Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  Pleasant though it was to be the centre of attention, Diana could have done with less of these evenings. For one thing, Moore would turn down the lights and dismiss the band the instant she left, thus forcing her to linger on or cut short the pleasure of the other guests. For another, her friends were not disposed to pay more than scant attention to their host, and he for his part wanted only to dance with her. She had to sit next to him at dinner and let him ‘murmur love or Chich-techicher-chich-chich hotly in my ear as we shuffled and bunny-hugged around’.

  When she escaped from Moore it was as often as not into the arms of Basil Hallam. Hallam was that rarity, a music hall performer who even by the exacting standards of 1915 could pass muster as a gentleman. He was slim, elegant, lacking in conversation but with a dreamy charm. His hammer-toe prevented him marching to war but did not impair the magnificence of his dancing. He was distinctive, romantic, pleasantly absurd. Diana adored him in a quiet way and called him ‘her little stick of barley-sugar’ – though more to annoy George Moore than because she thought the metaphor appropriate. Night after night he would linger to the end of the party and then take Diana home at 4 or 5 a.m. with two or three circuits of Regent’s Park to allow time for professions of love. He was jeered at by some who did not know why he had not joined the army and was given his quota of white feathers at the stage door. Diana too came in for a share of the abuse. ‘Is it you or your sister who is most responsible for keeping shirkers and cowards like Basil Hallam from fighting for his country?’ asked an indignant Dubliner. ‘You are no better than a traitress!’

  ‘Life is much as you remembered it,’ Raymond Asquith told Edward Horner in April 1915.

  There is desultory speculation in the Coterie as to whether Dotty is in love with Hallam. Hopes are entertained by some; doubts by others – but not I think by Hallam. On the whole my own impression is that her beauty is increasing and her humanity dwindling – a double portent which you may find it hard to picture. I am training myself to admire her as a natural object – the Alpine sunset, the Pink Terrace in New Zealand – instead of the damned unnatural and extremely provocative one she really is.

  Asquith’s accusation of inhumanity was echoed by many of her friends. ‘You, the Soul of Souls, yourself have no soul,’ wrote Tommy Bouch accusingly. ‘You told me I ought never to have taken you seriously and now I know you were right.’ Those who loved her and wanted her exclusive love in return were maddened by her determination to remain detached; her eagerness to offer friendship; her refusal, perhaps inability, to do more. ‘I can’t understand your form of loving people,’ wrote an agonized Edward Horner. ‘I can’t constitutionally believe in your loving me and a couple more.’ George Vernon was maddened by the vision of Diana surrounded by George Moore, ‘Duff hazarding his all. Edward buying licences. Michael [Herbert] and his oiliness. Raymond and his insinuations. Claud and his persistence, and you apparently distributing your favours to all with impartiality mixed with a curious caprice.’

  Diana, now aged twenty-three, would in many ways have liked to commit herself, even though she might live to regret it, but when it came to the point she found herself unable. To George Vernon she wrote:

  Nellie Hozier is off the hooks to a man with a head injury but I’m still on them – and likely to be till I wither and grow sour and unpalatable. Felicity [Tree] too is ‘off’ with Cory-Wright, while Iris quenches a dozen blue-flies’ thirst, and God knows her face betrays her. Nancy too is in the same boat of so-called iniquity, with better show yet a smuttier name. God help them both! They have more courage than me – and can seize an opportunity and hug and crush it against their palates irrespective of the taste and they are very happy while I go starved, and hesitating and checking my every impulse for fear of losing my pedestal of ice which was never of any worth to those who saw it and considered fabulous by strangers.

  One can find several reasons for her reluctance to quit her chilly pedestal. The marriage of her sister Marjorie Anglesey was going through a disastrous passage while the other marriage which she observed most closely, that of Venetia and Edwin Montagu, was hardly an advertisement for matrimony. In an age when any man you loved today might be dead tomorrow, restraint seemed the minimum required by prudence. Though flirtation could be delightful, the pleasure did not seem to increase with physical intimacy. But perhaps the most important single factor, one which she hardly admitted even to herself, was that she compared all other men to Raymond Asquith and found them wanting.

