Letters from France are the letters to his mother of a very courageous soldier; he was awarded the MC and bar, and the DSO. They are extraordinarily brave letters simply because they hardly touch Lancelot Spicer’s actual experiences. He fought in the front line on and off for years and almost all his friends were killed, but apart from an occasional grumble about water filling the trenches, and sometimes the mention of the abomination of desolation which was no man’s land with its dead and dying, he spares his family as much as he possibly can. He never fails to pretend to be ‘cheery’, and even when he is wounded he feels perfectly well. He makes the very most of days ‘resting’ behind the lines in a cottage or farmhouse, though he is not particularly kind about ‘les chers alliés’. Understatement to this degree shows courage and thoughtfulness of a high order.
One of the vilest scourges of war in the trenches was the plague of rats which gorged on unburied corpses. There is a fearful description of them in Alistair Horne’s history of Verdun, The Price of Glory. Lancelot Spicer never mentions them, except that as well as asking his mother to send a cake for the men he also asks for a tin of rat poison. His letters are a brave attempt to spare his mother and his family so that they might go on believing in ‘Tommy’ as ‘a character like a nice big fighting pet bear with an incurable yearning and whining for cheap cigarettes’ in Charles Sorley’s words. Possibly he partly succeeded.
The Hungry Ones is a book by another brave young officer who also survived Ypres, Loos and the Somme: C.P. Clayton. It is described as his ‘edited diaries’, the editor being his son, born after the war. If it was indeed written as a diary it is a pity that it could not have been published as such, which would have given it much greater interest and immediacy. Whether it was C.P. Clayton or his editor son who wrote in the historic present, it is a tiresome way of writing. This rather shapeless account of the ghastly war will appeal to those who enjoy reading about war, and as publishers’ lists bear witness, there are plenty of them.
Strangely enough both Lancelot Spicer and C.P. Clayton describe having white feathers pinned on them by mad old ladies in London; Clayton just after being decorated at Buckingham Palace when he had changed into civilian clothes to go on to a play. These pestilential women patriots did not re-emerge during the second war.
The Literature of War is very well done; it begins with Kipling and ends with John Le Carré’s cold war spies. Only English writers are discussed, there is no Tolstoy, no Stendhal, no Solzhenitsyn. Andrew Rutherford is an admirer of Evelyn Waugh’s three novels, Sword of Honour, far the most brilliant book to come out of the Second World War. There is a chapter on T.E. Lawrence and Seven Pillars of Wisdom, once so extravagantly praised. Mr Rutherford seems to accept Lawrence’s book as a truthful account of his part in the ‘revolt in the desert’. Not that it greatly matters whether it was true. It made a contrast with Flanders mud, and as such it was acclaimed. Lawrence’s description of how he killed a ‘mutineer’, quoted by Andrew Rutherford, is not very attractive, but then like so much that he wrote the episode was most likely a figment of his imagination; whether that makes it any more attractive is for the reader to judge. In any case the literature of war is not necessarily the history of war.
The Literature of War, Rutherford, A.; Letters from France 1915-18, Spicer, L.D.; The Hungry Ones, Clayton, C.P., ed. Clayton, M. Books and Bookmen (1979)
The Adorable Duchesses
Beautiful, charming, high-spirited and affectionate, a loving sister and a perfect friend, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was not a perfect wife. She was a compulsive gambler, her debts multiplied year by year until their burden crushed her. She never dared tell the Duke how much she owed, so that though from time to time he paid up, or partly paid up, she was never free from debt. Mr Coutts the banker was dazzled by her charm and prestige, but although he had three daughters to marry and saw what a help it would be if the Duchess would give them a little push, even he jibbed at the size of the loans she asked him for and the fact that the Duke brushed aside his requests that at least the interest on the loans should be paid.
In another way, too, the Duchess seemed as if she might fail as a wife, though this was not her fault. The Devonshires were married in 1774 when the Duke was 25 and Lady Georgiana Spencer 16. Eight years later she had had a couple of miscarriages but no child.
