The Wandering Years (1922-39) Read online

  THE WANDERING YEARS

  1922-1938

  Cecil Beaton’s Diaries

  Volume One

  To the Memory of my Father

  And tell of time, what gifts for thee he bears.

  What griefs and laughter through the wandering years.

  Euripides, Bacchae

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Part I: Cambridge, 1922

  Part II: The Vacation and Family Holidays, 1923 and 1924

  Part III: Bayswater and the City, 1925 and 1926

  Part IV: Holborn, 1926

  Part V: Venice, 1926

  Part VI: Charmouth, 1926

  Part VII: London: New Directions, 1926, 1927 and 1928

  Part VIII: The First Rung, 1928

  Part IX: America, 1929 and 1931

  Part X: A Country Setting, 1930 and 1931

  Part XI: North Africa, 1931

  Part XII: Ashcombe, 1931

  Part XIII: America Again, 1932

  Part XIV: Looking Back, 1933, 1934 and 1935

  Part XV: The Gallic Influence, 1935

  Part XVI: Griefs and Laughter, 1935

  Part XVII: Royal Romance, 1933 and 1936

  Part XVIII: An English Summer, 1937

  Part XIX: Manhattan Rhythm, 1937 and 1938

  Part XX: Summer Abroad, 1938

  Part XXI: The Last Summer, 1939

  THE YEARS BETWEEN: 1939-44

  ALSO IN CECIL BEATON’S MEMOIRS SERIES

  Foreword to the New Edition

  I welcome the republication of the six volumes of Cecil Beaton’s diaries, which so delighted readers between 1961 and 1978. I don’t know if Cecil himself re-read every word of his manuscript diaries when selecting entries, but I suspect he probably did over a period of time. Some of the handwritten diaries were marked with the bits he wanted transcribed and when it came to the extracts about Greta Garbo, some of the pages were sellotaped closed. Even today, in the library of St John’s College, Cambridge, some of the original diaries are closed from public examination, though to be honest, most of the contents are now out in the open.

  The only other person who has read all the manuscript diaries is me. It took me a long time to get through them, partly because his handwriting was so hard to read. I found that if I read one book a day, I had not done enough. If I did two in a day, then I ended up with a splitting headache! This in no way deflected from the enormous enjoyment in reading them.

  Altogether there are 145 original manuscript diaries dating from Cecil going up to Cambridge in 1922 until he suffered a serious stroke in 1974. A few fragments of an earlier Harrow diary survive, and there is a final volume between 1978 and 1980, written in his left hand. 56 of these cover his time at Cambridge, some of which appear in The Wandering Years (1961). 22 books cover the war years, and were used for The Years Between (1965), and nine books record his My Fair Lady experiences, some of which appear in The Restless Years (1976) and were the basis for Cecil Beaton’s Fair Lady (1964). These six volumes probably represent about ten per cent of what Cecil Beaton actually wrote.

  The diaries attracted a great deal of attention when first published. James Pope-Hennessy wrote of Cecil’s ‘thirst for self-revelation’, adding that the unpublished volumes were surely ‘the chronicle of our age’. Referring to Cecil’s diaries, and those of Eddy Sackville-West, he also commented: ‘We could not be hoisted to posterity on two spikier spikes.’

  I have to tell the reader that these volumes were not always quite the same as the originals. Some extracts were rewritten with hindsight, some entries kaleidoscoped and so forth. Certain extracts in these six volumes were slightly retouched in places, in order that Cecil could present his world to the reader exactly as he wished it presented. And none the worse for that.

  Hugo Vickers

  January 2018

  Introduction

  It isn’t easy to make public the private record of a lifetime. Of all forms of writing, diaries are the most personal; their publication cannot but invoke question or criticism.

  Most mysterious is why people write them. Someone once commented to me, ‘I always mistrust people who keep diaries.’ I winced and was set to wondering. Had I scribbled hundreds of volumes out of boredom, loneliness, frustration or the need for self-assertion?

