Darling Monster

by Diana Cooper

  January, 1950, Chantilly

  Papa’s little surprise Sunday lunch for me was an old American sculptor called Jo Davidson who sculpted half of me as the Madonna (the wax mask which you are familiar with) and his monstrous though nice wife, and Mr. Bill Stoneman, U.S. journalist, christened by me ‘Lava’ tout court in the Blitz days because he over-insisted that London would of necessity become lava before the year was out. He had a monstrous and not so nice wife. Papa shook his cheeks9 at Jo who was being admiring about Tito who he’d been sculpting and who had turned the charm on – also the successful corners of his country were shown to the poor sucker. Jo is a fine old figure, vital and lovable, and didn’t mind the cheek-shaking and anyway was screaming so loud that he heard nothing. Most of lunch we talked about Helen Keller – did you ever hear of her? Blind, deaf and dumb. She now at the age of seventy speaks five languages that she can’t hear, writes books, lectures and gives twenty hours of each day to working for the blind. Polly sits beside her (a lady) and taps out shorthand on her palm of what people are saying. Helen always says to Polly when they leave ‘Don’t forget your spectacles.’

  Love from Papa who’s just broken surface.

  Chantilly

  January 22nd, 1950

  Dolly’s hippopotamus daughter la Duchesse de Maille (the only issue of Dolly’s minute loins and the collaboration of two huge Polish husbands, one costaud10 Dane and a queue of lovers) gave 2,000,000 francs to an American lover, in whose trousers they were found (in cheque form, and that cheque not valid – in France a crime) at the Swiss frontier. So hippo is in trouble and Mogens telephoned to Nancy about it under his breath ‘So Dolly can’t hear me’, he said.

  Nancy is with us for the weekend. We came down Saturday and I’ve been hard at it. A new lease of life has been granted me by His giving his beloved sleep (which is it? I never know – is the sleep or the receiver beloved?).11 So I’ve ordered a long wall of new planted peaches, to say nothing of an orchard. I’ve moved the furniture about like chess pieces in the effort to make Norah Fahie’s room the Home Beautiful. The stairs are not very happily decorated and the corridor not at all successful and unrelated to the stairs in colour and style, and the carpet’s liverish filthiness aggravates the mess. Stop everything – hold your hat on – Noémi has just announced the birth of nine piglets – two dead make seven. The fowls are laying too in the bitter white ice-painted paysage and poor Melanie is the size of a cowstall. Both goats are in pod.

  I offered Mireille a motor ride to her home town in Arles near Aix. With tears she declined the invitation – couldn’t desert Jean. ‘Je dois me sacrifier, je le sais’12 and a lot more nonsense. Why can’t Jean take a ticket and go too? Because it bores him no doubt and he hates to divest himself of the kingly robes he flaunts at Chantilly.

  Papa’s story progresses and Aix’s peace should see it finished. Meanwhile exciting news from U.S. – offers, obviously Cecil de Mille from his Bible-inspired studio – for David. Now Korda bought the rights of David when it first appeared. You might have thought the Psalmist’s life was clear enough in the Book for anyone running to read but no, for the second time the film magnates think it’s an original story – or at least a pepped-up one – by Papa. Korda has agreed to relinquish his right and share the proceeds. We’ve asked 50,000 dollars. We might get 10,000 and if they give 20,000 that would mean a new car and some nylon shirts and bills paid off.

  January 27th, 1950

  Hotel Riviera

  Aix-en-Provence

  I’ve just written you a filthy postcard. I won’t say any more because I’ve just seen the postman through the window wobbling on his bag wheel with the weight of his load – perhaps part of it is from you to me. We got the out-of-the-blue telegram from Graham Greene and his fine Sin personified13 asking us to lunch at the Ritz which we did prior to starting south to be decarbonised. It was agreeable enough. Papa was épris by Sin and I by Graham’s sympathetic approach, not by his appearance. That grows increasingly embarrassing to look at. The colour and the patina seem to belong to something guilty that has been seared, perhaps by contrition but I think not. They talk glibly about buying a house in France. He speaks of his wife and she of her children. I wonder why they cling to us? Perhaps they feel lost in France – no friends and cut off by language from the big literary guns who can’t bark in English. Nancy was in a stew about her Bobby Hennessy film.14 They’ve read it and say they gave her most of the story so they’ll pay her £250 instead of £500, but they had promised her that when they told her the bare outline. She’s fighting it.

