Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  gala day when we left Milan for Certosa and had an audience of twenty or thirty undergraduates laughing, jeering, sympathizing at our outré lunch and ticket arguments. We were nothing if not prudish for a bit, but melted when eight of them sprang out at Certosa and followed us round the monastery, pressing lilies and wild flowers on us. Calamity at last knit us together, we missed a train back to Milan, so we all took a bank-holiday wagonette to Pavia, singing glees and Neapolitan songs all the way. They were too charming and we finally exchanged cards and sighed to think that we would never see them again.

  Italy was followed next year by The Hague and Paris, then Italy again. In 1911 it was Normandy, an expedition for some reason ‘hidden by a web of lies from Father’. Diana enjoyed everything but begrudged the time she was separated from her swelling horde of admirers: ‘I shall love stone cathedrals with their hundred straight pillars – man’s excellent improvement on tree-trunks – but how much more would I appreciate it if Edward was there to understand, unexplained, the humours and beauty of things.’ Then in October 1912 came the first intoxicating visit to Venice, the foreign city that over the years was to mean more to her even than Paris. The Marchesa Casati dominated the scene. Diana first saw her ‘drifting down the Grand Canal under a parasol of peacock’s feathers’ and soon became a regular attender at Casati’s parties, which were exotic, extravagant, vulgar perhaps but never dull. Once the Piazza San Marco was taken over as the Casati’s ballroom, filled with guests dressed as characters from pictures by Longhi and Guardi. The hostess herself wore ‘the trousered Bakst-designed dress of an animal-tamer. On her shoulder was a macaw, on her arm an ape. She was followed closely by an attendant keeper leading a restive leopard, or puma it may have been.’ Unfortunately the public were also there in force and greeted the Casati’s party with jeers and abuse. A near-riot followed. Diana revelled in the scandal, and still more in the fact that, though she could hardly match the bizarre splendour of the Casati, her golden-haired, blue-eyed beauty won her an army of admirers among the Venetians. ‘Every night a three-hundred-man crowd followed us on the Piazza till finally I had a duel fought over me by two unknown swashbucklers,’ she proudly told Edward Horner. ‘But an Italian success for a fair-hair is a bloody poor one – though very intoxicating.’

  Though she loved to be abroad she had her reservations about the natives. After a rapturous few days in Rome she wrote fiercely: ‘There’s nothing like Italy, but gosh, the people! They do run away with the macaroon. There’s not one passable one. All the men should be crushed beneath the heel.’ Next year it was Paris: ‘A thought from an Englishman is worth ten years’ devotion from these squalid, mis-shapen, Jewish, vulgar, loud-tongued, insult-asking Frenchmen.’ Never did she wholly escape from a generalized distrust of foreigners; before 1914, when her feelings were fortified by the arrogance of the master-race, they ran rampant. Her prejudices rarely survived long once she got to know strangers as individuals, but collectively she viewed them with distaste.

  ‘Jewish’ was one of the epithets she flung at the French. It is hard to know how seriously to take the anti-semitism of the English upper classes. Rothschilds, Cassels, Sassoons were fêted and flattered, honoured at court and accepted in the houses of the aristocracy, yet those same aristocrats abused them freely behind their backs and sometimes to their faces. ‘Filthy Jew’ was part of the common currency of schoolboy invective and the propensity of the English upper classes to behave like schoolboys has always been remarkable. Billy and Julian Grenfell, two of Diana’s closest friends, were particularly virulent. At Balliol Julian would watch for Philip Sassoon to come into the college and then, with a cry of ‘Pheeleep, Pheeleep, I see you!’ chase him from the quadrangle with an Australian stock-whip cracking within inches of his head. Even Duff Cooper, ardent champion of Zionism and enemy of every kind of persecution, a man who was in time to dedicate his book David to ‘The Jewish People’, snarled ‘These bloody Jews are all the same’ when not allowed to borrow Philip Sassoon’s Rolls-Royce one rainy night.

