Darling Monster

by Diana Cooper

  We’ve bought a Swiss guide book. It has a lot of passes with accompanying letters: G – good, V.G – very good, E – easy, A – awkward, D – difficult. The pass we fancied on account of its position and direction was labelled G and A, but on the morning of the ascent the weather was so appalling that we hesitated over the ‘awkward’. Luckily we chose a G and E instead because it was all but impassable. Bad petrol was causing the car to gurk and to falter. The windscreen wiper was hopelessly temperamental (this Kimberley is too). We stopped for an hour and a half at the foot to have the petrol drained out and the tubes blown through. It rained and hurricaned and snowed and fogged. The cars we met, and there were frighteningly few – were caked in snow and had their lights on at noon. However we did not meet darkness. We did meet over the frontier a river tearing across the road with a truck stuck in it and a queue of cars confronting each other. For a moment my old verve returned and taking on at full speed rocks and gullies and trenches and trees, got across the unfordable.

  Exhausted, we found to our surprise at Trema a gigantic hotel looking like some lobby between Life and Death and there we lay till morning brought us the most radiant of days. A glorious road from Trento to Riva and there was our own dear lake rich with fruit and flowers and there was Mr. Walsh at San Vigilio, sitting in a melancholic probably tipsy heap, drinking his lunch of Chianti. There was no one staying there, for all his letters complaining of pressure. He’s been too busy even to get to Garda for months, he told us, too busy tippling and spoiling the Locanda. I was cruelly frank and told him I disapproved of his having filled in with windows three of the first-floor loggia arches in order to make extra little rooms. He has also put up a melon-shaped sunblind like lido hotels and purposes to convert all the old flapping sail curtains into these horrors. He gave us a scrumptious lunch at a high price and we arranged to return for a weekend with Liz and Rai. On to Venice and the new hotel Gritti – very good. We have a lovely room and I’m not so cross as I was last year. Not so cross, but not very happy. I can’t feel myself. Everything is stale and unprofitable. No friends. It’s only really the English who buck things up abroad – the Randolphs, the Corrigans, the Chipses, the palaces and feasts. ‘In questo palazzo c’e ogni sera festa’9 said the gondolier of a house a lot of us took together. Today there is John Gunther10 with a slightly dreary bride, there are Mr. and Mrs. John Follet, the Ronnie Trees and an exciting Russo-American dressmaker called Valentina and that is all. No Korda, who I had hoped for, and so far no films. John Gunther is the only spot of fun and I tried to remember what it was pejorative that Kaetchen wrote to me during the war ‘What, I should like to know, is inside John Gunther?’

  August 18th, 1948

  Venice

  Venice is nothing if not quiet. Elsa Maxwell was signalled yesterday. Perhaps she’ll be the pep. Charlie B.11 has shown no kick. Sarah Churchill12 fell from the sky and a lot of really very base film people. The great showings start tomorrow with The Red Shoes (Rank).

  I got your letter yesterday – a great joy. My melancholia is so bad that it made me cry – don’t ask me why because I don’t know. I’m making Papa’s life a misery.

  I had a miserable day yesterday. A ridiculous August cold as a basis, promises that I didn’t keep to take Sarah sight-seeing, a ghastly lunch in a beastly bistro watching Papa not eat. I working myself into the belief that he had a mortal disease. After a fitful siesta he went to play bridge while I walked miles going into every church to pray, then back to my bed and an effort to read a book about de Quincey and at eight Papa came back and said he felt better and I believed him almost. I had a slight suspicion that he was saying it to stay my fears, and we dined with the Trees and Papa ate a bit and so I cheered up and we all four packed into the gondola and went to look at Colleoni riding against a stormy moon-flecked sky.

  Now it’s this morning again. I do hope I’ll be gooder.

  Much later – In fact it’s the 22nd and I’m sitting at the familiar table on the upper loggia at San Vigilio. The sky gave us a fright till ten but has come up smiling now at twelve. Papa grows steadily worse. I have a feeling of a faint hope he is a little better this morning because although he still spends the greater part of the day on the loo, he was able at breakfast to chew a piece of bread and some café latte. O dear, O dear, I have been so panicky and naughty. He’s as thin as a skelly and Mr. Walsh said ‘looks ten years older’ in his tactful way. His voice is the voice of the dying to which one bends one’s ear to catch the last words. He shuffles more than usually and never registers my protest or my nagging cry of elastico. He is exceedingly docile which is so alarming, and plays kind little tricks to reassure me, like ordering a drink and pouring it away when he thinks I’m not looking. Apart from the anxiety and the cruel hells my apprehensions plunge me into, it’s also so sad and boring to have holidays without the zest of meals and drinks. There’ll be no journey into Garda this morning, and no looking forward to the excellent lunch. In Venice no Harry’s Bars and no fun at all.

