Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  The fireworks, however, left no room for criticism. Diana produced a blue ticket and was told first that she must go upstairs, then that she should head to the left and finally that the corridor to the right was her proper route. After groping her way down an endless passage which she thought must have taken her almost to Constitution Hill, she was ejected on to a balcony, to be blinded by the blaze of fireworks. Only when her eyes adjusted to the darkness did she realize that just in front of one side she had the Queen in all her glory and on the other the portly President himself – ‘The Tour Eiffel enceinte de la France and merry as a medlar.’ As soon as the fireworks were over she fled the Palace to drive to a party given by the Hofmannsthals. Her car was slow in coming and so she sat with the coachmen, gorgeous in scarlet and gold coats, black and gold top hats and eighteenth-century golden-headed malacca canes with which to poke the ladies’ trains into carriage doors. She enjoyed this half hour as much as any of the evening. ‘They told me where they lived and coulisse tit-bits. Every few minutes they called my car again, nothing doing. “’E’s gone for a pint”; “’E’s found a bird.” “You don’t know Mr Presley, he’s not like that. I don’t believe your tannoy works.” “Tannoy always works. ’E’s gone to the Blue Man.”’

  Visits to England always involved the seeing of friends and innumerable parties. A grandly formal ball at Blenheim or Wilton would be followed by a dance given by Laurence Olivier at Terence Rattigan’s country house for Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. ‘Marilyn Monroe charmed everyone with her pretty face and mal pendue derrière – mal pendue yet featured by having so thin a layer of material that every fold and muscle and contraction of its cleft could be studied. She danced in ecstasy and exclusively with her husband.’ Then might come a picnic given by Ann Rothermere on the crumbling terraces of the Crystal Palace: vodka and prawns, chicken and white wine among the great drifts of willow herb, the urns, the fountains, a suburban Angkor where lichen and ivy reigned triumphant over Victorian balustrades and Paxton’s heroic bust. It was a fantasy world of beautiful people in beautiful places, and she saw just enough of it to convince her that she wanted more and could only be happy when home again for ever.

  Home was not only balls and picnics. In July 1957 she revisited Mells, the house in which she had once been so happy, to find an aged and saddened Katharine Asquith nursing a dying Ronald Knox. Mrs Asquith had told Diana about his appearance, but no warning had prepared her properly for ‘this spectre of skin and bone, swollen with wind and dropsy. The beautiful skull face was as vivid a yellow as the phosphorous red one sees in advertisements, and in this startling colour eyes yellower still and fearfully living. I can’t wipe the picture out. I long to forget it. Poor, poor old thing.’ Diana was not obsessed by death, it occupied her thoughts very little, whether her own death or that of other people. But the spectacle of suffering was something else; she rejected and would flee from it. It had taken her days of distress to persuade herself to Mells and was to take many more weeks to banish the awful vision from her mind. Ronald Knox’s was the last death-bed she was to visit; the thought that the one death-bed she could not escape must be her own was more a relief than a cause of fear.

  *

  Long before Duff died Diana had played with the idea of writing her memoirs. ‘I was always determined not to, and rather despised those who did’; but then she read Maurice Baring’s Puppet Show of Memory and was struck both by the pleasure it gave her and the ease with which it seemed to be written. ‘It would be an interest and an absorption – delving into the past I shall forget the future,’ she wrote, while still wrapped in the gloom that followed her eviction from the Embassy. Then Duff had begun work on his own autobiography, Old Men Forget; Diana recaptured her pleasure in life; the delights of authorship dwindled, the pains seemed more apparent. It was not until 1955 that the idea was revived. Rupert Hart-Davis, Duff’s nephew and a publisher of great distinction, read the letters which she had written to Conrad Russell from South East Asia and Algiers and urged her to write a book about her life. ‘They are absolutely wonderful,’ he wrote, ‘so vivid, amusing, original, witty and you. You are a natural writer, with your own style which could not be anyone else’s.’ The book would be fun to write, a delight to read and, never low in Diana’s list of priorities, might make a lot of money.

  Reading the first volume of Osbert Sitwell’s quintet, Diana had said to Conrad Russell: ‘There is a lack of inhibition and of humour in autobiography. It’s awful cheek!’ Now that she came to the point she found herself neither humourless nor inhibited. She had kept almost every letter written to her, her childhood memories were rich and vivid, the book poured out like a river in flood, bearing with it the bric-à-brac of a lifetime’s occupations. Her approach to evidence was cavalier – letters were ruthlessly truncated or amalgamated, words and dates changed, recipients muddled – but though her attitude to detail might make the historian wince, the whole was truthful. Diana in her autobiography presented as honest a portrait of the writer as it was within her powers to give: nothing extenuated, little held back; aware throughout of the extraordinary luck that had given her position and beauty, never falsely immodest about the contribution her own efforts had made to her success; frank, funny and in its essentials remarkably exact.

