Sir Harold Mario Mitchell Acton (5 July 1904 – 27 February 1994) was a British writer, scholar, and aesthete who was a prominent member of the Bright Young Things. He wrote fiction, biography, history and autobiography. During his stay in China, he studied the Chinese language, traditional drama, and poetry, some of which he translated.
He was born near Florence, Italy, to a prominent Anglo-Italian family. At Eton College, he was a founding member of the Eton Arts Society before going up to Oxford to read Modern Greats at Christ Church. He co-founded the avant-garde magazine The Oxford Broom and mixed with many intellectual and literary figures of the age, including Evelyn Waugh, who based the character of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited partly on him. Between the wars, Acton lived in Paris, London, and Florence, proving most successful as a historian, his magnum opus being a three-volume study of the Medicis and the Bourbons.
After serving as an RAF liaison officer in the Mediterranean, he returned to Florence, restoring his childhood home, Villa La Pietra, to its earlier glory. Acton was knighted in 1974 and died in Florence, leaving La Pietra to New York University.
Early years Background
Acton was born to a prominent Anglo-Italian-American family of baronets, later raised to the peerage as Barons Acton of Aldenham at Villa La Pietra, his parents' house one mile outside the walls of Florence, Italy. He claimed that his great-great-grandfather was Commodore Sir John Acton, 6th Baronet (1736–1811), who married his niece, Mary Anne Acton, and who was prime minister of Naples under Ferdinand IV and grandfather of the Catholic historian Lord Acton. This relationship has been disproven; Harold Acton in fact descends from Sir John Acton's brother, General Joseph Edward Acton (1737–1830).Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, 1999, 106th edition, ed. Charles Mosley, vol. 1, p. 28 Both of these brothers served in Italy, and are from the Shropshire family of Actons.
His father was the successful art collector and dealer Arthur Acton (1873–1953), the illegitimate son of Eugene Arthur Roger Acton (1836–1895), and counsellor to the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce.Armorial Families: A Directory of Gentlemen of Coat Armour, A. C. Fox-Davies, T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1910, p. 6Maurizio Cuomo, et al., 2015, "Genealogy of the Acton family, including the Lyon-Dalberg-Actons, and the Actons of Aldenham [lower center of image]," at Il portale informativo di Castellammare di Stabia: Storia, Personaggi Illustri [The information portal of Castellammare di Stabia: History, Famous People], see , accessed 11 July 2015. His mother, Hortense Lenore Mitchell (1871–1962), was the heiress of John J. Mitchell, a president of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank, an appointed member of the Federal Advisory Council,, and a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago (1908–1909).ARTIC, 1908, "Catalog of the Twenty-First Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists, October 20 to November 29, 1908," p. iii, Chicago, IL, US:The Art Institute of Chicago, see , accessed 11 July 2015. Arthur Acton met Hortense in Chicago while helping to design the Italianate features of the bank's new building in 1896, and the Mitchell fortune allowed Arthur Acton to buy the remarkable Villa La Pietra on the hills of Florence, where Harold Acton lived for much of his life.Martin Green, 2008 , Children of the Sun: A Narrative of "decadence" in England After 1918, pp. 1–8, 94–117, 220, 393–395, 425f, Mount Jackson, VA, US: Axios Press, , see or , or Martin Green, 1977, ibid., pp. 118–125, London, LND, GBN: Constable, , see , both accessed 11 July 2015.Charlotte Eagar, 2011, "The house of secrets and lies," The Sunday Times (magazine, online), 3 July 2011, see , accessed 11 July 2015. Subtitle: "The art dealer Arthur Acton's love affair with an Italian beauty led to an illegitimate child, two exhumed bodies and a long-running, vicious feud." The only modern furniture in the villa was in the nurseries, and that was disposed of when the children got older (Harold's younger brother William Acton was born in 1906).
Career and education His early schooling was at Miss Penrose's private school in Florence. In 1913, his parents sent him to Wixenford Preparatory School near Reading in southern England,Evelyn Waugh, 1983, The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, Donat Gallagher, Ed., London, LND, GBN: Methuen Limited, , see , accessed 11 July 2015. "Page numbers given inline." where Kenneth Clark was a fellow-pupil. By 1916 submarine attacks on shipping had made the journey to England unsafe and so Harold and his brother were sent in September to Chateau de Lancy, an international school near Geneva. In the autumn of 1917, he went to a 'crammers' at Ashlawn in Kent to be prepared for Eton, which he entered on 1 May 1918. Among his contemporaries at Eton were Eric Blair (the writer George Orwell), Cyril Connolly, Robert Byron, Alec Douglas-Home, Ian Fleming, Brian Howard, Oliver Messel, Anthony Powell, Steven Runciman, and Henry Yorke (the novelist Henry Green). In his final years at school, Acton became a founding member of the Eton Arts Society, and eleven of his poems appeared in The Eton Candle, edited by his friend Brian Howard.