  For a woman who fears commitments and who likes to share responsibilities, a relationship with a securely married man has obvious advantages. At several points of her life Diana was part of a well-ordered triangle. The Asquiths hardly provided this, yet her deep and lasting friendship with Katharine and her love for Raymond provided a tangle of loyalties and affection which seems curious to the outsider and must at times have perplexed even the protagonists. When Raymond was away she wrote to him two or three times a week and he responded with lyrical enthusiasm: ‘I swear that you are easily the Queen of Corpse-Revivers. A dozen syllables of your electric illiteracy would suffice to raise Lazarus’; ‘There is life in every word you write, Dilly; I can see the sap pulsing in the syllables, the vowels sing together like the morning stars, and the i’s toss their heads to heaven like daffodils in March.’ Diana shared a special place with his wife: ‘You and my beloved Katharine are the only women my vocabulary can’t more than cope with.’ When Raymond realized that he had no photograph of his wife to carry into battle he wrote to protest. ‘I have got a dinky little photo of Dilly and if that is found on my corpse instead of a picture of you, I know you will give me a wigging in the next world.’

  Everyone, it seems, was satisfied. Yet one wonders if Katharine can really have had the self-effacement not to resent the precious hours of leave which her husband devoted to their friend; whether Diana did not sometimes wish that she could have the prior claim. Sometimes Katharine seems to have betrayed at least a flicker of jealousy. It must have been in response to some such protest that Raymond Asquith wrote to his wife in April 1915:

  I felt quite guilty when my writing to Dottie made you whimper. I hardly ever do write to her, I hardly ever see her except in public, and it is not she but Fawnia [his nickname for his wife] whom I love. At the same time she flashes and dazzles and provokes ‘animated adoration’ and transient moods of guilty passion and licentious rhetoric which ‘blaze high and quickly die’. I think you make insufficient allowance for moods and for the imperative necessity of indulging them and – in the dingy times in which we live – of artificially stimulating, fostering, and cherishing the faintest spark of abnormal excitation. Whatever you may think of Dottie as an ideal, as a fact she is a very remarkable creature and it would be a gross abuse of opportunity not (as A. Bennett would say) to ‘savour her with every fibre of one’s palate’. But enough of Dilly. I don’t think of her much except when I see her, whereas I consistently feed my mind upon the perfections of the Fawn.

  The tone of this letter is somewhat defensive, yet it is probably a fair representation of his priorities at the time. The following months saw a growth in the frequency and intensity of his correspondence with Diana. She meant far more to him than ever before. That Raymond Asquith never betrayed his wife in any legal sense of the word is certain. Whether she might ever have felt herself betrayed, whether their marriage might have been one day in peril, must always be a matter for speculation. The children of that marriage believe firmly that it would not, that the honesty between their parents was total and the relationship so strong as to be unshakeable. Certainly to have shaken it would have caused Diana deep distress. Yet her love for Raymond was so passionate that it could only with the greatest difficulty have been contained. She was to have many years of deeply happy married life, yet she was never to feel again an emotion so intense or so impetuous.

  In February 1916 Raymond Asquith was sent briefly on a course to Folkestone. Diana went down there for the nigh
t and next day he wrote in ecstatic vein: ‘Even into this foul and dingy inn the recollected glory of your beauty flings its unquenchable beam – and your darling, darling charity of last night – a sponge of bitter wine held upon a broken reed to the lips of a crucified fool … For four hours – or whatever the day’s ration may be – I never wittingly remove my eyes from you, and yet at the end it is only as if a shooting star had flashed like a ribbon across a Stygian night.’ A gap in the correspondence follows but Diana wrote a few weeks later: ‘My darling, darling Raymond. I have loved so utterly your last two beseeching letters. I was longing for you to claim me again, and now you have done it fully, leaving no crumbs for another, thank God!’

