A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  Next day the papers were full of the ‘art hoax’. One of them said that Maurice Bowra had addressed Hat in fluent German and that Hat had been unable to reply, but this was an invention, for Tom’s German was much more fluent than Maurice’s. I believe in his heart of hearts Brian was very disappointed. He had hoped for a Hollywood-style miracle, and that he would be ‘discovered’ by an astonished art world as a master.

  Throughout his life there were to be a succession of disappointments for Brian Howard. Talented, attractive, very good company, it is hard to say why he achieved nothing at all. He had been a precocious leader of his generation at Eton and even at Oxford, and he was to see his contemporaries outstripping him one by one. I suppose he wanted the palm without the dust, but more disastrously he despised what was within his range. He might have made a success in journalism, or even fashion, but he aspired to greatness and thought such things beneath him. He wanted to be Rilke, or Nietzsche, or Picasso. The sad thing is that Brian’s life was unhappy; he sought release in drugs, he swerved between depression, elation and profound discontent, and he died by his own hand.

  A frequent guest was our old friend Mrs. Hammersley, loved by us all for her cleverness and pessimism. She went with the Sitwells on a journey in North Africa where she inconveniently fell ill. Osbert published an unkind story about this incident entitled ‘… that flesh is heir to’; its theme was that Mrs. Ham was a germ-carrier who suffered every ill that flesh is heir to and handed on the germs to anyone unwise enough to consort with her. Mrs. Ham was hurt; there was a coolness. One day I boldly invited them both for luncheon; after a moment of embarrassment they embraced and made up.

  We stayed with Osbert at Renishaw, a memorable visit because his parents were there. Lady Ida was vague and distant but Sir George was a delightful old gentleman who had made elaborate gardens at Renishaw of which he was very proud. He was not yet world-famous as one of the comic characters of all time, for Osbert’s autobiography was yet to be written, but stories about him—Ginger, as Osbert called him—flew about. They were relished by Gerald Berners, particularly the one where Sir George, at Montegufoni, threw a lighted twist of straw down a well in order to demonstrate its great depth to his guests. As they peered into the well Osbert was heard saying to Sachie, ‘I wish Father would light his beard and throw himself down.’ Renishaw, if one looked out of the windows at night, was seen to be ringed by distant flames which glowed and sometimes flared up to the black sky. It was an oasis among dark satanic mills and blast furnaces.

  In London we sometimes went to tea with Edith Sitwell; one climbed stone stairs to her cheerless flat and was given stale currant buns. We loved going and revered the poetess, who was as a rule nourishing some violent quarrel or feud upon which she discoursed.

  The Acton brothers had an immense house in Lancaster Gate full of rococo furniture. At about the time our Buckingham Street years came to an end they left London; Harold went away to live in China. Tom and I missed him very much and so did his many devoted friends; cultivated, charming and witty, we loved his company. His conversation like Lytton’s owed something to his irresistible voice. He and William, despite English schools, had retained certain Italian inflections from their Florentine childhood. Tom loved to hear Harold talk in his exotic way about everyday, commonplace things familiar to them both: ‘Tell about your rowing at Eton, Harold.’ Harold’s eyes glistened: ‘My dear!’ rolling his head, ‘I once fell out of my whiff! It was swept over the weir and shattered to atoms!’ Next time they met: ‘Do tell us again what happened to your whiff, Harold,’ Tom would say. Once we were dining together somewhere and a fellow guest was a painfully matter-of-fact woman who obviously felt she should disapprove of Harold. ‘You’re not the sort of young man I can imagine doing things underneath a car,’ she said in a rude way.

  Harold smiled and screwed up his eyes. ‘Ah!’ he answered slowly, ‘It all depends who with!’

  A few days after my twenty-second birthday we had a ball to which we invited everyone we knew, young and old, poor and rich, clever and silly. It was a warm night and the garden looked twice its real size with the trees lit from beneath. A few things about this party dwell in my memory: myself managing to propel Augustus John, rather the worse for wear, out of the house and into a taxi; Winston Churchill inveighing against a large picture by Stanley Spencer of Cookham war memorial which hung on the staircase, and Eddie Marsh defending it against his onslaught. I wore a pale grey dress of chiffon and tulle, and all the diamonds I could lay my hands on. We danced until day broke, a pink and orange sunrise which gilded the river.

