Memories of an Aesthete (Commentary) (Harold Mario Mitchell Acton and Evelyn Waugh's Novel 'Brides-Head Revisited') (Critical Essay)

Evelyn Waugh's celebrated novel Brides-head Revisited was recently committed to film once again, bravely (and very badly) in the face of the definitive BBC production of three decades ago. When I first saw news of the movie, my mind turned immediately to the book's figure of mantic wit, Anthony Blanche, since m 1981 I spent an afternoon in Florence with the man who inspired the character, Waugh's old Oxford companion Harold (after 1974 Sir Harold) Mario Mitchell Acton, writer, traveler, art-collector, arbiter elegantiae to his generation, and throughout his long life faithful and garrulous friend of many people more significant culturally than himself The story I tell here is derived from extensive notes written out immediately after our conversation. Various complications have prevented its publication before this point, but now seems the time to recall my own brush with the irretrievably lost world of Charles and Sebastian: "My theme is memory, that winged host. ..." I