Three Self-Images

...No such exotic period can salvage the current book from dullness, though the War experiences Acton recounts took him to Japan, Indochina, Malaya, India, and Egypt, and a generous American uncle later persuaded him to make extended visits in Chicago, Hollywood, Mexico, and New York...

...Yet because his primary passion and enthusiasm seem to have gone into his friendships, his memoirs are mainly a parade of carefully chiseled portraits...

...Lemay has had the courage to grasp memory as an Ariadne thread that can be trusted to lead him safely out of the destructive labyrinth of self-pity and self-deception, and so in the end it does...

...Very little of this can be detected in Acton's writing...

...Although Acton was to the Berenson manner born— as Berenson himself was not!—and could never have felt at I Tatti as Moorehead did on his first visit, "tense as a cat among the dishes and the Venetian fingerbowls," Acton's Berenson seems a flaccid figure drawn with uncritical snobbism and hero-worship...

...In the earlier volume, the seven years in China offered a fascinating change from the steady progression of glittering names...

...Between Moorehead the Australian journalist-historian and Acton the esthete there would seem to be little common ground...

...Acton knew Berenson from childhood as a neighbor and fellow aristocrat...

...Living as he did in the affluent elegance of the Florentine foreign colony until he was sent off to Eton and Oxford, Acton can summon up a dazzling array of semiprecious names...

...He has traveled widely, written some poetry, some novels, and a history of the Bourbons in Naples...

...John Leh-mann, in his autobiography, has portrayed Acton in London during the War, just back from India "bringing refreshment with his sparkling affectionate courtesy and his Chippendale flatteries" and describing India "with an irumitable flowery wit and Proustian eye for social comedy...

...As Moorehead writes, with characteristic Australian blunt-ness: "I was a queer fish in Berenson's world, and it was of course the attraction of opposites: he, the aged sophisticate who for fifty years in the most elegant surroundings had been pursuing the final subtleties and meeting the most literate people in Europe...

...Though he speaks of money rarely—and then in a discreetly embarrassed whisper—his father, a rich Englishman who had married an even richer Chicagoan, had exceedingly ample means to indulge a mania for art-collecting...

...In the foreword to his new volume, however, Acton gives a markedly different account: In 1939 he tore himself away from his adopted home in Peking to join the RAF, only to discover that he was being ignored for suitable duties because his long years in China had branded him a "scandalous debauchee" in England...

...While none of the later sections of Inside, Looking Out approach the passionate concentration of pain and pity he achieves in writing of his childhood, one's compassionate attention rarely falters, even when the prose is pedestrian and the people, like his second wife, are made to seem too good to be quite real...

...Moorehead came to sit at the feet of the grand old man of Settignano by a much less casual route...

...After the War, Moorehead settled down for a curiously frustrating time in Florence, trying to write a novel against the demoralizing tug of Italian dolce far nienle...

...His portraits of Blanche and Alfred Knopf are at once savage and remarkably charitable, and he has a shrewd eve for the unexpected similarities between these New York publishers and his barely literate farmer parents...

...Acton compares his father, in gentle mockery, with the antique-greedy Mrs...

...His memoirs are pegged on his long and close friendship with Alex Clifford, a journalist who died young: They covered the war together in the Middle Eastern desert, Sicily and France, Moorehead as correspondent for the Express, Clifford for the Mail...

...Let me fling it in the teeth of the Philistines...

...In early boyhood Lemay discovered the movies—the great American escape hatch—and at 17 ran away to New York City to become an actor...

...He was the fifth of 13 children born to an impoverished French-Canadian farmer in upstate New York...

...His viciously overworked mother gradually sank into insanity...

...In fact, he has written a more fervent and sympathetic record of his life than either the exquisitely cultivated amateur of the Villa La Pietra or the tough professional from Australia...

...IN THIS COMPANY of autobiographers Harding Le-may would at first glance seem to be the odd man out...

...But "I could not then," he points out, "acknowledge the resemblance between the two Jewish cosmopolitans who employed me and the backwoods French-Canadian Catholics who had brought me into the world...

...Yet both books are rich in recollection of Bernard Berenson at I Tatti, his great villa near Florence...

...Perhaps this accounts for the fundamental monotony of his new book: It reads more like a literarily embellished Who's Who than the candid revelation of one man's experience that an interesting autobiography should be...

...Moorehead, though he seems to be taking a conventional downward glance from the summit of achievement, has more likely been cleaning out his desk...

...his father hanged himself from a beam in the cellar...

...Berenson had read and admired a book of Moore-head's about the War and their odd friendship makes up the most interesting section of A Late Education...

...from his earliest years, the great and near-great in the arts and the Almanach de Gotha were his intimates...

...Time spent in England, and his later sojourns in France and China, widened the range of celebrities who became Acton's friends—a surfeit of Sitwells, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Bernard Berenson, Jean Coc-teau, Gertrude Stein, Somerset Maugham, ad infinitum —but the pattern of his life has remained essentially unchanged...

...What he had to accept instead was a home for runaway boys on the Lower East Side, bleak years of poverty and disappointment, wartime service in the Army...

...Writers & Writing THREE SELF-IMAGES BY PEARL K. BELL MEN WRITE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES for reasons that are as multifarious and varied as their faces, a truism borne out with particular force by three books published this spring: Alan Moorehead's A Late Education (Harper and Row, 175 pp., $5.95), Harold Acton's Memoirs of an Aesthete (Viking, 375 pp., $8.95) and Harding Lemay's Inside, Looking Out (Harper's Magazine Press, 273 pp., $6.95...

...Acton remarks that "memoirs should concentrate on all that is vital and attempt to recapture the hours and moments of exaltation and delight," but there was little of that for Lemay in the first 30-odd years of his life...

...In Harold Acton's case, we are provided with a number of self-proclaimed motives for autobiography that do not altogether jibe...

...Moorehead's Berenson is more readily incisive and probably more accurate...

...He began writing his memoirs to vindicate himself, but that first volume had an unforeseeable consequence which, in turn, has led to the present volume: A swarm of locusts, in the shape of "thesis writers and biographers soliciting impressions, anecdotes, personal appreciations of Edith Sitwell, Norman Douglas . . . and other absent friends...

...Let me write my own book in my own good time...

...But why devote further time and trouble to padding out other people's books for them...

...Even when he finally married exactly the right woman and became a father himself...

...Gereth in James' The Spoils of Poynton...

...The writing of this book has enabled Harding Lemay to acknowledge not only this strange congruity but a good deal more about himself, his family, and his life...

...Basta...

...In discovering the folly of "solving" problems by running away from them, he has learned to accept himself...

...But I would guess that this unity was added to the disparate recollections only when Moorehead saw the chance to bring out a book without sweat, following years of hard work on such big ones as his recent Darwin and the Beagle...

...Harold Acton was born in 1904 in the opulent Villa La Pietra in Florence, and lives there now...

...In the first volume of his memoirs, published more than a decade ago, Acton declared that it was time "we citizens of the world" asserted ourselves, "to remind our fellow creatures of what they are fast forgetting, that true culture is universal...

...I, the young Australian without background or connections, knowing nothing of painting or architecture, or indeed of half the subjects which were discussed so easily and in so many different languages in that elaborate and platonic house...

...Let me glory in the name of aesthete, for I am one in the proper sense of that word...

...when, promoted to vice president at Knopf, he seemed at last to have found his place in the New York hierarchy of success, he was pursued by the unrelenting furies of despair and discontent...

...Lemay, at 49 very much the junior member of this ill-assorted trio, has turned to autobiography partly as a means of exorcising the cruel demons nourished in an appalling childhood...