Cecil Roberts (1892-1976) was an English novelist, poet and dramatist. He was a prolific writer and although his novels were very popular in his lifetime, he is now almost forgotten. His books include A Terrace in the Sun and the Pilgrim Cottage trilogy. During my teens, I read and enjoyed many of his novels. I loved A Terrace in the Sun, a novel which introduced me to the idea of the past returning to haunt or delight us in the present. I find his novels interesting today because they are, in a sense, a commentary on the social structure of the 1940s and 1950s.
I have included him in my series of blogs on outrageous and interesting people because he was an outrageous snob. Here is an extract from the fifth book in his autobiography – The Pleasant Years (1974). It is clear to me, even as a fan of Roberts, that his books are entirely out of a different world.
I was back in New York at the end of April. I dined with Mrs Cartwright at her Fifth Avenue apartment. One of the guests was Mrs Dorothy Caruso, her cousin. She was very surprised when I recalled that in 1924 she had given me and my travelling companion, Armand de la Rochefoucauld, her box at the Metropolitan Opera House, and we had taken with us the two Mdivani brothers, Prince Serge and Prince Alexis, then in poor lodgings in New York. She had married Caruso a few years before his death. They had one child, Gloria, whom he adored. I said I remembered that she had told me Caruso would not allow any birds to be shot on his Italian estate near Florence, unlike other Italians. “What an incredible memory you have!” she exclaimed, “He loathed ‘other singers’ being shot."
Comments