  30th. Hotel Roi Réné, Aix-en Provence. Where we stay until 15th February. Oh dear, such a dreaded announcement I had to make to M. Swellin, the proprietor of the Riviera – namely that our projected stay of three weeks in his hotel would be beyond our endurance. Navrés, navrés, was all I could say, and trop animé.15 There’s no word for privacy, which is the clue of our departure. After a memorably terrible journey down from Saulieu to Chalon in darkness, fog and skating conditions, and from Chalon next morning to Vienne actually skating on the verglas at 15 kms an hour and twice getting drifted ourselves and having to cajole and bribe men to push us out, instead of lolling and staring and having the fun of seeing nine camions cast on their backs, we got to our destination, so happily remembered in August and so cruelly austere now – a clean cool room, no curtains, a little heating, no armchair, no writing table, no lamp. We were driven to the lounge, where a lovely fire was surrounded with drinkers, card players, bloods of the neighbourhood all so gay and loud and happy and loudest of all the radio. How could Papa work? And if he doesn’t work there is no point in his coming here, for he more or less ignores the cure.

  Now we’re in the royal suite in a hotel with revolving doors and vitrines. There’s not a lot of heat as the rooms are Embassy height and the chandeliers and sconces give tallow-dip lights. The chairs are spindle and the water un peu juste,16 but we’re much happier because of the privacy and possibility of work. If it would only warm up it would be pleasant and just as I hoped – reading Little Dorrit in the evening and stitching the patchwork at meals and during the reading. I’m on to my fifth Gandhi day.17 The doctor can’t believe it naturally and Papa thinks he’s a splendid doctor because he’s told him quite alarming things such as tension seventeen when it should be fourteen, le coeur un peu mou,18 and traces of sugar in the urine and the rest of it, he advocated drinking. Now I wrote to the fool before we arrived saying the patient drank too much – far too much – but being a fan of Papa’s and having probably read Talleyrand he says he’s perfect for his age and not to stop the booze on any account. A bottle of wine a meal he considers O.K. As for whisky, it never did any harm.

  Of course the poor mutt has no conception of how the Anglo-Saxon drinks whisky. He imagines what is called ‘a whisky’ actually under two teaspoons in a beaker of water, not quarter of a tumbler of Scotch with a splash. So now he drinks wine at lunch which he doesn’t at Chantilly and lies, poor fish, in a tepid bath for quarter of an hour and drinks the famous water in tiny sips and gets a flabby massage under a tepid drip-drip and is put to bed for an hour. I do only the massage and the tiny sips. The town is too beautiful. The great Cour Mirabeau19 in winter trim, with men standing lightly on the topmost branches of the huge ghost-coloured planes to amputate them, is a surprise when one has always seen it coolly dark beneath the dense summery branches.

  Nancy writes that Honks Mosley (all Dianas are Honks – I’m Honks Cooper) is bringing out an Xmas book called Are you an Hon? With questions like ‘Would you rather be strong and healthy or witty and clever?’ Nancy suggests ‘Would you rather be canonised or mediatised?’20 Dolly she says is in despair because a Perhapsburg has married into the unmediatised family of Ligne. A journalist came to see Nancy to ask her to write an article on English writers in Paris. She said ‘Well, who are they?’ ‘You, Peter de Polnay and Koestler’ was the answer. ‘My screams rather annoyed him.’

  Aix-en-Provence<
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  February 10th, 1950

  (and my tenth day foodless)

  The cure progresses. My empty stomach has been made more difficult to live with on account of Papa’s cold passed on to me in a more virulent form. For days it’s lasted and it’s still rumbling. Never again will I Gandhi except at Tring where we are all in the same boat and all the electrical and plumbing devices are there to function on the curing parts. Here in the land of bonnes tables and with this ridiculous old lady who strokes instead of belabouring me, it’s not worth it and makes it boring for Papa too. I take a vicarious interest in the menu and choose the dishes most appropriate to his liver, kidneys and other parts, but he’s eating more than ever before – spirits off and only a small ration of wine makes Jack a happy boy.

