by Cecil Beaton
As a result of his mind training, Boy doesn’t waste a single minute of the day feeling half dead or taking things for granted. Every experience is vital. His only motive is a determination to perfect himself. He has long since got beyond wanting fame or any of the nonsense I want.
Boy says, ‘One cannot escape from oneself. One is oneself at every moment. One must keep oneself as true and right as possible. It isn’t good enough to know that one is doing wrong and then continue to do it all the same.’
He didn’t show me any of his paintings; but I have a feeling Boy will achieve greatness because he thinks the right way, which is what matters, in fact, I got so carried away when he started to analyse my position that I nearly decided then and there to give up the petty, self-indulgent life I lead.
I suddenly saw myself as lazy and sloppy compared with Boy; my life is such a finicky frivol. Boy explained that I had got into this state by taking nothing seriously at Cambridge. As undergraduates, we were cynical, smart, amusing, publishing our failings and faults and laughing about them. We were too busy with foolishness to realise how sterile our existences were. How perverse and disgusting!
I really lived in Boy’s room. I felt freshly inspired with vigour. The evening was so much better than anything I’d done for ages. How stupidly and consciously affected my designs are. I am I, too, and I am capable of being better. I should become like Montaigne and renounce the world at a certain age, giving up all vain thoughts of fame. Fame is only the desire to win recognition from a mob I fundamentally despise.
We had a simple dinner. Boy cooked the new potatoes. His eyes sparkled like a baby’s when he opened a tin of expensive coffee. It was expensive, it was good, and he thoroughly appreciated that to the full. Out of custom, I should doubtless have opened the tin without any feeling whatsoever.
I didn’t leave until an unearthly hour of the morning, but went away with my brain working at full speed. I read Montaigne in bed, and it was almost dawn by the time I fell asleep.
How I envy Boy! I hope I shall see him always. I shall go to him whenever I want freshening up. I shall go to him for Holy Communion.
As a result of Boy’s influence, I have since felt alive; not merely soddenly comfortable, unquestioning, unnoticing. Before, I would very likely have eaten a Turkish Delight without fully appreciating the enjoyment. But suddenly I realise that at this very moment I am eating T.D. Is it good? Oh, yes. So good! Mm, mm! I am happy to be squelching this delicious, succulent jelly in my mouth.
EASTER OUTINGS
Good Friday, April 2nd
Reggie was up early. In a great state of excitement, he put on his new grey flannel trousers and went off to Brighton with Raymond[45] for the Easter holidays. They are staying at Harry Preston’s hotel, being charged thirty shillings a day. God, what a holiday! I should loathe it: Brighton! And expensive, too!
Mum and Daddy quarrelled, as they couldn’t decide where to go for Easter (and Mummie needs a change very badly indeed). Each blamed the other for not having come to some definite conclusion beforehand.
In any case, we went for a picnic in the car. I decided to be thoroughly lazy and good-natured, but to enjoy myself none the less. At all times, I must control my mind and not sit like dead mutton. Thanks to Boy, I will henceforth five as fully as I can.
It was a little difficult to do this in a cramped car. Everyone, including Becky[46], came along for the ride. Also, how can one keep alert and alive with unstimulating people?
The weather was unexpectedly brilliant; the trees were just budding and nature, at any rate, seemed alive. We motored to Turner’s Hill, intending to have our lunch trespassing on Lord Cowdray’s estate. But since our last visit, the preserves have become more formal and inaccessible. So we drove about the neighbourhood, looking for a suitable picnic ground. At last an ideal place was found. Down through a field we went, into a valley of wiry saplings. Here it was prettily carpeted with delicate but fat primroses, wild violets and a few early bluebells.
The bluebell wood started a chain of thoughts in my mind. It was just the sort of place I used to sketch at Harrow, when the art class went out on half-holidays with W. Egerton Hine, our art master.
Poor little white-haired Eggie (Boy tells me he is dead). He dearly loved sketching in a bluebell wood. He wasn’t much of an aesthete; but he had great technique, and under his guidance we became enthusiastic disciples. Here’s another landscape! And another! The whole countryside — cottage gardens, moors, churchyards, farmyards and even manure heaps — all was grist to his effortless output or our glib imitations. Using a lot of raw sienna, burnt umber and a touch of prussian blue, we covered the Wattman Nott with fake W. Egerton Hines masterpieces.
