Letter 14 is headed with its full date, 8 February 1934. “Thérèse Fould is by now really almost my greatest friend. She’s almost a Madame de Sévigné; brilliantly witty and quite delicious too. The awful thing is that I would quite as soon spend the rest of my life with her (no that’s not really true) as with Joan; and what makes it worse is that she is even richer prospectively. I seem only to take to the daughters of millionaires. They left today for Kitzbühel and I’m inconsolable – so much that after being up very late, I went out to Meidling this morning to have breakfast with them. But I suppose one ought not to marry a Jewess anyhow; especially if one is marrying someone else.” That letter’s envelope contains photographs of a group of eight, arms linked, Alan and Poppy among them, and both wearing Tracht, Austrian costume – for her, this was habitual, for him, fancy dress.
Semmering is on the outskirts of Vienna, with an architectural monstrosity, the Grand Hotel Panhans, at its centre. Alan had stayed there previously and since he returned to the hotel, revolution broke out in Vienna. The letter of 14 February told Vere that his flat was shut up with his passport inside and the servants away in the country. He could therefore not pass through checkpoints. Trapped in the hotel, he was watching from the window of his room troops and machine-guns moving down the road. Three days later he was back in Vienna in the Hotel Sacher. “Every few yards one is stopped for one’s passport, and there are bayonets on every street corner. I even saw a body in one of the main streets yesterday.” Alan had had a brush with the shelling of the Karl-Marx-Hof, a housing estate built to socialist designs and a landmark for tourists still today. This episode was immediately enshrined in the martyrology of the Left. In July the political situation deteriorated further when Nazis disguised in police uniforms stormed Dollfuss’s office and shot dead the Chancellor who might have held off Hitler and the Anschluss.
Marked “Private-ish,” a lengthy post-script to that same letter discussed what mattered to Alan far more than public events. One reason for staying on in Vienna, he confided, was to shirk the whole issue of Joan Eyres-Monsell. Also “A new complication. I find Thérèse Fould so enchanting.” Asking plaintively, “What am I to do?” he went on to remind his mother that she had heard Bobby talk about Baron Springer, “one of the great international bankers like the Rothschilds and the Schroeders” and also all about Mitzi and Frank Wooster. There were four Fould children – “as to being Jews I only meant that they are of Jewish extraction – but certainly have been Christian for three generations – nor was Fould a Jew at all!” (This deliberate lying has to be for fear of anti-Semitism at home.) “La baronne Thérèse and her sister are now with a governess at Kitzbühel – la baronne being about nineteen, and, as you guess, more than nice, as well as being extraordinarily intelligent in the most unassuming way, and very witty and natural. I can’t resist following them to Kitzbühel.”
Cameras were then novelties for the public at large, and a huge number of albums and wallets stuffed with snapshots evoke the life la baronne Thérèse, alias Poppy, was leading at that time. In the summer, she and her friends are photographed in bathing costumes at the edge of a lake or at the open-air tables of some Gasthaus. In the winter, she and the friends wear the thickest of jerseys as they sit again at open-air tables, only now in some ski resort. Healthy and happy, everyone seems to be laughing, on the best of terms with each other. Poppy is in the thick of it, and also in the photos is her sister Lily, younger by two years but as it were shadowing her. Hardly out of their teens, these all look like young and innocent beginners in flirtation.
Letter 17 on 19 February tells Vere that a telegram from Bobby invites Alan to meet him in Innsbruck, spend a few days in Monte Carlo and then go through Spain: “to be supported for four weeks free isn’t to be sneezed at.” Next day, Letter 18 is from the Hotel Tyrol in Innsbruck. Arturo Lopez, the supplier of heroin, was staying there.
I had the greatest trouble in concealing from the respectable that I also knew the unrespectable, and vice versa. However, the Foulds were charming, and nearly made me break my neck on skis…. This is a squalid and ill-à-propos moment to introduce the fact that you need have no worry about their income. Mitzi has been having a lawsuit with the Czech government for eighteen million; and has finally compromised, as she says, very badly. But as the Czech properties are only part of the whole and leave the Fould-Springer bank quite out of the question, she must have enough to go on with.
Mitzi and Frank went out of their way to be matchmakers. When Alan reached Paris, they and the girls were already there, and he could be impressed by the family’s possessions in France. “Yesterday we all went to Royaumont in the largest Rolls you ever saw,” he wrote home, “I feeling a little, well, a little – owing to having been induced the night before to join some people after dinner (not by Frank). And you know what that leads to.” The house was “miraculously beautiful,” built like an Italian palace. He admired the avenues of trees, the park with formal sheets of water set with islands. The afternoon was extraordinarily hot, and he spent it in a boat with Poppy and Lily. The others were “so unnecessarily nice that I’m sure, no I’m not, though, that they actually want me to marry Thérèse. But I must be wrong. Or has she said something? The awful thing is that I want to marry her. Then Joan – oh, it’s absolute hell.”
From Monte Carlo on what was to be their final journey together, Alan took Bobby out to Cap Ferrat to meet Somerset Maugham. By mid-March they were in Tangier, “horrible place. Unfortunately Bobby likes it.” Another candid postscript to a letter read, “I do wonder about these Foulds. Quite apart from anything else could one take on all that background of Rothschild cousins and Goldschmidt-Rothschilds and Kahns and Albus? Bobby, quite un-à-propos, said, ‘How pleased Mitzi would be if you could bring yourself to marry one of her daughters,’ and as she is almost his best friend I suppose he knows what he is talking about. I do know that she is particularly anxious for them all to marry Englishmen…. Also I know she likes me very much indeed – but; well, life is difficult, I’ve always heard.”
