The Pursuit of Laughter (5 page)

When W.F. Deedes was not yet Lord Deedes, the doyen of Fleet Street, when he was Mr Deedes, aged 22, he was sent by his paper,
The Morning Post
, to cover the war in Abyssinia. Advised about what equipment he would need in that faraway country, of which he knew
nothing, by enthusiastic shops such as Austin Reed and the Army and Navy Stores, he bought so many things that his luggage weighed a quarter of a ton. Everything was paid for by
The Morning Post
.

He travelled by train to Marseilles and then by sea in a French boat to East Africa. The Suez Canal was full of Italian ships conveying soldiers to fight and conquer Abyssinia. Deedes took the train from the coast to Addis Ababa, a train reminiscent of English trains today, rather uncertain as to timetable.

He experienced all the usual frustrations of life in a Third World country, but, with his mountain of luggage, he arrived at his destination.

Needless to say, the place was full of journalists, falling over each other to use the primitive means of communication to provide their newspapers with news, but there never was any news. They were not allowed to leave Addis Ababa to go to ‘the front’ and see some fighting, and were far from sure there was any fighting.

The Italians dropped a few bombs here and there, destroyed a few ramshackle houses and killed a few people. The League of Nations was outraged; everybody was outraged.

There are many parallels with the recent Iraq war; the UN was outraged, millions of people took to the streets in protest in England, France, Germany and Italy, but the Americans, like the Italians in 1935, paid no attention to public opinion and quickly and easily won the war.

The Italians wanted Abyssinia for no particular reason. Unlike Iraq, it was not oil-rich, the Emperor Haile Selassie, the Lion of Judah, went into exile.

I believe he lived at Bath. After the Second World War he was sent back to Addis Ababa, where he was murdered and buried in a deep hole under his bathroom.

The hole was covered in concrete, but eventually his body was recovered, and who should go to his ceremonial-burial but Lord Deedes, who seems to love going to Abyssinia. We may be sure none of his visits was quite as enjoyable as his first.

Among the journalists when Deedes was 22 was Evelyn Waugh, aged 32.

He was, at that time, the most perfect companion imaginable. Lord Deedes says he was a real help, as an old Africa hand, and praises his efficiency, although he missed the one and only scoop by being away when it was achieved.

He doesn’t mention the scintillating wit, the wonderfully original point of view of the Evelyn Waugh of those days. He detects the monster, but not, seemingly, the genius.

If, however, his small book about the adversities of being a reporter with nothing much to report sends people back to Evelyn Waugh’s novel,
Scoop
, it will have been well worth writing, because
Scoop
is one of the best novels of the twentieth century.

Deedes says he has been identified with Boot, the Candide-like hero of
Scoop
, but that all they had in common was mountains of luggage. He is surely right about this.

At War with Waugh: The Real Story of Scoop,
Deedes, W.F.
Evening Standard
(2003)

When I met Harold Acton in 1928, I was 18 and he 24. His fame among our generation was already great; at Oxford he had been the undisputed leader of the cleverest
undergraduates
, a well-known apparition disapproved by many, with side-whiskers and huge trousers. A self-proclaimed aesthete, he defended his attitude with clever, malicious wit, as well as the exquisite courtesy which characterized him all his life.

By 1928 there was no longer sartorial oddity, he was tall and dark and soberly dressed, wearing a wide-brimmed black hat. We were guests of John Sutro at a little restaurant near the Strand, Rules. John Sutro brought out the fantastic best in Harold, we talked and laughed for hours. Harold was the cleverest, wittiest, most outrageous person on earth in those days. His voice, his accent, never changed. They made even quite ordinary
observations
seem unusual, and his wicked malice irresistibly funny. We never stopped laughing when Harold was there, and perhaps such an appreciative audience encouraged him to perform.

At that time he and his brother William had taken a large house in Lancaster Gate; William wanted to deal in furniture, and as his taste ran to vast rococo objects the house had to be big in order to display his wares. Harold was busy writing
The Last Medici
. He had also written a novel.

William was a dreadful worry to Harold. At Christ Church, having swallowed some drug, he had fallen out of a window in Peckwater Quad, hurting himself badly. His
parents
’ favourite, they ordered Harold to look after him, which he was quite unable to do. The Actons lived at La Pietra near Florence; very fond of his mother, Harold heartily
disliked
his father.

My brother Tom loved Harold as much as I did; they had not coincided at Eton, but as they disliked games both had been wet-bobs there, which meant that a boy could spend his summer afternoons on the river, reading or flirting and pretending to row. Harold told us that his little boat had inadvertently been swept over the weir, ‘and my whiff was
shattered
to atoms’. Tom loved hearing this over and over again. ‘What happened to your whiff, Harold?’ ‘My deear, it was shuttered to uttoms’, said Harold.

He often dined with us, and sometimes a fellow guest was Lytton Strachey, who wrote to Carrington (28 May 1930): ‘Once more Harold Acton figured—I felt myself falling under his sway little by little.’ Nearly everyone fell under his sway.

