Beaton – Stuck in a Book

A delightful reread for #ABookADayInMay – Day 4

StuckinaBook All May 4, 20241940s, 1949, ACOB2024, Beaton 11 Comments

I read Ashcombe (1949) by Cecil Beaton back in 2012, sitting in the Bodleian Library. I quickly knew I needed my own copy – and this beautiful edition arrived. Here we are, 12 years later, and I have re-read and re-loved Beaton’s tale of finding, renovating and loving a beautiful countryside home in Wiltshire. Will I still feel the same as when I first wrote about it?

I think I must have been drawn the book initially because of its inclusion of Edith Olivier – I certainly read it during my DPhil, which included a chapter on her novel The Love-Child. It was while staying with Olivier in 1930 that Beaton made the decision to go and visit Ashcombe – a sizeable house left in some disrepair, hidden at near-inaccessible lengths in the depths of the Wiltshire countryside. (It is clearly a mansion, however homely Beaton tries to make it sound.)

I do not know if the others spoke during the trek up the hill. I was perhaps vaguely conscious of their eulogoies, but I was almost numbed by my first encounter with the house. It was as if I had been touched on the head by some magic wand. Some people may grow to love their homes: my reaction was instantaneous. It was love at first sight, and from the moment that I stood under the archway, I knew that this place was destined to be mine. No matter what the difficulites, I would overcome them all; considerations of money, suitability, or availability, were all superficial. This house must belong to me.

As it happened, the house never did belong to Beaton. The subtitle to Ashcombe is ‘the story of a fifteen-year lease’ – and Beaton did indeed lease the house and its significant grounds from its owner, who hadn’t thought it quite habitable. And indeed it wasn’t. The nominal rent of £50 per year was so low because Beaton would spend so much money on restoring the house – and, in the days before listing restrictions (or maybe even planning permission?), he went much further than restoring. Ashcombe has lots of (black and white) photographs included, and some of these are before and after sets – where he’s clearly extended windows, added walls and doors, and knocked things about at whim, as well as extensive landscaping. The landlord certainly got good value, but also seems incredibly tolerant for Beaton to pursue any whim at all. How many of our landlords would let a tenant have every visitor sketch their hand on the bathroom wall?

The photographs also show many of the people who came to stay. While Beaton leased Ashcombe for 15 years, he never lived there full-time. It was a retreat from a week in London, and he was often away abroad for months at a time. But while he was there, he brought packs of the great and the good from London (and even, before he was sure of the cook’s ability, all the catering from London too). We get to sneak into their lives, which seem to be a whirlwind of costume parties, charades, artistry and camaraderie. Quite what the locals thought we never discover – these are privileged, wealthy, often titled men and women who have seemingly endless energy and opportunity for antics. Many are names you’ll probably recoginse – Augustus John, Salvador Dali, Rex Whistler, Siegfried Sassoon. Even Tom Mitford gets a look-in, which he seldom does in books about his sisters. Naturally, I relished the times he spoke of Edith Olivier – older than most of her famous friends, and relatively new to this world, having been oppressively sheltered until her father died when Olivier was already firmly middle-aged, if not old.

Of the neighbours on whom I grew to rely more and more, Edith Olivier was perhaps the most cherished. It was she who, by bringing me into contact with so many new friends, was so largely responsible for my having blossomed into a happy adult life: and it was she who continued, without effort on her part, to discover your people of promise and bring them to her house. So many of the young writers, painters and poets came to her with problems about their work and their life, and they knew that after she had listened intently to their outpourings, her advice would be unprejudiced, wise and Christian. Edith’s youthfulness and spirit were of all time: she had unlimited energy, vitality and zest for life. Interested in every strata of humanity, she had never been known to be bored. After a strenuous day she would retire to bed, not to sleep, but to read at least three books, one of which she was to review, in addition to writing a most detailed journal of all that had happened to her during the previous twenty-four hours.

Having sat in Wiltshire Record Office with volumes of the journal, I can attest that it is ‘most detailed’. She wrote at enormous length and in horrendous handwriting.

