They did not, and Louise in particular. Louis worshipped his mother, and Myrtle was “particularly grieved over Madame's attitude.” “Australians sound terrible to us and we both look and sound terrible to them.”28 This was not the reception Myrtle expected. She belonged firmly to that class of Australians who hankered after Europe. When she was sober she assumed a very British accent; when drunk she became Australian. Whether drunk or sober, she had no command of any foreign languages, and her French was at best vestigial. There are fleeting references to something which went terribly wrong during their stay at Neuilly: the chances are that enough became apparent about the drinking habits of both Myrtle and Louis to horrify the Darquier family.29
Horrified they certainly were. After the couple's ignominious departure from Neuilly, Louise opened a letter from Roy, addressed to Myrtle. This may be how she discovered that Myrtle was at best a divorced woman, at worst a bigamous one. The despatch of Louise's first grandchild to a nurse in the English counties was unacceptable, though Myrtle maintained that “it costs far less to have her there than with us as we would have to pay board here for her—it is healthy there for her.”30 Louis' lack of employment was a major source of displeasure, as were his and Myrtle's nightlife and their spendthrift days. The family called Myrtle “une Anglaise,” “la Tasmanienne,” and longed to return her to the strange place from whence she came. Just as important, it seems, was the absence of the anticipated inheritance.
Myrtle struggled to please. Louise Darquier was always beautifully and expensively dressed, with exquisite jewellery, and was most particular about her hats, made for her by her personal “modiste” (milliner). Henceforth Myrtle attempted to flatter—or compete with—her mother-in-law by appropriating a passion for hats that always caused comment wherever she went. A vain attempt, because the Darquier family spent most of the next three years trying to force Louis to get a position, and to get rid of Myrtle.
The couple stayed on in Paris while Louis tried to find the money to return to London. Both he and Myrtle thought he could do so by writing a book. Myrtle was sure he could. Closeted together in their hotel room Louis worked on his first novel—False Gods was its title—while Myrtle took up the task of dealing with René. Louis' hatred for his family's “profoundly cruel attitude” and “inhumane solutions” meant that the only contact he now had with them were “fire-eating letters” to René, whose growing impatience was expressed only in a modest request that Louis could perhaps cease wounding him every time he tried to help.
Myrtle's letters tell us everything about her, except for those matters she could not face or would not talk about. Her spelling was shaky in English; as for French, she spelt the language as she heard it, and her inventive attempts to spell the names of her Darquier relations changed in each begging letter. Sometimes there is only a day or so between letters, some of them fourteen pages long, imploring, beseeching René:
“Could you let us have 500 francs to get things necessary for Baby andourselves and collect the book and send it away…”
“Louis or not I will have any more children—we cannot keep our selves and the poor little one. I have been very queer myself for the last fortnight…”
“My dear René we are again in a very difficult situation. We have had, so to speak, nothing to eat since Saturday…”31
The word “grateful” counterpoints “please send” and “as soon as possible” in all Myrtle's letters. René sent her the money, with admonitions she accepted with humility, apologies, abasement: “please Renè [sic] try to forget personal feelings about me…My people are not any more pleased with the match than yours…I am not material …”32 Louis, meanwhile, made matters worse by applying to family friends and colleagues for money, with calamitous results. He approached one of René's former colleagues, Jean Ostermeyer, who worked for the Grands Moulins in Paris, and followed up his initial success with further demands, writing: “be careful in what you say to René—he is a little boy, very pretentious and quite stupid despite his commercial sense about practical matters.”33 Ostermeyer sent the letter on to René. “I suppose,” wrote Ostermeyer, “that similar letters have been sent in many directions—As for me, I shall not be taken in twice. His last furore was not worthy of him, he lied and spoke badly about his parents.”34
Anatole de Monzie's office told Louis he would assist him later— “they were helping a banker at present.”35 When Louis applied to Jean's medical teacher, Dr. Clovis Vincent of the Salpêtrière Hospital, Vincent replied that Pierre Darquier had already warned him off, accompanying this instruction with richly descriptive comments about his second son. “I want you to realise,” roared Louis to René, “the hate that I have held for the last twenty years for the bastard whose name I regret to say I bear (and who always conducted himself, in war and in peace, in politics as in the family, physically and morally as the worst of cowards)…There are many personal elements in my failure, but also many profound causes for which I am not responsible—a heavy family inheritance, combined with intellectual poverty on one side and congenital cowardice on the other— a dreadful education, low in all points of view—the war above all—Two or three years of attempts are not too many, believe me, to get rid of this dross.”36
Myrtle's work became even harder, her letters longer. Baby, she wrote, “has wonderful health and is a very good and obedient child. She needs so many things.”37 So did Louis, who had ordered a new suit, but who was to pay for it? “To find a job is a terrible problem,” wrote Louis. “I wrote a big novel which I did in a desperate effort to be published as quickly as possible—the reader of one of the biggest publishers in London… wrote to me yesterday…‘I have read the beginning of it with considerable interest. ’ ”38 Louis wrote his novels under the name of Louis de Pellepoix; he wrote in longhand, and could not afford to get his manuscript typed; he knew nothing at all about British, or any other, publishing habits.
