Very often a curé came to luncheon; there was a little chapel in the park where Mme Costa spent hours on her knees, praying. She confessed and communicated daily. The curé was such a friend that one day after a copious luncheon they boldly asked him: ‘What on earth does Mme Costa find to tell you in the way of sins?’ Good, kind old lady that she was, always shelling out money for church charities and praying half the day. The curé replied: ‘Oh, c’est toujours la même chose. J’ai été odieuse avec les invités’ [I have been odious to my guests].
Although this was untrue, there is no doubt that she sometimes joined forces with Nancy in teasing Mrs Hammersley. ‘Jeanne and Nancy flatter each other outrageously,’ she once wrote rather crossly. There may even have been moments when she regretted having brought them together. On the whole, however, the autumns at Fontaine-les-Nonnes were an idyll.
Mme Costa’s grandchildren, Jean and Marie-Zéphyre, spent most of their holidays there. One day, when M l’Abbé, headmaster of Jean’s school, came to talk to his grandmother, Jean guessed (rightly) that he would be the subject of their conversation, and he made arrangements accordingly. At 3.00 a.m. a lady guest who was crossing the passage to her bathroom was astonished to hear Mme Costa’s voice, and then a man’s voice, coming loud and clear from the attic. It was Jean’s tape recorder, an invention which has proved a boon to eaves-droppers.
Kit and I often went over to Fontaine for luncheon, and he used to say, ‘Try and make it a Friday.’ Naturally in such a pious household Friday was fish day, and the fishes and sauces Mme Costa provided were, if possible, even more delicious than the fare on the other six days when there was no fasting.
Besides the money tease, Nancy had another way of annoying Mrs Hammersley. It was connected with politics. As usual, the world was in turmoil. In the 50s, the war in Indo-China, then the war in Algeria, were painful for nearly every French family, and yet the bien-pensant denizens of Fontaine wanted at all costs to cling to this ‘French department’ as Algeria was called. Nancy made sorties to Paris from time to time, and usually saw Gaston Palewski, or Gladwyn Jebb [the English Ambassador], or somebody who might be supposed to be in the know or at any rate to provide titbits not found in the newspapers. Mrs Hammersley waited impatiently for her return; she longed to hear what was being said in political circles. ‘What does Gaston think of the situation?’ (It might be war, or strikes, or a threatened devaluation; whatever it was Mrs Hammersley herself could be guaranteed to take the most pessimistic view.) Nancy’s answer was always the same: ‘Oh, he thinks everything’s perfect. He screamed with laughter,’ and so forth. However familiar Mrs Hammersley became with this particular tease, however aware that of course Nancy’s account of what she had heard in Paris was very far from the truth, it never failed in its object. ‘Nancy has been her wicked little self,’ she wrote to me. They loved each other, but Nancy could never resist the temptation to plant a dart. After a groan or two, however, they settled down to their bridge, looking forward to dinner.
Sometimes Mrs Hammersley came to us for a few days at the Temple in Orsay; Kit was always pleased to see her, just as he had been at Wootton twenty five years before. She and I, as always, discussed our friends and relations at length, each in turn. The agonized anxieties once lavished upon her children were now transferred to her grandchildren, though she could find little to worry about in Monica’s large and thriving family. She was interested in every detail of the lives of friends, or the children of friends. She was getting deaf, and wore an ‘aid’ on a ribbon round her neck; it had a wheel which she twirled frantically if she thought something spicy might be coming up. Bad news she relished, and once when a friend of ours married a young man who was clever, rich, and handsome, she asked how they were getting on. ‘Oh, very well,’ was greeted with silence. Then she said, with great emphasis: ‘Somehow one had hoped they’d be so unhappy!’ Her hope was realized; there was a divorce soon after. The words ‘somehow one had hoped’ passed into our language, and also into hers. I found a letter in which, referring to a royal marriage, she says: ‘We mustn’t say Somehow one’d hoped.’ Perhaps she was mellowing with age.