  Perhaps; but my obsession also stemmed from those same obscure motives that have impelled me to take snapshots all my life. Even as a child I felt haunted by a sense of the elusive. And when I grew up, carpe diem became my watchword. I exposed thousands of films, wrote hundreds of thousands of words in a futile attempt to preserve the fleeting moment like a fly in amber.

  Hence perhaps the existence of these pages. They are winnowed from an exhaustive record in which anything and everything was set down. But does that justify their publication especially when the most private events are described? I shall inevitably be charged with over-zealous candour. Why, my critics will ask, didn’t I hide the diaries under the floorboards?

  Reply is not easy. There is, of course, the precedent of other diarists who published journals in their own lifetime. But they have been men of letters, adventurers, generals or statesmen. My province is more frivolous, as my critics never cease to remind me. But perhaps for that very reason I may unwittingly have captured fragments of a social scene that might be shared and give a certain nostalgic amusement to others.

  If I am at times too candid, it is not by design but because indiscretion is almost unavoidable: individual idiosyncrasies are more dangerous to deal with than the events of a military campaign or an intrigue in Arabia. In any case, the reader will find I have spared myself no more than others. I find it painful to reveal myself as I was. This is scarcely a flattering self-portrait. Yet truth begins with one’s self. No attempt has been made to touch up those extracts in which I appear in a particularly unsympathetic light: for they, too, help to give a picture of the time. I hope, however, that the reader will bear in mind the social circumstances that formed me. In terms of today’s more relaxed manners and disregard of conventions, the opinions or attitudes of a young Englishman of years ago must inevitably seem preposterous.

  But I must not protest too much. Let the diaries speak for themselves. Their content remains unaltered, though from time to time I have fused a number of entries to form a single recollection of a person or a place. Readers may complain that too much space has been given to a description of an unimportant occasion, whereas some other event that must have been of consequence to me has been indicated in a couple of lines or entirely ignored. But surely this is the very nature of most diaries? In any event they are apt to give a lop-sided impression, since the writer generally does most of his work when feeling melancholy, lonely or down on his luck. Hence the general picture is often self-pitying, or gloomily introspective.

  I have tried to fill in the more serious lacunae with narrative comments — not so much to give an autobiographical form to the volume as to explain certain extracts that might otherwise be obscure or in need of a longer context. The story told here begins at Cambridge and ends with the outbreak of the Second World War.

  CECIL BEATON

  Part I: Cambridge, 1922

  After three escapist years at Harrow School, where my fledgling interests were ex-curriculum, and any signs of intelligence were seen only out of class, my father was faced with the problem of what to do with me. Most of my contemporaries now knew what they wanted to be in life; but at the age of eighteen I showed no particular aptitude for any known career. I had acquired somewhat of a reputation, and a certain amount of scandalous disapproval, for being able to make people laugh, and was considered sophisticated for my age. Yet I was, in many ways, remarkably
undeveloped. It is true that I had been the art master’s prize pupil, with a knack for water-colour sketches, and a derivative flair for caricature and theatre design; but I, myself, had little confidence in these talents. In fact, secretly I was as anxious about my future as my father must have been.

  It was therefore a welcome reprieve when my parents decided that my education should be continued at a university. Most parents already knew to what university, and to which college their offspring were to go. But my father was delightfully casual about such things, and one Saturday afternoon, at the thirteenth hour, set off at the wheel of the family Renault for Cambridge. Here he interviewed a Mr Armitage of St John’s college. It is only now, so many years later, that I understand what a remarkably generous and loving parent I was fortunate enough to have. Perhaps too close a proximity prevented his children from seeing him as the wistful and rather whimsical person he was; and with the years he wore a sad expression that may have been the result of feeling unappreciated. When, however, he came across some stranger who reacted to his charm or his wit, his whole being changed, and he shone brilliantly. My father had been all his life an enthusiastic cricketer and was, in fact, renowned as a wicket-keeper.

