by Diana Cooper
At 8.30 a doctor called and said nothing. It was the chief, the Dreamer – Dr. Lief, poor man’s Lionel Barrymore, respected like the Mahatma at Champneys, Tring. He left me a chit of paper telling me to report in the treatment room at ten for massage. Rather dull, I thought. The Charles Addams atmosphere increases as you get among the nudes and irrigations. They put me under a hot shower after the massage and rubbed salt into me – rather nice that was, and back I steamed in Yuma’s39 black satin dressing gown and my bald pate cap and Algerian slipslops, bath towel, rubber cap, book, specs and drawers in arm. The day looks long when you are back in bed at eleven and my head still ached too much to read but the radio was loyal and later I got better and read a Simenon book of short stories – all I’m good for – and the papers.
My room’s all right, looking on to burnt lawns and cedars, no comforts but all essentials, radio and telephone plugs, light over bed, hangers. I shall not leave it until I leave for good. I graduated to Osbert’s book, from which I shall rise to Winston’s. Today is Monday (third day) and it’s been colonic irrigation – beyond description horrid and humiliating. Twelve gallons pass through your guts, while a lady stares fascinated at the outflow. Next I had a sitz bath – equally humiliating but funny – two little baths in which you sit knees to chin, one very hot and one ice cold. You bear one for three minutes, the other (the freezer) for one. It’s a struggle to jump from one to the other and you do both twice. It must be nonsense.
I saw some cripples this morning which makes me think I’m in the right place. My knee is practically well – unfortunately before I came here and we shall never know if it’s the hot weather or if it’s the diabolic Russian professor in Paris with his magic baths and his sixteen liver pills a day.
* * *
1 Let a doe-rabbit die.
2 A little cluster of eighteenth-century single-storey painted pavilions, on the lines of Marie-Antoinette’s hameau at Versailles.
3 The previous park keeper.
4 From ‘Sitting on the Fence’, by Nathaniel Gubbins, a weekly column in the wartime Sunday Express which we all thought hilarious.
5 From the Quai d’Orsay. He a highly amusing diplomat, she a professional singer to the guitar.
6 An Airedale dog, which I just remember as a child in the early 1930s.
7 Proprietor and editor of Time and Life magazines.
8 ‘Yes, but Madame has never peed black. You can pee yellow, black, even blue, but Madame has never peed black.’
9 He had a very bad stammer.
10 Erstwhile Chilean diplomat, now living in Paris. Much addicted to opium.
11 Tony’s. (Not Nancy’s, certainly.)
12 ‘They’re old ones.’
13 Sykes.
14 Eric Linklater, author of Private Angelo.
15 Of the Château de Chantilly.
16 Liver attack.
17 One wonders.
18 She had visited the Hertford British Hospital.
19 Lady Mary Strachey, her lady-in-waiting.
20 The battle of the trousers – whether she should or should not wear them – was a leitmotif in their married life.
21 A little group of cottages with painted murals – probably inspired by Marie Antoinette’s hameau at Versailles.
22 A popular cabaret singer.
23 World champion.
24 Make-up man.
25 Parade.
26 Actress, dancer and singer, at one time the best paid female entertainer in the world. She was actually seventy-four.
27 Actress and singer.
28 My father’s biography of the biblical King David.
29 Les filles de Saint-Malo / Ont les yeux couleur de l’eau. A popular song at the time.
30 The unicorn was my mother’s self-appointed emblem.
31 Maxine de la Falaise.
32 Jacques Février, pianist.
33 Performers.
34 Sir Anthony (later Lord) Head and Lady Dorothea (Dot). He had been Minister of Defence, and was subsequently high commissioner in Lagos and ambassador in Beijing. Dear friends of my parents.