Eggie and his assistant Mr Vallance took us on many enjoyable expeditions. By Metropolitan railway we went to neighbouring stations (Ruislip or Pinner) where, apart from art, there was the joy of a cream tea at a farmhouse and surreptitious cigarette smoking in a church tower.
Once each winter we were herded along to the National Gallery in London, where Eggie made no bones about resenting the inclusion of the El Grecos. In summer he would take us to the Royal Academy. But first we’d lunch at Frascati’s, where Eggie and Mr Vallance always haggled over their portions of food. ‘Now, Mr Vallance, if you will give me that potato, I will give you a bit of my spaghetti.’ ‘Mr Hine, if you would give me a bit of your meat, I will give you one of these sausages!’
How Boy and I laughed! In fact, most of the pupils ragged the poor man terribly. A legend even sprang up, to the effect that poor Eggie had never in his whole life been to the lavatory.
April 3rd
Papa was determined to motor down to Brighton and see Reggie for a minute, as it was his twenty-first birthday. Momma suggested Reggie wouldn’t relish seeing us: he was there for a holiday. But nothing would stop my father, so off we trooped in the car.
I looked forward to seeing Brighton again. I wanted to go to the antique shops in the Lanes. And it would be amusing, at last, to get a glimpse inside the Royal York Hotel with its celebrities room. My only worry was that Father would plan our afternoon: he dislikes the Oriental Pavilion and insists on being on the sea front to get the air.
Poor Reggie was trapped. When we got there, Papa had nothing whatsoever to say to him: and, in fact, perhaps through exhaustion at having driven so far, he was in a bad temper. By the end of a dreadful meal at the Royal York, he had worked himself up into a towering rage. Reggie sat at a different table with Raymond. My mother said she thought it the most extraordinary thing that we should motor to Brighton to see Reggie on his twenty-first birthday, and then not have lunch with him and buy a bottle of champagne.
Part VIII: The First Rung, 1928
From now on, the diary entries become more sporadic. I felt somewhat guilty at the sight of my journal lying apart like a discarded lover: but life had become too busy for regrets.
Exciting new friends appeared like mushrooms — some brilliant in promise, others already eminent. They became willing sitters for extremely unconventional photographs, and contributed towards an exhibition which a hospitable gallery in Bond Street had offered to promote. Also to be on show were my somewhat amateur stage designs, and some impertinent caricatures, so the exhibition should not be lacking in variety.
The invitations to the Private View were duly addressed and stamped, when Ninnie (called back to give an occasional hand), on her way to post them, slipped and fell in the gutter. Little sympathy was extended to the hurt knee, but anxiety felt that the envelopes should not arrive splashed with mud.
In spite of their grimy summons and a pea soup fog, the crowds arrived in such unexpected numbers, which combined with the density of the atmosphere, almost shut off the exhibits. I knew that success was in my palm when Lady Colefax, a hostess of discrimination, not only spent the morning with her blackcurrant eyes darting from catalogue to people, but returned to do battle in the afternoon’s melee.
Newspaper journalists pou
nced ravenously on the more startling aspects of this show, and my name became known, even to the extent that that old walrus, Uncle Wilfred, reported to my family in bewilderment, that it had been used as a joke by a red-nosed comedian in an Edgware Road variety theatre.
Among my new friends the Sitwells were not only helpful in giving my professional career every stimulus, but they comforted me with their allegiance; by finding me good company, they gave me a certain and necessary confidence in myself. In spite of her somewhat forbidding appearance, Edith proved to be the most understanding of human beings. In her Bayswater flat, she was girlishly flustered and surprisingly maladroit. One’s heart went out to her as she clumsily knocked over the big brown teapot on her way to answer the door bell to admit Mr Yeats. She would hoot with deep laughter and apologise, ‘That’s me all over.’
One was never daunted by the intellectual discussions on poetry that followed, although I have no ear for poetry and was quite incapable of playing a part in these debates. Edith, however, was convinced that her problems were the same as everyone else’s, and, for my delectation and opinion, would later send me her new poems, written out by the ream in her loping handwriting.