  While we were at Cheyne Walk Augustus John painted my portrait. I sat in his studio at Mallord Street. I admired some of his portraits and was flattered to be asked to sit, but it was not enjoyable. Although he was then in his fifties he had already become quite an old man, with sparse hair and blood-shot eyes. I never found him good company, but Bryan was fond of the whole family and we stayed once or twice with them at Fryern. Pubs and shove hapenny are not among the entertainments I enjoy and a little of Augustus went a long way, though I liked Dorelia and her daughters. The sittings were drear. There was always an atmosphere of morning after the night before at Mallord Street, an ugly modern house built of dark bricks. The conversation was desultory and John was grumpy. This was probably my fault, but so it was.

  Another who painted me that year was John Banting. He did a head and shoulders of vast dimensions, the canvas being about six feet by four. Bryan bought the picture because Banting was very poor, and it travelled with me to various houses for many a year, never hung but always surfacing during a move and then going back into the box room. Now, huge though it was, it is lost. How one could lose an object of that size is a mystery; but it has disappeared. The John portrait I never cared for. It had been his idea that he should paint me, not mine, so there was no question of having to buy it. It ended up forty years later at Christie’s and now belongs to Desmond.

  In the hall at Cheyne Walk there was a wall painting in sepia of the river with little boats sailing on it, which I thought rather absurd. Not wishing to destroy it and yet not wishing to live with it either, we had canvas on stretchers fixed to the walls and whitewashed. When the house was ready I invited Mrs. Harington Mann, a great friend whose shop I constantly used for stuffs and upholstery, to come and see it. As we walked into the hall I began to tell her about the now invisible fresco. She seized my hands. ‘Promise not to mind what I’m going to say,’ said Mrs. Mann. ‘I painted the river and the boats.’ Before there was time for the full horror of my gaffe to sink in she went on: ‘I don’t like it either, I did it ages ago, and if this house were mine I should simply have painted it over.’

  Good, kind Mrs. Mann; I think she really meant what she said, but it was a horrid moment for me. Probably stories about this incident went the rounds. Many years later I was told that people were saying I had destroyed a fresco by Whistler at 96 Cheyne Walk, which only shows once again that people will say anything.

  In the summer of 1932 Cochran had an idea that he might produce The Winter’s Tale in a London theatre; he wanted to surprise the public with a new face, never before seen, for Perdita. He offered the part to me. I was rather pleased, and inclined to accept. Dr. Kommer, a friend full of kind flattery who, rather like Helleu, made one feel ‘good’, knew a great deal about the theatre. When I told him of Cochran’s suggestion he poured gallons of cold water on the project; he even went to Cochran and talked him out of it. Kommer had never seen me act so much as dumb crambo, but he must have known instinctively that I should have been hopelessly bad. It was as if he had been in the ballroom at Batsford when I was eight and watched the play Muv forbade us to perform. I was rather cross about Perdita at the time, but no doubt Kommer prevented me making a fool of myself.

  When he was in London Kommer had a Stammtisch at the Ritz where his friends were always welcome for luncheon. He showed me his visiting card; engraved upon it was: Dr: Rudolf Kommer, and in o
ne corner aus Cernowitz.

  ‘But you don’t live in Cernowitz do you?’ I asked. He was always on the move between New York, London and Salzburg. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘but in America they always say Kommer? that lousy Jew from Cernowitz? So I put it on my card.’

  He worked for Reinhardt, whose hideous and vulgar productions had wide acclaim in the Anglo-Saxon world. When in Salzburg they lived at Schloss Leopoldskron, a baroque castle on the hill. I liked Kommer; fat, bald, clever and kind.

