Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (30 page)

Those sitting in the drawing room upstairs – the Chairman, Constant Huntington; his wife Gladys; Lady Gosford, a former Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Alexandra; the critic Desmond MacCarthy; and the author and diarist Harold Nicolson, who has recently joined Oswald Mosley’s New Party – are making polite conversation when they hear a sound on the staircase. They rise apprehensively.

In walks Nora Barnacle, who married Joyce at the beginning of this month, having been with him, on and off, for twenty-seven years. (Up until then, their twenty-three-year-old daughter had assumed they were already married.) Nora is, observes Nicolson, ‘a young-looking woman with the remains of beauty and an Irish accent so marked that she might have been a Belgian. Well dressed in the clothes of a young French bourgeoise.’ He also notices that she is wearing an art nouveau brooch.

She is followed by James Joyce himself, ‘aloof and blind’. Harold Nicolson, the most beady-eyed of diarists, offers his first impression of Joyce as ‘a slightly bearded spinster’. He wears huge concave spectacles which flick reflections of light onto the walls as he moves his head. Threatened by glaucoma, Joyce is to undergo eleven operations on his eyes in his lifetime, and sometimes wears an eyepatch, which causes his eyes to have, according to one friend, ‘the same paleness seen in plants long hidden from the sun’. Nicolson thinks of him as ‘some thin little bird, peeking, crooked, reserved, violent and timid. Little claw hands. So blind that he stares away from one at a tangent, like a very thin owl.’

The party troops downstairs to the dining room while Gladys Huntington talks to Joyce nervously, in a very shrill voice, on the subject of the late Italo Svevo, the author of
Confessions of Zeno
, whom Joyce once taught. A tremor goes around the group as Lady Huntington suddenly bursts into Italian. At the table, Harold Nicolson is placed next to Lady Gosford. Their conversation is on the dull side – Eton College, and whether boys under twenty should be allowed to go flying – but Nicolson keeps his left ear tuned in to the neighbouring conversation between Huntington and Joyce. Joyce is apparently already contradicting his hostess pretty sharply, and with a sort of bored indifference. Nevertheless, Nicolson notes that he has a very beautiful voice. ‘The most lovely voice I know,’ he notes at a later date, ‘– liquid and soft with undercurrents of gurgle.’

The two conversations peter out at about the same time, at which point Desmond MacCarthy starts talking about last month’s murder of a lieutenant in the British Army. Hubert Chevis ate a poisoned partridge and died; soon afterwards, his father, Sir William Chevis, was sent an anonymous telegram saying simply, ‘Hooray Hooray Hooray.’
¹³⁴
Nicolson and MacCarthy join in an animated discussion of the case with great verve and enthusiasm. Nicolson politely tries to draw Joyce in. ‘Are you interested in murders?’ he asks.

‘Not in the very least,’ he replies, flattening his hands towards the ground, with, in Nicolson’s view, the gesture of ‘a governess shutting the piano’. Joyce says no more; he has never been nervous of silence, and takes
great pride in any silence he himself has created. He likes to punctuate his silences with sighs; Nora has warned him time and again that he could destroy his heart with his excessive sighing.

Nicolson and MacCarthy swiftly try to change the subject. MacCarthy starts talking of Sir Richard Burton, mentioning that Burton was once the consul in Trieste, where Joyce lived for some time. Later, Nicolson thinks that he may have noticed this topic sending ‘a pallid but very fleeting light of interest across the pinched features of Joyce’.

‘Are you interested in Burton?’ asks MacCarthy.

‘Not,’ replies Joyce, ‘in the very least.’

Again, they speedily switch the subject. Nicolson says that he has been allowed to mention Joyce’s novel
Ulysses
in his wireless talks. At last, Joyce perks up. ‘What talks?’

Nicolson tells him. Joyce says he will send him a book about
Ulysses
– he pronounces it ‘Oolissays’ – for him to read and quote. Now that he is safely on the subject of himself, he is full of enthusiasm. ‘He is not a rude man,’ concludes Nicolson. ‘He manages to hide his dislike of the English in general and of the literary English in particular. But he is a difficult man to talk to.’ And also to read: eight years later, Nicolson is faced with the prospect of having to review
Finnegans Wake
. ‘I try very hard indeed to understand that book but fail completely. It is almost impossible to decipher, and when one or two lines of understanding emerge like telegraph poles above a flood, they are at once countered by other poles going in the opposite direction ... I truly believe that Joyce has this time gone too far in breaking all communication between himself and his reader. It is a very selfish book,’ he concludes.

