of middle-aged Darbies and Joans? No home-breaker I, no cuckoo in other nests. I culled the premices, and it is a subtle satisfaction, even in retrospect, to have kindled flames in Elgin marble breasts. After many years, the breasts pretend to forget . . . Do they remember our ecstasies on the Thames and at Thame? Do they remember the poems they inspired? Let them blush as they read these words in their nuptial couches: I have not forgotten a single kiss. At the same time let them rest assured that with age I have learnt discretion. Aquarium may su vive, here and there, as a valentine of 1923. But when it was published James Stephens wrote to me: 'This is great verse-seen, heard, imagined, dug-at and done.' These words from a poet who was personally unknown to me, gave me more pleasure than all the other excellent reviews combined. In some ways Aquarium was in advance of its period, and for all its immaturities I have no cause to regret it. My poems made many friends. I was prolific and none too critical, and scattered them on the Oxford breezes. I read them from my balcony to groups in Christ Church meadow. They were always in demand. Certainly, looking back, they have had their day. Literary clubs and societies throve at Oxford as in Florence during the seventeenth century, and at first I was drawn to them like a moth. I fluttered my wings at the Italian Circle, the Spanish Society, the Ordinary, which invited me to read papers and join their discussions, and there were dining clubs as well. I read papers on El Greco, on Medicean Villas, and listened to poets, critics and learned professors who favoured us with visits. At 'The Ordinary' the members recited their own compositions. So nervous was each when his turn came that the process was more of a pain than a pleasure. How unlike the young poets of Italy or France! Here was ample opportunity to give each line its proper expression and each word its value: surely nobody could interpret a poem so well as its author. Yet nobody seized it. The poems were read in a self-deprecatory manner, amid stammerings and blushes. This irritated me at the time, but in 120

retrospect I am touched by their shyness, so English, so free from conceit. It gave their readings a vibrant sincerity. Minutes, often wittily worded, would be read at every meeting, then followed the few words to introduce the guest-speaker, and no matter how dull the address, some phrase of it would be seized on and given a thorough shake-up. Dullness begot brilliance as often as did brilliance itself. In too bright a blaze of intellect comment withers. A commonplace paper, for instance, on the subject of Tennyson, could kindle a livelier discussion than more explosive matter. Some one has said that to attempt a definition of poetry a man must have great leisure, or be very youthful. Being very youthful, as well as leisurely, we attempted a thousand definitions. The intangible of fantasy, which the Sitwells translated into such musical forms, appealed to my temperament most. create a world of the imagination did not necessarily mean ~to turn one's back on actuality. I could never agree that fantasy was a betrayal of art or that it meant shirking contact with the world. The conquest of poetic fact is more likely to come through fantasy than through other means. Hardly anyone then at Oxford shared my admiration for the Sitwells, and T. S. Eliot was only respected for his criticism in 'The Sacred Wood': his 'Prufrock' was not taken seriously. Housman, the early Yeats and de la Mare were the poets most generally admired and imitated. Had Rimbaud been known in England, we should have been spared Georgian Poetry. It was as hard for new voices to obtain an audition as it was easy ten years later. True, Robert Bridges had judged the moment propitious for ushering in the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins on a patronizing note of apology. Richard Hughes and Robert Graves had just graduated, in an aura of breezy promise. Graves still had a foot in Oxford, having settled at Islip with his wife, after living at Boar's Hill. L. A. G. Strong, a devotee of Synge and the Irish school, was teaching in the neighbourhood. The influence of Messrs. Hughes and Graves was paramount at the Hypocrites Club when I joined it. Skelton was their chosen laureate. This may have been due to Robert Graves, who felt that he had a special affinity with Skelton. Whenever he wanted a title for a new book he found it among Skelton's poems, and he had decided to live in Islip because it was associated with an abbot who had befriended that poet.

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The Hypocrites Club was so called because its motto was lipun:ov µi:v Mop-the Greek for 'water is best'. The language of its members was defiantly bawdy; their aspect somewhat aggressive. A rugged set they appeared at first sight and, to me, exotic. Doubtless the compliment was returned with interest. But the ruggedness was an externality: it went no further than unshaven chins and beer-stained corduroys. Beneath a scowling fa