I share this opinion with regard to Anita, an upper-class Anglo-Irishwoman, although I recognize that during her marriage to the bullying Paul it was hard for her not to be influenced by his rancid ideas. Once she had, with great difficulty, extricated herself from his orbit, she became less prejudiced. Like Edith Wharton, she belonged to a class that prized a light-hearted giddiness in its young women and didn’t encourage them to think deeply. Even intelligent Leonie was worried that the beautiful Margaret Sheridan might put off young men because of her obvious erudition. This is not to say that Anita was ever comfortable with Jews; she envied them for being cleverer than her and better at making money. On her 1935 trip to the usa, when she had stayed with Barney Baruch, he had told her that no good school would accept his daughter because he was a Jew. Anita told him that there had been Jewish girls at her English schools and added: ‘I did not much like them because they were so clever. Lessons seemed so easy to them.’ She insisted that Barney ‘guffawed’ at this honest remark. At the time, Anita was very young and naive but, in his book Blood Kindred, W.J. McCormack observes: ‘One should recognise naiveté as amongst the most dangerous attributes the innocent might possess.’
The night of 9 November was Kristallnacht, evidence of the slide towards genocide as German Jews were arrested, imprisoned and their property looted or destroyed. On 26 November Anita wrote to Rose from The Grampians: ‘Unity Mitford is dining with us and Paul is all prepared to like someone who really likes Hitler as much as he does. I’ve asked Des [her 16-year-old brother] as he’ll do funny sketches of it.’ There is also a brief mention of Paul’s son – she doesn’t give his name – who has arrived in England ‘run down and seedy … We are terrified of a return to T.B.’ On 15 December the Evening Standard ran a story that the 21-year-old Grand Duke Vladimir, pretender to the throne of all the Russias, was leaving Paris for a meeting with Herr Hitler to discuss the Ukraine. Anita commented: ‘Utter fiction – according to Korostovetz. Invented by Jews and Soviet White Russians to befuddle everyone of the real Ukrainian problem.’
The day after the Evening Standard article appeared, the real Ukrainian problem and everything else was put out of Anita’s mind when her five-year-old godson, Christopher Coats, fell down a lift shaft outside his parents’ Belgravia flat. Betsan and John (Jackie) faced the loss of their son with a courage that Anita marvelled at. They were sustained by their faith – ‘They believe that it happened deliberately because it had to – but Why?’ an anguished Anita wrote to Rose. Betsan had asked everyone to wear bright colours at the little boy’s funeral at Golders Green crematorium and Anita described the mourners’ pretty hats ‘perched over faces that looked as if they’d been scrubbed with a floor brush!’ Even Paul, ‘who has seen so much of death said he has never been so shocked – that boy was adorable, unique.’ ‘Icy and exhausted with nerve strain’ Paul and Anita went to spend an uneasy Christmas with the Coats at their house in Somerset. The loss of this small godson, the sight of his Christmas stocking and the memory of his tiny coffin sliding through the crematorium doors while his stoic parents watched arm in arm, put Anita’s own problems to the back of her mind, at least for a time.
5
Things Fall Apart
In the last year of that devilish decade, Winston Churchill castigated world leaders: ‘They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be important.’ The mood in Great Britain was one of tension, unease and wariness, artistic types being particularly suspect. The theatre director Joan Littlewood and her husband, the singer Ewan MacColl, were placed under mi5 surveillance early in 1939, when they lived in Hyde, Cheshire, where it was reported: ‘A number of young men who have the appearance of communist Jews are known to visit Oak Cottage.’ Politicians came under suspicion too. The year before, W.H. Auden had written to his brother John: ‘The central committee of the Conservative Party [is] already refusing, in the nicest possible way, all Jewish candidates,’ while ‘the military engineered the dismissal of the Jewish secretary of state for war, Leslie Hore-Belisha, on thinly disguised anti-Semitic grounds.’