  Many of the greatest pleasures in Diana’s life came to her through Jews whose affection she cherished and to whom she was utterly loyal. Many years later, when her son was describing the virtues of his latest friend, he was rash enough to qualify the catalogue with ‘… though he’s a Jew’. He can still remember the stinging box on the ears which his mother administered: ‘And what, pray, is there wrong with that?’ Yet she grew up with the instinctive anti-semitism of her class and race. When George V acceded she wrote to Patrick Shaw-Stewart that ‘he represents to me all that I most heartily dislike … except that I thank God that he hates the Jews’. Philip Sassoon was notorious for snapping up secretaryships to important people. One Easter Day Diana sent him a telegram – ‘Christ has risen and will shortly be needing a secretary.’ Such jibes never meant much to her and she would live to be heartily ashamed of them. In youth, however, she was as intolerant as the majority of her friends. Acquaintances were condemned for their accents, their clothes, their stupidity, their hair-style. Jewishness was just another to be added to the catalogue of vices; venial, certainly, but a blemish all the same.

  *

  Violet, Duchess of Rutland, had less truck than most with such follies. She was as unconventional in her choice of friends as in everything else. Edward VII was so put out by her goings-on that he took the trouble to call at Arlington Street to remonstrate; a woman in her position ‘ought to drop cards and drive in a barouche round and round Hyde Park, and not go to supper-parties and draw and do amusing things’. He was settled in an imposing armchair which turned out to be worm-eaten, and collapsed halfway through his harangue, pitching the monarch to the floor. A few years later Queen Alexandra similarly ended up on the floor at Arlington Street when the leg of a sofa snapped beneath her.

  In one thing, however, the Duchess was wholly conventional: the selection of husbands for her daughters. Here the most rigid tests of wealth and breeding were applied. Letty had married the heir to a rich earl; Marjorie a very rich marquess; Diana, the favourite, must do at least as well as either. The Duchess was said to keep a list of eligible suitors, putting a skull and crossbones against any that were inconsiderate enough to marry elsewhere. Foreigners had to be very grand to be included. The Crown Prince of Germany figured fleetingly. Prince Paul of Yugoslavia was one of Diana’s first suitors. ‘I despised him as a shiny little black thing.’ Diana sat next to the widower ex-King Manuel at dinner. ‘I like kings or commoners,’ she told her sister, ‘far better than those chronic eligibles with coronets on their fingers and coronets on their toes.’

  It was enough for a young man to be deemed eligible for Diana to distrust if not dislike him. Lord Rocksavage, rich and beautiful, was ‘an eligible eldest son after Mother’s own heart’. Most women considered him attractive but Diana found his conversation ‘unluckily reduced to three words, adaptable to any remark: “Oh”, “Really?” “Right-ho!”. Monotonous but a simplification of life.’ Some of the eligibles were later to be among her dearest friends, but at that time her mother’s approval was proof that they were undesirable: Lord Dudley was slothful and somnolent, ‘that bugger Bobbety Cranborne’ wholly unacceptable with his ‘loose gaping mouth and lean, mean shanks’ (‘bugger’, it should be stressed, being an epithet to which Diana was attached at the time and used with cavalier indifference to its usual meaning).

  Most eligible of eligibles was the Prince of Wales. The future Edward VIII was three years younger than Diana, which meant that the war had started before his name began seriously to be linked with those of women, but it was still permissible to dream. The Duchess had no doubt that her daughter was eminently well qualified to be Queen and that this should be her ambition. For Diana the dream was nightmare; she thought the Prince a snivelling cub and viewed with horror the prospect of internment in the court. She was far from being republican, but in her set it was unfashionable to admit to any enthusiasm for the royal family. When Edward VII died, the bell at Be
lvoir tolled all day and the flag was at half-mast. Nixon, the butler, ‘gave his views eloquently the whole damned day, always the same: “I tell you what I think, Milady. I think it’s very serious, not so much for the royal circle, but for the country!” I longed to say it was a hundred times worse for Mrs Keppel than all put together.’ Her main concern was clothes: ‘Every soul in the nation has a trim black outfit with the exception of us three, who look the fulfilment of makeshift in black chiffon wound round in every direction to conceal parrot-colours.’ As it turned out, the Prince of Wales was equally unenthusiastic about the prospect of an alliance with the Manners family. Whether, if he had liked the idea, Diana would have been able to resist the pressure from society and the glamour of the throne, must be doubtful. When the Duke of Connaught said that she was the only woman who would keep the Prince on the throne she professed dismay, but the flattery was intoxicating.