35 Mother of Queen Elizabeth II.
36 The Anglesey family (see Directory).
37 Quite simply, the elastic had broken.
38 Then known as a health farm, now as a spa.
39 Dress designer.
13
‘I wonder if Dolly’s up to her tricks again’
FRANCE, OCTOBER 1949–FEBRUARY 1950
New College, Oxford
October 6th, 1949
This morning I paid a courtesy call on Isaiah, my moral tutor. He advises me to spend these first few weeks going to every politics or philosophy lecture I can, so as to see what I’m up against. Then I must select one or two courses of lectures and follow them seriously. But if you could see the list of lectures – not a single title fails to strike terror in my heart. I quote three examples at random: Selected Problems in Scientific Method, Naturalism and Non-naturalism in Ethics, The Theory of Ideas in Descartes, Arnaud and Malebranche. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘and what books should I read?’ ‘They’ll give you a list later on,’ he said, ‘but I’ll give you a few titles now, if you like.’ I took two of the books recommended out of the library. Of the first, Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, I have read the first chapter, twenty-two pages long, and understood not one syllable. It’s very discouraging and robs one of all self-confidence.
All love,
John Julius
I HAD ARRIVED at New College, Oxford, to find that my Moral Tutor was the celebrated Isaiah Berlin. I never quite understood what a Moral Tutor was, and I don’t think Isaiah was any too clear himself; he was intended, I suspect, simply to be a rather vague guardian angel who would keep a fatherly eye on the undergraduate’s well-being. Over the next three years I was to see him a lot and grew to love him dearly, but of moral tutorship I saw not a trace.
I had agreed, rather reluctantly and on my father’s advice, to read PPE – Politics, Philosophy and Economics – but after a fortnight I changed to Modern Languages, choosing French (why? I already spoke it fluently) and Russian, which I did not, but had been studying on and off since the age of twelve. It was the greatest mistake of my life. My father had implored me not to. A foreign language, he argued, could not possibly be taught at an English university: the only way to learn it was to go to the appropriate country, stay with a local family and immerse yourself in it night and day. As to the literature side, that was positively dangerous; literature was designed to give pleasure, not to be the object of analysis and study. How right he was. While I was at Oxford I must have read some two hundred French and Russian classic novels; I have hardly ever picked one up since.
My parents, meanwhile, continued to live at Chantilly, shuttling backwards and forwards to London and holidaying in Italy in the summer; they also took the cure together, this time at Aix-en-Provence. In the past my mother had done this alone; it was only now that the state of my father’s health persuaded him to accompany her. When he could bear it no longer they returned home, she to her continual domestic problems while he worked on his first and only novel Operation Heartbreak, and, later, on his autobiography Old Men Forget. The Venice Film Festival continued as a hardy perennial.
Chantilly, Thursday
October, 1949
O undergraduate, I think about you and your Serbian prince.1 How did you get on – how cold were you that first strange night and how generally apprehensive? I’m very cold today. It was summer heat at noon yesterday in Paris but today here it’s bitter. Our journey was pleasant and uneventful. I found myself curiously exhilarated. The sun and Dover Castle never gleamed more beautifully – the cliffs at their misty whitest put a lump in my throat. A lovely new ship, The Maid of Orleans, was understudying the Invicta. I felt it was last merriment before winter.
Nothing new in Paris. Cecil waiting to be picked up by me, uncomfortably packed with crinoline in my dirty Ford. Off we bowled to the U.S. Bruces –
Elsa Maxwell, Elsie Mendl and the Walter Lipmanns, Helen Kirkpatrick, Robert de Billy. I had a pleasant enough dinner of memorable food. Evangeline looked like a ravishing Sir Joshua in dead blue draperies of taffeta, Elsie was next prettiest. Next morning the horrible restless mess of our new life in France – Noémi’s idiocy, the telephone ringing perpetually but not functioning, Papa swearing he must have a secretary, no orders carried out, dirt and chaos in charge. Barley, Papa, Cecil and I lunched at Le Doyen (badly) out in the sun. Papa sent his oeuf cocotte away as it was rock-hard, his cold partridge was also dismissed as dry and tasteless, even the protest plate of ham and chicken ordered in pique found no better success and a mouthful of mediocre cheese was all that got down.