In February 1939 Anita went skiing in Chamonix with her brother Desmond. The short holiday had to be extended when Des had a bad accident on the slopes. Hospital arrangements were primitive. Anita wrote to Rose: ‘Yesterday, I had a battle royal with the surgeon who wanted to take the pin out of his knee without anesthetic [sic].’ When Des was finally put under, Anita tried to clean up his bed, ‘which was a miniature “Western Front” blood and other things mixed’. She kept these grisly details from Marjorie and asked her to send Irish bacon for Desmond’s breakfast. She told her mother: ‘Des takes a French newspaper and we both delight in the recognition of Franco!’ The victorious Spanish dictator had destroyed the town of Guernica, killing 2000 people in 1937, during his country’s civil war.
Sitting around in a hospital gave her time to think about her marriage. Her reason for coming to Chamonix had been to escape, for a time, her husband’s growly presence. Tattered Banners had gone into a second edition, having received ‘quite good but stupid reviews’. When Des was well enough to be left, Anita told Rose, she planned to return to London ‘and write & write & write & try to make some pennies to pension Paul with’. She thought that if Paul had enough money she would be able to leave him: ‘One of my few beliefs is that one can do what one likes in life as long as it does not cause other people suffering – And behold here I am trapped, unable to kick off the shackles and live because it would hurt Paul.’
Shepherd’s Bush was a prison:
Oh I am so bored, and caged and unhappy there … for nearly 5 years he has bound me down to material worry and struggle! I have learnt to do accounts and cook and put up quite a good little conventional bourgois [sic] show but oh the inner weariness and boredom. … One can’t struggle for ever between pity and irritation! I am glad he is being so pompous and silly as it makes it easier to loosen the shackles. If he was ‘little boy’ and weepy it would be far worse.
From Chamonix, she wrote to Rose every day, signing off ‘Love, Nita’. They understood each other’s
uncomfortable souls …we can’t fit into a respectable little nitch [sic] and like it … For the moment I am living – it is like cold water thrown in one’s face, icy water that makes one’s blood feel like thin fire – I like snow and rocky crags and inaccessible summits and I hate ordering vegetables in Shepherd’s Bush. Have just heard Desmond’s doctor broke his leg ski-ing this afternoon!!! Such a nice young man!! Don’t tell Mummy!
By early March Des was able to have the plaster cast on his leg removed. Anita could have returned to London. But she didn’t, writing to Rose: ‘I am a new person – out of the rut, rebellious, not at all inclined to drudge any more.’ Her daily schedule obviously included a liaison, ‘go out ski-ing with lunch at 11 (private please) and come back at 4’. As for Paul: ‘I can’t cope with him. I have only tried to help him and I have dug that book [Tattered Banners] out of him. It sounds so brutal but to me that book was the kernel of Paul and now only the husk remains.’ She went back to London in April, following Rose’s advice not to make a hasty decision to leave Paul because ‘it may be just the beginning of dawn and one should wait till the light comes’.
On 14 April Anita wrote to Rose from Shepherd’s Bush:
I believe Paul must have intercepted a letter from my friend in Chamonix. He gnashed his teeth and wanted to strangle me with a belt. I got to the stairs and shrieked. He clouted me and then broke down in hysterical weeping, lay on the floor and sobbed wildly. … If Paul continues raving I’ll have to leave or my nerves will break up too.
But she stayed, explaining that she was sorry for Paul and didn’t want to upset Marjorie or cause a scandal.
At some stage during that last pre-war spring Anita made another attempt to leave. An undated letter to Rose, written from Dover, en route to Calais, describes how she hid in the train lavatory
while Paul prowled the station platform looking for her. He didn’t have his passport with him, so went back home, where he found a letter from Rose explaining the point of Anita’s journey – whatever it was. She seemed to be planning a permanent move, partly because of the favourable exchange rate – ‘it is mad to live out of France!’ – but, predictably, she returned to Shepherd’s Bush.
Everyone had opinions about the likelihood of war. Korostovetz’s view was that ‘Roosevelt’s plea … was just a Jewish machination to put all the blame for war on the dictators.’ Writing to Rose on 4 April, before her short-lived flit to France, Anita returns to her domestic dramas: ‘Thank goodness the sun helps one to laugh things off … Oh – it’s all so opera comique!’ Paul is delighted by Anita’s suggestion that they write ‘a Ukrainian book entitled “We Wait for Hitler”. He is such a maddening child – I am like a mother with an awful baby that I can’t leave just because it is so awful and no one else would look after it.’ ‘We Wait for Hitler’ seems to have been accepted by Longmans Green but not published. Other titles had more success. Anita helped her husband write Just Hacking and, at the end of April, her life of Rodin was published in America where it was well reviewed and earned her one hundred dollars. Thoughts of war returned in her letters to Rose. On Easter Sunday: ‘Some day England will just have to put a stop and then it will be war and then … ???’ A few weeks later, on 29 April: ‘I thought Hitler’s speech brilliant, sane and dignified, the best he has ever made.’ She was dismissive of her cousin Winston – ‘his head is like an angry beehive of ideas’.
