27 November 1942.
Went to a party at Nancy Mitford’s – I had a long conversation with Unity Mitford. She started the conversation by saying, “I have just hit my left breast against a lamp-post as I was bicycling here.” She said, “I tried to commit suicide when I was in Germany but now I am a Christian Scientist – not that I believe a word of it, but they saved my life so I feel I owe it to them to be one.” “I hate the Czechs,” she said suddenly in a loud, emphatic voice, “but that is natural – they tried to arrest me and I had not done anything. I did not even have the Führer’s picture in my suitcase as they said I had.” She has just recently returned to England where her role as Hitler’s English friend does not make her popular. I must say I liked her better than anyone else at the party. She has something hoydenish and rustic about her.
Great discussion with George Ignatieff about the future of Europe. He sees the great age of the Slav people dawning. I see our being drawn gradually into supporting every and any regime in Europe that offers a bulwark against communism, i.e., in terms of power politics against a triumphant Russia with overwhelming influence at least as far as the Rhine. Of course we shall try to get rid of the more stinking quislings and put in progressive governments, but above all, we must hold the cordon sanitaire against Bolshevism. Could there be two worlds after the war – the Atlantic and the Middle European plus the Balkans – the former dominated by Anglo-Germany – the one democratic and semi-capitalist, the other communist?
What will our relations with Russia be after the war if they win against Germany? As long as they remain behind the Curzon Line and busy themselves with reconstruction we might get along all right, but Russia will inevitably be on the side of every revolutionary government in Europe. We shall become suspicious of her and will tend, for the sake of balance, to back anti-revolutionary forces. Thus a new war will be prepared. Indeed we can see the forces that are already preparing it.
23 December 1942.
Went down to spend last weekend – Elizabeth and I – with Stephen Tennant. It was a dreamlike and unrepeatable occasion. From the moment of coming out of the rainy December countryside into his apartment all was under a magician’s spell. It was partly the sense of being picked up on a magic carpet out of the prosaic into the midst of everything that is extravagant and strange. In one wing of what was formerly his country-house and is now a Red Cross Hospital he has furnished a set of rooms to suit his own fantastic taste. Such huge white velvet sofas, piles of cushions, and artificial flowers, chandeliers, such a disorder of perfumes, rouge pots, and pomades, such orchid satin sheets and pink fur rugs, toy dogs, and flounced silk curtains, mirrors at angles, shaded lights and scented fires. But the unreality of it attained to an intensity which was pure artistic illusion – too fantastic to be vulgar or funny and with a strange honesty as a natural mask for Stephen’s high-strung, high-coloured, but never vulgar nature.
On the train down we found ourselves sitting opposite Augustus John wearing a tweed cap which he removed to reveal that noble head of a moth-eaten lion. Fixing us with his unfocussed gaze he made an effort to assemble meaning and made charming light conversation, full of malice and fun. At intervals he dozed off – his beautiful hands in his lap.
At Salisbury Stephen met us coiffed in a blue knitted helmet – his too-golden hair arranged in a becoming crest. Through the driving rain under a gun-metal sky with sodden leaves piled high in the ditches we drove to Wilsford and were wafted up into the pink rococo of his apartment. “Rich stains of former orgies,” he said giggling at the spots on the silver-satin cushion covers; but he is not a comic. His drawings are brilliant evocations of the Marseilles underworld. His notebooks are full of them and all the same characters reappear – matelots and tarts, procurers and pimps – faces which have obsessed him. Perhaps he is too undisciplined to express his obsessions in terms of writing.
Elizabeth talked to Stephen of dialogue in the novel – of how every sentence must bear directly or indirectly on the theme – must be a clue or the counter-point to a clue. In that sense how “every novel is a detective novel.” It does no harm to linger in places where one has pleasure in writing provided one makes it up by skimming quickly elsewhere so that the tempo of the whole is not slowed up. How a phrase should be written down when it occurs because it may be fruitful of unexpected developments; may contain seeds which would only come to life when it is on paper.