I see from her letters that Nancy was not the only one who teased Mrs Hammersley. After the war, when the English ‘intellectuals’ hurried over to Paris in droves, they seem to have bored their French counterparts with excessive adulation. There was a story at the time that Jean Cocteau had turned on Raymond Mortimer, saying: ‘Allez-vous-en, affreuse bergère.’ [On your way, horrible shepherdess.] Raymond, a good critic and agreeable man, had a rather absurd side, one could very well imagine his unfortunate curls under the bonnet of a shepherdess. He was a friend of Mrs Ham’s and I must have passed on this tale; at least I can think of no other reason for the letter I received. She wrote:
Darling Diana,
Long have I feared I was nourishing a viper in my desiccated bosom. But a nest of vipers!!! So sweet and charming, so lovely and benign seemingly. ‘How charming Lady Mosley is, I wish I could have stayed’ said Mrs Oglander*. A nest of vipers; the Mitford sisters.
* Mrs Aspinall Oglander, a great friend and neighbour of Mrs Hammersley in the Isle of Wight.
She goes on:
I dearly wish you were sitting here for a chat, though I suppose it would have ended with a back chat and scoffing….
Sometimes she referred to us as ‘the horror sisters’, and once she wrote:
Darling:
You tell Nancy I’ve dropped you. Have I ever dropped you? I tell Nancy that you and she have come full turn to being one—in politics, you sisters love dictators. I don’t. Anyhow I’m much too feeble just now to hold anyone so I can’t drop them. They can drop me. Please don’t. I still sit cramped in my chair staring at the snow and the dying birds.
She heartily disliked and disapproved of de Gaulle, a cause of friction with Nancy, and wrote triumphantly of a bishop she met at Mme Costa’s who told her he was the devil incarnate.
Much as I loved her, I sometimes dodged Mrs Hammersley. Unless one had plenty of time to spare, it was worse than useless to get in touch with her. She wrote at the end of 1961:
Where is Debo? Silence de glace a mon égard. Have you joined the Horror Sisters? Et tu Brute? All the promises of a visit, all come to nought. You creep silently over from Paris, and hope I shall not get to know. But you betrayed yourself in the Daily Tel… [how? a letter perhaps]. Well well, I don’t much wonder considering the floods and hurricanes and cold and wet.
Did Muv tell you my friends have forced me to come to London Jan 1st for six weeks (they have not offered to pay) so I go to the Adria Hotel from Chatsworth (DV) on 1st. Now don’t tell me you won’t be in London. Fond love all the same,
Mrs Ham
We were in London during the winter of 1961; Mrs Hammersley was now 84. She wrote:
Have you forgotten you said you’d come down for a few days? Or is the weather too daunting—too much like the end of the world, which I constantly think of, as the coast crumbles and erodes, trees are hurled down, my hedge breaks up and the heart sinks… I think Sowing [Leonard Woolf] the best of all those numberless autobiographies.
Another time she wrote: ‘Please come here in the New Year, or will the bomb have fallen?’
It was not easy for me to get away, although I very much wanted to see her, and no doubt wrote saying: ‘I die for you.’ A postcard came: ‘If you really died for me, or w’d my b, you’d come.’ Elizabeth Winn, a great friend of Debo’s and much loved by Mrs Ham, was once heard addressing her dog with the words: ‘I worship your body.’ This expression was taken on by Debo, and applied to people, animals and inanimate objects she happened to like. I once heard her say, ‘Oh! that chintz! I worship its body.’ Probably now that the liturgy has been changed and everything with the savour of the seventeenth century removed, young people will not recognize body-worshipping as having been part of the marriage service. In any case, Mrs Hammersley said if I really died for her and w’d her b, I would go down to t
he Isle of Wight. I went, and very delightful it was. Delicious food, pretty house, windy walks along what she insisted was the crumbling coast—rather unexpectedly, even in old age she was a great walker. And then the joys of the ‘chat’.
My poor mother had Parkinson’s disease, and Mrs Hammersley, though genuinely sorry, could not resist saying: ‘What about the good body now?’ Muv had been used to dismiss doctors in a rather airy way, saying the good body would cure itself. She would never have written: ‘My health is precarious nowadays, despite Nancy’s gibes, and I have to take care and not get tired. Fond love always, Mrs Ham.’
