by Diana Cooper
22 February
Duff’s fiftieth birthday. He never groans at the passage of time. I can’t think why. The night before the Warners threw us a star-scattered party. It was a bit of an orgy, none the worse for that, and we enjoyed ourselves hugely. I started in a fine pink brocade Molyneux dress, but Mr David Selznick told me that my breasts were too flattened and that people were complaining about them, and could I change? So I went back to the old Central European peasant’s dress and took a new lease of deep-bosomed life. This morning after being woken betimes by Anne Warner’s enchanting child of five singing “Happy Birthday, Mr Cooper,” I feel fine. “The climate looks after you here,” as George Gordon Moore used to say as he gulped down another demijohn of alcohol. We lunch with adorable Vivien Leigh in her caravan. There had been galaxies of kisses the night before, and now we had a birthday bottle of champagne and more kisses, and back to pack, for we must leave these glowing fleshpots of Ming and jade, these beds of Chippendale and asphodel and moly, for the desert and the war. I witnessed a fine battle between very “sound” Elsa Maxwell and a hideous Hitler agent, who turned up at Elsa’s hotel to book a room and got an avalanche of insults from Elsa in front of the manager and clientèle. “I’ll have you run out of the State of California,” she said. I never hoped to hear the phrase. She will be as good as her word.
Duff and I agree that we could live in California. It has a radio quality of having the world in this little space. You can tune in and live your day in whatever country, art or grade of intelligence or idiocy you feel inclined for.
In the train
Hard reading and looking up every minute for a squint at this amazing desert. It goes on and on. I picture the Mormons crossing it. Mountains, rocks, canyons, no habitation, no animals, an occasional eagle; grey as shadow, with grey vegetation and our own dissolving grey smoke wreathing it. Occasionally there is a contorted grey cedar growing out of rock, and it looks like Hades, drawn by a scholarly Chinese of the fourth century. At other times the valley opens wide and it’s snow and blue skies and pyramid-shaped rocks and architectural geology, looking for all the world what it should look like—a Masonic Victorian print. I look up to the sky for an eye in a triangle. Soon it will be Nebraska and then Iowa, and then Illinois. We turn the clock’s hands on an hour every day. There’s a lecture at Chicago, another next day at Louisville, Kentucky. The police came to see us at Salt Lake, as threatening letters have been received about the lecture at Louisville. I mustn’t think about it.
Louisville
Duff’s threatening letters weigh upon me, not unduly, but imagine my nerves when at 7.30 a.m., that dark hour of arrival and Press photography, we were met by a posse of ’tecs and a couple of big cops carrying bludgeons! We hopped into a police car along with the ’tecs and whizzed through the streets shrieking like a million banshees. I enjoyed it very much.
It’s a nice place and the hotel was most tasteful. The police had us well in hand. The two ’tecs sat in the room next ours with the door open and their eyes on the elevator. At five Duff was escorted to a radio station to do a local broadcast, and said that he’d be back in half an hour. The boys took him off to find a mint julep and he returned an hour late. I’d worked myself into a hysteria of terror lest he had suffered at the assassin’s hand. A lecture that evening followed by a very successful reception, which ended in the night-club of the hotel with dancing and carousing, everyone a bit lit and the boys each warning me about the other’s tipsiness.
New York
March
It’s nearly over. Three good letters from you this morning tell me what to expect. The coal-and-foodstuffs muddles pass belief. I suppose wartime has always been the same in all countries. Well, I’m coming back to it all, and I don’t care a pin about coal or light or food. But I do care about fear and alarms and excursions, death in all forms, hidden weapons, germs and gasses, and getting both ends to meet. I must try and find a profession. Kaetchen suggested that I write him news of London weekly in my own inimitable style and that he will publish it. I have promised to try, but I doubt its working, especially as a letter is made amusing by the stories of muddle, mistakes, cattishness and gossip, none of which would help our rough island’s cause.
The tour draws triumphantly to its close. I must bid goodbye to light and security, and look forward to darkness and fear.