In 1782 Lady Elizabeth Foster came into their lives. The daughter of Lord Bristol, Bishop of Derry, she had left Mr Foster by whom she had two sons; she was on her own and very short of money. For the Devonshires it was the coup de foudre. The Duke, hitherto considered rather cold and lethargic, became a new man. He flirted with Lady Elizabeth, he made jokes and was agreeable to everyone. Georgiana loved her not only for herself but because through her the Duke had become approachable. With Lady Liz as go-between life was in every way easier for the Duchess.
Inevitably there was gossip about grand people who lived in a goldfish bowl, and when the Duchess became pregnant it was thought wise that Lady Liz should go abroad for a while. She took the Duke’s natural daughter by a Miss Spencer, a little girl of seven, with her, and she also took letters of introduction to Queen Marie Antoinette and Mme de Polignac. The Devonshires and Lady Elizabeth corresponded, and she kept a diary, which is why so much is known about ‘Canis’ the Duke, ‘Mrs Rat’ the Duchess and ‘Racoon’, or Bess, Lady Elizabeth Foster. The Duchess wrote to her: ‘God bless you my angel love, I adore and love you beyond description, Canis sends a thousand loves’.
Lady Liz was a fatal charmer, adored and courted, and she did not waste her journey. Kings and Queens, at Versailles, Turin and Naples, received her with kindness, and she had a devoted admirer in Count Axel Fersen. She was having such a lovely time that she lingered in Naples long after the Duchess’s daughter was born. Canis implored her to return. He had gone back to Bath for his gout.
‘This place has been very unpleasant to me compared with what it was a year and a half ago. For then I had the Rat and Bess and good health and fine weather, and now I have none of them till a day or two ago the Rat and her young one came down here.’
Three months later Georgiana wrote, saying: ‘As much as I long to see you it is not for me I write. I am certain poor Canis’s health and spirits depend upon your soothing friendship’. Could Bess not spend the summer with them at Chatsworth? She could go abroad again for the winter. The Racoon gave in; she left Naples, and in Switzerland on her way home Gibbon described her in a letter to Lady Sheffield as ‘poorly in health but still adorable.’
Did anyone dislike Lady Liz? Lady Spencer abominated her; she feared for her daughter’s marriage. Many years later, Georgiana’s daughters disliked her, and they said she was affected. This was obviously jealousy, both their parents being besotted by her. On the other hand Georgiana’s sister, Lady Bessborough, loved her all her life.
Next time the Duchess became pregnant Lady Elizabeth did so too. Their daughters were born within a month of each other, but the circumstances were very different. Appearances had to be kept up, and the unfortunate Lady Liz had to hide herself and her baby. She went to a frightful flea-ridden hole in southern Italy for the birth, helped by her brother, Lord Hervey. She called the child Caroline St Jules and put it out to nurse. Thenceforward her one idea was to get little Caro into the Devonshire House nursery to be brought up with the Duke’s legitimate children. Lady Elizabeth also had a son by the Duke; they called him Augustus Clifford and he became a distinguished Admiral. It was odd to give him the name Augustus since one of Lady Liz’s sons by Foster had that name already.
When the Duchess was expecting her third child she was afraid her money worries might make her miscarry, so she fell in with Bess’s idea that the baby should be born abroad. Undeterred by the French Revolution, which had begun in July 1789, the Devonshires, their daughters, the Duchess’s sister and brother-in-law, accompanied of course by Lady Elizabeth Foster, all gathered at Spa, and Brussels, and finally went to Paris, where in May 1790 Georgiana gave birth t
o a son, Lord Hartington, always called Hart.
Back in England after this triumph, she was faced once more with her creditors. She totted up her debts, they came to £61,000. Worse still, she fell in love with a younger man, Charles Grey, future Lord Grey of the Reform Bill. Soon she was expecting his baby. The Duke was furious, and insisted that she leave England. On her way to the coast she was forbidden to stay at Devonshire House or at Chiswick. This makes it clear that had she produced a boy the Duke would have divorced her. He would have considered it dishonest to his brother that in the event of Hartington dying childless, Grey’s son should inherit everything. Considerations of this sort did not prevent the ladies, Georgiana, her sister and mother, and Lady Elizabeth, who had all gone to France to be with her during this difficult time, from reviling the Duke. Bess said he was a brute and a beast. Fortunately the child, born at Montpellier, was a girl, ‘Eliza Courtney’; the Greys adopted her.