In one of her last letters, in January 1963, she says: ‘lf you love me at all, let alone W my B you will write to me again. Letters alone sustain me…’
There is no cure for old age, and my mother and Mrs Hammersley, friends for sixty five years, died within a few months of one another. Hers was the charm of sharp intelligence, wonderful elegance, and a real and deep interest in every aspect of the lives of her friends. This interest was also lavished upon small children, who loved her accordingly as she loved them. When Debo’s son was three, Mrs Hammersley said: I suppose you realize he’s at the very zenith of his sweetness.’ There was a song she had composed for her own children when they were little; she played and sang in her rather husky voice. The last line was: ‘How I shall miss you, when you are grown!’ She sang it to us, and then a generation later to my little boys. The poignancy and truth of the words only struck me, painfully, when I was myself old, and my children ‘grown’.
Towards the end, Rosamond Lehmann had built a house near Mrs Hammersley at Totland Bay; having her, whom she had known as a child, nearby was a great comfort. Christopher says that for his mother Rosamond was, in every sense of the word, her closest friend during those last months. She died in her eighty seventh year.
Lytton Strachey & Carrington
I was 18 when I first met Lytton Strachey in 1929, and 21 when he died at the age of 51. To my present aged self 51 sounds quite young, and yet I always thought of him during our friendship as an old man. In the early days he complained in a letter to Roger Senhouse [his passion of the moment] that I was ‘probably too young to provide any real sustenance’. However youth’s a stuff will not endure, and partly because of him I grew up quickly.
He was a hero to our generation as author of the wittiest books. After his death he was scolded by his less brilliant successors in the art of biography for having made fun of great figures of the past. He was said to have ‘de-bunked’ them, and even to have twisted the truth in order to further his devilish denigrations. In fact, his eminent Victorians (for it is his essays about them which are the principal target of the anti-Strachey school) leave the reader with profound admiration for Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, and General ‘Chinese’ Gordon. Dr Arnold is another matter. Had they met, he and Strachey would have loathed one another, and perhaps it is a mistake to write about someone so thoroughly disliked. As to Queen Victoria herself, she is an authentic heroine to Lytton Strachey, though (like Disraeli) he could not help seeing the comic side.
When Bertrand Russell read Eminent Victorians he was a prisoner in Brixton Gaol; it was during the First World War. His screams of laughter were so loud that, he says, one of the turnkeys came to remonstrate with him and to remind him that prison was a place of punishment. Similarly, when Queen Victoria’s great-grandson the Prince of Wales (Edward VIII) found, lying on a table at Philip Sassoon’s, Lytton’s book about his ancestress, he was convulsed with laughter the whole time he was reading it.
The oddities of the characters who make history are just as true and often as important as battles or Acts of Parliament or the ending of one reign and the beginning of the next. It is seldom, indeed, that even fairly solemn newspapers like The Times or the Guardian fail to provide subjects for laughter every day of the week, and so it has always been. The jokes and ironies in Strachey’s books help to underline the pathos which is also part of truth. His own view of history is explicit. In his opinion it is not a science but an art. Faced with an unwieldy accumulation of facts, only an artist can convert ‘this raw mass of grape juice into a subtle, splendid wine’.
Early in 1929 Emerald Cunard introduced me to him at the opera, where he was in her box, and at a supper party that she had afterwards we sat next to each other. I had longed to meet him, and having done so I clung to him tenaciously, inviting him to dinner, to luncheon, or for a chat by the fire in the afternoon. He always came, and enthralled us all by being so wonderfully, so exactly what we had imagined him to be: learned, rather intimidating, and brilliantly amusing.
By this time the Victorians and his teases were in the distant past, but the enormous success of the two books had changed his life because money was no longer a worry. He lived in modest comfort at Ham Spray, near Hungerford in Berkshire, and in London, and he could afford to go abroad from time to time. He reviewed when he chose to, and above all he could concentrate upon the period of history which puzzled and enthralled him: the sixteenth century. French literature was his passion. He was a natural teacher who liked to read aloud, which he did in the Strachey voice, but not with the shrieks and squeaks that added so much zest to his jokes in conversation.