Then they talked about the sticky passages that haunt writers. Whether it was best to make a frontal attack on such difficulties and never rest until they were overcome or, as Elizabeth said, to sidestep the dragon in the path and to go on to what one wanted to write and return to the difficulty later, perhaps from a different angle or aspect. She told us how Virginia Woolf when writing her last book Between the Acts was heard to say, “For six weeks I have been trying to get the characters from the dining-room into the drawing-room and they are still in the dining-room.”
Virginia Woolf haunts the lives of all who knew her. Almost every day something is added to my knowledge of her – that she was a snob – that she could be cruel, as when one lovely May evening a young, shy girl came into her drawing-room in Bloomsbury to be greeted with the overwhelming question from Virginia, “What does it feel like to be young in May?” The girl stood shambling in silent consternation in the doorway. But how they revolved around Virginia Woolf, how much she must have done to liberate them all, to give them weapons of coolness and wit, and how often they say, “Virginia would have enjoyed it” or “she would have enhanced it.” But to me her reflected atmosphere is rather alarming – the exquisite politeness – but an eye that misses nothing and a power to puncture gracefully, opportunely, and mercilessly if occasion arises or the mood changes.
28 December 1942.
To have heard (as I did the other night) T. S. Eliot on the subject of Charles Morgan1 was to be entertained at a most delicate feast of malice – the sidelong, half-pitying, good-natured, kindly approach -(“Poor old Morgan, etc.”) the closing in on the prey, the kill, so neat and so final, and then the picking of the bones, the faint sound of licking of lips and the feast is over.
1 Sir Stafford Cripps, left-wing Labour former Solicitor-General, had been British Ambassador to Russia since 1940. A few days after this entry was written he was recalled from Moscow to become Lord Privy Seal.
2 These two German battle-cruisers had been stuck in Brest from March 1941 until they escaped through the English Channel on 12 February, despite the RAF and the Royal Navy.
1 He was now stationed with the Canadian army in Sussex.
1 A French ship, carrying 3,000 tons of explosives, collided with a Norwegian vessel in Halifax harbour on 6 December 1917 and devastated about one-tenth of the city.
1 Herbert Morrison, Labour Home Secretary in the Coalition Government, had been a pacifist in 1914–18; 12th Duke of Bedford, pacifist with sympathies for fascism; William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury.
1 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which had just been published.
1 Novelist, playwright and essayist, author of The Fountain, The Flashing Stream, etc., sometimes subject to similar disparagement in England, much respected in France.
1943
1 January 1943.
Last night the end of the year with a wind howling down the steep gully of flats outside my window. I feel both sad and excited as though I were seventeen and in my bedroom at The Bower on some winter night in my youth. Christ! Why has it all happened?
3 January 1943.
Elizabeth has borne with all my attempts to play-act my life, although she has so little patience with histrionic characters, without ever making me feel a fool. She has shown me up to myself – good money to some extent has driven out bad.
People in Russian novels stand for hours – sometimes all night – gazing out of a window dreaming over a landscape or lost in a mood. I have never been able to stand at a window for more than a few minutes at any time in my life.
4
January 1943.
Now arises the question of whether or not I should join the army. Elizabeth thinks that I might make a “useful soldier.” She says if I join the army she will join the ATS I doubt if either of us will do either. I can see that this idea of joining the army is closing in on me unless I can prove to myself that it would be unfair to the service I am now in and just a piece of heroics. Unfortunately the work here has been so slack recently that I find it impossible to believe that I am pulling my weight in the war.
Walked alone in Regent’s Park beside the grey waters of the canal, under a grey winter sky. I tried to get Elizabeth but she was out and the house was shuttered and looked as if it had been unoccupied for years. I felt as though I had come back years later to find her gone and the whole thing in the past.