  Enough of that. We got here last night and Liz and Raimund though they said they would meet us (Leonardo has kept the two best rooms and telegrams, three in all, have been sent to Salzburg to tell them of the importance) have not turned up. A telegram says they will arrive this afternoon. As we go tomorrow morning it’s not much good. There are, staying in the Locanda, a couple of happy homosexuals whose dream of love is being shattered by a big bony Englishwoman who joins their table – a saga-teller without jokes and no pauses. I asked Mr. Walsh who she was. ‘She’s been here too long – like fish, she’s beginning to smell’, he said. Papa toyed with a grain of rice kicking it around the plate with his fork while I ate a curiously planned meal of hors d’oeuvres followed by a flaming rum-soused plum pudding. The other inmates I have not taken in yet. Meanwhile in Venice, where we return, the Biennale plods on. The English exhibition of pictures, Turner first, is excellent – the cream of the show for me. A mediocre collection of French Impressionists, a ghastly modern French room of ordures, another of Picasso, interesting Italian sculpture and some American turds. The film takes place afternoon and evening at the Lido in a mammoth airless cinema (hard arse). Dressed to kill, we went by launch to help inaugurate it. The English kicked off with one of the most embarrassing uncaptioned pictures I remember to have seen, Eyes to See With. It shows you pictures of the things you don’t look at, i.e. Houses of Parliament, a cornfield, waves breaking on a rock, an apple tree in bloom, the stealthy eyes of a cat. No really I was ashamed. (Papa’s chest is peeling – he pulls and pulls at long dead winding-sheets of it, then he feeds the minnows with our breakfast bread and now he’s just tried the skin shreds on them and they’ve gobbled them up in a flash.)

  We had the worst places in the house. The next picture was The Red Shoes, a picture to show that ballet can be filmed. Moira Shearer of Sadler’s Wells is the star and there are lovely things in it including Massine and technicolour, but it’s an hour too long. The story is puerile and it was uncaptioned. Now a ballet film can stagger through unexplained, but what are the Italians, who complained of this one, going to make of the Winslow Boy? Or the new Graham Greene involved story? When it was over we were all convoked to a party at the Excelsior – supper and dancing al fresco. I asked the head waiter ‘Who is receiving?’, as I wanted to make an acte de présence. ‘Io’,13 he said, so I said ‘We shan’t need a table.’ We hung about by arrangement to meet up with Sarah Churchill, the film actress who has never appeared on the screen (goodness, she must be bad if, as Winston’s daughter, she has never yet got her name on the programme) and Captain and Mrs. Moore, a very common young couple who represent Korda in Italy, but they’d thought it simpler to go home and leave us looking. Film people as a whole are the most ill-mannered people ever brought up. Why is it? Actors are not – Oliviers, Lunts, du Mauriers, Cochrans behave like gentlemen, while the film folk keep you waiting two hours and don’t repent. The biters were bit the other day when Sarah and the Moores kept me, the Preside
nt of the Biennale, a Senator to boot and Sir Arthur Jarret and mistress, the chief distributor of films in England, waiting for over an hour. Sir A. and his girl walked out after fifty-five minutes saying they were not office boys.

  The next night I went to the American programme alone as Papa was too weak and loo-bound. I saw Louisiana Story, a backwoods almost actuality, worth seeing for the native backwood boy and his fight with a crocodile and his tame ’coon and his odd French language. This was followed by A Double Life, when Ronald Colman plays the strangling of Desdemona five times, otherwise not too bad. This film had captions and now I fear it may be only the English who have omitted them. The Swedes and Poles and Czechs and Mexicans who are all showing are bound to caption them.

