Harold Acton - Nancy Mitford: The Biography

Nancy Mitford and Harold Acton were born in the same year, 1904, she in London and he in Florence. He remained a Florentine all his life, in spite of Eton and Christ Church. Nobody who was at school or at Oxford with him could ever forget his delightful personality , his Italian accent, his brilliant uninhibited conversation, exaggerated courtesy and sublime wit. Harold and Nancy made friends, and when I grew up in 1928, I felt about him as all our generation did: here was the cleverest, the most scholarly, the most amusing man ever born.

He and his brother William lived in a rather terrible house in Lancaster Gate, chosen for its large rooms where William could display rococo furniture, which he bought, and sold to the discerning, while Harold wrote his first book, The Last Medici, and a very disappointing novel, Hum Drum. The novel unluckily appeared at the same time as Evelyn Waughs Decline and Fall. It was the beginning of a pattern which often recurred: seemingly less brilliant members of his generation were far more successful than he, when they put pen to paper.

Both brothers loved parties, and all the intellectual feasts a great city can offer. Harold was a star, and when he left London in 1932 to go and live in Peking it was as if a light had been extinguished. William returned to Florence, Lancaster Gate was no more, and we felt bereft. Harold wrote to us all from time to time, and friends like Robert Byron and Desmond Parsons visited him in China, but until he came back in the war and joined the RAF his absence left a void.

When my sister Nancy died in 1973, after a long illness, my sisters and I were more than pleased when he suggested writing this memoir; nobody could have done it better. He quotes extensively from many of Nancys letters to Mark Ogilvie-Grant, her confidant , about her unhappy affair with Hamish St Clair Erskine, which wasted several years of her life. Harold was the first person to mention the Colonel in print; he was alive and we all agreed about this.

During her twenties Nancy wrote a couple of novels and contributed to various womens magazines, in order to make a little money. Her talent was dormant; she had not even the first requisite of a writer: a room of her own, but perched here and there with friends and relations, or stayed at home in the country though she much preferred London. When the Hamish affair finally broke, she made a disastrous marriage. But at least she had a house of her own.

The war changed her life. She fell in love, she got a job at Heywood Hill. The disastrous husband went abroad with the army, and she wrote a best-seller, The Pursuit of Love. Her prolonged adolescence was over, and from the age of forty she wrote books which have made millions of people laugh (and cry!) which brought her a fortune. As soon as possible, in 1945, she got a flat in Paris, where she lived for twenty happy years. Her French translator said of her: Elle ntait pas bonne, mais elle tait gnreuse.

Then her luck changed again. She had given up novels and was writing historical biographies , as amusing as they were well-researched. She bought a house in Versailles where everything (except her books) went wrong and she was assailed by incurable cancer. Two rather unhappy loves and an unhappy marriage, followed by a painful death, made me say, as quoted by Harold, Her life was too sad to contemplate. It seemed so at that moment, but in fact she had twenty years in which everything went right, her great talent was rewarded by enough money to lead exactly the life she most enjoyed.

She was often a guest at La Pietra, Harolds Florentine Villa, where he was a perfect host. As he had no heir he offered to bequeath his estate to Eton, which refused. He then offered it to Christ Church, which was equally pusillanimous. Therefore, he left it to an American University, whose fortunate students go to La Pietra, with its olive groves and famous Italian gardens, to study Italian art.

All Harolds genius was in his personality. Not even his interesting histories of the Bourbons of Naples do him justice. Fortunately, he was often filmed for television. He was wonderfully himself, a star of the first magnitude. One can only hope these films will be carefully preserved for posterity.

Diana Mosley

Paris