  Mr Armitage immediately recognised my father’s charm, straightforwardness of manner, and simplicity of character, and he enjoyed the cricket talk. After the interview, it was arranged that, although the college was full, I should have rooms in Bridge Street and could ‘go up’ at the beginning of the next term and remain on, provided I could pass a special examination to be taken on arrival.

  Neither of my parents was particularly interested in the arts or in their manifestations. My mother certainly had an innate taste and sense of design and proportion, which I have consulted all through my life. My father, as a young man, was an amateur actor in the days when the amateur theatre had a certain status; and he often delighted, and at the same time embarrassed, us by his imitations of the actors of his day. But it must have been baffling for this straight-sailing couple to discover that the eldest of their four children was turning out to be so different from all that was expected.

  Even as a child, I preferred to sit silent and self-conscious among the grown-ups while other children played rounders or rolled in the mud. I displayed not the slightest interest in cricket, or how to throw a ball with a twist on it, and now I was showing dissatisfaction with home life, as well as signs of outrageous snobbishness. I was full of inner yearnings, growing my hair ‘like a piano-tuner’, and developing other ridiculous aspects of aestheticism.

  My ambition to break out of the anonymity of a nice, ordinary, middle-class family certainly manifested itself in other tiresome outward forms; one of which was the pleasure I took in surprising, or even shocking people by the inimitable way in which I adorned myself. Thus, it is not at all unexpected that, on the first occasion here recorded, I should purposely have allowed myself to be caught wearing a peculiar assortment of garments, before changing into a conventional suit, by the Victorian Mrs Perry, the only bona fide actress, albeit retired, my parents knew. Mrs Perry was the extremely respectable widow of a Folkestone doctor, with whom my family had made friends when holidaying one summer. Although Mrs Perry was an aggressive personality, and enjoyed every opportunity to take the centre of the stage, she had never been celebrated in the professional theatre. Yet to our somewhat conventional family house in Hyde Park Street she brought a distant exciting flicker of the footlights.

  October 4th 1922, 3 Hyde Park Street, London, and 47 Bridge Street, Cambridge

  When I woke this morning, I had only one thought in mind: I wanted Cambridge to be a success. I wanted it so much that I was late for breakfast, and had a terrible rush with the packing. I filled two huge trunks with books, albums, and photographic equipment, and got very hot doing so.

  For no known reason I was wearing an evening jacket, red shoes, black and white trousers, and a huge blue cravat. I cannot think what impression I made on old asthmatic Mrs Perry arriving for lunch with my mother; she caught sight of me before there was an opportunity to change. But then Mrs Perry was once an actress and therefore less likely to be surprised than most of my parents’ friends; not that she looked like an actress in her black bombazine and bonnet — more like an old Victorian landlady, or Queen Victoria herself — and I am sure that putty face with the shiny warts had never been covered with grease paint.

  At lunch she boomed away, breathily, in her rich fruit-cake voice about her uncle (Leigh Hunt) and Shelley, and it made one realise what a long way back she goes into history. However, when she started to hold forth about her daughter Elfie, and how she was going to be given the part of an understudy, lunch seemed to go on for ever. One big course followed another, while Mrs Perry held the limelight.

  After much excitement and further packing in all sorts and sizes of extra boxes, I finally got off in a taxi. Not much bother at the station but I had to pay eight shillings for excess luggage.

  In the train I read Mrs Pat’s Memoirs, but my cold was bad. I sniffed a horrid lot, then just sat back looking out of the window. It was a cold, rainy day, with a grey and white sky. There were stretches of jade-green fields, of grey, feathery trees. The cool, calm scene seemed to make me think clearly. I felt depressed at the prospect of the maths exam, and other terrible things: having to live among awful heartiness, and in filthy rooms smelling of onions, decorated with landlady’s horrors.

  I wanted in future to see everything as it really was. I wanted to have a little more grit. The man sitting in front of me had large, fat lips and a huge nose. He was ugly, but he looked as though he had grit; for some reason, that was what I wanted. Could I, in the event of another war, possibly go in the trenches and fight as others had done before me? I wanted to do that and more: I wanted to ride bikes and fight. I often despise people who do these things, but I wanted to be able to do them.