As their awkward luncheon at the Huntingtons’ comes to an end, Desmond MacCarthy makes this observation to Harold Nicolson. ‘Joyce,’ he says, ‘is not a very
convenient
guest at luncheon.’

IS DIARISED BY

Sissinghurst Castle, Cranbrook, Kent

August 1967

‘Your purple border is wonderful,’ says one diarist to the other. ‘Congratulations.’

The relationship between the fashionable photographer and designer Cecil Beaton and Harold Nicolson is edgy, though whenever they meet they are impeccably polite. It is, in its way, a clash of diarists. Both keep diaries with a view to publication, so that when they are together in the same room they inevitably feel a sense of competition. Who will have the last word?

Nicolson, eighteen years Beaton’s senior, refuses to take Beaton seriously, either as a person or as an artist. He has always had a stern, puritanical side to him, and disapproves of Beaton’s natural flamboyance, his addiction to glamour. He pigeonholes him in the jet-set, a modish group for whom he maintains a natural aversion. In the opinion of his friend James Lees-Milne, ‘Harold loathed what he considered spurious people. He was inclined to be critical of actors, stage producers, scene designers, no matter how talented they might be, because he associated them with the meretricious.’

When the first of Harold Nicolson’s three volumes of diaries is published in 1966, three decades after being written, Beaton records in his own diary that he has been reading them with ‘enormous pleasure. I can really hardly fault the book –’ But he then adds a testy, almost rabid cavil: ‘– although I have been on the lookout to do so on every page, for I have never liked Harold Nicolson, have always mistrusted him, considered him a phoney. I don’t know whether I’ve resented his “getting away” with
so
much, being a fairly successful politician, at any rate respected by Churchill, Eden and group, a worthy critic, a figure in contemporary literature, a personality in the glittering world, a father, a loving husband, a gardener, and all the time a man with a most greedy lust for young men.’

Beaton is passionate in his denunciation, not of the diaries, which he so keenly enjoys, but of the diarist, who repels him. He disapproves of the essential contradiction at the heart of Harold Nicolson: so straight in his diaries, yet so unbuttoned in real life. ‘Perhaps it is more the greed than the lust that irritates me. Perhaps it is just that I dislike his obvious lusting. Although furtive of eye, no one shows his feelings more nakedly than Harold. He digs into a second helping of suet pudding, his double chins pucker. As he looks at a hefty schoolboy bicycling by, Harold’s fly buttons pop through the air like rockets. Physically he is repellent to me, the pig features in a fat bladder, the awful remains of schoolboyishness, the pink cheeks, the crinkly hair, the offensive pipe ... Yet here is a book full of very frank self-revelations. He comes out of it with enormous charm, a man of great perceptiveness, fairness and sincerity, altogether admirable.’

Nine months later, Beaton reads the just-published second volume of the diaries. ‘Again I wonder why it has been that, in spite of being told again and again by his friends, James P[ope]-H[ennessy] and others what a fine fellow he is, I’ve never liked the man.’

Once more, he is struck by the contradiction between the real-life hedonist and the ‘unvulgar, noble-minded’ voice in the diaries. But there is something more visceral in his distaste: ‘When scrutinising the photographs I again see that I am as put off by his physical appearance as I was in life. How unfair this is, especially as he is the first to denigrate himself in all respects. But the Cupid doll mouth, the paradoxical moustache, the corpulence of hands and stomach all give me a
frissant
[sic] and there is no getting over the fact that I could never become a friend of his.’

Cecil Beaton has long been transfixed by the horrors that come with age. His diaries are full of grim descriptions of lines and sags: the furriness of Greta Garbo’s skin, the ‘fat, coarse hands’ of Elizabeth Taylor, the Queen Mother ‘fatter than ever, but yet wrinkled’. He is equally horrified by his own decrepitude: ‘The mouth is a slit, the head on top baldly bullet-like, and the wild hair sticking cockatoo fashion out above the ears is that of King Lear.’

