More Than an Aesthete: Harold Acton Revisited

Harold Mario Mitchell Acton, the son of Arthur Acton, was born in 1904. His father was an illegitimate offspring of an adviser to the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce, and consequently he and Harold were less distinguished scion of the Acton family than they liked to suggest.

What transformed his father’s and his own circumstances was his American mother’s inherited wealth; it supported and shaped Harold’s long and privileged life. The main source for the character of Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited”, Harold was a nomad, not entirely a citizen of anywhere. Waugh’s fictional depiction captures the essence:

“An attempt had been made in his childhood to make an Englishman of him; he was two years at Eton; then in the middle of the [First] war he had defied the submarines, re-joined his mother in the Argentine, and a clever and audacious schoolboy was added to the valet, the maid, the two chauffeurs … Criss-cross about the world he travelled with them … When peace came they returned to Europe, to hotels and furnished villas, spas and casinos … he dined with Proust and Gide and was on closer terms with Cocteau and Diaghilev … At times we all seemed children beside him…”

A proponent of “art for art’s sake”, Acton was a stand-out undergraduate at Oxford and a privately financed exotic, thereafter. He lived in pre-war Peking and flirting with a career as a poet and a translator of poetry from the Chinese.

That said, there was more to Acton than some have allowed. Though he relished his notoriety as an aesthete in a world of barbarians and flaunted his reputation in two volumes of autobiography published after the Second World War (Memoirs of an Aesthete in 1948 and More Memoirs of an Aesthete in 1970), he became a notable historian and a cultivated focus of cosmopolitan Florence.

Today, he risks caricature and fading from view; becoming a sepia figure in a technicolour world. He deserves better.

In his mature years, Acton established himself ever more firmly at “La Pietra”, the beautiful Renaissance villa he eventually inherited from his parents. “La Pietra” was a stunning house set in the hills above Florence and is, to this day, the home of his father’s art collection, surrounded by tailored gardens sloping down the hillside. For Harold Acton it became an exquisite refuge, a venue for generous hospitality, conversation and a literary launchpad for some of his most accomplished books.

Despite writing of the Medici in two books in the 1930s, his most accomplished histories were not about the Grand Duchy of Florence but about the history of Naples and the Bourbons.

Florence was smoothly elite, but for Acton, Naples was more edgy; its hinterlands more evidently layered in ancient history, most strikingly at Herculaneum, Pompei and Paestum. He worked long and assiduously in the archives of Naples and turned his efforts to good effect in The Bourbons of Naples, (1734-1825) published in 1956 and the Last Bourbons of Naples (1825-1861) five years later. The books are lengthy (and currently out of print) yet scintillating. Acton writes narrative history through vivid portraits of key personalities.

Some academic historians, however, are suspicious of Acton’s books, devoid as they are of footnotes and focussed on the aristocratic layers of society, most especially the Bourbon family and their numerous hangers-on. Acton would not have settled well in the Academy of today. He is closer in type to Steven Runciman, another privately-funded historian, than to the university historians of today. He is very differently cast than the professionals who seek to disparage him, though no less accomplished.

Most significantly perhaps his books offer a different vantage point, one on the southern edge of Europe and looking north. From the French Revolution to the unification of Italy, Acton takes the reader along unexpected paths and illuminates with great freshness relations between Naples and other European powers, not least Britain. He never loses his sense of the individual actor in the drama, whether that be his Acton kinsman who became the Bourbons’ longest-serving Prime Minister, or the menage between Emma Hamilton, Admiral Nelson and Lady Hamilton’s husband, William, the British Ambassador at Naples. There is never a dull sentence.

A true custodian of his inheritance (and a strong and much appreciated supporter of the British Institute in Florence), in his later years Acton received his many visitors, some exceedingly eminent, including Prince Charles and his first wife, in mannequined style and with his unmistakable antique voice. With his own end in sight, Acton sought a new owner for “La Pietra”, one equipped financially and vocationally to do credit to the villa’s art collection and gardens. Illustrating to the last his own cosmopolitan origins, he bequeathed the villa to New York University on his death in 1994. This outcome was not without contention and an ownership dispute lasted for some years, launched by the descendant of an alleged liaison between Harold’s father and his Italian secretary.

Nothing about Arthur’s son is dull. He is still able to engage his readers through his grasp of another world, that of eighteenth and nineteenth century Naples as ruled by the often wonderfully dysfunctional Bourbons. His Memoirs of an Aesthete can still provide much pleasure. Acton was a one-off, an independent scholar for whom the arts really mattered, the like of whom may not be seen again.