So much of Ashcombe is joyful: the joy of home and the joy of friends. Beaton writes brilliantly about the pull of a beautiful place, and about the frenetic happiness that a group of carefree people can bring out of each other. They are unafraid of simple silliness. But the book does have its mournful edge. Nine years after the lease began, the Second World War started.

I remember I was about to step into a hot bath when I was informed that Poland had been invaded. The news was like a death knell. We had to wait one endless day more before we heard, from a calm but tired voice on the radio, that Hitler had refused the last request for a peaceful solution to his demands.

At Ashcombe, as we sat listening to the Prime Minister in the small parlour, my mother wept a little. The speech was soon over. We were now at war.

Beaton writes with sensitivity about the impact on war – mostly on fatalities among his friends, particularly Rex Whistler, since Beaton’s own wartime experience was clearly easier than others. Ashcombe is something of a retreat from the worst of the bombing and devastation in London, but is not left unaffected.

Almost equally sombre is the end of the lease. Beaton hoped to continue living there (at least for some of the year) for the rest of his life – but, after the lease had been extended a few times, I finally came to an end. The landlord wanted it back and there was nothing Beaton could do. Houses are often important in fact and fiction, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a better account of the heartbreak of leaving a home you have truly loved, against your will. It only happened to me once (when all my housemates rather suddenly chose to leave Oxford), but it is devastating and takes a long time to get over.

Beaton may have had other homes and I daresay they were palatial and beautiful – but Ashcombe clearly caught and kept his heart. In this delightful, poignant, effervescent book, he has given the house an excellent tribute.

Ashcombe – Cecil Beaton

StuckinaBook All February 6, 2012April 26, 20151940s, 1949, ACOB, Beaton 24 Comments

Firstly, I’m so thrilled about all the response to Muriel Spark Reading Week, which will thus definitely go ahead! More info on dates etc. when Harriet and I have conferred…

Secondly – I’m a bit wary about putting this blog post up… because I don’t have a copy of the book myself, and it’s so lovely that, if I can convey that even slightly, all the secondhand copies online will disappear. But I can’t afford the ones that are around now, so… I’ll just have to tell you about it, and cross my fingers that I stumble across an affordable copy somewhere. Sigh. Sometimes I love you guys too much for my own good.

Preamble over: the book is Ashcombe: The Story of a Fifteen-Year Lease (1949) by Cecil Beaton. I wanted to read it because Edith Olivier features a lot (she first told Beaton of the house) and so I sat in the Bodleian and read it. I also took lots of photos, but then I looked again at the photography permission form, and noticed that I’d promised not to publish any of them anywhere, including online. Oops. So I’ll have to see what pictures are available elsewhere. (This photo comes from here.)

Ashcombe is about a house of that name, inhabited by Cecil Beaton between 1931-1946… actually, shall I let Cecil Beaton explain the book himself? He kindly does so in a Preface:

My tenure of Ashcombe House began with new year of a new decade – the fatal decade of the nineteen-thirties. “The thirties”, years marked by economic collapse, the rise of Hitler and the wars in China and in Spain, were essentially different in character from their notorious and carefree predecessors, “the twenties”, but they had one thing in common – living then you could still cherish the illusion that you might go on for ever leading your own private life, undisturbed by the international crises in the newspapers. This illusion was finally and irrevocably shattered in 1939.

So utterly has the world changed since that summer day, nearly twenty years ago, when I stood for the firs time under the brick archway at Ashcombe, and surveyed my future home, that ways of living and of entertaining which the seemed natural today sound almost eccentric., Looking back through old diaries recording some of the parties that took place at Ashcombe in those days, it struck me that for this reason it might be interesting to try to string together in narrative form my recollections of that time. The shape these recollections have assumed is that of a memoir of the house itself, but thought I see this little book primarily as a tribute of gratitude to Ashcombe, a house I shall never cease to regret, it is also and inevitably a story of the people who came to visit me there.
Someone wrote to him, on the book’s publication, to say how pleased he was that Beaton ‘made clear that we were not a group of delinquent Bright Young Things dressing up’. And indeed, he introduces all the guests over the fifteen years as friends, rather than celebrities – even though amongst their number were Rex Whistler (who painted the image below), Salvador Dali, Diana Cooper, and other luminaries from the worlds of art, theatre, and literature.

