A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography of Diana Mosley

by Diana Mitford

  When Muv was dying, and throughout Nancy’s illness, Pam was the one they longed for—so kind, so practical, so calm.

  ‘I assure you I hardly ever open a book. Of life, though, my experience has been very wide.’ The words are Zuleika Dobson’s, and Zuleika has a good deal in common with my sister Debo. When the hero of Max Beerhohm’s novel says to Zuleika: ‘Yet you often talk as though you had read rather much. Your way of speech has what is called a literary flavour,’ Zuleika replies: ‘Ah, that is an unfortunate trick which I caught from a writer, a Mr. Beerbohm, who once sat next to me at a dinner somewhere.’ A great many writers have at one time or another sat next to Debo at dinner, and most of them have become her bosom friends. At least one, Patrick Leigh-Fermor, has suspected her of being a secret reader. If one asks Debo: ‘Have you read so-and-so?’ the answer is an angry and impatient: ‘Of course not.’ Myself, I incline to the view that, just as some people pretend to have read what they have not, so Debo pretends not to have read what she has. Is it possible to be so clever, so funny, so original and so well-informed without, just occasionally, opening a book? (She admits to reading poetry.) Possibly it is; but as to Zuleika’s ‘literary flavour’, Nancy’s books are a positive catalogue of jokes and turns of phrase invented by Debo; next to Farve, she is the most important source, and her sayings are scattered through all Nancy’s post-war novels. Debo’s letters, scribbled in the train, at the hairdresser or between times at an agricultural show, are fantastic in their flights of fancy and their funniness; her descriptions of people and of scenes sharply in focus.

  Of my sons I shall not speak; they are too close. Jonathan and Ingrid were divorced; I forbore to cavil, remembering my own youth. Both have married again, both are happy and pleased. The last of my sons to marry was Alexander; he married Charlotte Marten who, like me, comes of a big country family.

  Next to loved relations and friends, the greatest luck is to live in beautiful surroundings. The little Temple with its classical perfection of design gives unending pleasure. Since the war I have arranged more than a dozen houses and flats, some quite big, others very small. Each time when at the end of my labours I have shown the results to M., he has said, like Seismos in Faust:

  Und hätt’st du nicht gerüttelt und geschüttelt,

  Wie wäre diese Welt so schön?

  (And had it not been for your upheavals, how could this world have become so beautiful?) He always liked the results of my ‘upheavals’, but it never stopped him selling and moving on, each time for excellent reasons connected with his politics, all he minds about. The exception has been the Temple, where we have lived on and off for twenty-six years and where, if such a thing were possible, I should like to live for ever.

  We have seen the trees and hedges we planted there grow, framing the house and hiding a garden full of flowers and shrubs and roses and honeysuckle, delicious scents and bright colours reflected in water. Here I work all summer, regretting my gardening ignorance and often referring to my bible: The Small Garden by Brigadier C. E. Lucas Phillips.

  When we first lived at Orsay we used to take a short cut from the Paris road across fields to get to the Temple, bumping over the grass. One autumn evening I was driving with Debo and out of the mist loomed a camel; he put his great head to the car window and had a look at us. He belonged to a circus; next day he was gone. Now municipal playing fields, wide motor-roads and groups of villas have appeared where the circus animals used to be turned out to graze. Acre upon acre of market gardens and strawberry beds, cultivated for thousands of years, have been destroyed and coated with concrete for the innumerable commuters to Paris. Fortunately for us, the Temple is in a valley with a little vista of trees and water. Had there been a ‘view’ it would have been spoilt by now, but it has remained, a small oasis in a suburban desert.

  When the summer ends and it is cold and wet, Paris is only half an hour away. Seen from a distance, for example from the terrace in the park at St. Cloud, it is easy to get the impression that Paris has been completely ruined since the war. Julien Green noted truly in one of his books that the view from St. Cloud could just as well be of Detroit. Yet despite the disastrous concrete towers ringing the city and planted in a haphazard way within it here and there (the most incongruous are at Montparnasse and the Halle aux vins) when one is walking in the centre of Paris one sees little that is ugly; more often than not the towers are masked by the familiar old streets and squares. Many vistas on the other hand have been spoilt, and it is shocking to look up the Champs Elysées from the Carrousel and to see above the Arc de Triomphe, where there should be only sky, the absurd new skyscrapers of the Défense. Fortunately President Giscard d’Estaing has forbidden any more towers to be built; it is a case of better late than never.

