Darling Monster

by Diana Cooper

  Yesterday I gave some very millionairish orders – both wings of the house and half the wide path to be grassed and prepared for roses and lilies and again the whole flat to be licked with paint. I’ll sell the diamond ring (your wife’s) or the bold dressing-case (your wife’s only if she had a huge house – there was never a table at the Embassy big enough) but it’s no use with these treasures hidden, one in a jewel box, the other in a cellar, and groaning and grousing at the dirt and ugliness. Lunched yesterday with Susan Mary, did a dentist who wanted to extract a tooth as I was leaving for a thirty-hour journey, and boarded the train at eight.

  5 p.m. We have now been an hour in a tunnel. Now, thirty miles from La Spezia, we are in the heart of a foul-aired single-line warren waiting for a train to telescope us from behind or from the front, or for another engine to arrive from Spezia and pull us out. It’s very disconcerting and it’s given me diarrhoea. We were almost two hours in that predicament. I discovered that the train was electric so we were lucky not to be in darkness too. Ces messieurs les directeurs kept wonderfully calm. The pleb Italians were a bit noisier. So we didn’t roll into Rome till midnight but, day and night being one to the Wops, it might have been six on a winter’s evening except that it was balmy and one wanted (at least I did) to exchange our limousine for a cloppety-clop fiacre. The colleagues all get down at the Excelsior Hotel, but we know something better and stay on the top of a Roman hill, one of the seven, overlooking Christian Rome.47

  We are on the fifth floor with a little balcony and there beneath our feet bulges St. Peter’s – domes and spires of a calendar of Saints – all with bells that summon sleepy faithfuls very early in the morning. We walked about in the forenoon, admiringly happy. Aperitifs on the Piazza del Popolo prepared Papa for his director’s lunch and me for a well-deserved lunch with Signor Carandini, once Ambassador to St. James’s. It was lucky I thought of him among the many ‘angling’ calls I made, for he had the Foreign Minister, Count Sforza, lunching and Mr. and Mrs. Crowther of The Economist so I felt from their point of view ‘just the thing’. The afternoon was given to Joan48 and me cloppeting round town and shops till dark. We had a very loquacious old driver and every time he turned to talk he laid his reins down and every time I picked them up and started off au grand galop.

  Cocktails with the local English Military Attaché called MacNab. I made that invitation by explaining that I had lived in their house in the Forum (it belonged to Gerald Berners). The programme for the proposed jaunt put the fear of death from exhaustion into all our hearts. This was the timetable for twelve middle-aged couples: 7.30 at station; autorail to Assisi arriving 10; three hours sight-seeing; 1, lunch; 3, motor to Perugia; three hours visiting the treasures and monuments; 7, dinner; 9, autorail to Rome arriving midnight. A plan to tire a Strength Through Joy group. It was decided against the night before. Half the day was amputated and we were promised a home-coming at six. That’s for tomorrow.

  Rome

  October 24th, 1948

  I’m reading the potted edition of Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (Chateaubriand for babies). Very good. He goes to America in 1791 and takes an expedition across the Mohawk and into what he takes to be virgin forest. ‘Je fus pris d’une sorte d’ivresse d’indépendance. Ici plus de chemins, plus de villes, plus de monarchie, plus de république, de présidents, de rois, d’hommes’49 but then he stumbles upon a ‘hanger’ (whatever that is) packed with Redskins, war-painted like sorcerers, half naked, oreilles découpées,50 feathers and nose-rings. In their midst a little powdered Frenchman in an apple-green suit, jabot and cuffs of lace, sawing away at a miniature violin for the Iroquois to dance to. It was M. Violet, a dancing master paid with beaver skins and bear steaks to give them lessons in deportment and dance. He addressed them as Monsieur le Sauvage and Madame la Sauvagesse. He was proud of their lightness and Chateaubriand says ‘en effet, je n’ai jamais vue de telles gambades. M. Violet, tenant son petit violon entre son menton et sa poitrine, accordait l’instrument fatal. Il criait aux Iroquois “A vos places, Messieurs” et toute la troupe sautait comme une bande de démons.’51 He goes on to say how strange it was for a disciple of Rousseau to be introduced to the life of savages by a little myrmidon of General Rochambeau throwing an Iroquoian ball.