Myrtle never returned to Australia after 1928, but the threnody of her Tasmanian family and the money she would one day inherit trills through all her letters like the sound of a piccolo. She was prone to use Australian idioms, and René did not take kindly to being told he was not “fair and sporting,” or was hitting “below the belt” when he occasionally did not send the money demanded. Myrtle herself knew how to get a blow in: “you know René all these men who went through the war are not as strong and able as you are… [Louis'] nerves were completely shot to pieces.”39 She insisted, again and again, that her prospects had been ruined only temporarily by the Depression in Australia, that the family land would boom again, wheat would recover, and “a good price for wool would greatly alter their position.”40
Myrtle's mother Lexie was only fifty-two when Myrtle used her anticipated death in such letters to assure the Darquier family that when she died Myrtle's share of the estate would be “considerable and will provide a happy future for us.” Until that day (which was not to come for nearly thirty years, and which would provide no fortune then) she implored them to imitate the generosity of her own family, who continued, with difficulty, to send what they could. Myrtle's tactless comparison of Tasmanian generosity with the parsimony of the French family was the last straw. Louis' family offered bribes for Myrtle to go away. Myrtle fought back:
Despite all the difficulties in England [Louis] was so much better there…It is very silly of you to imagine that by me going to England Louis would be better…I realise Madame wants me to leave Louis but I venture to say she does not realise what would happen…every day I say I will not stand any more but despite a heavy black eye etc, numerous bruises, many dreadful insults and locked doors and disturbances I cannot leave him…I have nothing to gain by staying but hunger and more difficulties and the dread of something even more frightening.41
After six months of this, Louis caved in and went to see René in Strasbourg. He now had “nothing, nothing, nothing.” Before his final submission he tried once more:
For a long time Maman set out t
wo assumptions, which despite all appearances are false, i.e.
1. Sandra is responsible for everything that has happened, happens or will happen 2. Louis is ready to leave her in one way or another.
On this basis, on my first return to Paris, I had to listen to inhumane solutions that the greatest wretches would not be able to accept… and you…asked me yesterday; “Has Sandra left?” forgetting, no doubt, that having nothing to pay for her shoes, it would be difficult for me to pay for her passage to London.
But that is not the point—
The essential fact is that all these difficulties that I have undergone, undergo and will undergo are due to me, to my ideas, to my need to escape from the principles of a country where I cannot live—whatever have been the difficulties (for a long time so stressed by poverty together) that I have found in my marriage—it remains that I have found in it the only satisfactions that I have known in my life. There is nothing of a genital nature in this—(another of the stupid and gratuitous hypotheses of Maman)—it is of the most profound spiritual nature—so much so that if I sacrificed it I would lose my reason for living…42
Louis refused to give up Sandra; returning to live in France would be moral suicide. If his family declined to finance his literary career, he preferred to live in the gutter in London. This was his last sally. The family promised Myrtle £2 a week—over £100 a week today—to stay away from Louis.