  Paris is still a lovely city; there are still traces of a douceur de vivre not found elsewhere. More people have witty things to say; more people are perfectionists; there are hundreds of brilliant cooks, dozens of gifted dressmakers, any number of clever, meticulous artisans. One day, ordering curtains from my tapissier, he showed me two kinds of curtain rings from which to choose; they looked identical, but on close examination one was solid and expensive while the other was light-weight and cheap. The tapissier picked up the cheap ring, and saying angrily: ‘Voilà ce que je pense des anneaux creux!’ he flung it into the dusty and cobwebby recesses of his old shop. The second rate is ruthlessly discarded.

  A sad change in the streets of Paris of recent years is that the priests have abandoned their soutanes and now dress ‘en clergyman’ in grey flannels, while the beautiful habits of the nuns, each, as Marthe Bibesco once pointed out, in the fashion of the century when their order was founded, are no longer worn. Inside the churches a stern puritanism is the order of the day.

  When I awake in Paris my spirits rise; there is an exhilarating lightness in the atmosphere. There is a feeling that something agreeable is about to happen, and very often it does. The legend that the French are inhospitable to strangers is completely untrue. Nobody could love their friends more than I do, but with a few exceptions who have come into this account of my life I shall not mention the living. A catalogue of their delightful virtues would quickly pall; they know very well they are doted upon and appreciated by me, and none more so than our Paris friends.

  I am glad I saw Paris before the skyscrapers were built, and that I knew the Île de France before the demographic explosion and the motor car together transformed it into a maze of motor-roads and built-up areas. I regret places I could have seen before the war and did not. I wish I had visited Jerusalem before it was ruined by blocks of flats, I wish I had been to India, to Indochina; my advice to the young is hurry! Go to Dordogne before the grand panorama is all dotted with villas, go to Greece. I am happy to have lived in the English country as Laurie Lee describes it in Cider with Rosie; and even to have known poor old Hyde Park before the Knightsbridge barracks were pulled down to make way for the obscenity which has wrecked the place; and to have seen Dresden before it was bombed.

  Malraux once wrote: ‘Le musée est, après tout, ici bas, ce qui donne la meilleure idée de l’homme.’ Unfortunately this is becoming daily more true, as man destroys the sublime works of his ancestors out of doors while death duties, threat of thieves and high insurance premiums gradually banish pictures from the walls of private houses, including those which are open to the public. Having seen how the galleries in Washington and New York show their treasures, I no longer mind so much when European art crosses the Atlantic. Commercialism and crowds are more destructive than bombs, and since we live in a barbarous age I count myself lucky to have been to Stonehenge as it was when Hardy wrote Tess of the d’Urbervilles; and that I saw Paestum as Goethe saw it.

  Another lucky chance; I heard all Wagner’s operas many times before it became the fashion to dress them up in a ridiculous way. Even Flagstad singing Isolde would have been slightly diminished had one been obliged to look at a row of old coats hanging on a line, or whatev
er the latest innovation may be. Only Wagner attracts these oddities. With my musical friend Geoffrey Gilmour I have heard many marvels at the Paris Opera, Don Carlos, for example, and Turandot, perfectly sung and with splendid decor by the brilliant Jacques Dupont, in recent years. The vogue for spoiling Wagner’s operas will surely pass.

  I am also glad I had the good fortune to know various men and women whose fame reverberates down the years; painters, writers, politicians, and can measure what is written about them against my own experience. History is not necessarily either objective or true, depending as it does so largely on the prejudices of the historian. Probably this does not greatly matter, but once the fact is recognized it encourages scepticism about received ideas.

  29.