Oxford years In October 1923, Acton went up to Oxford to read Modern Greats at Christ Church. It was from the balcony of his rooms in Meadow Buildings that he declaimed passages from The Waste Land through a megaphone (an episode recounted in Brideshead Revisited, through the character Anthony Blanche). While at Oxford, he co-founded the avant-garde magazine The Oxford Broom, and published his first book of poems, Aquarium (1923). Acton was regarded as a leading figure of his day and would often receive more attention in memoirs of the period than men who were much more successful in later life; for example, the Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams described this encounter with Acton in his autobiography George (1961): Williams also described Acton's review of The Picture of Dorian Gray in the Oxford student newspaper Cherwell: "a charming boy's book, we would suggest a cheap edition to fit comfortably into the pocket of a school blazer"; and summarised Acton's modernist approach to literature: "But if one finds the words, my dears, there is beauty in a black-pudding."
In 1925, Graham Greene wrote to his future wife: 'The person I miss most now that I'm away ... is Harold ... Although I wouldn't admit it to anyone else his attack on me in The Cherwell was the best and most useful criticism I've ever had, and any alterations I try to make in my stuff is founded on it'. Twenty-five year later Greene wrote to Evelyn Waugh of having visited their mutual friend in Florence: 'How nice & dear he is, & and how I didn't realise it as Oxford'.Edward Chaney, 'Sir Harold Acton 1904-94', The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance (London, 2000), pp. 377-82; revised edition of obituary published in Apollo, CXXXIX (June 1994), pp. 52-53
At Oxford Acton dominated the Railway Club, which included: Henry Yorke; Roy Harrod; Henry Thynne, 6th Marquess of Bath; David Plunket Greene; Edward Henry Charles James Fox-Strangways, 7th Earl of Ilchester; Brian Howard; Michael Parsons, 6th Earl of Rosse; John Sutro; Hugh Lygon; Harold Acton; Bryan Guinness, 2nd Baron Moyne; Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross; Mark Ogilvie-Grant, John Drury-Lowe.
Influence on Waugh Evelyn Waugh populated his novels with composite characters based upon individuals he knew. Acton is reputed to have inspired, at least in part, the character of "Anthony Blanche" in Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited (1945). In a letter to Lord Baldwin, Waugh wrote, "There is an aesthetic bugger who sometimes turns up in my novels under various names – that was 2/3 Brian [Howard] and 1/3 Harold Acton. People think it was all Harold, who is a much sweeter and saner man [than Howard]." Waugh also wrote, "The characters in my novels often wrongly identified with Harold Acton were to a great extent drawn from Brian Howard".
General strike and after In 1926 Acton acted as a special constable during the general strike, apolitical as he was, and took his degree. In October he took an apartment in Paris, at 29 Quai de Bourbon, and had his portrait painted by Pavel Tchelitchew.Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948. Moving between Paris and London in the next few years, Acton sought to find his voice as a writer. In 1927 he began work on a novel, and a third book of poems, Five Saints and an Appendix, came out early the following year. This was followed by a prose fable, Cornelian, in March. In July Acton acted as best man at the wedding of Evelyn Waugh to the Honourable Evelyn Gardner. Waugh's Decline and Fall bore a dedication to Acton 'in Homage and Affection', but when Acton's own novel – disastrously entitled Humdrum – appeared in October 1928, it was slated in comparison with Decline and Fall by critics such as Cyril Connolly.
In the later 1920s, Harold frequented the London salon of Lady Cunard, where at various times he encountered Ezra Pound, Joseph Duveen and the Irish novelist George Moore. On visits to Florence he cemented his friendship with Norman Douglas, who wrote an introduction to Acton's translation of a lubricious 18th-century memoir of Giangastone de' Medici, The Last of the Medici, privately printed in Florence in 1930 as part of the Lungarno Series. A fourth collection of poems, This Chaos, was published in Paris by Acton's friend Nancy Cunard, though the Giangastone translation pointed in a more promising direction. History was indeed to prove far more congenial to Acton than poetry. His The Last Medici (not to be confused with the earlier book of similar title) was published by Faber in 1932, the first of a series of distinguished contributions to Italian historical studies.Andrew Gumbel, 1996, "Shadow of the Last Aesthete," The Independent (online), 14 April 1996, see , accessed 11 July 2015. [Subtitle: "In his Tuscan palazzo, Sir Harold Acton created what he hoped would be an enduring idyll. Two years after his death, the dream has turned sour."]
One close observer, Alan Pryce-Jones, felt that life in Florence weighed upon Acton with its triviality, for, like his father, he was a hard worker and a careful scholar. The East was an escape.Alan Pryce-Jones, 1994, "Obituary: Sir Harold Acton," The Independent (online), 28 February 1994, see , accessed 11 July 2015. He took up residence in Beiping, as Beijing was then known, which he found congenial. He studied Chinese language, traditional drama, and poetry. Between his arrival in 1932 and 1939 he published respected translations of Peach Blossom Fan and Modern Chinese Poetry (1936), both in collaboration with ,John C. Jamieson, Cyril Birch & Yuen Ren Chao, 1974, "Shih-Hsiang Chen, Oriental Languages, Berkeley (1912–1971), Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature," at University of California, In memoriam, 1974 (online), pp. 20–22, Berkeley CA, US: Academic Senate, Berkeley Division, p. 5, accessed 11 July 2015. and Famous Chinese Plays (1937) in collaboration with L.C. Arlington. His novel Peonies and Ponies (1941) is a sharp portrait of expatriate life. He translated Glue and Lacquer (1941), selected from the 17th-century writer Feng Menglong's Tales to Rouse the World, with a preface by Arthur Waley, the leading scholar-translator and member of the Bloomsbury Group.