  On our way to Italy that summer Bryan and I motored through the south of France with Barbara Hutchinson and Victor Rothschild who were engaged to be married. We visited the Saintes Maries de la Mer and Aigue Morte and churches and the Aldous Huxleys and we stayed a few days at the Jules César at Arles. One morning I awoke with a sore throat which quickly became so swollen that I could no longer speak. My companions decided to take me to Avignon where they put me to bed and got hold of a bearded doctor from the Institut Pasteur. He diagnosed diphtheria. He kindly allowed me to stay in my hotel room rather than removing me to an isolation hospital, and every few hours he gave enormous injections. His treatment was so effective that in little more than a week I was able to travel to the sea. When I told my London doctor he said crossly: ‘Oh well, kill or cure I suppose.’

  However, our troubles were not over. The doctor had given anti-diphtheria injections to the others and the unfortunate Victor suffered a violent reaction. He became bright red, swelled up and had a high temperature. He was tormented by a painful, itching skin. I can see him now, under his mosquito net, his bed so full of talcum powder that it looked as if he was in a snow storm. I felt it was all my fault that this brilliant young man had been laid low. When he recovered we all spent a few days swimming and then Bryan and I left for Venice.

  Venice that summer was full of friends staying in various palaces and hotels and spending their days at the Lido. Our countrymen were not on their best behaviour; at one dinner party, a picnic on Torcello, there was a fight.

  Randolph was being very much himself; one day at luncheon at the Lido Taverna he teased Brendan Bracken by calling him ‘my brother’. Up jumped Brendan and Randolph rushed away down the beach to escape from him. When Brendan caught up with him Randolph reached out, snatched off his spectacles and threw them in the water. Brendan, half blind, stood in the shallow sea roaring like a bull and peering short-sightedly at the sand until somebody retrieved the spectacles, broken, for him. An American was heard to say: ‘Fon is fon, but that Randolph Churchill goes too far.’

  Tom was there, staying at Malcontenta with Baroness d’Erlanger; and Doris Castlerosse, Bob Boothby, Kommer, Mona Harrison Williams of the aquamarine eyes, the Mosleys and their children, Tilly Losch, Edward James, Baba de Lucinge, Lifar, and many Venetian friends. On the beach we congregated round the hut of Princess Jane di San Faustino, an old American lady with a sharp eye and a sharp tongue. Emerald was also in Venice, and Sir Thomas Beecham, but she was cross and not at her best.

  We sat on the Piazza San Marco during l’heure exquise’ when the setting sun lit up the gold mosaics on the church, then went to change and dined somewhere in the delicious airless heat, and we slept under mosquito nets, for in those days mosquitoes came in swarms off the canals to eat one alive.

  Although the city is as beautiful as ever, the tragedy of Venice since the far-off days of which I write has been the foul rash of industrial development on the mainland, so close as to pollute the whole atmosphere and hasten the decay of the glorious place. That some who have made fortunes out of this evil desecration have also busied themselves on committees to ‘save Venice’ cannot exonerate them in the eyes of real Venetians. The resultant feuding has not been helpful. Paradoxically, the great flood of 1966 alerted the whole civilized world to the danger that Venice could sink beneath the waves. Much has since been done, and Venice is ‘rising’, the flood proved a blessing.

  Forty-five years ago Palladio’s Malcontenta was a house of noble beauty in a bleak and lonely setting which emphasized its grandeur. Now it is surrounded and encroached upon; trees have been planted in an attempt to screen it, and succeed only in emphasizing the miserable truth: it has been wantonly spoilt, like so many other places in Europe which, spared by war, have since fallen victim to money grubbers. An obvious example is St. Paul’s cathedral, dwarfed and hidden by office blocks.

  10.

  MOSLEY

  The ‘national government’, elected at a time of national panic and world-wide slump in the autumn of 1931, was a depressing phenomenon. Now aged twenty-one, I had a vote but did not use it. Had there been a Lloyd George Liberal in our constituency I should have voted for him, but there was not. The over-blown Tory majority and the—as it seemed to young people then—absurd figure of Ramsay MacDonald pretending to lead it as prime minister were a despairingly inadequate combination.