What a joke it is – a cosy bachelor pried out of his shell and being drawn principally for reasons of face-saving into the horrid prospect of army life. What a short story for someone. By suggesting that I should become a soldier I have put myself in for stakes which I know I cannot afford to play, and depend on other people to get me out of the situation. Perhaps no one will be bothered to do so, and that in itself has a sort of attraction for me. I have now a card to play against myself.
30 January 1943.
I saw a Duncan Grant painting today that made me want to go in and ask the price. I suppose it would have been about two hundred pounds. It was a picture of a small closed café with blue shutters by the sea-front somewhere not far from Wimereux – I should think painted in the early morning before opening time – before the patron had come down to give a perfunctory polish to the linoleum bar – on a morning of damp and shifting weather. The paint had the wetness of the weather and the indecisive cloud shiftings. This morning was just such a morning. I got up early with the idea of going to Holy Communion but decided while shaving that I was not fit to receive Communion – too selfish and sin-satisfied. So I went to the little Anglo-Catholic church and knelt facing the altar while the Service went on – “It is meet, right, and our bounden duty” etc. I was cut off and felt it.
I asked Elizabeth last night whether it was possible to regard oneself – not with violent disgust but with a steady cold distaste as one might feel towards an unattractive acquaintance whose character one knew all too well. She thought, “Yes, if one had been over-praised for the wrong reasons.”
31 January 1943.
A day like a day at the seaside. You expected to hear the waves lapping and pictured rain-swept piers. In fact I was nowhere near the sea. I went to visit Roley in the hospital with jaundice at Horsham in the heart of the Canadian-occupied district. Everywhere Canadian soldiers, often with local girls. I suppose somewhere under the surface a Sussex rustic life goes on. An occupying army irons out the character of a neighbourhood – everything looking down-at-the-heel as in London. The rich settled bloom has gone, the stripped naked country-houses are all barracks or hospitals, the avenues morasses of mud from military vehicles, the fences down, the gardens neglected – the little towns submerged in khaki.
6 February 1943.
A sunny, almost spring morning spent in solitary bachelor fashion like so many similar solitary mornings of self soliloquizing – in Oxford to the sound of bells – at Harvard a breakfast of waffles and maple syrup, the good and abundant coffee, Sunday papers, the North American sunlight – in Paris, in Ottawa, in Washington, and in Tregunter Road with the Salvation Army band in the street outside and even the cats and dogs oppressed by a London Sunday. All those Sunday mornings and now another with the wireless in the distance and the servants banging and whistling in the courtyard. Mornings when I have repaired the holes in my ego.
Shaftesbury Avenue was lined with American soldiers just standing there, very quiet and well-behaved, watching the crowds or waiting to pick up a girl. The American troops are everywhere in the West End. They make a curious impression, very different from the legend of the swashbuckling, boasting Yankees abroad. I wonder what they really think about it all. They are so negative that they arouse one’s curiosity. They themselves seem completely incurious. They look as though they were among strange animals. The Canadian soldiers up against the British try at once to establish human contact – they make jokes, pick quarrels, make passes, get drunk, and finally find friends.
13 August 1943.1
Conclusion of the Civil Aviation Talks. This is a test case for our post-war relations with the Empire. Unless Ottawa reacts strongly we shall have accepted in these talks the idea of a Commonwealth body presiding over an “all-red route.” What functions and powers such a body would have is as yet by no means clear, but the precedent is interesting. It is the first post-war Empire body to be set up. The initiative came from Australia. The Australian concept of the future of the Commonwealth is in contradiction to the Canadian and South African. It obviously suits the British book to have projects for greater centralization come from a Dominion. Australia has served notice that she will continue to be a member of the Club at her own price. I should be much surprised if there is not a fight from Ottawa.
6 November 1943.
Talked to Elizabeth about the way women seem, however they purport to be employed, to have the leisure to spin a cocoon of imaginings and questionings around their personal relationships so that when a man blunders into this area he so often finds it thoroughly mined beforehand.