  23rd. I laid my hand on Papa’s tummy yesterday on the off chance of having healing powers and the waters dried up and he ate a good lunch and at three the Hoffs arrived. San Vigilio was at its worst, a hundred cars blocking the yard, but they were delighted with it. Radiant weather, a bathe, a rollicking dinner, booze and laughter and clouds forgotten. Leonardo (steaming) introduced me to the Count and Countess who were dining here. I shrewdly suspected in order to see Liz, whose beauty I have talked of loudly, and now today is a sparkler and we are off to post this letter at the P.O. of Garda and throw back a few Cinzanos. They all ask tenderly about you.

  Where we once lunched on Como

  September 11th, 1948

  With every fruit tumbling over me from a horn of plenty, unfailing sun, zephyr breezes, free rooms, gondolas and launches at Korda’s expense, the perfect hotel, all the pleasures the film world can offer, I have been too suicidally wretched to write – to you I love best (coupled, naturally, with Papa). We bore each other quite dreadfully. I bore him because I study his every gesture, sigh, gurk or twitch, determined with dread to find him in bad health, which must be most horribly irritating, and he bores me because he is so spoilt that a kind word flung into the silences he thinks will suffice to interest me. He’s never eaten or drunk a thing on these holidays, and is as thin as Augustus on the last day, i.e. a sugar plum.14 It’s obsessed me out of all proportion.

  We left once-loved Venice thank God this morning and got to hated Como and this dear little inn. On the way we lunched with Isaiah and Ashley and Virginia, at San Vigilio. That place resists my depression and lunch was fun. Papa ate a couple of slices of salami and a sip of wine, and the sip was worth more to my spirits than a bottle of the same.

  The films in Venice got more fast and furious. The last we saw was Puffin15 Asquith’s Winslow Boy, very very good. We had to see it alone with Puff in a private room and wait an hour for the projector man to finish his supper. We’d had none (not that that matters to Papa), so it was lucky it was good and we could say so sincerely to Puffin. Then there was a quite dreadful party at Torcello, an hour away from Venice. No incidents, no scandals, the nearest occurring at the last moment when I got into Elsa Maxwell’s launch (on invitation), so did Orson Welles but he sulked with jealousy in the hold, a few others asked personally and a few unasked, namely a reputed artist called Leonora Fini and her two lovers. Elsa lost her head completely, and for no reason as the boat wasn’t crowded. ‘Get out of my launch!’ she trumpeted. ‘Get out, get out I say. I happen to like invited people and my friends. Get out!’ I was deeply ashamed for her.

  Now a night has passed and I feel happier. Papa ate soup and ham and the place is sweet – modest to a degree but silent and cheap after the deafening expense of Venice. We are sitting on the terrace, Papa I needn’t say reading. The sun hasn’t reached us, but the opposite over-populated hill is ablaze. We shall now make our way to Milan and lunch and buy some necessities, and this evening we hope to turn up at Portofino and find Jenny waiting with the povero vecchio16 to carry our traps to the summit.

  Chantilly

  September 22nd, 1948

  I never write, but from today I solemnly swear to scribe my day-book17 without fail. My life has hobbled along hectically on a broken wing, commuting to Paris on account of Molyneux and Hamlet première committees, and I’ve had Nancy and Juliet and Jenny in the house. Juliet has encouraged and alarmed me. I’m really quite beastly to her, snapping her up and telling her to her face not to be so dense or stupid or irritating, but she has a greater sense of interior decoration and a better knowledge of gardens than I have (if only she wouldn’t call cowslips necatus anthroglotus or the like) and I should be – and am – duly grateful for the help. Jenny has been screamingly funny. She’s produced out of a hat lots of little catches. One goes:

  I was standing by the corner of the street

  As quiet as quiet could be,

  When a great big ugly man came up

  And tied his horse to me.

  Also

  The five o’clock whistle never blew,

  So poor old father never knew

  And went on working till half-past two.

  She is a funny girl – one fault and one only. She cannot keep off the trunk18 telephone. Paris from here forty times a day and about six Zurichs, Portofinos and Amsterdams daily.

  Nancy has as good as finished her book. It’s to be called Diversions19 and she’s pleased, but every line that she wrote at Chantilly – well fed, isolated and telephone-less – had to be rewritten. I’m thinking of writing my own memoirs at last. I was always determined not to and rather despised those who did, but Maurice’s reread Puppet Show of Memory shows me how simply it can be done. It would be an interest and an absorption – delving into the past I shall forget the future.