  The great expedition took place yesterday and was proclaimed an unparalleled success. Perugia was scrapped like an old husk and that brisked us all up. 7.30 saw the twenty-odd depressing crowd of us, all middle-aged, a bit infirm but bright as buttons, fresh as daisies, right as trivets, keen as mustard (by the way it’s the 27th and I’m en route to Genoa shaking like a jelly as we tear up Italy’s shin-bone, the sunny sea lapping a grey-green deserted country on our left). We are all rather middle-class, the wives cling to their spouses like calves to cows, clutching their cuffs or coat-tails and anxious-faced if we lose touch. The countries too are apt to cling to themselves – Altrinchams and Coopers wink at each other across a crowd of Dutch, Italians and French and make a dash for the table for four. No tables on the 7.30 autorail however and no precautionary coffee to swallow before leaving, so I felt a bit faint and comaed during the three hours shaking in the thick mist that obliterated the lovely country of Umbria. We knew it must lift and were not afraid.

  Out we all hobbled with our hand guides and better still our live professor-guide (an admirable man, brief, bull-voiced and discriminating) out and into an autobus that blinded us up to the sun on the heights of Assisi. I was there with Noona52 as a child forty years ago and remember little. I think it’s been improved since then – fewer modernities and no advertisements or petrol pumps, most lovely streets and churches. St. Francis – you know, the first to love nature and animals – a big modernish church, is built round his own Wendy-house-ish little chapel and on the top of it is a whopping big gold Madonna that is said to move at twilight. We were not there at the moving time but Mrs. Dunn and her daughter (U.S. Ambassadress) and their sceptical Communist chauffeur saw it almost topple down, while Mr. Dunn didn’t. In the cloisters of this same church is a bed of bramble roses into which many centuries ago St. Francis threw himself to overcome by pain some local temptation. Imagine St. Francis’s surprise – not a thorn to draw his blood, and there they are alive and thornless still. It is claimed that no species of rose is without thorn and that these same roses transplanted regrow their spines.

  On Sunday we had a date to visit St. Peter’s and the Vatican. Thank God Papa resolved to stay home and get some reading done. He would meet us, he said, at the Trevi – a magnificent fountain into which you threw coins in order to be certain of return to Rome. St. Peter’s was all that was expected. I kissed St. Peter’s toe, or what faithful lips have left of it, and we turned our steps to the Vatican. Shut on Sunday. You can see why I was glad Papa hadn’t come. It took a long time. It took the banging of the first door in our nose by a Swiss Guard with a halberd. He was dressed in working-blue and not the gay jester colouring and steel helmet worn when the Holy Father is in residence. At the next door it took a long conversation and a lot of lies to another Swiss Guard at a table. I said Count Sforza had given me a name to ask for in case of trouble and I’d forgotten it. No good. I asked them to telephone the Count. No, I could telephone if they’d get me the number. They handed me the book. They saved me by saying the Foreign Office would be shut. I told them to imagine I was Winston Churchill and what would they do then? They said ‘Chiuso’. It took the old trick of not moving and the three of us forming an obstacle in a bottle-neck, to get us moved on to the next barrier. Suddenly tedium is stronger than guardianship, the morale gives, the pass is sold.

  The same story at the second gate, this time with a serious man in civvies. I got as far as a laughing ‘Siamo molto, molto importanti.’53 This shook him into telephoning to some high power or principality which produced a tiny little priest carrying the key of the Sistine Chapel. He marched us off with stern instructions to return us. This was a triumph to be followed, after inspection of the chapel, by a far gre
ater triumph. A grander, more canonical Father appeared carrying two massy keys. He was showing a rare little chapel to two teenagers. It was a chapel where H.H. goes on Easter Thursday and it has two frescoes that Michaelangelo painted to show what he could do. I knew it was not usually shown to the public and I asked if we too might not have a peek. The Monsignor, for that is what he turned out to be, beckoned us to follow. He was young and amused, had a bit of English and took a great liking to us. He took us everywhere – the purlieus, the board rooms and to see, from a window, his own quarters. Most desirable they looked, set in a cranny of the great façade of St. Peter’s, a little flat rooftop, two little French windows opening out on to a terrace of geraniums in pots, canaries in cages, some socks being dried. He offered me a visit to the loo – I can only think to show off the plumbing. Then he started to ‘dress’ for lunch with an American diplomat. This meant putting on a fine red silk sash – ‘obligatorio’ he said, ‘ma molto antipatico’.54 One wondered why.