(this picture came from a great blog post on Little Augury, which has several others from the book too)

But for me, there was one stand-out character in the book: Ashcombe House itself. When Beaton first found it, with the help of Edith Olivier and Stephen Tennant, it was in neglected disrepair. He eventually managed to negotiate a lease from its owner, Mr. Borley (who seems to have been appositely boorish) at a cheap rate, on the understanding that Beaton would do a great deal of restoration to the property.

And these were the sections I loved. I’m a sucker for any property programme on television – they can be buying, selling, or building a house, but my favourites are when they transform them. So it’s my hankering after Changing Rooms scaled up to a majestically bohemian and artistic standard. There are plenty of photographs throughout, many showing ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots, and although they are (naturally) in black/white, they still give a wonderful picture of the process and the time. Above all, the pictures and writing together create a three-dimensional picture of what Ashcombe was like to live in. I love novels where houses play an important role, and it’s even more delightful when the house in question existed, and its effect was real.

Ashcombe, in this century, could be neither a gentleman’s home nor a farmer’s retreat. It is essentially a artist’s abode; and, under the varying conditions in which I lived there, the house conformed to every change of my temperament and mood, proving as great a solace during the grey years of war as in the now almost forgotten days of gaiety.
Of course, Ashcombe alone might not give this effect. It has latterly been owned by Madonna, which is rather a ghastly thought. I doubt she has the same artistic sensitivities of Beaton, if her leotards are anything to go by. Part of the charm of Beaton’s book is his character, and the friends he had. I doubt I’d have been entertained by them so much if they were in a London townhouse, but transport them to the idyllic countryside of Wiltshire, and I’m enamoured. I don’t mean that I was bowled over by the individuals themselves so much as the type of group. It did make me wish for a moment that my friends were all artists and writers and theatre managers: we could go and paint murals on the walls of our country homes and put on impromptu plays in the garden. Then I realised that my friends and I do sometimes paint together (albeit on canvas) and have been known to read out an entire Shakespeare play together – so I’m not doing too badly. But I’ve never had a circus room (how delicious would that be?) and never had call to say “It’s too bad, they’ve broken my best silver bird-cage!”

(A painting of Ashcombe owned by Beaton, c.1770)

Sadly, of course, the years of his lease were not without sadness. Beaton moves onto the war, and writes movingly of how it affected him and his friends – at least one of whom, Rex Whistler, was killed in action. While this section was written no less well than the rest, perhaps it is of less especial interest than those parts of the book which focus on Ashcombe House – simply because so many other people have recorded the pain of war. An anguish, if less extreme then no less real, comes when Beaton must end his lease and say goodbye to Ashcombe. Or, rather, he is evicted when Borley decides that his son will move in. Within his rights as a landlord, but still a desperately sad loss for Beaton, who so clearly loves the house.

What I didn’t expect, when I ordered Ashcombe to the library, was Beaton’s talent as a writer. I knew him as a designer and photographer, but had not expected him to write so beautifully and simply about his house. Without ever having seen the house, I now know it intimately – not the layout, but the feel of the rooms and the grounds and the surrounding county.

Beaton in the bathroom, surrounded by visitors’ hands(!)

Thinking about it, this might not be the ideal book for the city-lover. Even though I currently live in a city, my heart is definitely in the fields and woods, and the spirit of the countryside. The people there are friendlier. The mix of nature and man and animal is much clearer to see, and beautiful even when at its most practical. I will devote a post to this at some point, I keep building up to it, and Ashcombe is another piece in the jigsaw of why I love the countryside. So if you love London (and so many of you seem to) or have never lived in a small village, then I don’t think you’ll be able to love this book in quite the same way that I do. But, perhaps, as I can read books set in London with the passing interest of a tourist, so you can come on a reading charabanc, have a good look around, and then rush back to your streetlighting and taxis and neatly contained parks. For people like me, who love villages and villagers and life in the middle of nowhere – who don’t really feel completely alive anywhere else – Ashcombe is not simply an ode to artistry, a toast to happy memories, and a lament against the far-reaching damage done by war; it is a paean to the countryside and to life lived amongst fields, and trees – and happy, playful friends, unaware of what was around the corner.