So we went to bed, and dear Willow was put in a very creaky basket by Papa’s side and she scratched unintermittedly all the long night through. I was awake again at 3 a.m. and got no more sleep, so I know. Then the duck started waking France. I’ve never heard such duck-a-wauling. Mireille says it’s because there is only one drake to satisfy the many – absolutely untrue. Then we walked through the park to Chantilly. It was grey and sad and I thought how much I missed you and I hoped you missed me, but you won’t have time. John Russell,2 Miss Europe’s husband extremely amusing – lots of long messages from Aliki (who I’ve seen but once in a crowd). I must, she says, be sure to dine with her next time we are in London. She wants her side of the story3 heard, I opine.
Now they’ve all gone and the dread moment has come when I must face up to life at Chantilly. The garden is an unrecoverable jungle. The gardeners must be sacked. Madame hasn’t produced with all my resources one rabbit, one egg, one litre of milk, except when drawn by the Communist at the railway crossing.
Chantilly
October 8th, 1949
So we waited hours at Le Bourget, your godmother Essie,4 Noël Coward and I and Papa. The delay was because the Heads’ new baby was what is known as a ‘blue baby’ and no good, dying and bound for insanity, and it took on to die this very day, and the Heads, torn between sense and sensibility, could not come. The Scotts missed the aeroplane and chartered another. It’s a nice party – Noël volunteered to do his new stuff. Within six months he will release a review Hoi Polloi, a play Home & Colonial and a film heartrendingly emotional – another Brief Encounter, played by Celia Johnson and himself.5
The songs were not good enough – one about Josephine had the commonest of all jokes about historical figures. ‘Du Barry was a lady’, ‘Good Queen Bess’, etc. Another about cats wasn’t too bad. The best one is told of the Three Dames – supposedly Dames Sybil Thorndike, May Whitty and another – and why they were made Dames, but when he broke into I’ve been to a Marvellous Party and London Pride they were of a far far better calibre. He amused us till 1 a.m. blowing his own trumpet and hoping that he was concealing the fact, but he’d forgotten it when I was told that he was sitting next Virginia Clarke at lunch and that she was uniquely interested about the stage and its celebrities. No go to him, said he, he never talked theatre.
October 9th. Yesterday shone gloriously from the start. The sweet and tender Willow who makes my few sleeping hours more fugitive by scratch, scratch, scratching in a creaky osier basket, gave every sign of wanting to be put out at 2 a.m. so down to the kitchen I groped, finding no switches. She shot out into the moonlit fog and no calling and cajoling would bring her back. I waited, eating all the bits of cheese I could find and at last, barefoot and frozen, gave it up; leaving the back door wide to the burglars, I regained my bed. Not worth telling. She was there in the morning when solicitous Papa went to look for her at six.
The day was beautiful enough to forget the night and after marketing with the house party we were set to receive an enormous group for lunch. All the dahlia heads had dropped off and the last zinnias had wilted on account of Noémi forgetting to put water in the vases. Prince Dimitri6 brought a small flourishing medlar tree reared by himself, the which was planted ceremoniously and a bottle of champagne cracked on its pot, breaking the pot not the bottle, and Hugh Fraser came bringing a Miss Kennedy with whom he is in love, and little Greek Leila Ralli came bringing her own sleep that immobilised her on the stone steps for two hours in the midst of the hurly burly.
Chantilly
October, 1949
I dined with Mary and Lucien and Drian and Felix Youssopoff, murderer of Rasputin. Very old7 and once I loved him, so near forty years ago. He was at Oxford and often wore, it seemed to me, cloth of gold, pearls and aigrettes. Those were the days before the bloody assault and before the revolution and before Aunt Marjorie chose Charlie and not him to marry, and he sang his Russian songs on his guitar. The other night, once we got the top lights off and the candles flickering, he looked his twenty-year-old self again and the voice and verve were what I remembered in the days of my infatuation.