  Off he bussed in a U.S. Army Ford and we in our car tore back to poor Papa. He’d been waiting hours. The Monsignor had warmed to his work and wouldn’t let us off the remotest corners of the Vatican, and to make matters desperate there was no café in the Piazza del Trevi. Chianti on a hill outside Rome settled everything except lunch which arrived just as we had to start to make rendezvous with the colleagues. Back into the motorbus again, don’t lose touch with Papa, hope they’ll open the top, everyone in favour except a local Molotov who vetoes it on the courant d’air55 ruling. That’s the Campagna, there the Alban Hills, now harbouring old Pacelli56 at Castel Gandolfo, there are the Sabines, Horace’s Farm perhaps and there the Villa d’Este at Tivoli where we all bundle out and enjoy the fountains, take snapshots, get a bit splashed, general jinks and back exhausted at seven.

  Now we come to yesterday – the last day of this very happy outing. The weather was not all that good. Jenny came through and I’m to stop at Portofino for two days. Betweenwhiles we had visited the U.S. Embassy and our own twice, once for dinner and once to see the garden. Ours is the ugliest house in Rome. It was the German Embassy before the war and poor pretty Lady Mallet is agonised as to how to get it better. I should have been appalled if I’d had to cope and as for the famous Palazzo Farnese where we lunched yesterday – it’s the Frogs’ Embassy – the gloom of it would have vanquished me. How it brings home the beauty of our Paris house, its light and gay atmosphere, its perfect size, its furniture, its bed and bath, its boudoir and bibliothèque. No other Embassy can touch it.

  I must have missed a whole day because there was lunch with the No. 2 of the English Dips. – Ward by name and his nice wife and pretty villa and monstrous children. He took us along the Appian Way afterwards – just what I love best – all ‘Love Among the Ruins’57 – all the glades colonnades – all the bridges, courses, aqueducts. The vestige of the city guessed alone, stock and stone, so I cried a bit and Papa dropped off and Mr. Ward at the wheel didn’t notice.

  Yesterday we went to the Borghese Museum and saw Pauline in her nakedness lying marbly on her marble bed and we saw Bernini’s idea of David throwing the giant-killing stone and gasped at its goodness. Bernini is St. Peter’s and much of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome, and there I learnt Caravaggio, hitherto but a name, now a known master, and Danaë by Correggio whom I had forgot. Another new friend, once a diplomat to the Holy See, called Uttley, took us to Hadrian’s Villa where one day I hope to wander with you.

  Voghiera

  October 31st, 1948

  I’m sitting in a cold and comfortless waiting room in a ghastly junction called Voghiera not a hundred miles from Turin. Papa came into the wagon-restaurant after we’d left Rome with a face like Priam’s when they told him Troy was lost, to break to me that there had been a landslide at La Spezia cutting off the line to Genoa, and therefore no hope of getting off at Rapallo. I took it well enough, in fact rather warmed to the adventure of detour and the unknown. Instead of a lovely welcome at 3 or 4 p.m. we limped on to this horrible place where Papa and I parted in silence and tears, he for the north, me for another limp to Genoa.

  November 1st. Papa telegraphed me the following ‘MISUSE WHEAT MILO VETO GENIAL EXIT SCOLD DOZEN MENUS’.58 It quite worried me. I thought ‘Can he have gone actually mad?’ when an idea struck me, and sure enough after much thought I made sense of all but the last two words. Can you solve it? The unclued words may be corruptions (Got it! ‘Do send me news’).

  The weather never cleared up, in fact it got worse and yesterday was a brute. I left this morning and they were leaving too by car and now I’ve got to the horrible Voghiera again and I’m sitting writing to you – pretty cold and miserable. I’ve got collywobbles and had a look at the loo – quite impossible – so vicious horses must be held, if they can be, till they’re given their heads in the Wagon-Lit. There’s another hour and a half to go. I’ve been here since two and it’s four now. Occasionally I order an expresso laced with a drop of Aurum, which is a liqueur made of oranges, about the best thing ever I struck.