Myrtle was “really very worried about him—he is so nervy and tired and bursts into tears at the slightest provocation. I cannot help but be frightened at his violence and I dread the thought of scandal and really Louis is completely impossible at present. He is quite broken and when I think and speak of leaving him he goes to pieces—I am really afraid how all this is going to end—hitting people in restaurants…It would be far from cricket to leave him when he is poor and miserable.”43
But she went. Louis wrote to René: “Sandra left yesterday—Do not forget her—and above all the blonde child who must be beginning to cry famine.”44
6
Shreds and Patches
AWARE THAT THE DARQUIER family “cordially dislike even the mention of my name,” Myrtle nevertheless told them that she knew “in her heart” that Louis would be a lost person without her, and he was.1 The rue la Boétie, in the 8th arrondissement, is home to a long corridor of hotels—the Rochester, Excelsior, d'Artois, La Boétie, d'Angleterre. Suitably near the Champs-élysées for Louis, as dismal today as they were then, with cheap rooms mouldering beneath the dull glare of angry flock wallpaper, these dubious hotels were home to Louis and Myrtle for most of the next decade.2
Louis spent much time in the bar of Le Select, around the corner on the Champs-élysées, where he wrote despondent letters to René. Within weeks of Myrtle's departure for London he fell sick in his “vile room” at the Hôtel Excelsior: “all is truly awful—you have separated me from the only being in the world who matters to me.”3 He did not care whether he lived or died. In that part of London which Myrtle could no longer frequent except to pick up her post, Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence were enchanting the world in Private Lives, and Al Bowlly was singing “Goodnight Sweetheart” at the Monseigneur. Within months, Myrtle's bank manager gave her the fare back to Paris to “see what René and Louis' friends could do.” Back with Louis, she dared not approach the Darquier parents, and so began to plead with René again, her letters lengthening as her shame grew: “Louis received your cheque for 300 francs—you will perhaps wonder why I am answering this letter considering I already know your intense dislike of me and all appertaining to me.” Their luggage had been seized by the hotel, they owed money in London, Louis could not pay the hotel bill in Paris and had only two shirts left. Myrtle complained that she had to “wash my lingerie and put it on next morning—also my stockings—I may tell you I have never before been used to that.”4
Myrtle wanted to take Louis back to England to write his novels, “not the career I would have chosen for him but if he makes even a moderate success we will all be so proud and happy.”5 Also, a Major Lawrence was presenting an opportunity, offering a cottage for Louis to write in, and was waiting for them in London.6 The Darquier family seems to have decided that Louis could not function without Myrtle; another start together in London was therefore to be financed. René provided the funds, but this time the money came not as a gift, but as an authorised loan. Myrtle insisted that Louis needed to be suitably dressed to meet his great new opportunity: “unfortunately Louis cannot emulate Ghandi [sic]”—Gandhi was in England in the autumn of 1931—“in clothing— such a pity as it would be so much more easy.”7 Louis felt the same:
As soon as I arrive in London I race to the tailor who there can deliver in three or four days—I prefer to buy everything there because it is better made and cheaper, I know it—However I look at it the total is the same
5000f or thereabouts for the hotel
3000f for Sandra (already committed!)
5000f—clothes, shirts, shoes etc for me
5000f—travel, pocket money for the future.
18.0008
Baby cost him, or rather should have cost him, five hundred francs— £175 in today's values—a month, half the average industrial wage in Britain at the time.