The old song refrain was:
Fancy me and Mrs Stubbs
Joining all the ladies’ clubs,
Fancy us forsaking pubs
At our time of life.
Iris and I saw ourselves as these jolly old girls and on a night of blizzard and rain in New York I thought I would go and bid her farewell, perhaps for ever.
I packed Duff off to a smart dinner, put on the old squadron cap, a tarpaulin jacket and my rubbers, and set out to walk down to 11th Street, where Mrs Iris Stubbs lives below stairs. On the way I bought some raw hamburger steak, a pound of butter, some bread and some fat raisins. Getting late, I hopped the subway for the last lap. What fools foreigners look from ignorance! In the station there is a turnstile with a slot for one’s nickel and several other odd slots. I pop mine in and wait for a ticket to shoot out. It doesn’t shoot out. I peer and press things and shake, and finally have to appeal to a stranger who thinks I’m dippy and tells me to walk through. He passes on while I’m still trying to explain that it’s all different in England.
Iris lives underground in a room that is 50% charm and the other 50% Zola. There we threw back a schnapps and started off in the downpour to find places gentlemen (you are an exception) wouldn’t look for. Tonight it was discovery of an Armenian restaurant where we dined sumptuously enough on vine-leaves, lamb, raisins, curds, honey, almonds and heady white wine. Afterwards, already very late, a vain hunt for anywhere with a dim light. Just fancy! Back to the pubs with Mrs Stubbs!
New York
9 March
They forgot to call us at 8.30, so we woke at 10.30 by good luck. Imagine the frenzy and scramble. Somehow it was done without time for tears, though many were shed as we steamed out of port, the band playing and the crowds waving their loved ones away. I’d hoped to see the Queen Elizabeth, which caused a tremendous sensation by arriving out of the blue, like the Mayflower unannounced, but she was not in sight.
On Board
I don’t sleep at all. I never shall again, I fear. Is it due to deep-lying fear that takes control at night, though well in hand by day? I fear it is. One gets tired of reading after three hours. I try reciting old poems to myself and I reconstruct the Enchantress trips, or look at my own eyelids, which makes me think of nothing, or make the mental effort of relaxing, which is done by pretending that you are sinking through the bed. Nothing works.
Gibraltar
Darling Conrad, reading old English papers I’ve just learned of Lady Horner’s death, and so long ago. One doesn’t see English papers at best for two weeks after publication, and as it isn’t news in America it’s not unnatural that we didn’t know. I’ve seen a few details that I hope to be true, i.e. that she died in her sleep. Well, well, she was like a fine tree, strong and beautiful in youth, and in age magnificent, a great shelter. I knew her first as Mark’s kind mother; that’s a long time ago, and now is a good time to be cut down. Poor Katharine, what a lot she will have to shoulder. How desirable the convent will look to her as she flounders through wills, trusts, mortgages, mortmains, mergers and all the insane laws that follow on death. Only you will be of help.
Naples
Vesuvius letting off very little steam. Somewhere in a Pass the dictators are kissing each other. God help us all. Just landing. No time for farewells.
Paris
No sign of war in Paris, no delays or substitutes. Heavy meaty and buttery meals in abundance. The Government fell with a thud as we arrived. Conversation at dinner stuck to who would be who tomorrow. Most are for Paul Reynaud. Henry Bernstein considers him a man of such value that his Premier-power should be kept for a toughe
r time. He has a mistress in a boater called Madame de Portes. Not my type—beastly strong.
