A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  For many years before the war Daisy was ‘the best-dressed woman in the world’, and she was accustomed to being the most elegant and admired person at any Paris party. Her aunt, Princesse Edmond de Polignac, was giving a musical soirée and decided she would wear all her jewels, tiara, necklaces, bracelets, on the front of her dress so that from throat to waist she was covered in glittering gems. When Princesse Natty de Lucinge arrived she exclaimed: ‘Oh! princesse, que c’est merveilleux, vos diamants!’

  ‘Oui,’ said Princesse Winnie; ‘oui, je crois que ça doit faire un certain effet, car Daisy en arrivant tout à l’heure m’a dit: Oh, ma tante! Que c’est joli, ce tulle!’ and Daisy had pointed to a wisp of tulle round her aunt’s neck. Princess Natty told this to Jean de Baglion years later. She never allowed me to say, ‘Daisy is a saint.’ ‘No,’ she used to say, ‘not a saint.’

  An old friend who came to Paris from time to time was Pavel Tchelichew. During the war he had lived in America, and his English was now as rapid and inaccurate as formerly his French had been. He told me that the voluminous correspondence between him and Edith Sitwell was put away in a safe to be opened and published in the year 2000. When he asked about Jonathan and Desmond and I told him they were married with infants of their own: ‘These babies!’ said Pavlic, ‘they will read the letters!’

  He died in Rome but his ashes were brought to Paris, the city which, like so many painters, he looked upon as his spiritual home. There was an Orthodox service at Père Lachaise conducted by a young red-bearded pope, and Sauguet gave the oraison funébre. Every individual in the little crowd had dearly loved Pavlic, he was brilliant, original, with more than a touch of genius.

  For six years during the fifties we had a monthly magazine, The European, which I edited. It was not a financial success and it never had a wide circulation, but it seemed worth while at the time that there should be at least one review in England devoted to the European idea, the idea, as M. had put it in 1948, of ‘Europe a Nation’. When we started it in 1953 the Conservatives were back in office. Churchill, in opposition, had made one or two pro-Europe speeches, and although Anthony Eden was hostile to the whole concept there had been some reason in 1951 to hope that now Labour had been defeated a move would be made in the right direction. In 1950 a volume of Churchill’s speeches had come out, edited by Randolph, with the encouraging title Europe Unite. Now that he was once more prime minister he immediately abandoned the idea, just when it had become evident that our former Empire having melted away, and as the French were being driven out of their overseas colonies one by one, while Italy and Germany had already lost theirs, the intelligent thing to do was for Europe to unite. The alternative was permanently to accept the ignoble role of pensioners of the United States. Although as leader of the Opposition Churchill had also welcomed the idea of a European army, no sooner was he back in office than, in Walter Hallstein’s words, he ‘obstinately opposed the European Defence Community and the European Political Community’. Professor Hallstein is doubtless correct when he says that until the middle fifties Britain hoped to go on playing its old role of balance of power politics; it ‘still did not recognize its inability to play a world role in view of its declining military and economic strength’.26 Suez was the turning point, when the anti-European Eden was prime minister. His disappearance from the scene came too late; what would have been welcomed by France and Germany in 1951 was no longer so. The Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957 and the European Community was formed without Britain, a tragic mistake on the part of our country. In 1961 when Mr. Macmillan applied to join he ran into the veto of General de Gaulle, and Britain was finally admitted only in 1971; the result of British shortsightedness and Gaullist intransigence had been that the idea of Europe was hampered for a generation.

  In The European M. wrote political notes every month in which he constantly stressed the importance to Britain of joining the Community.

  I collected articles, and if we were short of copy I wrote myself. I wrote a Diary, and reviewed political memoirs, mostly by old friends or old enemies. In September 1958 I printed a letter from Muv:

  Sir,

  I wrote the following letter to the Scottish Sunday Express after reading a paragraph in their issue of 28 June 1953 under the title ‘Politics and Personalities’ by Cross Bencher.