As for the Sitwell brothers, both of them had established a mode of aesthetic existence that completely satisfied my own taste. No detail of their way of life was ugly or humdrum. They managed to give a patina of glamour to a visit to an oculist, a bootshop, or a concert. Each catalogue they received from a wine merchant or a bookseller in their hands became a rare volume. With their aristocratic looks, dignified manner, and air of lofty disdain, they seemed to me above criticism.
A whole new world of sensibility was opened to me while sitting in candlelight around the marble dining table in Osbert’s house in Chelsea. Here, it seemed, witty observations, and an appreciation of dolphin furniture, were more important than poor forgotten Mr Skinner’s ‘big cash’.
I learnt a great deal about the art of living while staying with Sacheverell and his newly-married Georgia in their home in Northampton. Here Sachie held forth, in the deepest coke-crackle voice on such diverse subjects as the castrati, Offenbach, Norma wreaths, Ingres, or Ronald Firbank. He would produce his rare books on plants and birds, and while listening to a vast collection of gramophone records, he would wear an expression of resigned helplessness or wistful exasperation as he smoked large Turkish cigarettes in boyish, unformed hands.
More new friends, some of them to become important ingredients in my life, were coralled when a sequel to Lady Grey’s Wilsford festivities was staged in the South of France.
A villa was leased by his mother in which Stephen could be cherished by dozens of Guinnesses and other exquisite young girls while convalescing in the winter sun.
Here, too, for companionship and visual contrast, was old Mrs Belloc Lowndes, a French pastry cook’s version of Queen Victoria, digging her podgy fingers deep into the resilient cushions of her dough-coloured face, and rolling her r-r-r’s in greedy relish of the succulent meals.
Another face unknown to me among my fellow guests belonged to a rather swarthy and formidable middle-aged woman wearing a tall purple pixie hat. She seemed to eye me with definite disapproval. Lady Grey, always so intently busy communing with birds and the stars, was vague about mundane matters; only fitfully did she think of introducing her friends to one another. When I asked Lady Grey who this critical lady was, the answer in no way gave promise of less forbearance.
Miss Olivier comes of an old Huguenot family, and is a figure in the archaeological and ecclesiastical life of Wiltshire. Later I discovered that this was true; but the description was far from resembling the dashing, dazzling person who so soon was to become a lifelong friend. After we had confessed our mutual shyness and struck a chord of mutual sympathy, I began to rely upon Edith Olivier for advice on every conceivable variety of subjects. Until her death many years ahead she wielded over me a wise and efficacious influence.
Edith Olivier had spent most of her life, until his recent death, in quietly looking after her exacting father in the Wilton Rectory. Suddenly the country robin emerged as a bird of paradise. Her small Gothic dairy-house in the park at Wilton became brim-full with such varied characters as Ronald Storrs, Leonard Woolley the explorer, Siegfried Sassoon the poet, and, most cherished of all, Stephen’s Slade school friend, Rex Whistler, the promising young painter whose murals at the Tate were not yet completed. Edith started a prolific career as an author; the first of her numerous novels was now about to appear, and her interests became boundless.
Rex was also staying at the villa, and although he remained always in the background of any gathering, and at first gave an impression of exaggerated retirement, I felt as proud as when a child completely accepts and returns one’s friendship, when Rex revealed to me his great gift for intimacy, and decided to come forth from his shell to wield his irresistibly potent brand of charm.
Rex’s poetical appearance — the profile like an ivory cameo, and pale unseeing eyes — was, I soon discovered, in contrast to his rugged health and independence of character. In spite of his vagueness and inability to cope with worldy affairs, he could be extremely caustic and was by no means removed from the down-to-earth reality of high life. Rex was always a refreshing companion: each time one met, his frankness and honesty of purpose seemed to grow in effect. Everyone reacted with delighted surprise whenever he entered a room.