Anita hoped that she and Paul could travel to Central Europe together as foreign correspondents or, should war come and with it communist domination, ‘go so peasant that you won’t recognise me’. But she was being facetious. For the foreseeable future, life was about writing books on Paul’s behalf, stabling and exercising other people’s horses and trying to calm down Marjorie, who dreaded Jack being called to arms. With the bad timing that was Anita’s speciality, Rodin, Immortal Peasant was published in England by Herbert Joseph in July.
Sir John Lavery RA, who had known Rodin well and painted his portrait, wrote the introduction, and the Duke of Westminster and Lord Howard de Walden were among the notables acknowledged by the author for their ‘invaluable assistance’. Sir John noted Anita’s family connections – daughter of Shane, cousin of Winston and Clare – and declared that ‘Rodin himself would have asked for no greater tribute to his memory than that his biography should be written by a girl.’ This is perhaps a sly reference to the sculptor’s womanizing ways. The book is decidedly girlish in its unfettered admiration for Rodin, who Anita admitted was a wife-beater and unable to feel affection for anybody but who had a lumbering innocence and a love of nature.
In his lifetime Rodin had been called ‘The Zola of sculpture’. He was an anti-heroic realist who ignored the Victorian fashion for vapid stonework. His Burghers of Calais (1889) shows a group of wretched, vulnerable men stumbling towards their expected execution rather than righteous martyrs. He was a man, Anita wrote, ‘for whom life was anything but dainty’. Nevertheless, she gave him a Mills & Boon makeover: ‘He saw her coming, starlit and virgin, flowing in loveliness to the arms of the mysterious city … Autumn swept in, scarlet-cloaked and frosty-fingered.’ There is quite a lot of this. As was the case in all her biographies, Anita knew more than she was telling. What she didn’t divulge about Rodin was that he used women to further his career and then discarded them. So Rodin’s affair with Camille Claudel, whose surname is withheld by Anita, ends because of the jealousy of his permanent mistress Rose Beuret. Not a word about Camille’s reluctant abortion, her conviction that Rodin was appropriating her work and even conspiring to have her murdered, nor that she spent the last thirty years of her life in a mental asylum, where she was committed by her appalled family. This is Anita’s version of the end of the affair: ‘They did not meet again, but Rodin knew that he would never forget the appeal in those brown eyes, the deep brooding eyes of his Venus of Villeneuve.’
Anita is determined to present a love story between Rodin and the long-suffering Rose, a peasant woman whom Rodin married in 1917, the year they both died. The other women in his life get short shrift: the American-born Claire de Choiseul, again not named, is the villainess of the book, a blowsy, tipsy harridan, although, in fact, she introduced the sculptor to rich American investors. The English artist Gwen John, who was twenty-seven when she began an affair with the 67-year-old sculptor, isn’t mentioned at all. These evasions and omissions may have been because, in 1939, when the book was published, Camille and Gwen were still alive. Even so, twenty-two years after Rodin’s death, it was questionable to depict him as an unassuming innocent; he was a man who pushed for and received multiple public honours and appointments, including the presidency of the International Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers. The book is undeniably fun to read and shows a fine understanding of Rodin’s work and how he transformed sculpture into something more painterly. But in a country edging towards war, there was little interest in a sculptor no longer as admired as Jacob Epstein, whose work was more massive, more controversial and more fitting for the stark times. Rodin Immortal Peasant received good reviews in Punch, Tatler and The Northern Echo, which, unhelpfully, didn’t appear on the news stands until 5 September, two days after war was declared.