  Stephen, my lovely Czech labourer, has been seduced away from me by higher wages. Jacques is for the high jump. He refuses to work and puts the heaviest chores on grovelling Maria’s back. Jean, noble and plausible as always, is a martyr to crises de foie, while Mireille is equally martyred by jealousy. Result is that Jean can never help us out in the Paris sty, because if he leaves Chantilly Mireille believes him to be sleeping with his wife.

  Chantilly

  September 25th, 1948

  Now it’s Saturday and weather to dream of – icy at dawn when I go out, blue fingers clutching milk pail, duck food, mangels and pig swill, the sun just up, sparkling on dewy spiderwebs and not a breath of wind to disturb the icy splendour. By mid-day it’s so hot – cut-down delphiniums are budding and blooming again. Animals fed and drained, I pick with paralysed fingers heavy-headed dahlias, golden rod, yellow daisies – everything in flower seems to be of gold and lasting, and I stick them in the vases in which they will so quickly wilt and then up I go and wake Jenny. She says I always wince when I look at her first – she wears a frilled linen nightcap, the opposite of mine, Hogarthian and unleashed.

  Jenny, Papa and I went to Chantilly market. Everyone elated and stimulated by the weather made it gay and hopeful. I bought a block of paper, a red cord to tie my last pair of spectacles to my person, some white fringe, three figs and three small melons. I coquetted with the idea of buying some bunnies and I met my old charcuterie friend who bought the hermaphrodite pig. He knew (by tom-tom?) that I had a saleable pig and behaved a little too keenly for me to sell cheap. I made a date in the sty at 12.30 and after a pause at the quincaillerie20 to buy a kettle, three enamel basins, two coffee cups and a purple umbrella, we went to see if the Golden Arrow was on time (and you know what that spells: Pernod).21

  Melancholia still on leave. I’ve had a wonderful barter bit with the pig buyer. He and I leaning over the sty and Jean, with a face stained by tears of laughter, in the offing. He pretended that he had to throw the flesh of the hermaphrodite to the crows as it smelt so strongly of urine. He claimed that my promising sow, which he also wanted to buy, would be barren as a mule for anatomical and visible reasons that I really can’t write about. I told him he was a fraud and an amateur. In the end he gave me 30,000 for the boy pig, and I was triumphant till that kind idiot Maria told me it was worth double. We had a drink on the deal. ‘Du porto, Monsieur?’ ‘C’est mon préféré.’22 Great fun.

&nbs
p; Yesterday was les grèves23 in Paris. No autobus, no metro. The radiance of the weather quite spoilt its effect. No one minded walking. The taxi man who I spoke to was forced – to his own loss – to sit idly on his box for two hours. He hated it, he said, but ‘il n’y a pas de choix’.24

  September 26th. Yesterday was a gallop of spirits and people and sun and fun. First to join the house guests was Wynne Godley (oboeist)25 at 10.30. I met him at the station and frankly flinched when I saw his get-up, or rather the dirt of it – his trousers frayed, the seat much darker than the legs, and the deep khaki shirt looked smelly. He is said to wear his pyjamas under his suits, but I saw nothing peeping out. It was so hot that chairs had to be moved under the tree. Bill Patten, Papa and I went to see the Golden Arrow go through. Next arrived John Foster26 and lastly Hector McNeil, the pick of the Labour Party. Luncheon was a rollick, John Foster and Hector talked well above my head – extraditions, foreign labour, economics. I was treading water and trying to smile and exclaim in the right places. After arrived a new couple, called Christopher Buckley, foreign correspondent of the D. Telegraph. He was a great success with Papa as he knew all the Belloc poems by heart, great chunks of the Wine Ode27 and all the Ballades. They stayed to dinner and we spouted our pieces until all hours.

  Jenny in a Guatemalan skirt and décolleté blouse and Wynne in his dirt and me in scarlet trousers and large straw hat and head in wimples, went over on invitation to Royaumont, the house of Max Fould Springer, and its adjoining abbey where intellectuals can live for 500 francs a day. Susan Mary, carrying great melancholy, came too, perfectly dressed in a light summer suiting and making us the more conspicuous. Wynne may go and live for a bit with the intellectuals, each in his not very narrow cell. As we walked down the vaulted corridors, wonderful part-singing came floating out of a rehearsal room. The cloisters were dripping with crimson creeper. The tobacco plant filled them with a drowsy smell. Break off for I forget what.