Chantilly
November 4th, 1949
That ass Judy went on saying ‘It can’t be a cold, I’ve got “Tschuu-u-uu, snort, snort, snuffle, sobs, schlosh” because I’ve never had a sore throat or tickle.’ She outspanned or spewed or outpuked on me all right, and has laid me low too when I wanted to be brisk and brilliant for David Herbert whom I found in Paris on my arrival Tuesday morning. London’s single day I put to a lot of good with Oggie’s help. Papa had a room at the Dorch. and it still is a bit of a sentimental emotion to return to the old defence. I can visualise the ‘lounge’ as it was in 1940 with half-painted women lying in horrible heaps in chairs with their dirtyish linen pillows under their tired cheeks. I wondered always who they were – not residents surely, for they would have had a bed in the basement or cots in the passages. Perhaps they came for dinner and claimed they could not be put out till the ‘All Clear’. Then on any floor as I turn the bend to the left of the lift my throat fills for Emerald – her voice, her welcome, her little treats and curious presents, her utter lovableness. O dear I miss her so.
I made a perfect journey alone with my cold. Aspirin-calmed, I slept through most of the ferry clanking, my luggage, as usual, a bit bizarre – one small zip bag full of honey and coffee, two huge cardboard boxes of plants from Bulbridge and double armful of camelia tree branches, quite unnegotiable into any entrance or exit and filling a wagon-lit. I lunched at the best of the Chinese restaurants. Superb, with David, Alvilde, Janey Bowles and an eccentric American née Hungarian tzigane. I’d met her and liked her a lot in Tangier. And then Truman Capote. They never warned me so as to watch me flinch, but I didn’t. A sturdy little pink girl of fourteen, with her blonde straight hair plastered neatly down all round, short for her age in rather light grey trousers and turtle-necked sweater with feminine curves suggesting through, and lovely little white hands and delicate chain ring and bangles. There you have Truman.
That night I had him again. I got quite fond of him – my love of freaks perhaps – and he’s anxious to be liked and warm. I’ll have to have another go at his incomprehensible book.
Remember the 5th of November is for us over here the Saint-Hubert, so with my cold smothered and smothered myself in a fur coat the property of Molyneux I go with Papa to Rambouillet and watch the hounds bay and hear the blessed mutter of the Mass through the strains of horns blown in harmony. A hound with leafy collar will be held by a Louis XIV-liveried hunt servant in front of the altar. The priest will tell us how God loves the herbivores to be hunted. The pack will be blessed, chocolate and brioches will be eaten. The Duc de Brissac will blow a solo on his horn, the riders will be off. We’ll follow up in cars till we’re bored and then we’ll have a big fork tuck-in and so home to go dancing with horns on at a venerial ball at Royaumont.
Papa deep in writing a scenario which we developed one night when the Ford broke down on us in Paris. We tried to go to The Snake Pit on the Boulevard. We couldn’t as the time was wrong and we dropped into a large luxurious café (one to be remembered for its comfort, ladies, first-class orchestra and its consommations in rooms where the orchestra is relayed – quite our place
for a snack) and then got lost in working out the plot, based on Operation Mincemeat the true war op. of dressing a corpse up as a Colonel carrying documents re the proposed landings (naturally deceptive) and having the poor thing with its private pocketfuls, the picture of its girl, its decorations, washed up on some Portuguese beach. We make the corpse one who was a patriot and incapable, miserable by being useless in the battle, but in death vital to the war’s winning. I think he’ll write it as a short story first.8
Later. Papa came back a crowned victor, shot the record for the fourth Republic – 494 in pheasant, 150 to his gun. Carl was outclassed. Kitty [Giles] five months gone, sweet as pie, great losses to us when they go to Rome.