  Bryan’s father came back from his summer cruise; he had not stood for parliament and that winter he accepted a peerage. He called himself Lord Moyne and chose for his motto Noli Judicare. He was an admirably unprejudiced man who lived up to the motto. Sarcastic about the ‘National Government’, that autumn he often looked in at Buckingham Street for a chat and I grew very fond of him.

  It was not necessary to have a particularly awakened social conscience in order to see that ‘something must be done’, in the renowned words of King Edward VIII some years later. The distressed areas, as they were called, contained millions of unemployed kept barely alive by a miserable dole; under-nourished, over-crowded, their circumstances were a disgrace which it was impossible to ignore or forget. The Labour Party had failed to deal with the problem, the Conservatives could be relied upon to do a strict minimum, yet radical reform was imperative. Could it be beyond the wit of man to manage the economy of a powerful and rich country which ‘owned’ a quarter of the globe in such a way that its citizens could eat their fill and live in decent circumstances?

  The waste of the talents of gifted, inventive and hard-working people under leaders like MacDonald and Baldwin made one almost as angry as did their surely unnecessary privations. For the rich, however, life went on much as before the crisis. Nothing will stop young people enjoying themselves; there were parties and balls, concerts, operas and plays, travels abroad, country house visits, hunting, shooting, racing. Early in 1932, not long after the deaths of Lytton and Carrington had left a painful gap in my life, I first met Oswald Mosley. I shall henceforward refer to him as M. He has never been called Oswald, and his nickname, Tom, was my brother’s name, which leads to confusion. In the collection of Carrington’s letters so brilliantly edited by David Garnett there is a letter from Carrington to Lytton Strachey in which she says: ‘I had a nice chat with Diana over the fire after dinner alone. She told me a great deal about Tom’s character.’ After ‘Tom’ the editor has put in brackets, ‘Mosley’. This letter was written in July 1931, before I ever met Mosley. It was Tom Mitford’s character we were discussing.

  M. and I were put next to one another at a dinner party given by the St. John Hutchinsons for Barbara’s twenty-first birthday. He told me he had seen me before, once at Venice, and at a ball at Philip Sassoon’s. ‘You were sitting with Billy Ormsby-Gore,’ he said. From that moment we met everywhere, and I listened to him as he talked.

  He was completely sure of himself and of his ideas. He knew what to do to solve the economic disaster we were living through, he was certain he could cure unemployment. Lucid, logical, forceful and persuasive, he soon convinced me, as he did thousands of others. He seemed to be the one person who had the answer, and as R. H. S. Crossman was to write many years later: ‘Mosley was spurned by Whitehall, Fleet Street and every party leader at Westminster, simply and solely because he was right.’

  In terms of experience M. was light years ahead of me. When the first war began I was four, but he was seventeen and as he was at Sandhurst was immediately engaged. He had fought in the air and in the trenches. Invalided out before he was twenty, the tre
mendous and shattering experiences of those years propelled him into politics. In the khaki election of 1918 he became Conservative M.P. for Harrow. His meteoric rise has been described many times. Very clever, quick, fearless, sharp as a needle, he excelled in debate in the House of Commons, while on the platform he became the best speaker of his generation. He soon left the Conservative party, and sat as an independent. The Liberal Westminster Gazette, edited by A. J. Spender, wrote that M. was ‘the most polished literary speaker in the Commons, words flow from him in graceful epigrammatic phrases that have a sting in them for the government and the conservatives. To listen to him is an education in the English language, also in the art of delicate but deadly repartee. He has human sympathies, courage and brains.’

  On the platform he was as effective as he was in Parliament. ‘When Sir Oswald Mosley sat down after his Free Trade Hall speech in Manchester and the audience, stirred as an audience rarely is, rose and swept a storm of applause towards the platform—who could doubt that here was one of those root-and-branch men who have been thrown up from time to time in the religious, political and business story of England. First that gripping audience is arrested, then stirred and finally, as we have said, swept off its feet by a tornado of a peroration yelled at the defiant high pitch of a tremendous voice’ wrote the Manchester Guardian soon after the 1931 election.