  Compared with this, all her other relationships seem to some extent artificial. Yet to the other men involved they were real enough. Patrick Shaw-Stewart was constantly battering at her to marry him or, failing that, at least to go to bed with him. ‘You, you see, always want to keep (1) me (2) your old virginity. Whereas I always want to get (1) your heart and soul (2) your worshipful body.’ On one occasion she evidently let him go a little further than usual. He woke up next morning feeling like a cock ready to crow vaingloriously, though only if ‘you divided the cock’s harem – which probably runs to a score – by twenty, left him with one infinitely desirable hen who happened to be a bit of a freak, and compelled the poor old bird to read “yearly” for “hourly”’. Even his modified triumph only endured a short time: three weeks later he was leaving a house-party rebuffed, ‘a perfect specimen of the draggled male … Anyone might have cried to see me: amazing, isn’t it, how women have the heart to inflict such terrible damage?’

  Duff, who respected Shaw-Stewart’s pertinacity, was always nervous lest his rival should wear Diana down and triumph by sheer will-power. Back from Salonika on his last leave, Patrick Shaw-Stewart hastened to Belvoir to have another try. ‘Pray God with me for courage to face this great ordeal and to let me triumph‚’ Diana telegraphed to Duff. But could God be relied on in so delicate a matter? Duff waited in agony for twenty-four hours, but one glance at his friend’s face when they dined together on Shaw-Stewart’s return from the country was enough to reassure him.

  Probably he had more to fear from Edward Horner, for Diana could always be melted by a man’s frailties, and of these Horner had many. ‘I want only to remember how I love you, which is difficult when I think of your limpness,’ Diana wrote sternly, but in fact Edward’s limpness was his strongest card. Like all her would-be lovers he was hot for certainty. ‘When you say you love me, what do you mean?’ he demanded. Did she want to lie beside him, and more, most nights? Would she like to be with him whenever she felt expansive and whenever she felt sad? If not, she did not love him. Inevitably the answer was a dusty one, but there was an irresistible sweetness about his fecklessness. Duff loved him, but was inclined to dismiss him as a serious threat. Raymond Asquith was more perceptive. When Edward was on the point of departure for the Middle East, Raymond wrote:

  The plain fact is I do not like your doting so much more fondly on old E than on me and being so much more wretched at his going than you ever are on mine. I grudge those two days on the hearthrug – the sobbings and the huggings and the vowings that he was the only man you cared a fig for … I fear, I very much fear, that you are Wendy to the rest of us and ‘wonder wife’ to old E. I don’t say it’s surprising, still less culpable: on the contrary it’s almost too dreadfully natural to be worthy of a woman of your calibre. I only say it’s surprising, still less culpable: on the contrary it’s almost too Edward but only against God and the world for not making me younger, richer, wittier or more beautiful.

  It would be tedious to list the full roll-call of those who at least professed their love for Diana. Sometimes it almost seems as if she was so well known to be inaccessible that men tried out on her endearments that would have been dangerous on a more susceptible target. To be in love with Diana was to be member of a club, not particularly exclusive, perhaps, but boasting many distinguished members. Tommy Bouch wrote from France: ‘Here is one more victim for you, and be honest – you like making victims.’ George Vernon called her ‘unique, blood-maddening, love itself incarnate, and you will yet drive me to my grave. My eyes grow hot when I think of you.’ Claud Russell continued to propose to her at monthly intervals. To all of them she was evasive; not repelling bluntly but offering little hope. She felt bound, she told Major Bouch, to share her favours: ‘To make the many happy, what alternative is there?’

  There was no such play-acting about her relationship with Duff. Viewed in retrospect there seems to have been an inevitability about their wooing, in spite of its many vicissitudes and the rival claims on their affections. As early as April 1914, after a late supper at the Cavendish in which Diana had been absorbed with Basil Hallam and Duff making noisy love to Marjorie Trefusis, ‘Diana said to me in the hall that though we both had our stage favourites, we really loved each other best, and kissed me divinely.’ There were many moments in the next five years when each one doubted whether marriage with the other was desirable or even feasible, yet they both found it curiously difficult to imagine being married to anyone else.