  Sitting in the train with my gloves on, I thought of what I’d be like after Cambridge; and if I’d be there long, and if this diary would be interesting. Somehow I wished that I’d had my photograph taken on my first day of this new ordeal. It might be interesting later, though at the moment I’m tired of myself. I always seem so terribly the same, doing such stupidly petty things as telephoning and writing letters and having meals and going to theatres. I’m also tired of my appearance. I always look the same — the same hands, the same thin figure and a face without too much expression in it.

  I drove here in a taxi, wondering if my rooms would be miles from anywhere, or if they’d be even worse than expected. The luggage was brought up. I tipped until the change ran out. My rooms were shown me by a cheerful, sensible man whom I liked. Then an old fellow came grumbling up the stairs, and the landlord gave him a shilling on my behalf — very kind.

  My quarters turned out to be quaint, with old, sloping ceilings and floors, with white walls and black beams. At least I could make something of them. I was pleased. And when the housekeeper and the maid seemed ‘all right’, I lost the last of my depression.

  After unpacking, I went out to see Armitage at St John’s. He seemed delightfully vague and suggested I come back on Friday after I’d had my exam. I’m fortunate to be up here at all, without having passed the exam, but I really feel that I’m up here on the strength of my father’s charm. I then bought a cap and gown, terrified of looking ridiculous in it — which I did.

  The landlord (I believe his name is Haynes) brought up a Mr Sutcliffe, another ‘new boy’ of St John’s, who has rooms beneath mine. We went to Hall together, but as he had his own friend I kept rather apart. It was a large dinner, and I fed my rotten cold according to the old wives’ rule, and I talked to a red-headed youth, evidently from the north.

  Afterwards, I came back to these digs quite happy, meaning to write diary, do some maths, despatch letters and go to bed early. But I had a visitor. It was Bobbie Heath, from Harrow, who charmingly decided to call. He liked my rooms and my dressing-gown very much. I showed him my drawings. H
e thought I was improving. It is nice to show one’s drawings to people who appreciate them. Everyone at home is too casual about my efforts. He then switched to showing me some of his photographs, but I was by then too tired to be enthusiastic. At last he hobbled down the narrow stairs.

  I’m too tired to write to Kyrle[1] now, but I’ll write tomorrow. Gordon[2] will be here by then; also Boy[3], which will be splendid.

  My bedroom is countrified. I had rather hoped for something more prosperous, but I suppose this is paradise compared to other quarters. There is no fireplace in the sitting-room — a pity when my friends come to eat food round the polished table.

  Tomorrow the exam. I have an awful sinking feeling. It will be terrible writing to my father in America to say I’ve failed.

  October 5th

  I shan’t hate Cambridge after all. In fact it ought to be quite fun: lots of people wander about, looking lost and bored. I daresay Oxford would be no nicer. Certainly they must have landladies there, and china cats, but perhaps nothing as horrid as the Market Square, or the road down by the Red Lion: that road is always crowded; people get knocked down by cars, there’s an awful noise of bicycle bells and it smells with pipes in everybody’s face.

  My rooms are growing on me. But how shall I furnish them?

  It will have to be cottagey. What pictures can I put on the walls? I’m tired of ballet pictures. I think Pamela Bianco’s[4] illustrations would be suitable in black frames and large mounts. Or some Georges Barbier: I might write to Kyrle and find out what books Georges Barbier illustrated.

  Generally, I stay awake for ages when I sleep in a new room. But last night, in spite of a hard pillow and no air coming through the little window, I fell asleep almost at once. When I woke early this morning, the bedroom with its sloping eaves looked romantic by dawn darkness. I lay for a while in delightful semi-consciousness, thinking about the day’s business: that damned exam had to be got through, and so many other things. I had a big breakfast, though it felt odd to breakfast without newspapers.