When Georgiana returned to England from her two years exile little Hart did not recognise her at first, but he soon grew to love her. Lady Liz brought Caro St Jules with her, she was supposed to be a French refugee. Aristocrats were flocking to England; in 1793 France was gripped by the Terror. The Duke adored Caro St Jules, who was the prettiest little girl ever seen, and once, when the news was grim and he thought she might be in danger from the Paris mob, he had openly wept.
There were now huge house parties at Chatsworth, and great celebrations for the wedding of the elder daughter, but from this time on beautiful, generous Georgiana was never quite well. She had blinding headaches, she lost the sight of one eye, she suffered agonies from stone in the kidney. The treatment of illness in those days involved frightful barbarities from the doctors, which the Duchess endured with great courage.
She died in 1806, and fairly soon afterwards the Duke married Lady Elizabeth. She outlived him for many years, and when in 1824 she was dying in Rome the devoted Hart, now sixth Duke of Devonshire, hurried out from England and knelt at her bedside. Hart combined his mother’s loving, generous nature with his father’s cool intelligence. Known to history as the Bachelor Duke, it is possible to imagine that he had seen too much of the vagaries of married people to wish to marry himself.
The complicated loves and the children, legitimate and illegitimate, of the Devonshire House circles are described in detail by Arthur Calder-Marshall. His theory, that but for Lady Elizabeth Foster the Duchess would have remained childless, may be true.
Politics (except for the famous Westminster election in which Georgiana and her sister canvassed so boldly for Charles James Fox) are not much mentioned. As Whigs, the Devonshires were inclined to view the French Revolution in an almost indulgent way, although they had been well received at Versailles by Marie Antoinette, Mrs Brown as they called her. A friend of theirs writing to Georgiana described the Queen: ‘… she is one of the most disagreeable looking women in the world, as I always imagined her one of the worst.’ Compare this with Edmund Burke who also saw her: ‘Surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision… glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy.’ Notabilities are never seen by their contemporaries except through the eyes of political prejudice.
Revolution or no revolution, when a love child was to be born they went to France. Georgiana’s daughter by Grey was born in 1793, the year when the King of France was beheaded. (One of those who voted for his death was Philippe Egalité, Duke of Orleans. Mr Calder-Marshall says he was the King’s brother, which makes him even more odious than he was. In fact he was the King’s fourth cousin once removed.)
It is not correct to refer to Georgiana as the fifth Duchess of Devonshire. Supposing four dukes in a row each married twice (and many a modern duke has had three wives) would the second wife of the fourth duke be the eighth duchess? Of course not. She would be the second wife of the fourth duke. Such details do not detract from the interest and amusement of The Two Duchesses. Both ladies were legends in their own lifetime, exceptional in their beauty and charm, as all can see in their portraits by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Angelica Kaufmann and other artists. There is a picture of Georgiana as the moon goddess by Marie Cosway in which her face is much finer and lovelier than in the more famous Reynolds. Hart said this was the best likeness of his mother ever painted.
When he was quite old, Lord Melbourne, prime minister, describing what a great character his mother, the celebrated Lady Melbourne, had been, added: ‘But she was not chaste’! He might have said the same of his mother-in-law Lady Bessborough, and of her sister Georgiana, and of their bosom friend Lady Elizabeth, second wife of the fifth Duke of Devonshire.
The Two Duchesses, Calder-Marshall, A. Books and Bookmen (1978)
The Lives of Others
Joe Kennedy
This is a hatchet job on the father of President Kennedy, but the axe falls on America itself. Is the story true? Who knows.
Joe is lunching with Cardinal Spellman: ‘I just bought a horse for $75,000, and for another $75,000 I put Jack on the cover of Time.’ The Cardinal’s comment, if any, is not recorded. His nephew was present, and told the author. Joe Kennedy was very ambitious, and at one time hoped to be President himself, but Roosevelt appointed him ambassador to Great Britain, to get him out of Washington. He hoped at the same time to annoy, by sending such a very Irish American to England, but in fact Joe Kennedy became a popular figure in pre-war London, with his charming smile and large family.
