  Tony
Heyes,
our man from England, gives us another thoughtful and somewhat wicked
views of a social icon.The Unexpurgated Beaton... Hardcover: 528 pages Publisher: Knopf; 1st American Edition edition (October 28, 2003) ISBN: 1400041120 |
| The
late Barbara Cartland, a prolific writer of romantic novellas (what an
aunt of mine called “three penn’orth o’
passion”) once described in a
television interview the privations she’d suffered following
the Great
Crash of 1929. “We were so poor”, she said,
“We had to fire all the
servants and dine in restaurants”. It is given to few of us
to suffer
such poverty and to few of us to show such fortitude*. Understanding her mindset is extremely difficult for the modern reader and similar difficulties beset the reader of Cecil Beaton’s recently published unexpurgated diaries. His view of society is notable for his ignorance of the realities confronting most people and his values are bewilderingly trivial. Every year, for example, he made a list of the people he envied. The Queen was always top of the list (not that Beaton wasn’t, in his own particular way, a Great British Queen.) Reading his unexpurgated diaries one imagines them being declaimed by Margaret Dumont. His diary has been published before but previously it was expurgated. Anyone expecting this new edition to be full of steamy revelations will be sorely disappointed. What were previously excluded were bitchy or unkind remarks about living contemporaries. Now that he and many of his “victims” are dead the editor feels free to print his comments in full. He gives short shrift to Katherine Hepburn, Mae West, George Cukor and Elizabeth Taylor. He also frequently laments so many of his friends having let themselves go – the rest of us would regard them as having aged. Years ago, reading Andrew Holleran’s The Dancer from the Dance, I read a phrase that stuck in my mind and re-surfaced as I read this book: “Never forget that all these people are primarily a visual people... And being people who live on the surface of the eye, they cannot be expected to have minds or hearts... Do not expect nourishment for anything but your eye.” Beaton’s work certainly nourished the eye. His photographs and stage and film sets and costumes are breathtakingly beautiful, but his philosophy and ambitions nowhere go beyond social climbing and visibility. He laments that few people invited him out as he got older. The truth was his friends were made uncomfortable by him. He always dressed to the nines and beyond, so always required plenty of notice. All the social niceties had to be observed and he judged harshly anyone who didn’t share his love of what Lady Bracknell called “surfaces”. Appearance, while not being all, very nearly was. Ostensibly successful, Beaton is in many ways an object lesson in how single-mindedness can bring you success and at the same time exact a terrible price. Are the diaries worth a read? Certainly. They provide an insight into a world most of us are unlikely to occupy and many amusing, gossipy titbits. A fountain of wisdom they are not. She also said that as one aged one had to decide whether to sacrifice one’s face or one’s figure. There were those who said it was difficult to discern which she’d decided on but they were just being nasty, weren’t they boys and girls? Tony Heyes |