  When she read the first 10,000 words she was appalled. How could anyone be asked to read this shapeless mish-mash? Evelyn Waugh had gallantly volunteered to act as editor-cum-ghost-writer. Diana declined the offer: ‘He has better stuff of his own and does not have the time or the pocket, besides it would make me much too nervous.’ Now she almost wished she had accepted. She compared notes with Charlie Chaplin, who was also at work on his memoirs, to find that all he could think of was the number of words he had written each day. He did not even seem to know what point in his life he had reached. ‘I suppose it’s planchette again, only dictated planchette, and maybe for that reason v. good, for if Charlie stops to think his genius stops simultaneously. He has no art left, poor clown, except for breeding children and loving his darling wife.’

  She turned for help to her Roman friend, Jenny Crosse. She would pour out her unrevised memories on paper; Jenny would transform them into grammatical and lucid prose, disentangle her knotted ramblings, impose order on chaos. When Mrs Crosse had finished the first chapter, Diana found that the end product was no more pleasing to her than the original; ‘I found myself so tenacious of my tripe that I hated the tampering’. She sent the original and the revised version to Rupert Hart-Davis, who was delighted by the first and dismayed by the second. A few specimens of Mrs Crosse’s work survive in the final text. ‘Geneva,’ wrote Diana, ‘is the place for any girl who wants confidence in her sex-appeal bucked up a bit.’ ‘Geneva,’ amended Jenny Crosse, ‘is certainly the place for a lady who needs her confidence in her desirability bolstering up.’ Rupert Hart-Davis was having none of this. He told Diana that she must write her own book and that editorial interference should be confined to the correction of spelling and the addition of the odd comma here and there. ‘My editor insists on making a proper monkey out of me,’ Diana told Jenny apologetically. ‘I shall call it The Old Visiters, thereby taking the comparison with Daisy Ashford out of the reader’s mouth.’

  What to put in and what to omit was the problem that worried her most. What about love-letters? Was it common to include them? ‘Stuff them with love-letters,’ advised Waugh firmly. ‘You’ve never been one for ghastly good taste, have you? It’s the bastard in you – Edmund and Edgar constantly at strife.’ Apprehensively Diana obeyed, and awaited a barrage of hostile criticism. She had no need to worry. The Rainbow Comes and Goes was published in 1958 to an almost ecstatic reception. It is fair to say that most of the critics in the grander papers were personal friends, but their names still make up a roll-call of the literary establishment. ‘Brilliantly fresh and vivid and charming,’ wrote David Cecil; it captivated Raymond Mortimer ‘both as a picture of a vanished world and as a revelation of a character’
; Harold Nicolson said that it was ‘one of the most genuine self-portraits I have ever encountered’; Evelyn Waugh called it ‘poetic, idiosyncratic, poignant, funny, unflagging, scintillating, simple, stylish’. The Sunday Times paid the then massive sum of £6,000 for serial rights, 11,800 copies were sold by the time of publication, 30,000 by 1959, bringing her, for sales of the Hart-Davis edition alone, £12,535. Hatchards had a signing session which produced most gratifying sales, though Evelyn Waugh, who put in an appearance ‘tight and very jolly’, claimed that eighty per cent of the sales were made to resident shop-girls rather than customers. By any standards the publication had been a resounding success.

  The Rainbow Comes and Goes took its title from Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’: ‘The rainbow comes and goes, and lovely is the rose’. For her next volume, taking her from the end of the First World War to the outbreak of the Second, she chose the ending of the noblest of all the stanzas of that great poem:

  At length the Man perceives it die away

  And fade into the light of common day.

  The Light of Common Day did indeed show some decline from the fantastical fairyland of Diana’s childhood memories. It was far more dependent on letters to and from Duff and, in the later parts of the book, Conrad Russell; instead of re-working them into a narrative she allowed them to speak for themselves. ‘Less of a book and more of a scrapbook,’ complained Cyril Connolly. ‘I wish she would try to build up serious portraits of her friends instead of leaving it all to their letters.’ On the whole the tone of the reviews was friendly enough, but Diana, predisposed to believe that her work was drivel, heard it as a chorus of abuse. ‘Darling, I’m awfully sorry for you,’ she wailed to Rupert Hart-Davis, who replied contentedly that sales were well up on the previous volume.

  She embarked on her third volume with nauseated apprehension. Her zest had gone, her nerve had gone, only drudgery remained. ‘Quite lost and incapable as a drunk in a gutter,’ she described herself to Hart-Davis. ‘I must have got those two books written in a trance.’ Dutifully she ploughed her way through the Second World War, depending ever more heavily on the diary-letters which she had written Conrad Russell and on his replies. Vivid, exuberant, original in phrase and outlook, her letters were in fact works of art of a high order, but she became less and less inclined to do more than string them together with a tenuous commentary. By the time she had reached 1944 she was near despair. Then inspiration struck.

  ‘My eyes can’t see my own book,’ she told her publisher, ‘its dimensions, its balance, its throttling tedium or original naiveté. All I can see is a slough of despond. I am working in the dark like a black mole, unconscious of what I am throwing up and miserable. Suddenly a winged thought! Why not end the volume with Algiers? I am sure it will be long enough and I have a phantom fourth volume that John Julius can do after my death. This way the French section will be postponed until historically and socially it will be respectively more interesting and less expurgated. The author can deal touchingly with my death and romantically with Duff’s … All those beastly people will forgive me if I am dead. The author can pile on the “amie de la France” which I have never been. They can make a glamorous Chantilly sequence, which I cannot. And then my pompe funèbre.’