I walked the streets, very unlike London, hardly any sandbags. Those that there are protect whimsical objects like glass fountains, while splendid monuments must take their chance, and the black-out’s a blaze. No reassuring balloons pattern the sky, no robot aerial guard, gasoline is rationed. The Ritz barman told me that they feed the cars alcohol. Motor and man drink from the same tap. Business as usual at Molyneux. Patterns are chosen subconsciously when talking of Sumner Welles or Rumania. Suzy, the ultra-fashionable hat-shop, is the same chaotic monkey-house it always was, a welter of ankle-deep débris, straw, feathers, spangles, flowers, buckram and elastic. Clients sitting mesmerised before cruel looking-glasses, Sumner Welles at last forgotten while cunning workwomen pull roses and bows over their right eyes. Very unlike New York, where surroundings and service are designed to soothe and lull and glide you into easy buying of the mass-produced. God help her who wants her own idea carried out. Here a creation must be born with labour-pains. To secure an impudent little lid needs a desperate tussle in a tropically-heated battle-room heavy with the smell of stale scent and hot hard work. Screaming like a jay among jays, I bought three. They ought to see me through my war. The French think that we are smug. We think we’re better prepared than they are. The Americans think us phoney. What is to be done about mankind?
In London Conrad’s letters awaited me:
Mells
25 March
Your lovely telegram has come. I shall see you tomorrow. If I seem boorish and insensitive don’t misjudge me. It will be better when I have been alone with you for hours. I’ve hated this separation more than I’ve ever told you. I would much rather be dead than live without you.
The Ides of March are come and gone, and with them the anniversary of the death of Julius Caesar (perhaps the greatest man that ever lived) and also finis of Czechoslovakia. The pig’s pen is being dug for victory. As I was digging I thought seriously about the Resurrection. I find it quite impossible to believe in it, and yet after two thousand years the persistence of the belief is very strong. I dare say I am the only person in the whole parish who feels any strong inability to believe in the Resurrection. We are all bewildered in a maze on a sea whose chart is lost.
CHAPTER TWO
The Last-Trump Capital
WE were homeless in London on our return from America to face the real war. Those days became so charged that I find it insuperably difficult to calendar them. Childhood is stamped on the fair face of one’s uncluttered memory as clearly as morning, and a heart beating with love, enterprise and procreancy seemed recordable, but when I come to armies clashing in the dark, to destruction, to the rulers and their strength, shortcomings or ambivalence, their relations with Duff, or even the impression that they made on me in those noisy years, I am lost in a rabble of stampeding thoughts that can never be rounded up.
“What will she do when she gets to the interesting years?” asked Vincent Sheean. “To Winston? To de Gaulle? To the things that matter?” “O my dearest Jimmy,” I felt like saying, “what more can I do? Friends and critics ask of me what is beyond my power. I’m only a narrator, a recorder of what mine eyes have seen. I can’t speculate, conclude, judge or even write character-sketches. Scorn not the saga: don’t shoot the narrator. We all dip into the Creevey papers for cheerful gossip, and into Hickey’s memoirs, less for his journeys than for his weakness for claret and women. And who would not rather read in his diary of how Pepys pinched the housemaid hoping not to be seen, of how Nell Gwynn was prettier than he had thought as she dressed in the shift-room cursing because the pit was not fuller, or hear of the clergyman’s slip of tongue when he prayed God ‘to preserve to our use’ not the kindly fruits of the earth, but ‘our gracious Queen Catherine,’ than hear of his arguments in ‘the Office’ or read his history of the Navy? It is for you, my ever-pink-and-white boy, who with Winston got me somehow through the blitz, for you, for historians, journalists and modern recordings to uncover the motives and measure the ebb and flow of the tides that stormed against us, while I tell of the clothes, sulks and smiles of the characters I knew, and of my own quakes and quiverings, sunlit heydays and many triumphs over Giant Despair. I can’t cope with more.”
My letters shall be my staff and scrip, for they are undeformed by memory. The first I find, written to Kommer, is clearly propaganda and meant to be quoted to his prophets of defeat in the United States.
London
Late March 1940
We were welcomed here like people returning from the Promised Land of Utopia. A million questions, flowers, more questions, birth and death announcements, more questions. So often on return from foreign adventures one has to bear with cruel disinterestedness: friends have not registered one’s absence; one’s narrow escapes and aesthetic thrills fall on ears listening to home chatter, and one reluctantly suppresses the photographs and press cuttings. But here was a new experience. “What did you do?” “What did they say?” “What do they really think?” “Do they think us phoney?” “Are they on our side?” “Why is the betting going against us?” “Why do they send us food?” Fortunately, magnificent accounts of Duff’s lecture-tour had reached home. Friends from all parts of the United States had written. The New York and London caution-mongers have been disproved by heart-warming reports of future contracts (offered but not signed), so no breath need be wasted blowing Duff’s trumpet.