Lytton had designed his own appearance. He was tall, lanky, delicate-looking, inclined to stoop, and he had an enormous nose. To balance the nose a moustache, which he grew as a young man, was inadequate; he decided upon a long and bushy beard, brown with reddish tints. Beards were much more uncommon in those days than they are now, or were in Victorian times. He could, therefore, never pass unnoticed in a crowd and was instantly recognized by nearly everyone. It is odd that such a fundamentally shy person should deliberately have drawn attention to himself in this way, but there is no doubt he transformed the curious physique bestowed upon him by nature into an artistic reconstruction of a patriarch or an early Christian saint. There is a mosaic in one of Constantinople’s Byzantine churches which could be a portrait of Lytton Strachey, as exactly like him as Lamb’s and Carrington’s pictures. He was almost beautiful, but it was a strange beauty wholly without sexual attraction. Since he was beguiled by a succession of seductive young men he suffered agonizing disappointments, some of which we know about—like his despair when Duncan Grant preferred Maynard Keynes to him. Ignorant of these dramas, I nevertheless instinctively knew his life was in this way unsatisfactory; it was quite obvious.
In 1930 I invited him to stay with my husband Bryan Guinness and me in Ireland, which was bold to the point of rashness, because the long and disagreeable journey it was in those days entailed a sea crossing, nearly always rough, in a boat with few comforts, and had to be followed by a rather lengthy visit if it was going to be considered worthwhile. The whole outing started disastrously because, owing to a muddle, ‘owing to the incompetence of the idle rich’ was Lytton’s description in a letter to a friend), he was not met, and was obliged to get into an uncomfortable train and then take a taxi which got lost, ‘the rain all the time pouring cats and dogs’.
It is dreadful to contemplate what Lytton’s feelings must have been when no welcoming chauffeur appeared on the quayside at Dublin. I am sure I was contrite, but until I read his letter about it almost forty years later I had entirely forgotten that his visit began in this inauspicious way. His journey back was perfect. He took a cabin with no porthole so that he could not see the rocking of the ship and arrived at Holyhead ‘without a qualm’, he wrote.
Lytton had bought a new suit for Ireland, a tweed of a rich marmalade colour which set off his beard to perfection. He had discussed his packing with Carrington and decided to take full evening dress as well as his dinner jacket; rather lucky, as I am sorry to say we dragged him to an evening party at Government House, as the Viceregal Lodge was then called. Carrington wrote to him: ‘What wizards we are to have guessed there would be a Vice Regal Ball with white shirts!’ I expect he hoped to get out of it, but this I refused to allow. He was worth his weight i
n gold on such occasions, his presence keeping boredom at bay in even the most unpromising surroundings.
The only time during the visit that he resolutely refused to do what I asked was when he was expected to go to a play at the Abbey Theatre. We had already been to one play there, and it had been very dull. As I could see that Lytton was suffering we all left after the first act. When the programme changed (the Abbey was a repertory theatre, but there was a dread sameness about the plays) he simply refused to go. He hid behind his beard and spectacles, but his thoughts were easy to guess.
Henry Lamb, the painter, with whom he had been in love twenty years before and subsequently had a rather uneasy, quarrelsome relationship, was also staying in the house. I think they were quite glad to find each other, old friends, even old enemies, of the same vintage in a crowd of the very young. Among the guests was the clever, saturnine Henry Yorke [Henry Green, the novelist, then aged 24], who never forgot sitting next to Lytton at the deadly play, and how Lytton had whispered to him about one of the dreary characters: ‘I’m feeling rather low about Ignatius.’ When Strachey’s biographer, Michael Holroyd, asked many years later what Henry Yorke’s impression of him had been, he stressed his unfailing courtesy to us all. Naturally in his letters to friends a more critical, fiercer Lytton emerges, but he rather enjoyed the company of young people and basked in our admiration and our laughter at his jokes. He did not write, as he once did from Garsington, that he had been on the point of screaming from sheer despair. When one considers Lady Ottoline Morrell’s hospitality had saved him from the boredom and discomfort of his life as a young man among the crowd of Stracheys at home in Lancaster Gate, this fact alone—of the relative mildness of his complaints—shows the enormous change in Lytton and the extent to which success had mellowed him.
The Pursuit of Laughter Page 46