On 23 August the Nazi-Soviet Pact, sometimes called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, was signed by the two thus-named foreign ministers. It specified a non-aggression policy between Germany and Russia. On signing, Molotov suavely remarked to the journalists present that ‘fascism is a matter of taste!’ The exiled Trotsky called it ‘the midnight of the century’. Anita found the news ‘glumly depressing’. Paul feared that Russia and Germany would form a permanent alliance and mourned the loss of Ukrainian independence, which might have held Russia in check. But sitting out in the sunshine at Marjorie’s cottage in Hertfordshire improved Anita’s mood. After all, Leonie had told her that the Duke of Connaught’s secret scouts had assured him that there would be no war.
When war was declared two days after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, it was something of an anticlimax. Anita was more concerned with the reception of her book: ‘Paul innocently says everyone will read it in the trenches.’ Shane had a new book out too: Mrs Fitzherbert: A Life Chiefly from Unpublished Sources, was published by Burns Oates, as was a second volume: The Letters of Mrs Fitzherbert and Connected Papers. Neither made much impact. Shane and Desmond became citizens of the Irish Free State, although both took part in the British war effort. During that first wartime autumn, the Leslies, like many other scattered families, were deciding where best to wait out the conflict, which Shane predicted would be over by Christmas. Marjorie, with ten pieces of luggage, went back to Glaslough. Shane applied for a teaching post at his old school, Eton, so as to be near Jack, who was stationed at Chelsea Barracks. In Somerset, Betsan Coats, assisted by a Buddhist monk, took in twenty-four evacuated children and their minders. They left after three weeks, as they thought that the countryside was ‘utter desolation’. In London Paul was fretful as he had no success in finding a job at the War Office and Rose decided to rent Marjorie’s cottage.
‘It would take a war to give Paul a rest and me a good time,’ Anita wrote to Rose in November. There were fewer horses to train, no point in writing books, which hardly anyone would notice or buy. She went cubbing in Northamptonshire, justifying this larking about to Leonie: ‘I feel I am “helping the war effort” much more by having as pleasant a time as possible which is just what he [Hitler] doesn’t want.’ She had no intention of doing any war work since women who had volunteered for service, she told Rose, ‘have resigned in futile rage and disgust at the petty jealousies that ruined all their efforts.’ She didn’t listen to Winston’s stirring speeches, writing to Marjorie in Ireland: ‘You can’t imagine how bored people are with the war here. No one wants to listen to fancy speeches. They are just entirely occupied
with the way it hits agriculture or finance in their particular business.’ In this letter, she gives an account of her birthday party, for which Marjorie paid, which she held at Quaglino’s restaurant. ‘It was packed with Jewesses in mink coats and the newest ultra hats over one eye.’ The following month Anita and Paul moved into Marjorie’s London flat in South Lodge, St John’s Wood, assuring her that they would keep the flat tidy. They had no qualms about buying clothes on Marjorie’s accounts at Harrods and Simpsons. Their main inconveniences were the blackout, which meant they had to stumble through dark streets en route to a restaurant, and Paul’s failure to find a job – ‘the Intelligence is packed with Jews and I don’t think there is much chance’. This was Anita at her most unpleasant. On Christmas Day, in spite of petrol rationing, she and Paul were able to drive to Hertfordshire and eat a delicious turkey with Rose.
At the beginning of 1940 Anita had earned £15 from Rodin, which had, so far, sold 140 copies. In May Finland’s Saviour, Paul’s book on Field Marshall Mannerheim, was published by Jarrolds. It claimed to be ‘recorded by Anita Leslie’ and, like Paul’s previous books, was obviously written by her, her tinkly style recognizable from her own biographies: ‘Until he was three years old little Gustaf Mannerheim never spoke a word … Petrograd, where the ‘Nineties were as naughty and infinitely more glamorous than elsewhere! … There were blushes and lowered lashes as he passed at a Court ball.’ An early hint that the naughty and glamorous 1890s were the years that Anita would make her own in her later writing.
On the publication of Finland’s Saviour, the Rodziankos were featured in a Tatler article. At the South Lodge flat, Paul is seen popping a champagne cork with his sword, while Anita, exquisitely dressed and made up, sits decoratively on an antique chest making a telephone call. Nothing about the article gives any intimation that a war was going on. The photographs had been taken some weeks before the issue appeared. By the time the magazine went on sale nobody felt much like popping champagne corks.
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