An aged, nearly blind man of letters living off a legacy from his eccentric now-dead wife and subsisting mostly on a diet of eggs. His two homosexual amanuenses. A rackety young English woman eking out an existence in Rome. A grand, decaying house hard by the Ligurian Sea owned by a half-American marchesa. It sounds like the setup for an Elizabeth Bowen novel, or perhaps one by Ronald Firbank. But this was, in fact, the scene at Gli Scafari (The Brigands), near Lerici, Italy, on the Gulf of Spezia, in the year 1957.
The man of letters was Percy Lubbock, who attained some fame in the 1920s for his book The Craft of Fiction, which advanced a Jamesian, formalist view of novel-writing. His eccentric now-dead wife was born Lady Sybil Cuffe, the daughter of an Irish peer. Her first husband was a rich American of old New York stock, Bayard Cutting; the two of them produced a daughter, Iris, who later married Antonio Origo, becoming Iris Origo, Marchesa Origo, and winning deserved plaudits for her writing. Lady Sybil’s second husband was Geoffrey Scott, the author of The Architecture of Humanism, which remains perhaps the best defense of classical architecture ever written. Percy came third, in what all assumed to be a mariage blanc, for women were not his type.
The rackety young woman was Susanna Chancellor, soon to become Susanna Johnston by marriage to the young architect Nicky Johnston. By her own telling she was
twenty-one and, for no particularly good reason, perched in Rome. Very lost. Very broke. No boyfriend, no sense of direction, no qualifications, no ambition other than a yearning to stay in Italy.
The amanuenses were much more than home aids, being budding art historians who went on to make a major impact in the field. They were John Fleming and Hugh Honour, more or less unknown at the time, but soon to begin quietly productive careers that culminated in their World History of Art (1982), which became a standard textbook for art-history students and is still used today.
A Villa in Tuscany is the remarkable story of how all these characters were brought together, as told by Susanna Johnston herself, who died in 2022. Subtitled “John Fleming and Hugh Honour Remembered,” the book is about much more than Johnston’s lifelong friendship with “Honour and Glory” (as the pair were widely known, though she never calls them that in the book). Indeed, it is a transporting account of a time and place now lost forever, when independent historians with a little money could live in formerly grand houses throughout Italy; when the Ligurian coast was dotted with foreigners coming to swim (but hoping to not drown) in Byron and Shelley’s waters.
Johnston’s long association with Fleming and Honour almost didn’t come to pass. She was brought to Gli Scafari by the writer and broadcaster Gordon Waterfield, who, having learned that Fleming and Honour intended to vacate their positions in Lubbock’s household, thought the charming young Susanna might be a suitable replacement. The trouble was, as Gordon told Susanna on the drive out, “Percy is certain to be prejudiced against employing a girl.” Initially he was, but he eventually came around to Susanna, who fell into a daily routine of dealing with Percy’s correspondence, reading aloud to him the air-mail edition of the London Times, then lunch (invariably some egg dish), then “heavy reading” in the afternoon (“Although a determined atheist, Percy was interested in theology”). Lighter reading came after tea, which meant Henry James, Edith Wharton, and sometimes Agatha Christie or Thackeray, all of whom Percy had known save for the last.
This arrangement, which Johnston describes with both tendresse and a good deal of wit, lasted for a year or so, before she returned to England, where she met her eventual husband. Nicky Johnston had been at Cambridge with Honour. Lubbock’s reaction at losing his now-trusted aide was one of ironical warning: “I look forward to seeing you here as soon as possible and I, for one, believe in very long engagements.” It was a fairly short one, as it turns out, and the marriage took place in December 1958, at which point Lubbock recedes from this memoir (he didn’t die until 1965, his final years rather diminished in Johnston’s telling).
The stage is given over to Honour and Fleming and their charming house near Lucca, called the Villa Marchio, which they purchased in the early 1960s. The house—“painted in a blotchy and peeling pink” with “a double flight of stairs” leading to the front door and a recessed wing on either side—became, along with their formidable scholarship, the lifework of Honour and Fleming, who were partners in all senses. For many years Johnston was the third partner in fun and mischief, visiting the Villa Marchio and soon buying a house nearby.
Johnston brilliantly delineates their respective personalities; Honour “had clever, humorous and kind eyes” with a way of speaking that was a “bit antiquated . . . almost Shakespearian,” whereby Milan became “Millern,” for instance. John was “inquisitive, almost cheeky.” But as Johnston tells it, the two—whom she calls “the boys”—always operated as a unit, with the personal pronouns “we” and “our” in constant employ, such as in Fleming’s report that “Our dentist is very pleased with our teeth.” Their wry sense of humor is well documented by Johnston, as when she relates an anecdote of how the boys “had observed, in print, that when pursuing old altar pieces in Tuscan hill towns,” John Pope-Hennessy, a prominent homosexual art historian, “did not neglect ‘the local flora and fauna—especially the fauna.’ ”
That sense of humor was apparent to me the first time I came across John Fleming’s name, attached to his splendid biography of the Scottish architect Robert Adam’s early years, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh and Rome (1962). Fleming clearly identified with the caustic Adam, who groused continuously about architectural rivals and his manservant Donald, whom he nicknamed “The King of Sleep.”
There may also have been a gloomy streak to the pair. David Pryce-Jones, who knew Honour and Fleming through Muriel Spark, told me that he once ran into Honour at the passport office in London, filled at the time with Muslim migrants all sporting full niqab. Honour turned to David and said, “I’m not sure we won the war for this.” But such dour moments were, as Johnston makes clear, rare, for the boys’ life was a happy one, filled with good company and good cheer among the Anglo-American set in the Lucchesia.
Susanna Johnston’s memoir is a fine tribute to two men that one would have liked to have known. Through her vivid storytelling, by the final page we feel that we do.