Three months after reading the second volume of Nicolson’s diaries, Beaton visits Nicolson’s gardens at Sissinghurst, which are open to the public. Having gloried in this ‘triumph of horticultural knowledge and imagination’, he spots Nicolson sitting in the sun outside his home, now
eighty years old, and a widower. He has suffered a stroke and is in decline: he no longer reads or writes, and has virtually stopped speaking. He is indifferent to the acclaim that has greeted the publication of his diaries; how odd, he remarks to his son Nigel, to publish three books one does not realise one has written. On summer evenings, Nicholson sits beneath a bundle of coats by his cottage door, ‘like a venerable buddha gazing into space’, according to his biographer.

Beaton walks over to what he calls ‘the remains of Harold N’. After his stroke, ‘he is really just a clockwork dummy’. He sees him smile. ‘His eyes are bright, but he is clothed in the anonymous vestments of old age, scraggy white moustache, bald white hair, pendulous stomach. But his brain does not work any more, just vague automatic answers in reply to something he doesn’t understand,’ Beaton will jot down in his diary on his return home.

‘Your purple border is wonderful,’ he tells Nicolson. ‘Congratulations.’

This too he will jot down.

‘I haven’t been out much lately. I haven’t seen it,’ replies Nicolson. To other questions, he responds with ‘a good-humoured low benevolent growl’.

Beaton bids farewell to his fellow diarist. ‘He seems contented in his animal state of relaxation and inactivity, which could presumably continue for another fifteen years,’ he concludes. As it happens, Harold Nicolson dies nine months later, while undressing for bed, thus handing the last word to Cecil Beaton.

IS OFFERED LSD BY

La Mamounia Hotel, Marrakesh

Early March 1967

Cecil Beaton is exhausted. ‘I feel stiff and terribly old ... with aching eyes, neck and back ... I face up to the horrible realities. My body is misformed, my head a mess, my brain a morass.’

He has come to Marrakesh to recuperate. He was tempted to stay with the fashionable art dealer Robert Fraser, as he knows his fellow house-guests would include Mick Jagger (‘At last an opportunity to photograph one of the most elusive people, whom I admire and am fascinated by, not determined whether he is beautiful or hideous’). But he is feeling antisocial, so he checks into the Mamounia Hotel.

It offers him no respite from his weary introspection. ‘Extremely displeased with myself’ and ‘hating all that I saw of myself in the nude’, he spends four days alone, but one evening when he goes down to dinner he is buoyed
¹³⁵
to discover ‘sitting in the hall ... Mick Jagger and a sleepy-looking band of gypsies’. Robert Fraser, who is coughing by the swimming pool (‘he had swallowed something the wrong way’), invites him to join them for the evening.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have come to Marrakesh to escape the furore surrounding their forthcoming drugs trial, and are using the opportunity to consume more drugs. The local hash is a particular favourite. ‘I heard that a way of collecting it was to cover children in honey and run them naked through a field of herbs, and they came out the other end and they scraped ’em off,’ Keith recalls.

Beaton has eyes only for Jagger, though he does his best to conceal it. ‘His skin is chicken breast white, and of a fine quality. He has enormous inborn elegance.’ Over drinks, Jagger rambles on about how England is a
police state; he plans to sue the
News of the World
for saying he has depraved the youth of the country.

Off to a restaurant, they jump into a Bentley filled with Pop Art cushions, scarlet fur rugs, pornography and ‘the most deafening volume of pop music’. Mick and Brian Jones start jigging around, while Anita Pallenberg fills Beaton in on her role in a new film:
¹³⁶
she plays a woman who shoots her boyfriend dead after he tries to beat her up. Coincidentally, Brian has recently been beating her up, suspecting her – rightly, as it happens – of conducting an affair with Keith.

Over dinner, Beaton finds Jagger ‘very gentle, with perfect manners’. A black woman starts singing. ‘What marvellous authority she has,’ says Mick, who takes to the dance floor. Beaton is ‘fascinated with the thin concave lines of his body, legs, arms. Mouth almost too large, but he is beautiful and ugly, feminine and masculine, a “sport,” a rare phenomenon.’

As the evening unwinds, their conversation blossoms. ‘Have you ever taken LSD?’ asks Mick. He thinks Cecil should: being a painter, he would never forget the colours; one’s brain works on 4,000 cylinders, not just four. ‘You saw everything glow. The colours of his red velvet trousers, the black shiny satin, the maroon scarf. You saw yourself beautiful and ugly, and saw other people as if for the first time.’ Jagger insists it has no bad effects. ‘It’s only people who hate themselves who suffer.’