  The skies have been rather beastly. The cold isn’t piercing but has no spring in it. The town is preparing with zest for the Carnival. All the forains21 in the mechanised caravans are here in their thousands. There is an arena of seats round the big fountain and there are switchbacks and the Star and the Caterpillar and a hundred booths for fat women and skeleton men – all the fun of the fair and I can’t play alone and Papa is not a swing or a roundabout. The shop windows are full of Pierrot costumes in yellow satin and masks and dominoes. We’ve done nothing. I’ve lain in bed most of the time reading La Chartreuse de Parme. I’ve only digested one volume out of four so perhaps haven’t given it a fair chance but the summing up is dull so far. Yesterday I had the great treat of Louise’s second instalment of Juliette – wonderful. It’s a short book (three long instalments) written to be filmed. You’ll eat it. I won’t send it, but I’ll keep it carefully for you. She should have gone by now to Paul-Louis’s house in Strasbourg, for a year, so she thinks. I’d put it at two or three months but she never writes.

  There’s a nice market here made nicer by the niceness of the Frogs (the pets). They really are pets. If they were so disposed in the north I should be much happier. It’s smiles and little politesses and winks and self-last all the way. I dropped my red pocketbook, stuffed with sterling, in the market. It was returned before I got home. There’s a bit of foire aux puces22 where I’ve bought for fr.100 a present for Auberon more useful than the one he gave me – a compact leather snuffbox prettily labelled Lanterne à poche and inside a collapsible contraption and candle beyond compare. I’ve also bought a sachet of faded pink satin and lace with green embroidered ‘D’ for fr.100 and a lot of strips of chintz for my patches and a strong electric lamp that focuses down on to one’s employment leaving the room in inky gloom, and a kilo of kapok to make a new pillow for Willow. It’s the twelfth day now and I’ve had a cup of nourishing yoghourt.

  My mind is full of election.23 Speak whenever you can.24 It’s splendid practice and say the wrong word rather than ‘Ah . . . or . . . er’. Elections gave me at thirty-odd an interest in politics and a vague comprehension.

  Aix-en-Provence

  February 10th, 1950

  It’s all nearly over. I broke the great fast and that makes luncheon expeditions possible, so we’ve been to Marseilles twice and to Cassis and today we go and look at a double-starred Abbey of St. Maxime near the Abbaye de Celles, where once we went with Papa and found an Englishman who opened that day and hadn’t an egg or a sprout in the house. Since then he’s earned a star in Michelin so I suppose we’ll eat there and not in the Abbey bistro as intended. We’ve learnt to love two new dishes – quennelles de brochet and loup flambé à la fenouil. We read and read Little Dorrit aloud. Papa is tireless out of kind consideration but we never get even halfway. Then I read a book by drunken Polnay25 called Into an Old Room (a line from Fitzgerald’s poem ‘’Tis a sad thing to see the year dying’. Polnay lived and wrote the book in Fitzgerald’s house, and we are never allowed to forget it.

  Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam was refused by the publisher and privately printed (250 copies) by the translator (or author we can say – it has only a very vague relationship to the Rubaiyat), quatrains (for that is the meaning of the word) being considered of no account in Persia, and a few given to his friends and the rest sent to Quaritch to sell. He sold them for a penny, and as soon as Swinburne and others discovered its genius, it was selling at a guinea a copy. Now that edition, as you can imagine, is priceless and fingered at Cambridge by the privileged as the Grail might have been by Galahad.

  Every day the town waxes faster and more furiously forain.26 If only you were with me I could enjoy it. The fireworks are going to be stupendous, but we shall miss them and be satisfied with the défilé and the hurly-burly. I shall buy a mask to surprise Papa. Susan Mary writes that Kakoo and Moucher Devonshire,27 our most self-effacing duchesses, failed on their appearance alone to get into Dior’s. Susan Mary put it right. She also tells me that Bill’s efficient, modern-moralled girl-secretary can’t dry her tears over Ingrid Bergman’s baby.28 The first day she had to be sent home, and she’ll never suffer a disillusion so severe.

  Nancy writes that Dolly’s chauffeur told her que Monsieur est à la mort.29 Mogens went into Dolly’s bedroom and had a heart attack at 2 a.m. (Tony says because he found Kinsky in bed with her). He’s dying of fear and terror like in The Speckled Band and the reason is that his brothers in Denmark have both got cancer and he thinks he’ll be the next. Anyway at vast expense they lugged in the kind of telescope you see Mars through and gazed at his heart. Nothing wrong at all, so he’s got up again and is painting the Duc de Doudeauville.