Harold was the only person who succeeded in being friends with Nancy Cunard without forfeiting the friendship of her mother, Emerald. Nancy and her black lover were often to be seen at Lancaster Gate when visiting London, but if Emerald knew of it she never allowed it to affect relations with Harold, an ornament of her luncheons at Grosvenor Square. As a rule she waited until her guests were assembled before rushing in herself, but one day we were all, including Emerald, waiting for a late comer. When
David Cecil was shown into a room where perhaps a dozen people were chatting, there was a moment’s silence while he crept awkwardly towards his hostess, broken by Harold’s slowly enunciated words: ‘The Stricken Deer’. David Cecil had just published a biography of Cowper thus entitled.

Although at his English schools Harold, with his cosmopolitan background, Italianate accent and refusal to join in anything childish, must have seemed a strange phenomenon, he was apparently never bullied or harried. He must have had a very strong character, which in some unusual way kept him entirely immune. We were told that even at his private school barbarity did not prevail, and he recited his poems to astonished children of ten or eleven, provoking a rude reaction. Perhaps his sharp tongue made them a little afraid of him, and his extreme politeness disarmed. He was always ready with a harsh but courteous snub if somebody tried to be rude. A hostile, rather mannish woman whose car had broken down near the house where we were all dining, said to him aggressively: ‘You’re not the kind of young man one can imagine doing things under a car!’ Harold, slowly rolling his eyes, replied, ‘It all depends who with’.

In 1920 his novel,
Hum Drum
, came out. It was a grave disappointment to his
admirers
. By a piece of bad luck it appeared at the same time as Evelyn Waugh’s brilliant
Decline and Fall
. They were reviewed together; nobody praised
Hum Drum
. As Harold and Evelyn had been at Oxford together, very much in the position of master and disciple, it was a painful episode. As if to underline it, Evelyn had dedicated his novel to Harold. On and off for the rest of his life Harold wrote fiction, but his talent lay elsewhere. His genius was in the brilliant charm and radiance of his personality, unequalled in his
generation
.

Although
The Last Medici
had a succès d’estime, Harold was deeply hurt, and decided to withdraw from London and go to live in China, the land of his dreams. He had become a notable figure in London, as he had been at Oxford. His departure was mourned by his many friends, and it was probably hastened by anxieties about William. He took him home to his parents in Florence, a nightmare journey with William threatening suicide.

Harold came back to England in the war and joined the Air Force. He resumed his friendships, and once went for a journey with Evelyn Waugh, ‘our irascible friend’ as he described him in a letter to me. But he found him too difficult, too rude. He himself never changed. He stayed with me in France, and I with him at La Pietra. It is for others to describe him there; I am one of the few who remember the fantastic and admirable Harold of long ago.

Evening Standard
(1994)

When the Prince and Princess of Wales visited Harold Acton, the Princess was reported as having said she had never in her life met anyone like him. She was absolutely right. The only person remotely like Harold was his brother William, who died long ago.

Harold was a brilliant talker, whose idiosyncratic voice, with Italian inflections, amused the listener, quite apart from his inspired and malicious wit. William had the same voice. Harold wrote many books, but for some reason they never came up to the expectation of those who had been held in thrall by his conversation.

His memoir of my sister Nancy must be reckoned one of his best books. They had been friends for more than 40 years, ever since he left Oxford. He was born in 1904, and he and his brothers were educated at Eton and Christ Church, but they always seemed Florentine to us. Towards the end of his life he was host at his beautiful villa, La Pietra, to all the world. Everyone visiting Florence expected to be invited by him, and he
angelically
submitted to being one of the ‘sights’ on no account to be missed.

At school and at Oxford Harold was a poet, and dressed rather extravagantly; his
contemporaries
looked up to him as a perfectly civilised cosmopolitan paragon. To his friends he was, and remained for his whole life, a source of endless amusement and laughter, as well as a connoisseur of art and literature.

After Harold left Oxford, he and William lived for a time in a huge, ugly house in Lancaster Gate, where William bought and sold rococo furniture. Harold settled down to his writing. At the age of 24, he was already a shining fixed star in the London literary and social world, an ornament of Emerald Cunard’s luncheons in Grosvenor Square, where his presence ensured fireworks and clever repartee such as Emerald loved to orchestrate.

Unluckily, the publication of Harold’s novel
Hum Drum
coincided with that of Evelyn Waugh’s first novel,
Decline and Fall
. This was a disaster for Harold, the critics hailing Evelyn. Harold went away to Peking, William to Florence. They left a very sad gap.

Years later, in his
Memoirs of an Aesthete
, Harold wrote spitefully about Evelyn Waugh, Brian Howard, Robert Byron and Cyril Connolly. He pictures himself as having been the only civilised man among a bunch of backward and boorish Englishmen. Nobody seems to have minded; the attack never reached its target. Harold once described Evelyn Waugh in a letter to me as ‘our irascible friend’. Which is fair enough, because he did become
irascible
as years went by.

It is a great mystery why Harold Acton, so witty and with such a penetrating
understanding
, was never able to get his talents down on paper, but it is a fact. In Peking he felt completely at home. He loved everything Chinese and translated Chinese plays, hoping they would be a success on the London stage, which they never were.

He came back to England for the war, and once when I asked him if he would ever return to his eastern paradise, he said no, every one of his friends there was dead. All were mandarins, killed by the communists.