  ‘To the Editor of the Scottish Sunday Express

  Sir,

  I could not believe my eyes when I read the assertion of Cross Bencher concerning the outbreak of war in 1939: “Britain was determined to fight. And the British would have been a wiser people if they had decided instead to let Germany and Russia fight it out. Isolationism… was the best policy.”

  These were the very words and the very sentiments which landed a thousand loyal British subjects in prison for the duration of the war. I am waiting to see what happens to Cross Bencher! Nothing, of course, as everyone now agrees with these ideas, too late, alas!

  Yours faithfully,

  S. Redesdale’

  My letter was not printed, and the usual courtesy of an acknowledgement from the Editor was also omitted. I am not really surprised, as it is not popular to revive memories of the time when Habeas Corpus and Magna Carta were no longer in use in England and the years when imprisonment without trial was quite usual. I must say it is interesting to find these opinions on the war, which were formerly considered so wicked, published without comment in the Sunday Express, so much are they now taken for granted.

  Yours faithfully,

  Sydney Redesdale

  Inch Kenneth, Gribun, Isle of Mull

  My mother received a letter from a Mr. E. J. Robertson, from the Chairman’s Office of the Daily Express; he said he had seen her letter in The European, and that after a ‘most thorough enquiry personally conducted by the Editor’ they had been unable to find any trace of her letter to the Scottish Sunday Express.

  About our imprisonment without trial M. wrote: ‘Lord Chatham opposed the war against America in violent language; Charles James Fox opposed the war with France, and most of the Whig leaders hurried to Paris to dine with Napoleon during the brief peace of Amiens. No-one thought of arresting them, or suggesting that they might help the enemy. We were still living in the tradition of the great Elizabeth, who appointed a Catholic to command her fleet against Catholic Spain. Dago values were not yet in command of England.’

  On the whole I enjoyed doing The European, though due to my natural laziness I was also quite pleased when after six years M. decided to give it up. Even with a monthly magazine there is the constantly present worry of the inexorable passing of time, the feeling that ‘it’s later than you think’. We depended on the post, since I was usually in France or Ireland and sometimes even further afield. Unless I could see the galleys I knew there would be misprints to disfigure a whole issue. Twenty years ago the posts within Europe were dependable; if it was sometimes difficult in those days it would not be possible now to dream of editing a review from afar while relying on the post.

  In 1959 The European ceased publication. One year before, the Americans had released Ezra Pound, who ever since the war had been locked up in a lunatic asylum; the Americans and Russians hit upon identical treatment for their dissident poets. During the war Pound, who was a credit crank and thought usury the source of all evil, broadcast from Italy, his home for many years. According to our ideas it was inadmissable to broadcast from any country except your own in time of war, and Ezra Pound’s diatribes against usury, even though they were nothing to do with war, became a hostile act as soon as America was a belligerent. When the American army reached Pisa Ezra Pound was imprisoned in a wire cage, and subsequently in a lunatic asylum in the United States. The spitefulness of the American revenge was almost biblical in its ferocity. After twelve terrible years Pound went straight back to Italy, where he lived happily for the remainder of his life.

  The world of letters owes a debt to Dominique de Roux for Les Cahiers de l’Herne, his idea and his creation. The volumes
about Céline, for example, contain testimonies and descriptions connected with the life and work of the novelist which would have been lost but for l’Herne. Considering how difficult and obscure Ezra Pound’s poetry is even for the English it was very bold to publish two Cahiers about Pound in French, but all over Europe he is venerated and admired, so that curiosity about him knows no frontiers. In Alan Neame’s words: ‘If any poet incarnates the vicissitudes of the century it is the author of the Cantos.’ Over the years, we published some of the Pisan Cantos in The European with imaginative and fanciful notes by Alan Neame. As our magazine declared itself to be an ‘open forum’ contributors did not necessarily agree with M.’s political ideas, though all of them were for united Europe. On the literary side the most amusing and interesting articles came from John Haylock, Alan Neame and Desmond Stewart. They sometimes came to Orsay, and whether or not the results of our editorial conferences entertained our readers we certainly amused each other.