  SORROWS

  Hamish Hamilton published A Life of Contrasts in 1977. We went to London and I did the usual round of interviews, wireless and television, accompanied by Juliet Nicolson, Hamilton’s publicity assistant. Christina Foyle gave a Foyle’s luncheon at the Dorchester. Jamie Hamilton seemed pleased by the reviews, but as to another book it never occurred to me that I might write one, I had said my say.

  M. was getting rather frail and apt to fall, he had Parkinson’s disease. A drug called Modopar kept it at bay, and his hands never trembled in the way Muv’s had done. He wrote what he called broadsheets on the topics of the day, and sometimes did interviews on television. He had no notion of ‘giving up’.

  I reviewed for Books and Bookmen for years. The editor, Philip Dossé, had six magazines, with names like Theatre and Actors, Music and Musicians and so forth. I said to him one day, ‘doesn’t Books and Bookmen lose a lot of money? There are very few advertisements.’ He said yes, but that one of the magazines was soft porn and it paid for all the others.

  He never hesitated to publish my reviews, however unpopular my opinions: he loved controversy. He received furious letters from some of his other contributors, notably from A.L. Rowse, the historian, and always sent me the letters so that I could reply in the same issue rather than waiting a month.

  He himself wrote us many letters in his illegible scrawl; Auberon Waugh said he once got eight of them in one week. I realised there were money problems despite the profitable soft porn, and half thought we might collect a few thousand pounds from his many devoted admirers to keep Books and Bookmen going while making a real effort to get advertisements. Christina Foyle had told me she sent large numbers of the magazine to Australia, for example, because she got huge orders for books as a result. It was an excellent publication, worth saving. It turned out to be quite impossible however. Philip had borrowed a quarter of a million from banks, he was made bankrupt and the magazine died in 1986. Philip died too; he did not care to live. It was a great sorrow to me; he was a clever and original man.

  In 1979 my very old friend, Frank Pakenham (Lord Longford) telephoned and asked if I would write a life of the Duchess of Windsor for the publishers of which he was Chairman, Sidgwick & Jackson. I said I couldn’t possibly do it, I knew nothing about her and she was very ill. He asked if he could come and talk it over. Of course I begged him to come.

  Both M. and I, despite public differences of opinion, loved Frank (he had said in a review of my memoirs that I ‘lacked a dimension’, and we had had a quarrel about the row at M.’s meeting in Oxford in 1936.

  He came to the Temple, and we talked about the book he wanted. He said I need do no research; just use printed sources, and my own friendship with the Duchess. I told him we had never been intimate friends, but he said that was of no consequence. He had got some new photographs of the Windsors, from Jack Le Vien who had filmed A King’s Story. Finally I said I would do it.

  Gaston Palewski, who rather improbably had become a great friend of us both, dined with us; he was interested to meet Frank. He said to me afterwards that Frank was ‘intelligence incarnate’. Both Gaston and M. encouraged the idea of a book; there had recently been a vicious attack on the Windsors, published in America, full of lies.

  The new photographs turned out to be pictures that had been used over and over again, but probably nobody noticed that. For my little book I read the Duchess’s (ghosted) memoirs The Heart Has its Reasons and various accounts of the Abdication, and I saw or wrote to every person I could think of whom I had met at her houses in France, or had seen in other people’s houses when the Windsors were there, asking them to try and remember things she had said, her famous wisecracks, and what it was about her that made her dinner parties so gay and amusing and the conversation so stimulating. I regretted hours I had spent with her after the Duke died, when I could have asked her a thousand questions. She was now in a semi-conscious state of near oblivion, and her doctors forbade anyone to approach her. Even if they had not, there would have been no point in seeing her.

  One thing had always been perfectly obvious to anyone who knew them at all well, and that was the Duke’s deep love for her.

  A very old friend of hers I wanted to see was Lady Sefton. She was in London, mortally ill. She said if ever she felt well enough to talk to me she would send a message. One night I went to a dinner party and got back about 12, to find a message that she had telephoned at 8 pm saying would I come at once; she felt well enough to receive me. It was too late, I had missed my chance. She died soon afterwards. She sent me letters she had had from the Duchess in recent years, and they were a great help, but not to be compared with the talk I so narrowly missed. There was nobody else alive who remembered the Duchess before she left America. I saw plenty of people who had stayed at Fort Belvedere with the King when Mrs Simpson was a fellow guest, but Lady Sefton had known her long before.