A great deal of our welcoming took place at the Savoy Hotel, where we had decided to perch until I could divest my house of its battledress. The Savoy was selected because now more than ever is the Grill the one place in London. Without music and apparently without closing time, you are certain always to find bits of the Cabinet there (for where else can late supper be eaten?). Workers off their shifts, actors, writers, the Press, Mayfair’s hostesses who have abandoned their private houses and still want to entertain—they are all grazing in the Savoy Grill. Friends move from table to table—here a cup of soup, there a glass of wine.
By living in this great hotel one need never wrestle with the black-out, which is blacker than ever—no gleams to guide one, no Dursley lanterns, if you know what they are.* Who, who is so fond of the black-out that it remains? Sandbags have greatly diminished, civilians have discarded their gas-masks, but the nightly eclipse still wraps us round with death in its darkness.
We little thought in September last that spring would see us so unscathed. With thousands of others I thought and feared that London would be a smouldering heap, disease on the march, many friends widowed, confusion worse confounded, the Apocalypse, the Legion of Anti-Christ still to be faced and fought, perhaps even in our land. Instead the cities are strong in protection, guts and gaiety. The newspaper stories deal with hardships of winter, not of war.
The theatres boom. The movie I saw the other night showed Hitler and Mussolini gesticulating in their ridiculous fashion through snow on the Brenner Pass. I automatically started hissing, but my protest was drowned by hoots and shouts of laughter. The higher the goose-step, the more the two chins thrust themselves forward, the more tickled the audience.
Evelyn Waugh, now an officer in the Marines with as smart a little moustache as Errol Flynn, has never been so happy. Edward Stanley is one of four officers in a minesweeper. They bag as many as fifty in a week. He reads Shakespeare to the captain over tumblers of hot toddy, between catches. I have never seen a man of thirty so childishly high-spirited.
Last night to the Admiralty, where I went to dine with Winston, my dearly-loved First Lord. O what a change was there since my day! Did you ever see my bed? It rose sixteen feet high from a shoal of gold dolphins and tridents; ropes made fast the blue satin curtains; round the walls Captain Cook was discovering Australia. Now all has suffered a sea change. The dolphins are stored away and on a narrow curtainless pallet-bed sleeps the exhausted First Lord. My gigantic gold-and-white armoire holds his uniform. The walls are charts. On the top fl
oor, where I had hung chintz curtains spotted with red and blue seahorses to amuse my little boy, the Churchill family is installed. It makes a delightful self-contained flat with dining-room, bedroom, kitchen and their own lovely pictures. Winston’s spirit, strength and confidence are a beacon in the darkness, a chime that wakes the heart of the discouraged. His wife, more beautiful than in early youth, is equally fearless and indefatigable. She makes us all knit jerseys as thick as sheep’s fleeces, for which the minesweepers must bless her.
Bognor
Later
I am back in Sussex for my child’s holidays. Always faultless in my eyes, he delights me and the urchins of the Lodge with his songs—“Hang up the washing on the Siegfried Line” and “Run, rabbit, run.” The relief here shows even more than in London. Since October my cottage has been dense with child-refugees. Even digging on the sands these poor mites had gas-masks to hinder them. The Stately Homes in my radius were all gutted of their fine trappings and turned into maternity homes for mothers from crowded areas. Aubussons had given place to linoleum, and rows of hospital beds were the only furnishings. Heirlooms, pictures and their own children had to make way for cradles, charts and nurses. In the brilliant sun of last September, exhausted and cumbersome women lay panting in last-word Fortnum & Mason garden chairs, staring at turquoise bathing-pools. They were not happy. They learned of new pests, like wasps. They yearned for their street of neighbours and familiar surroundings, however squalid. One mother said that she could stand anything but the trees; they really got her down.