  Dominique de Roux induced Ezra Pound to come to Paris, where he had lived for years before he settled in Italy, to visit old haunts and to sit to the German sculptor Arno Breker. We dined with them. I was put next to the poet; he spoke not one word. This was disconcerting to begin with, but he seemed perfectly contented and sat looking nobly benign while general conversation washed over him. ‘Does he never speak?’ I asked Dominique. ‘Non non, ah non. Jamais,’ was the reply.

  Cyril Connolly who went to see him in Italy later on, hoping I suppose to interview him, was met with the same total silence. He made the best of it, announcing that when he left Ezra Pound after two days he found he missed and regretted the silence of the sage.

  The political side of The European has lost its actuality, but it is a reminder of M.’s farsightedness. The literary and critical pages of the magazine contain nuggets of gold among the inevitable dross.

  We were careful about libel, which in England can be an expensive luxury, and we published a story by Hugo Charteris without realizing how rash this was. Hugo was a dangerous writer in the sense that he always took real people for his characters, generally his best friends or near relations, and described them in a brilliantly accurate way so that no doubt as to their identity remained. He then attributed to them every crime in the calendar, holding them up to hatred, ridicule or contempt, sometimes to all three. Shortly after Hugo’s story appeared in The European we happened to meet Boofy Gore who said: ‘I’m Looty Cook.’ Looty Cook was the name of one of the characters in the story. Boofy Gore and Hugo had both worked on the Daily Mail and he said the story was not fiction at all but simply a report of an incident that happened in the newspaper office. ‘I don’t mind,’ he added kindly. Strangely enough, as far as I know, Hugo was never sued for libel, but some of his novels remained unpublished as a result of the threats of his victims.

  We printed his Looty Cook story in the early days of Hugo’s career as a novelist; later on I should have been apprehensive of even the most seemingly harmless tale if it came from his pen. All novelists draw their characters more or less from nature and thus all novelists are bound to use people they know for models. But whereas most of them digest and transmute, Hugo spewed his up whole and then proceeded to decorate them with extraordinarily unpleasant additions, criminal pasts and so forth. He quite expected his victims to be upset and I know of at least one case where he asked: ‘Did you mind?’

  ‘Not a bit,’ said the victim.

  ‘Oh! You must have,’ said Hugo.

  Just occasionally Nancy put a person or an episode into a novel with great truthfulness, an example being Basil in Don’t Tell Alfred and his activities as courier for a travel agency. When Alexander was about eighteen he earned his keep one summer holidays by taking English tourists to Spain and bringing them back again. Each time, as there were a few hours to spare in Paris, he went to rue Monsieur to ask for a bath. He described his work, ‘packing in the meat’ as he called it, to Nancy in picturesque detail. ‘May I come with you to the Gare d’Austerlitz?’ she asked one day.

  ‘Oh no, don’t come,’ he said, and then seeing her disappointment, ‘well, all right, but you mustn’t seem to belong to me.’ In the taxi he put on his armband and at the station he herded the flock while Nancy stood quietly shrieking a little way off.

  She was puzzled by the wonderful stamina displayed by the tourists. ‘Why do they do it?’ she asked one day. According to Alexander they were crammed into carriages like so many black holes of Calcutta, perishing of heat and thirst.

  ‘Oh, different reasons. For some of them it’s sex.’ ‘Sex? In the black holes of Calcutta?’

  ‘Oh no, when they get there. The girls often pick up men at the customs.’

  ‘What? On those dirty old tables then?’

  ‘Oh, Aunt Nancy, of course not. On their day off,’ he explained. In Don’t Tell Alfred Nancy imagined the rest; the scene at the station ‘packing in the meat’ was authentic.

  Osbert Sitwell in his autobiography laughs at his mother’s friends, the Fun Brigade, because they fled at the sight of any author for fear he might take them and put them in a book. Of course they were perfectly right, it can happen and it frequently does.

  24.