  Her first proposal came from smaller fry. Claud Russell was a grandson of the Duke of Bedford and adequately rich, but he did not rank high on the Duchess’s list. He had been in love with Diana since he first saw her at the age of fifteen, tobogganing in the snow with folded arms and eyes shut, ‘like a heroine of fairy tale going on a last enchanted voyage’. He waited till she was eighteen, then presented her with a diamond-and-ruby pendant and proposed. Diana accepted the pendant and refused the marriage; ‘He seemed a frightfully old man, almost like a cripple.’ She continued to keep him as a suitor, though. She always hated to let any man pass out of her life. When Edward Horner threatened desertion she wrote in dismay: ‘Do you imagine that I don’t want you, someone who will talk and listen to me and perhaps love me? Let me know, and I’ll settle whether to console myself with winter sports, or let green, slimy river-bubbles burst above me.’ And yet, though she wanted Edward Horner to love her, she was by no means sure that she wanted to love him in return. Love, she told Patrick Shaw-Stewart, ‘brings pain and sighs in its train and endless rue, whereas I would bring nothing but fun, gladness’. Flattery, courtship, flirtation, a mutual pursuit of pleasure, this was all very well, but anything more serious was a threat to be countered by hostility or indifference. ‘I love you desperately,’ wrote Shaw-Stewart, ‘but it’s no use saying so, as the statement is always a signal for an outburst of brutality.’ ‘Your remote look in that taxi‚’ complained Edward Horner, ‘seemed like an instrument of torture.’

  Diana knew that in some way she was failing to give them what they wanted; not physically, which the social climate of the age would anyhow have precluded, but in any kind of whole-hearted commitment. She regretted it, was even slightly alarmed by it, but did not feel it within her to offer more. Patrick Shaw-Stewart wrote reproachfully after a weekend at The Woodhouse in which he felt she had neglected him. Diana replied in terms that showed contrition yet little hope of amendment:

  What can I say, except that I was fairly unconscious of being anything different from my heartless ’umble self and that I’ve got one of those new marble hearts, and that I like you as well as (not an atom more than) anybody – and surely now you must realize that I’m not so good a woman, and please you mustn’t love me, because I’m only one of those Children of Illusion. It’s damned nice and unselfish of me to ask you this, so realize it.

  It is to be doubted whether the recipient took much pleasure from this muted apology.

  *

  By 1912 or 1913 Diana’s circle had widened far beyond the original Brancaster group. Its inner nucleus, however, remained tight-knit and exclusive. ‘The Corrupt Coterie’, as it was called affectionately by its members and disparagingly by those not admitted to membership, consisted largely of the children of members of the Souls – Asquiths, Listers, Horners, Trees, Grenfells. But where the Souls prided themselves on their spirituality, the Coterie flattered itself that it was ‘unafraid of words, unshocked by drink, and unashamed of “decadence” and gambling – Unlike Other People, I’m afraid’. Its debaucheries were innocuous – at least until the war liberated London society to sin more spiritedly – but its pretensions to wickedness were many and vociferous.

  The Asquiths were at the heart of the Coterie and immeasurably important to Diana. Katharine Asquith was Edward Horner’s sister – ‘a lovely, tall creature,’ Laurence Jones described her, ‘large-eyed, long-lashed, with a magnolia complexion’. She was far more intelligent than her brother, a perturbed spirit endlessly questing perfection and causing herself much tribulation in the search, capable when young of a reckless gaiety which at times seemed to border on hysteria. Her friends loved her but found her withdrawn, even mysterious. ‘All girls – like all men – long to know you well because you are so beautiful,’ said Blanche Stanley, ‘but are puzzled how to do it because you are so uncommon and remote.’