He firmly believed money is power, and he amassed a huge fortune. He was clever about money, selling all his stocks and shares just before the crash in 1929, to buy back later.
If he could not be President himself, he determined his sons should succeed. In Jack he had a perfect candidate, handsome, charming, and a war hero. He organized the campaign in detail, but never appeared with his son in public. The ‘image’ is so important, and by 1960 Joe’s image was not the brightest. He is supposed to have said, ‘I’ll pay for a win but not for a landslide,’ and a narrow win is what he got.
After his well-known affair with the actress Gloria Swanson, Janet Des Rosiers was Joe’s mistress for nine years. She speaks well of him: affectionate, thoughtful, generous, according to her, and she probably knew him better than anyone. He was clever, energetic, untiring and devoted to his family.
After his great triumph of getting his son into the White House things went desperately wrong for Joe Kennedy. He had a stroke which left him speechless until he died. Two of his favourite children had been killed long before in aeroplane crashes; now he had to endure the assassination of first Jack, then Bobby. Each time he was told the terrible news he sat in bed, tears streaming down his cheeks. He must have been in an agony of frustration as well as sorrow; the only word he could say was a loud ‘no’ whenever his wife Rose appeared in the doorway of his room, and he waved her away.
For such an executive man, accustomed to running manifold businesses, as well as everything connected with his children, loss of the faculty of speech must have been enough purgatory to cancel out any number of sins.
The Sins of the Father: Joseph Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, Kessler, R. Evening Standard (1996)
A Riot of Fun
‘I think you’re the most American American I’ve ever met,’ said the Foreign Minister to Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam; and the same could very well have been said to William Randolph Hearst. He was the European’s idea of an American—not the typical American, because to be the multi-millionaire owner of the world’s biggest chain of newspapers could not he said to be typical of anything, but rather the personification of what, presumably, the typical American aspires to be.
Business, success, money; with a glorious background of swimming pools, film actresses, Gothic banqueting halls, Arabian Nights palaces stocked with the Best Art that Money Can Buy, (this reverence for Art is a very touching American trait); it was glamour, glamour all the way.
What else can money buy? Why, power of cou
rse. It is no fun possessing more displaced Spanish monasteries, more square miles of California, more tapestries, silver, wild animals, Old Masters, Cadillacs, Tanagra figures and apartment buildings than anyone else if you cannot influence affairs and mould history.
Here is where the newspapers were supposed to come in. Hearst’s genius for knowing what the public wants to read—sex, crime and comic strips—gained his papers their vast circulation and made him richer year by year. Money is power, and newspapers form public opinion.
Hearst was ambitious. He wanted to be Governor of New York and he hoped to be President; he also had causes he wished to promote (crusades as he called them). He spent millions of dollars, the presses poured out millions of gallons of printers’ ink, on these crusades and on recommending W.R. to an ever-growing number of his fellow citizens. What a shop-window! America’s biggest—the world’s biggest. Everything about him the biggest in the world. And his political campaigns the world’s biggest flop. Not only could he not put himself over, even his backing was fatal. To be supported by his newspapers was a disaster dreaded by politicians both Republican and Democratic. ‘The professionals… wanted no more to do with him, since his touch was fatal to a candidate,’ his biographer writes. His political power was a minus quantity.
For, incomprehensible though it must have been to him, even though x million families bought his papers daily through the length and breadth of the States and thoroughly enjoyed the comic strips and stories of sex and violence, and even (possibly) spared a glance for the carefully chosen political news and the inspired leaders composed with words of one syllable in sentences of not more than five words, this did not mean that x million men and women paid the least attention to what they had read (or skipped) when the time came for them to cast a vote. It almost seemed as though the mere fact of being invited to vote one way, the invitation cunningly sandwiched between a delectable rape and a coloured comic strip, was enough to make them do the opposite. It was very perverse of them. Could it have been that they distinguished what was serious and important to them from what it amused them to look at as they travelled to work?
The Pursuit of Laughter Page 40