  INCH KENNETH AND LONDON

  From France and from Ireland we made frequent journeys to England. Every year I went up to Scotland to visit Muv and often to Northumberland to visit Farve. The journey to Inch Kenneth was grim; it was impossible to get up there in a day from Paris. I elected to spend a night in Glasgow; the great attraction there was the picture gallery with the Burrell collection. Next morning there was a train to Oban which caught the boat to Mull. At Salen Muv’s ancient shabby car would be waiting; there was a drive of eleven miles across Mull and then a mile of sea to Inch Kenneth in her boat, the Puffin. One arrived half dead to a wonderful welcome and a delicious Scotch tea.

  As Muv grew older one of us took her up to Scotland when she left London every April. Once she and I arrived at Oban on a stormy day and when we disembarked at Salen pier there was no car; this meant that it had been too rough for her boatman to be able to cross from Inch Kenneth to Mull. With our mountains of luggage we went to the inn, but it was full. We sat on plastic chairs in the bar, tired out. Muv was completely unmoved but the thought that we should be sitting there for the rest of the afternoon, and then for the long unnaturally light evening, and then all night long, and possibly for several days until the weather changed, sent my heart into my boots. It was all I could do to conceal my despair. There was no question of going back to Oban, Muv would never have dreamed of such a thing and in any case there was no boat until the following day. The rumour soon went round the village that Muv was marooned, and a saintly old person appeared with an offer of putting us up for the night. I slept badly; it was the uncertainty that was so depressing. There was no particular reason why the storm should abate. Late on the following day the old motor appeared. We had only been twenty-four hours at Salen but it had seemed more like a fortnight.

  We crossed to Inch Kenneth on a grey and choppy sea. Clambering from the dinghy into the motor boat, both of them dancing on the waves, was not easy for Muv, aged eighty, but as we settled into the stern of the Puffin wrapped in oilskins against the driving rain she shouted to me above the horrible noisy wind: ‘Fun, isn’t it?’ I shouted back: ‘Great fun.’

  I never quite understood the love my mother felt for her island. It was inconvenient to the last degree. There was no telephone, and if the sea was rough there was no post. She spent a good part of each day looking through field glasses to see if any people should chance to appear on the opposite shore at Gribun, or whether a black spot had been fixed on her garage which meant there was a telegram for the island. When, on calm days, the boat went over to fetch the mail excitement mounted. Ages seemed to go by, even after the boat came back, until the little sack was given to Muv to open. If it contained nothing but bills the disappointment was dreadful. When I was going to the island Debo started writing a week in ad
vance, and wrote every day, so that I could be sure of a letter from the little sack; I did the same for her. It sometimes seemed as if the post which linked her to life and to the mainland was far and away Muv’s greatest pleasure, a close second being the wireless news and the newspapers.

  It was difficult not to wonder whether the trouble and annoyance of the long journey were worth while if at the end of it one was to live for letters and news which were so much more readily available almost anywhere else. However, I kept these impious thoughts to myself, and the island had compensations in its lonely beauty. If Muv saw through her binoculars that there was a picnic party on Mull, or better still if a yacht appeared in the sound, she sent her boatman to fetch whoever it might be and then gave them a terrific tea. She said during the time it took for the boat to make the journey her cook had time to make fresh scones. There again, such a haphazard choice of guests was, to me, a strange taste. It must have been the gambler in Muv which made her positively enjoy the unpredictable journeys and the luck of the draw at her tea parties.

  She was a great reader of biographies, diaries and the like, her library books were posted to and from London. Sometimes a book she had looked forward to proved to be a dud but there was no chance of changing it for another, the long process of posting had to take its weary course. Everything on the island was more difficult than elsewhere, including farming. When the bull was needed he had to swim over from Mull, the rope on the ring in his nose made fast to the motor boat. Several men had to be found to push him into the sea which he entered with the greatest reluctance. One year when I was there Muv had acquired a bull of her own. He roamed the island at will and one met him face to face round the corner of a rock on one of the beaches.