  In 1907 Katharine Horner married Raymond Asquith, eldest son of the Chancellor of the Exchequer who the following year was to become Prime Minister. Raymond was a scholar of Winchester and Balliol, winner of the Ireland, Craven and Derby Scholarships, a First in Greats and a Fellowship at All Souls. With these towering academic achievements went indifference to worldly success; he had chosen the Bar as a career and would undoubtedly have excelled at it, perhaps too done well in politics, but he could not be bothered to fight hard, preferring to cultivate his friendships and his intellectual pleasures. John Buchan described him as a demi-god: ‘a scholar of the ripe Elizabethan type, a brilliant wit, an accomplished poet, a sound lawyer – these things were borne lightly, for his greatness was not in his attainments but in himself … Most noble in presence and with every grace of voice and manner, he moved among men like a being from another world, scornfully detached from the common struggle.’ Demi-gods are by definition inhuman; Raymond Asquith could appear so to his acquaintances but to his friends he was warm, sympathetic, an exhilaratingly good companion. Posterity may fairly doubt the qualities of many members of the lost generation but about him there can be little dispute.

  He was fourteen years older than Diana, ten years older than Horner, Shaw-Stewart, Lister, the Grenfells, or others of the group. One cannot be sure why he chose to make so many of his closest friends in a younger generation; perhaps in part because he loved to lead, probably still more because he found this particular group more amusing. Certainly he achieved leadership. ‘He was the king,’ said Diana. ‘He was the one we liked best and he liked us better than his own people. He was wonderful.’ His influence on her was far greater than that of any other of her friends; she read books to please him, echoed his opinions, feared his criticism. She loved him with a fervour that only first love can inspire.

  It is more difficult to be unequivocally enthusiastic about the Grenfells. Julian and Billy Grenfell were the two elder sons of Lady Desborough, a fashionable hostess whose wealth, ambition, toughness and hunger for applause ensured her pre-eminence in a crowded field. ‘Ettie is an ox, she will be made into Bovril when she dies,’ said Margot Asquith, Raymond’s step-mother. Lady Desborough craved the exclusive love of her sons and resented the affection they felt for Diana. Billy, the second son, was undeterred. ‘You get 100 out of 100 for companionship, beauty, wit, intelligence and intellect, 77 for athleticism and 7½ for lawn tennis,’ he wrote to Diana, and then again a few months later, ‘You have given me wonderful and amazing love; I dare not think how much.’ In fact, though Diana was fond of both the brothers, she felt no love for either. There was a brutal heartiness, an insensitivity about them which accorded ill with the decadence that was her favoured affectation; she did not actively disapprove of their anti-semitism, their crude consciousness of caste, their worship of the traditional manly qualities, but there was a stridency, a vulgarity about them that she deplored. Few of the people she loved were conspicuously full-blooded and she found a little of the Grenfell boys went a long way.

  Denis Anson had some of the same attributes, though he did not elevate them to the level of a philosophy. A rich, sporting baronet, he could never resist a challenge and passed from one wild excess t
o another. Billy Grenfell recalled ‘a glorious dinner’ in his rooms, after which ‘fifty rabbits were lowered out of Trinity in wicker baskets – whereupon one hundred excited humans and one mangy bull-dog ran after them, and the Dons ran after us, and afterwards collected the defunct rabbits into large piles and buried them’. An unattractive scene; but Denny Anson was as likely to risk his own life as that of a rabbit, and his charm and genuine kindness redeemed what otherwise might have seemed boorish or even brutal.

  Lord Vernon was another who was more loving than loved. George Vernon was short, stout, spoiled and very rich; endearingly hopeless and inducing in almost every woman a wish to mother him and put him right. He was extravagantly generous, and though it was not his readiness to foot the bills which won him a place in the Coterie, he was undoubtedly valued for his bank-balance as well as for his gentleness and sweetness. Edward Horner once accused Diana of being engaged to Vernon. Diana dismissed the charge as absurd, but it was not for want of soliciting that she was not. ‘If you could imagine a millionth fraction of the amount I worship you, you would be obliged to forgive me‚’ wrote Vernon. ‘Oh Dibbins, I implore you to say you’ll marry me. You sit in every chair and I see you in every step and I can think and imagine nothing else but you.’