In October 1931, back in London, Myrtle thanked René profusely: “All I ask,” she wrote, “is for Louis to be a successful writer.” Louis promised nothing would be spent on anything else, and gave René his “word of honour…never to ask anything of you again.”9
In Oxfordshire, Elsie's sister Maud was working as a weekend cook for Sir George Schuster, a prominent company director, economist and government adviser. The first photos of Anne are as a bonneted baby sitting in the palatial grounds of the Schuster estate at Nether Worton, near Duns Tew. Initially Louis erroneously assessed Elsie as “not very demanding usually as to the regularity of her payments.”10 Elsie was more intelligent. She knew early on that, aristocrat or not, he was no better than he should be. Between themselves Elsie and Maud “always thought he was a wrong'un and a swine for abandoning Anne: a swine AND a Baron.”11
But for them, as for Louise Darquier, it was Myrtle who was really beyond the pale. Myrtle's view of Elsie as “a good honest woman” who “does not bother me till she cannot go on any longer”12 did not fit at all with Elsie's view of herself. As a children's nurse, she had lived in the aristocratic world to which Myrtle and Louis only aspired. Though Myrtle considered Elsie to be “only a poor working woman,” those she lived amongst considered her “a superior person,” “upper class,” and she was treated as such by the country folk she knew. “She liked being above herself,”13 just as Myrtle did.
In the Tews, those who knew Elsie in those days loved her. “She was a fine person” and “could see the funny side of things.” She amused them with her sense of humour, her sharp tongue and her anecdotes. Elsie was a goer, a positive person with a mind of her own—“Anne could not have had a better person to look after her”14—and what she wanted for Anne, she would get. Elsie loved her Baby, but she wanted the money too.
Myrtle saw Elsie as a woman of the lower classes who “adores Baby and nobody else would look after her as she does and for little more than the milk bill,”15 but Myrtle's tactlessness, as with the Parisian Darquiers, seems to have enabled Elsie to see through her immediately. As Anne was just beginning to walk, Myrtle was buying herself clothes in London; no matter how often France and Tasmania sent money “for Baby,” Myrtle's allowance seldom made its way to Duns Tew, and came to Elsie, if at all, months in arrears.
The kind of hotel the Baron and Baroness returned to in London in 1931 had no stationery of its own, and no telephones either. Thomas Cook in Berkeley Street and American Express in Haymarket were their post offices, while in their room Louis wrote on and on, from 9 a.m. to two in the morning, or so he said. Fuelled by his great belief that he possessed “the sacred fire,”16 Louis longed for recognition: “I follow a hard road, perhaps a long one, but wh
ich is the only possibility for me, and in which I am practically sure of success.”17 “I am tired of this existence but I feel sure he will forge ahead slowly,” said Myrtle, adding, “I know he would make a success as a writer. He was born to be one.”18
Louis was happier with this new book than he had been with False Gods—rejected and so now forgotten. In addition he produced some “soldiers' stories” which he fired off for publication in Australia. This time he was writing only for the public; he was trying to produce a best seller. Until his new clothes became “too shabby to go and see people,”19 he pursued publishers and titled persons—the Comte de Castellan (sic),20 a Mr. Magnus, Major Lawrence. All of them drifted into thin air. Louis and Myrtle gave up lunching; sometimes they had nothing to eat for days.
In 1931 Spain ejected its monarch, the Second Spanish Republic was declared and the Great Depression reached France. But nothing impinged much upon the Darquiers' closed world. In 1930, when Louis had been battling with Robinson to become a glorified car salesman, Oswald Mosley had left the Labour cabinet. In March 1931 he founded his New Party, and in August Ramsay MacDonald abandoned the Labour Party and formed a national government. The pound was devalued in September, and in October, just as Louis returned to London, MacDonald's national government won a landslide election and Mosley formally launched his British Union of Fascists.
Louis Darquier and Oswald Mosley were near-contemporaries; despite the resemblances between them—the strutting and fretting, the speechifying and fisticuffs, unquestioning, loyal and adoring wives— Louis Darquier made no contact with Mosley and his British fascists when living in London. He appears never to have mentioned Jews in these Depression years, though Myrtle often did. Comments such as “A Jew named Lang sent [Louis] to the film people and he has to go back there on Friday” (Louis was now attempting a film script); “that Jew told him last week he would do something he would regret if he were not more careful”; “even that Jew told him it was impossible and had quite a lot to say,”21 while unexceptional for the time, nevertheless make it clear why Myrtle had no trouble tolerating Louis' future activities.
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