  The idea of my writing this little book seemed to please most people, but my dear friend Jean de Baglion was violently against, and implored me to give it up. He disliked the Duchess intensely (without ever having met her) because of her one-time close friendship with Jimmy Donahue, a bête noire of his whom he knew rather well because he was a cousin of Jean’s friend Barbara Hutton. (He was no doubt a very degraded individual.)

  The book came out in 1980. It was as truthful and objective as I could make it, simply a description of the Windsors as I had known them myself, and as their friends knew them. The Duchess was, of course, never to see it. She was in a twilight world. One journalist asked me if it was a whitewash job, as if I had been writing about the Kray brothers.

  Jamie Hamilton was furious. It never crossed my mind that he might have wanted it; he had never suggested another book. He vented his rage on Frank. When I saw him some months later he said: ‘I have forgiven you, but I shall never forgive Frank.’

  Soon after the publication of The Duchess of Windsor M.’s health declined rapidly. In the winter we had planned a visit to London and he was to do a television interview in Newcastle. I dreaded this; I knew he was not well. In the event, he was unable to travel and had a temperature, not very high but enough to keep him indoors. The doctor made nothing of it. On 3 December 1980 he died, aged 84.

  I knew, later on, that his quick death, with no suffering or hospital, was exactly what one would wish for any loved person, but at the time my anguish was far beyond such reasoning. My brilliant and beloved companion, and husband of forty four years, had gone, and I longed to die. The wireless banged on about him all day, some of the tributes rather touching. I turned it on and off. My children came, Debo came, and Pam. He wanted to be cremated and we went to Père Lachaise. People came from London, from everywhere, Catherine from New York. I registered very little but the wonderful kindness.

  Three weeks later it was Christmas. I wanted only to be alone with my grief, but Debo made Jean de Baglion bring me to Chatsworth. We flew to Manchester I was like a zombie and just did as I was told. Andrew and Debo, Pam, Kitty Mersey, Jean and I were the little party, and it undoubtedly did me endless good, though I must have spread a terrible gloom among them. I felt my own life was finished, and in fact a few months later I nearly died.

  Back at the Temple the winter
dark was in tune with my sorrow, which was sometimes like acute pain, then faded and then suddenly came back. I couldn’t control my tears, which flowed, dried up, flowed once more. Everyone told me time would help. I didn’t believe it, but of course, mercifully, it did, and I gradually became less of a zombie.

  In the Spring, Tony Lambton, whose sympathy and telephoning had been a solace throughout these sad weeks, invited me to stay at Cetinale, his house near Siena. I said I couldn’t accept, I should be an impossible guest: I woke in the night and had to get food and drink, only in my own house could I behave in such an odd way; and then my deafness was such a bore for everyone. ‘Oh’, said Tony, ‘I often get myself a welsh rabbit at 3 am, so we can have it together’. In his wonderfully kind way he persuaded me to accept. I took the Rome Express as far as Florence, lunched with Harold Acton at La Pietra, and Tony fetched me in the afternoon.

  Cetinale is a paradise on earth. I had not been in Italy since we gave up our Venice summers years before, when gondolas and motorboats became too difficult for M. to climb in and out of. The beauty of the house, the garden, and the landscape of ripe corn, sunflowers, golden harvests and the huge forests on the skyline, had a healing effect. I often stayed with Tony Lambton and Claire Ward in later years, but this first visit was vital. I was able to laugh again.

  One day Tony took me to San Gimignano, and there I had the first intimation of calamity. We walked up the steep hill to the cathedral and I felt so dizzy that I sat in the great church with my head down, afraid I might faint. I soon recovered, but the following month, staying with Max and Jean in the South of France, I fell flat on my face on a cinder path and got cuts and bruises. I became totally vague, lost my way, took no part in conversation, which seemed to float miles away in the upper air. Max and Jean and Alexander and Charlotte were kind but puzzled. Back at the Temple I got much worse. Charlotte tried in vain to get doctors; they are not to be found in Paris in August.