  Same evening. We did go to St. Maxime Abbey and got actually into the bistro which looked inviting exteriorly, and Papa went so far as to say nous voulons déjeuner,30 but once into the dining room we were put off by the single gloomy men at separate tables and by a handful of gloomy whiny children, so with courage I said Papa was mad and he knew perfectly well we had friends at Brignoles and that when he says déjeuner he always means apéritif, and out we skedaddled without a backward glance. Papa’s become a most dreadful moral funk. He’d sooner face really any disappointment, discomfort or misery than face up to a fellow man and cut his loss. We’d still be at the Riviera or back in Paris if it had been left to him to escape to the Roi Réné.

  So we came to the Abbey of Celle and were greeted by Mr. Morris as though we were the only begetters of his success. The place, bathed in the first real spring sunshine, looked enchanting and the food was A1. The visitors book in which Papa had written a verse had been stolen, so he wrote another Rubaiyat and Morris gave us a big parfait de foie gras (he’s sold £2,500 worth to Fortnum’s) and a hideous hand-woven scarf which a palateless old spinster weaves so as to be monkish, and I think he’s just the man to advise about the English restaurant which is always gnawing me. I think the opportunity of a lifetime presents itself at the next French International Exhibition (1952?). There is sure to be an English Pavilion and eating-house and that’s the moment, with the Government’s backing, to be allowed the running of it. Then if it were all the rage we might carry it on en ville afterwards.

  Mr. Morris profoundly remarked that why Frogs pay so highly for their food is that to them a good meal is an entertainment as the opera is to us, so that £2 or £3 for a big dinner isn’t much. I can’t see it like that funnily enough, unless it’s a picnic or cooked by the party with laughter and ‘What did you do with the lard?’ Besides I never eat but the tail end of a fish or a pig or an orange, so can’t see two quid go out on that.

  P.S. I wonder if Dolly’s up to her tricks again. She’s buried two husbands – one tied in knots of arsenic agony. She is naughty – poor Mogens does so enjoy life.

  Aix en Provence

  Monday, February 13th, 1950

  Dear! What we have been through. Let me, though, before I make your blood congeal say that we think all’s well. We had to go, protected by the conservateur, last Saturday morning to see the picture gallery – delightful, and nice examples of many schools and a full-face portrait of Sir Thomas More (saint and ours) first class, Flemish. Ingres, a lot of desirable stuff, and no Cézanne
who’d lived and painted at Aix. The keen little M. Malbos had a room set aside of works of Cézanne’s friends and the frock he wiped his brushes on and etchings from his hand and extraordinarily academic detailed student’s drawings, as impeccable as Ingres. He had three watercolours, one I was proud to note given by our Ivor Churchill,31 but no canvas. He knew it was silly, but stronger than himself was his desire to let us into his secret. That very morning he thought he had bought one from a man who had paid 250 francs. So he smuggled us into his den to have a peek. You never saw such an enormity, or rather such a mesquinerie; he feels sure it is Cézanne’s wife and well it may be, like a picture of one’s head coming through a hole in the backcloth on which is a bicycle or a kilt. The face is three sizes too big. He’s going to give the seller 50,000 if it’s genuine. Why, one asks oneself, did the purchaser give 250 for the daub? One might easily give £250 for the gamble but why 5/- to disfigure a wall? How funnily this letter may read in a hundred years, like writers who listened to the first performance of Tannhäuser and rioted with rage.

  Papa and I and Willow piled into the Ford to make a bolt for Toulon and lunch. Halfway to Marseilles we stopped to open the car, and as Papa (believe it or not) helped me on with my horrible new fur coat, we saw Willow had jumped out and already was the other side of the arterial road. I knew at once what must happen. I heard the 80 k.p.h. camion tearing round the slight bend, and was so certain that the silly thing would start across in her road-senseless way. Nothing to be done. I buried my face in my hands. I heard the grinding of the brakes and the rush of the engines already dying in the distance and then I looked and saw this pathetic yellow rag turning over and over then lying still and the yelling and screaming. We tore to pick up what we thought must be dead or dying and laid her still wailing on the roadside. A very little blood was dribbling from her mouth. Of course her general state was one of dementia, though she soon calmed down and reduced the yells to little moans. It was a miracle, for the car had gone right over her – between the four wheels – and she was not dead.