  I’ve got a book by Siegfried Sassoon about George Meredith because it’s associated in no mean way with my early youth. Meredith is thought to be coming out of his eclipse after thirty years. I adopted him as a child because of having been called after Diana of the Crossways. At my age of fourteen to twenty he was ‘the rage’. An exceedingly obscure writer, I pretended, I fear, to understand all he wrote. I clearly can’t have done but I understood his two great poems, ‘Modern Love’ and ‘Love in the Valley’, and knew them both by heart. ‘Modern Love’ consists of fifty-one sixteen-line sonnets. Papa knew it too and does still, and all my bande of Oxford boys specialised in this genius, of whom Oscar Wilde said ‘His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning.’ I don’t think you would ever swallow him, anyway not whole like I did. Noona had his volume of poems dedicacé-ed for my twelth birthday ‘But if she my Muse had been, Better verse she would have seen’. They must be the clearest lines he ever wrote. I remember with horror writing him a letter of thanks in what I took to be his own style. It must have been horribly embarrassing, but he answered it, writing ‘Let the younger Diana know that her words came to me . . . Cela m’échappe.’ I used to know it proudly by heart. It ended with something about ‘if ever she falls upon Crossroads may she have a guide within’, etc. etc. I saw him once, when perhaps only seven. He was already very old and crippled and supported by two servants. He’d come to Arlington Street, I think to be drawn by Mother’s pencil. When he died I carried on just nohow – ‘boo-hoo’ and must go to the funeral (cremation rather) at Dorking and went with my governess Mrs. Page (Podgie) dressed out of Mother’s wardrobe as a crow. Comic, why was I allowed? A figure of fun, arms full of purple iris which I flung dramatically into the grave along with a flood of tears. As we got into the train for home, eyes bunged out, scarlet blocked nose, J. M. Barrie, who I just knew, ran up and said ‘Now you’ve got to be a good girl’ – ‘now’ meaning after what you’ve seen and felt, I suppose. So naturally I’m enjoying the book.

  Then I’ve got Journey without Maps, by Graham Greene, an unfinished book about John of the Cross, an unreadable book by Maugham and some flower catalogues. These ought to do the journey. I reach Paris in the morning, I hope, after a night with an unknown fellow traveller. What shall I find to greet me? A letter from you is my great hope. We are asked to Rothermeres for Christmas but Wadey has it that you want to stay with the Navy for the Feast and join us for New Year. So be it.

  November 1st. The train was one hour late and the season got hourly colder. At last it puffed in and a surly attendant kicked me into my compartment with ne’er an Ambassadrice or a Directrice. I tried bribery with gold and tobacco to get the section to myself. I imagined, as I shivered in the unheated carriage, the shortcomings of my sleeping companion, old, fusty, smelling, an orange, a troublesome and fruity cough, train-sick, so it was a relief at Turin when the shadow of the coming event was the smartest of air luggage, a new
plaid rug, a butler to see fair play. The event was no less than Spam59 Churchill in the radiance of her success and beauty. I became the old, train-sick, coughing ‘undainty’ old ’un. Still the boot was easier on that leg. The cubicle now was drenched with expensive scent. The lovers from the darkness of the platform whispered anguished farewells. Spam’s back, curved over the window door in coquettish kissing so-longs, was wagging its tail under the darkest sleekest of baby mink coats. My heart naturally sank a bit at the thought of conversation, but she was very friendly. Her new Italian jewellery had left marks under her ring and on her jaw her ear-rings had socked her one. A long saga of how Randolph had tried to remarry her filled up an hour. Poor Randy, he’s so lonely and so lost, jobless and a disappointment to his father and his friends and himself, that Spam was touched and considered returning to her burden, if after a six month’s trial she felt she could. The fool drags her out of a convalescent bed, drags her down to where we Christmassed last year starting at 7 a.m., drives all out, rather tight and talking ten to the dozen of what interests him, coughs and spits all night and is surprised to find her a wreck next day, though not sufficiently submerged to swear that never will she again be his wife.