  Duff had the great advantage over his friends of being permanently in London. Though he did not feel any shame at being held to his job in the Foreign Office while most of his friends went off to the war, it was not a wholly enviable position. It was difficult not to feel at a disadvantage when the other men at a party might be dead a week later fighting for the cause of one’s country; difficult not to concede that they had the right to attentions which one felt would normally be bestowed elsewhere. Duff was furiously resentful when Diana let Patrick Shaw-Stewart take her home after a party, but it was the last night of Patrick’s leave. He protested, but felt a cad as he did so. Nevertheless, the fact that he was there, permanently available in times of grief or stress, the one dependable point in a shifting world, meant that his position in Diana’s life became gradually more secure until in the end it seemed inconceivable that he should ever be removed.

  His behaviour in the early years of the war was not likely to render him more eligible in the Duchess’s eyes. He gambled heavily. At a typical evening of chemin-de-fer in Duff’s rooms, Alexander Thynne lost £198, Sybil Hart-Davis and Sidney Herbert £472, Diana £30 while Edward Horner won £598, Jack Pixley £76 and Duff £51. Sybil and Sidney couldn’t pay, so Duff’s winnings disappeared. There was no such dispensation two nights later when he lost £242.

  He drank as much as ever and behaved when drunk with the irresponsibility of a teenage undergraduate. One night he deposited Diana and Katharine Asquith at Arlington Street. ‘A great wave of buffiness came over Duff as we left.’ He decided that he must at all costs rejoin the women. Laboriously he clambered over the high spiked railings that then divided Green Park from Piccadilly, and tottered down the garden walls that flanked the park, trying to count off the houses between the Ritz Hotel and the Duke of Rutland’s London seat. ‘With a soaked besotted brain’ he finally put all to the hazard, scaled a wall and found himself in a strange and silent garden. He crossed the paling into the next garden and again into the next, leaving behind him a trail of battered flowers and betraying footprints. Finally he arrived at the palatial splendours of Spencer House, realized he had gone too far and began a precarious retreat: ‘Poor Love, not remembering that at best he would have found his vain, weak nails baffled by Mother’s pane. It was “love’s light wings” all right – but he paid for them with a new coat shredded and good trousers tattered.’

  When drunk his natural pugnacity was redoubled. Dining one evening at Verrey’s with him and the Raymond Asquiths, Diana complained that a man at the next table was staring at her. Duff turned and hurled insults at the back of the offender’s head: ‘You cannot mean that miserable, ugly, little man has dared to look at you?’ A few minutes later Diana said he was looking her way again. Once more Duff wheeled in rage, to find himself face to face with Sir William Tyrr
ell, until a few weeks before Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office. ‘Lucky for me that he is a fallen man and he was dining, I think, with a prostitute.’

  The Duchess was horrified and outraged by such exploits; Diana horrified and delighted. Duff might be aggressive, bad-tempered, inordinately demanding, yet he was never dull. His style of love-making inclined rather too far towards the hyperbolic to suit contemporary taste. ‘My dazzling, many-coloured angel,’ he wrote, ‘I am wasted with desire for you. I am utterly undone. Oh wonderful cold red heart so pitilessly entrenched behind the miraculous shield of warm white flesh, you give me no peace, you possess me to the very entrails. Your heart is harder than a tiger’s claws, but your skin is softer than the Virgin’s heart.’ And then again: ‘You beautiful, blond, white-breasted bitch. How desperately people adore you. Oh dear, devilish Dilly, I never saw so many swine cast before one pearl.’ Such fin-de-siècle extravagance did not ring as false in 1915 as it would today, but Diana found that a little of it went a long way. On the whole she preferred him in cool Augustan mood:

  The word ‘love’ means little to most people, but to me – nothing. I have read that it should interfere with a man’s sleep or even trespass upon his enjoyment of his meals, which, for my own part, nothing but thoughts of my figure have done. But I find that I miss you most inconveniently and the thought of not seeing you at champagne-time is as exasperating as it would be for the moth to miss his candle of an evening.

  A lover who could leap from Dowson to Henry Higgins in the course of a few days might not inspire confidence but at least he was never the same for long enough to grow stale.