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Harold Acton (1904 - 1994)
From early boyhood, Harold and his brother William were exposed to the world of the arts and especially to aestheticism and modernism. Reggie Turner, a friend of Oscar Wilde, was a frequent guest at La Pietra with whom Harold discussed poetry. Diaghilev was a guest who mentored William's painting, and Harold later became a fan of Diaghilev's protégés, Nijinsky and Massine, keeping scrapbooks filled with pictures and clippings of the handsome young dancers, worshipping them in the same way teenage girls worshipped matinee idols. Sent to school in England at Wixenford, Harold spent most of his time in the library. At first mocked by the other boys for his Italianate English, he eventually won over his classmates by mocking himself through exaggeration of his foreigness. Playing on the stereotype of the mad Italian lover, he claimed to already be well-experienced in amour, and to have lost his virginity to a black woman from America. Returning to Florence in 1914, Harold was sent to finish prep school in Geneva after the outbreak of World War I made travel back to England too dangerous. In 1918 he returned to England with William to attend Eton, where his schoolmates included Brian Howard, his close friend and first lover, as well as Evelyn Waugh, Oliver Messel, Robert Byron, and Ian Fleming. Another foreigner who had been exposed early in life to the aesthetic and modernist movements, Brian Howard found in Harold Acton a soul mate, and the two boys took upon themselves the mission of introducing modernism to the masses at Eton and throughout Britain, where the staid styles of the Victorian and Edwardian periods were still entrenched, and aestheticism had largely been killed off by the scandalous trial and imprisonment of its greatest advocate, Oscar Wilde. Merging the artistic passion, sensuality, and luxury of the aesthetics with the tastes of the modernists, Harold and Brian developed a type of dandyism which was emulated by many of their classmates. Ian Fleming, who did not adopt the dandy lifestyle, would years later incorporate some of its elements into the creation of the James Bond character. Together with William, Harold and Brian formed the Cremorne Club, a society of aesthetes which conferred honorary membership on Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Symons, and Paul Verlaine. With the assistance of their teacher, Aldous Huxley, they published the Eton Candle, a literary magazine devoted to the aesthetic and modernist arts. Among Harold's contributions was "Hanson Cab No. 23 bis," a story whose hero Athelstane drinks milk from a jade cup and washes in a blue marble bathtub while a servant plays Bach on an organ carved from cypress wood. The narrative style used in the story was later adopted by Waugh in his own stories. Among those who read and was impressed by the magazine was Edith Sitwell, who befriended Harold and Brian and got them their first major exposure as writers. Graduating from Eton, Harold and Brian moved on to Christ Church College at Oxford, where their mission to introduce modernism became even more impassioned. To this end, Harold recited T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" to passersby through a megaphone, an act immortalized by Evelyn Waugh in a now famous caricature. His first collection of poems, Aquarium, was published in 1923. Acton was a major contributor to Oxford Poetry, and even co-edited the 1924 issue with Peter Quennell, though their collaborative relationship was stormy. Harold would later claim that his contributions had "prepared the soil" for W.H. Auden and others, which to some extent was true. Indeed, the 1925 edition was dedicated to Acton as "beloved and magnanimous duce of poets." But by his final year at Oxford, Harold's classmates, which now included not only Waugh but also George Orwell and Cecil Beaton, were beginning to find their own voices as artists. The once innovative Acton was rapidly being outpaced by those to whom he had shown the way. Years later, he would lament that his literary successors saw him as only "a minor versifier." Eschewing the diplomatic career suggested by his parents, Harold spent his first three years after Oxford as one of the "Bright Young People," attending parties, playing public pranks and hoaxes, and travelling, especially to Venice and Paris, where he met Gertrude Stein and Jean Cocteau and their respective circles of artistic and literary friends. Reading Hemingway's early writings, he criticized the author as living "in dread of betraying (his) emotions, except by hiccups." He was equally critical of Auden and Isherwood's first published works, which emphasized ideas over words, in contrast to Stein and Cocteau. Acton wrote his own collections of verse, Five Saints and An Appendix and This Chaos, and two novels, Cornelian and Humdrum, the latter of which was so critically blasted that he "sank out of sight," returning to Florence. Here he found and translated an unpublished biography of Gian Castone, last of the Medici princes of the city, which he later used as the source material for his own work, The Last Medici, published in 1932. That same year, he traveled to America to visit his cousins and also Carl van Vechten and Muriel Draper. His tour of America completed, Acton went on to China, with hopes of merging Chinese and Western aesthetic styles. Buying a house in Peking (now Beijing), he lived among other British expatriates in the city. A novel, Peonies and Ponies, emerged from the experience, satirizing the expatriates in Peking in much the same way Evelyn Waugh satirized the expatriates in Hollywood in The Loved One. After seven years, as the war between China and Japan began and political tensions in Europe approached the breaking point, Acton returned to England, living with Robert Byron. When war was declared on Germany, he sought and was initially refused employment at the war office, but soon found work lecturing on Anglo-Italian relations to the Women's Royal Naval Service and other groups. He later found work in Blackpool, teaching English to men in the Free Poland Air Force. When Italy entered the war, Action's parents were arrested as enemy aliens, but later bribed their way to freedom in Switzerland. In 1941, the same year Peonies and Ponies was published, Acton was inducted into the RAF as an intelligence officer. Shipped to India, he found himself relegated to a lowly clerk's positions, which he came to believe was a punishment for the free living and non-conformity of his youth. Later he returned to England, working as a press censor, then serving in this capacity in Paris after the city's liberation in 1944. After the war's end, Acton spent time with his relatives in America, where he wrote a fantasy novel, Prince Isidore, and a similar piece, The Fable of Princess Volupine. He later returned to Florence, only to learn that William, whose career as an artist had been largely frustrated, had committed suicide. His parents had never fully accepted Harold's aesthetic lifestyle (or for that matter, his homosexuality), and William's death made them more distant than ever. Harold spent most of his time in Italy at the Action's ancestral home in Naples, where he researched and composed a history of the city's old Bourbon rulers. This work, The Bourbons of Naples, was considered by many to be Acton's best. Much of Acton's later life was spent researching and writing histories and critical tomes on Italian and British history and culture, and it was for these that he was eventually knighted. He also wrote reviews for the New York Review of Books and published his autobiographies, Memoirs of an Aesthete (1948), and More Memoirs of an Aesthete (1970), both invaluable glimpses at the literary, artistic, and gay life of the early twentieth century. Never abandoning the fun loving dandy side of his persona, Sir Harold was often seen in the company of Europe's jet set, including Princess Margaret and exiled Eastern European royalty. He was almost always available for lectures and interviews, but always refused discussion about his old friend Brian Howard, who committed suicide in 1956. Upon Sir Harold's own death in 1994, La Pietra, which he had inherited upon his father's death in 1953, was bequeathed together with its art collection to New York University. The Sir Harold Acton Award, given by New York University to Italians and Italian Americans who have made significant contributions to the preservation of Italian culture, is named in his honor. So too is the Harold Acton Library and Cultural Center at the British Institute of Florence. Martin Green's Children of the Sun: A Narrative of "Decadence" in England After 1918 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), was a major source for this article and is recommended. Links:
Caricature of Acton by Evelyn Waugh
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