  The winged thought was swiftly brought to the ground. Rupert Hart-Davis pointed out that a chapter on the French Embassy was a crucial part of her story; John Julius was notably unenthusiastic about the proposal that he should take on the fag-end of his mother’s life. Reluctantly she gritted her teeth and set to work on the last chapter herself.

  For a title she once more looked to the ‘Intimations of Immortality’. Trumpets from the Steep might not seem to have any very obvious relevance to the story, but it sounded splendid and struck a vaguely valedictory note. Sentimentality and self-pity could easily have become the keynotes of this account of fading beauty and grandeur slipping away for ever, but Diana was never one to indulge herself in such feebleness. Gratitude for all she had received, a striking absence of rancour, above all a triumphant readiness to make new discoveries, to explore new fields, to live in the present and look to the future, mark the end of her story as forthrightly as they had the beginning. ‘This is one of the most perfectly realized autobiographies of our time,’ wrote Margaret Lane, and certainly few autobiographies can have caught more authentically the personality of the author.

  Her job was done, and though she was heartily grateful to have it behind her, it left a larger gap than she had expected. Once again the pattern of her life required examination. While the books were being written and the profits rolling in, she had been determined to remain in France and save her income from what seemed to her the unacceptable depredations of the Inland Revenue. Now she was ready to return to England. It was just as well, for the Institut de France, which administered Chantilly and all its outlying châteaux, had been growing increasingly restive. Their first sighting shot had been fired in November 1956, when the Board of Directors wrote to say that, as her lease was almost at an end, they had decided to dispose of the house and would like her to be out within six months. The letter was signed by M. Fossier, the administrator of the Domaine de Chantilly. Diana appealed to higher authority but got nowhere. ‘I must start fighting it, I suppose. The stinking, sodden Connétable offers as an excuse that “M. Fossier ne vous aime pas”. His next suggestion was that the rent was too low. They’ve put it up twice in nine years and they’ve only got to give me the chance of accepting the increase or getting out.’ Paul Louis Weiller was called into action, and hired a lawyer to defend Diana’s interests, but whether she could hold out for the three years she needed to finish her book seemed very doubtful.

  The press got wind of the battle. Sam White, the perpetually well-informed correspondent of the Evening Standard, telephoned to ask if it were true that she was to be evicted.

  ‘What, Mr White, will you never learn? You’ve never got a word out of me. Why should I feed your paper?’

  ‘Well, Lady Diana, the Evening Standard is always very good to you.’

  ‘Wrong, Mr White! They’ve twice said I was having a face-lift and they print my age in brackets whenever they print my name.’

  ‘You’re so amusing, Lady Diana.’

  ‘Of course if you paid me, Mr White, that would be another matter and more interesting. They pay you, don’t they? What will they pay me?’

  ‘Oh, you’re so amusing, Lady Diana.’

  ‘Goodbye, Mr White.’

  But Sam White had the last laugh when he procured from the Domaine de Chantilly details of the still modest rent that Diana was required to pay and put the information in his column.

  Figaro took up the story. It announced that the veteran Algerian nationalist Messali Hadj was to have St Firmin placed at his disposal. ‘As a matter of fact this château is at the moment being rented by a distinguished English lady. The Institut, however, formally contests her right to sub-let.’ Diana had sailed decidedly close to the wind by sub-letting St Firmin for several months at a time while she was on her travels or writing her autobiography in Rome; it was at the most, however, no more than a technical breach of the terms of her lease and would have been discreetly ignored if it had not formed part of the Institut’s campaign to evict her. Other causes of friction abounded. Hugh Gaitskell, then Leader of the Opposition, was caught climbing out of the park at 7.30 a.m. after taking a morning ramble from St Firmin and feeling a sudden urge for a cup of coffee in the village. A few days later Nancy Mitford and some other friends were found trespassing by the Due de Broglie himself, head of the Institut de France, who ‘sent them spinning home with his rage’. In 1960 came a polite letter from Henri, eldest son of the Comte de Paris, to say that he understood she was leaving the château and that he was greatly looking forward to living there himself. When exactly did she expect to move?

  By now the last volume of her autobiography was published, the bulk of the income safely banked, she was ready to retreat. All that
remained was to decide where she should go. England certainly. London certainly; she could not afford houses in both London and the country, she would never be short of friends whom she could visit all over Britain, a base in the capital was indispensable. The more elegant areas in the centre were far beyond her purse. John Julius and Anne had recently leased a house in so-called Little Venice, a picturesque area on the canals beyond Paddington. Diana cast her eyes in that direction. Anne incautiously held forth on the delights of Clapham, an area as far south of the Thames as Little Venice was north. Diana interpreted this as meaning that she was to be exiled far from her family.