At Cap Ferrat, at the suitably named La Primavera, the days went by as we laughed and talked in the sun. The evenings were spent playing guessing and writing games, or somebody would read aloud ‘Papillée’, Marcus Cheke’s fantasy about Paris under the Directoire, or selected pieces from Shelley, Conrad, and Emily Dickinson. The formal parterres blazed with purple spring flowers, green terraces led to gnarled pine trees, grey limestone rocks, and dashing, lashing sapphire sea; existence seemed to consist of day to day delights.
August 1928
August in London can be very pleasant. I enjoyed getting on with my work. I hoped to have some pictures in the Salon of Photography, and also to finish the photographs to be used in the new Arnold Bennett play.
This morning, Viola Tree, vague but confident, said I could come with her to the dress rehearsal of Bennett’s play. Viola was typically late, and I had to wait a bit at the stage door. Lady du Maurier, russet-cheeked and flashing of smile, saw me, was horror-struck and flew into a fluster: ‘The last person we want to see. He’s so hypercritical. If the secret of the play gets out, all is lost.’ (The secret was that the play had been written as an up-to-date version of Faust.)
Gerald du Maurier didn’t give a damn about the secret, but worried about his make-up. He called to his wife across the footlights in his dry pumice stone voice, and asked if it looked all right. ‘Oh, no, Gerald, too pink and white. And the eyes are too dark.’
Gerald waggled all over, then grunted stertorously, ‘Well, I’ll take some of this muck off my eyes.’
Grace Wilson, the nondescript leading lady, then asked if her make-up was satisfactory. No one bothered to answer. But there followed a long discussion about the length of her skirt. Muriel du Maurier complained that it was too short, showing her knees. Arnold Bennett said he moved in the highest circles; and, ‘Believe me, they are worn short.’
Muriel chimed, ‘Oh, well, perhaps they are in Paris.’
To my surprise and delight, I found that Osbert and Sachie were in London. Osbert asked me to dine with him and Rex Whistler at Boulestin’s, the prettiest restaurant in London, with its deep yellow varnished walls, cloudy mirrors and Dufy designed silks. We sat on banquettes and in the most leisurely and epicurean manner, enjoyed Osbert’s talk, the cheese sauces and red wines. Osbert has very early in life acquired the grand manner without pomposity. He tells a story with interruptions of ‘Huh Huh’ as he himself enjoys the humour and looks quickly from one face to another for approval. He is generous in his appreciation of others’ attempts at wit, snorting with painful grunts of suppressed laughter
during an imitation of some new friend or rival.
When leaving, Osbert fell up the stairs and said, somewhat surprisingly, ‘That means good luck.’ It seemed so out of character.
Rex and I hadn’t seen one another for months, so that there was so much to discuss that we could not now call a halt to the evening. In fact, when Osbert was bundled into a taxi-cab an impetus was given to the outpourings on many subjects in which our host could not have shared. Yattering so volubly that we were oblivious of the direction in which we were going, we walked until I got a hole in my sock. Then we sat on spiked railings, and unaware of the chiming of clocks, gossiped about friends: Stephen’s relapse of health, his strange relationship with his mother, his recent friendship with Siegfried Sassoon, a paradoxical combination of characters, the one so flamboyant and the other so retiring.
We talked of Edith Olivier, with whom Rex had just been staying. Edith, at the best of times, likes to be on a chaise-longue with her head lower than her legs, while she reads or converses in her sibilant, jerky tones. This time, Edith, having cracked her knee-cap, lay prostrate on her terrace while she read the proofs of her new novel, As Far as Jane’s Grandmother’s.
We discussed Osbert’s vicissitudes with his father, who, with his ivory complexion and ginger beard, looks like a Victorian Tintoretto. It seems that, much to Osbert’s exasperation, the father’s extravagance is now manifesting itself in the removal of an ornamental lake from one side of the Renishaw park to the other.
Rex has a bonté towards mankind. Curious about all aspects of his world, he finds the complicated behaviour of some of his friends completely baffling, but his interest in gossip is never malicious. Rex, so romantic with his luminous face, Roman nose, and large crown to his head, exudes warm-heartedness and sympathy, but he is a strangely remote person. I doubt if many people even impinge on his inner feelings. He seems to accept me as a new bosomer, but I wonder if, apart from his deeply reciprocated devotion to Edith, he has really loved anyone.