16 November 1943.
Saw Archduke Robert of Austria at the St. James’s Club. He surprised me by suddenly saying, “I am the cat’s whiskers.” He had just been weekending with de Courcy who, he said, would embarrass him in the train coming up to London by addressing him in consciously loud tones as, “Your Imperial Highness” before a carriageful of suburbanites.
4 December 1943.
Dined with Simon, the gold-haired pretty-faced son of a doting and strong-minded mother with a damp old country-house in the Shires and not enough money to keep the old name going. He went from Oxford into the Guards and has now married a Viscount’s daughter. He reminds me of the young officers whom Litvinow happens on at their picnic near Baden in Turgenev’s Smoke. He has a smattering of liberalism, a survival of Oxford days and a core of gentlemanly arrivisme. He was talking about the discussion groups that have now been instituted in the army. At the last group meeting he had put up for discussion the inevitable release of Mosley.1 He found the soldiers solidly but incoherently against the release. Then they talked about the Hereford Birching case,2 and there again the men were, as he put it “silly and soft” and all against beating children – said it did no good. He explained to them about the merits of corporal punishment but refrained from quoting from his own experiences at public school because public schools are a “tricky subject” with the men.
The night after the release of Mosley, Barrington-Ward, the editor of The Times, came to dinner at the Masseys’. He was cagey. He said it was a bad blunder, but he did not intend to publish any letters of protest yet until he had heard Mosley defend himself. In fact he never has published one. I think most Englishmen were disgusted at the release, but within the next day or two it was clear that the Extreme Left were making political capital out of it. “All of us” closed their ranks. The Times published a guarded leader in support of Mosley. On the division the Tory Party went solidly into the lobbies to vote in defence of his release. The Liberal individualists rushed to the support of the Habeas Corpus.
20 December 1943.
Spent the entire day at the International Labour Organization Conference and ended by being rather fascinated by the play of interests and personalities and absorbed by the family party atmosphere of an international conference. It has been interesting to watch the skilful old hands at this sort of game.
About the usefulness of our proceedings I am in some doubt. There is a good deal of mass self-hypnosis engendered at such gatherings and confirmed in this instance by visits from Mr. Eden, blessings from Ernest Bevin and a laudatory article in The Times. But the doubts persist.
A code of labour legislation and social security for the liberated European countries? Splendid, but who is to apply it and in what conditions? In the chaos of a half-starved Europe ridden by class conflict? Are the Balkans ripe for such an utopia? Is Spain? Will Russian commissars order the rhythm of reconstruction by this measure? Will they agree to it in the parts of Germany they may occupy?
21 December 1943.
Lunched with Derek Patmore – he and Peter Quennell are editing Anne-Marie’s memoirs and are bringing it out in a very Almanach de Gotha manner – I think quite wrongly. It ought to be given a full Romanian flavour – a sort of rococo Ritz 1912 affair. I am afraid they will make her a bore by treating her too seriously.
22 December 1943.
Dined with Elizabeth, Maurice Bowra, and Raymond Mortimer1 – a most unusually entertaining evening. Every now and then in London you have such an evening and feel at the end of it that this is what is described in memoirs as “brilliant” conversation. Bowra fascinated me by his vitality, malice, and wit. Although a very Oxford product he looks like a Midland businessman – stocky, bullet-headed, with very small hands and feet. He has donnish tricks like “that is a good point,” if he is pleased with what you say. Raymond Mortimer seemed young and vulnerable beside him and was on the defensive throughout. At dinner Bowra made a dive bombing attack on him, “Catholic! Conshie! Cagoulard!” Raymond seemed to love it.
25 December 1943.
In the morning Elizabeth and I went to the Christmas service at the Abbey. It was crowded. The procession had to make a path between the people as it wound its way through the nave and into the choir. One saw the banners moving unsteadily over the heads of the people – an immemorial lurching movement. Candles were blazing against the iron-black pillars. We came back to lunch with Alan, off cold duck and white Corton 1924.
Siren Years : A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937-1945 (9781551996783) Page 19