Somerset Maugham pursued them to Spain. Written in the Hotel Alhambra Palace in Granada, Letter 25 on 2 April relates that Maugham has a huge car and he and Alan have spent most of their days driving in it to obscure and beautiful places. He wanted to hurry back to Vienna to finish a book that promised to be twice as long as Anthony Adverse and would take him the rest of the summer (no trace survives). “Dare I hope that Bobby will pay my fare home?” he wondered.
In fact, he spent the rest of the summer courting Poppy. All his life he was to consult fortune-tellers, and one in Vienna wondered if he would find out how miserable he had made someone in England. Frank continued to encourage him. On a drive from Salzburg into Germany Frank without warning told Alan that he knew Thérèse was very fond of him, and Mitzi would be delighted to have him as a son-in-law. “It is rather exciting,” Alan concluded. In the photographs of that summer, he looks pleased with himself, a slim and attractive figure, the lederhosen showing off his legs and the white knee-socks that go with Tracht; and she in a dirndl, irresistibly pretty, doll-like as she turns her face up at his. Both were play-acting at being Austrian; otherwise they had nothing in common, not education, not religion or nationality, not experience, not even a mother tongue. Poppy and everyone in her world, even or sometimes especially the servants, were conditioned to believe that wealth and privilege must make everything come out for the best. She had no way of knowing how to judge Alan’s intentions or to find out why his friends were almost exclusively homosexual. No means either of knowing whether to take him on his own terms as someone with a genuine literary vocation. The one person in possession of all the facts about Alan was Frank, and he was not about to reveal secrets that compromised him. Poppy and her siblings talked among themselves rather bitterly about the relationship between Frank and Eugène; otherwise here was another classic example of the sexual innocence deemed at that time to be proper for well-brought-up girls. Jessie used to say tha
t one evening at Meidling she had found Poppy in tears. She must be pregnant, Poppy said, because Alan had kissed her on the lips. Many years later, Lily was putting her stamp on Royaumont, and made me open a trunk stored there with Poppy’s initials on it. We found it to contain those pre-war Austrian clothes. In the pocket of Alan’s lederhosen was a testimony of sorts, a contraceptive that had survived longer than the lovers who could perhaps have made use of it.
Another undated letter to Vere has to have been written as the moment of decision approached. Almost all of it is twisted or outright untrue, especially about Poppy’s appearance and her religion. “I thought I told you all the facts about Thérèse. She is a Roman Catholic, I imagine, and has neither American nor Hungarian blood in her veins. Her father was created Baron Fould. Thérèse is therefore half French, half Austrian. The Springers are, I’m sorry to say, Jews, and cousins of the Rothschilds, Goldsmids, Goldsmid-Rothschilds [properly Goldschmidt], etc, but really very very very nice.” Poppy was coming to Salzburg, “and there I can straighten things out finally.” Mitzi was “absolutely simple and uns-nobbish,” and so wouldn’t want the husbands of her daughters to have any money. “I’ve heard her say, ‘I’m so stupidly rich.’” Even if Poppy had £100 a year, he’d still want to marry her. “She’s got a comic little face, not in the least good-looking, but most awfully nice. Not much what you call ‘painted.’”
Early in September, Mitzi and Frank were visiting different villages in the Salzkammergut. Among guests at meals were Alan and Oswald Fordham, Mrs. Rodd (Nancy Mitford, had Mitz only known it), Baron Stiebel from Florence, and Erwein Gecman. On the morning of the 10th Alan told her that he was longing to ask Poppy to marry him; he was sure she would say no but might later change her mind. Mitzi had been expecting this for months, she acknowledged in her diary. After a serious talk with Alan, “we were both ever so pleased with each other!” That day, the girls and Jessie went to the Hotel Post at Ischl. Nearby, at Traunkirch on the Traunsee there is a tiny, very old chapel, and there on the 13th Alan proposed. By then, Mitzi and Frank were already away in Venice, where they went with clockwork punctuality at that time every year. In their hotel “there was a message, Mr Pryce and Mrs Jones have telephoned together.” Poppy rang again next day. “What a sweet, young, clever, commonsense, agreeable little couple they will make. They ought to have a lovely and interesting life,” commented a Mitzi delighted with the way things had worked out, and not failing to note two practical factors in favour of this marriage: Poppy would be acquiring a British passport and the sweet little couple’s wish to live in Meidling spared her the complication of getting money out of Austria.
Nanny Stainer was at Royaumont while her rival Jessie was being Poppy’s chaperone. The day after she became engaged, Poppy wrote to reassure her. “I knew always since the day I saw him in January in Vienna that I was in love with him but I never wanted to admit it to myself for I never dreamt he could be for me.” Just five days after he became engaged, Alan got down to brass tacks: “I want Thérèse to have about £1,500 a year, and for us both to have permission to live at Meidling. I could not bear to be quite dependent on my in-laws, and I know that the need to make some money without the danger of starvation if one does not (and consequent worry) is the best incentive to work. I am, after all, before everything a writer. I must write. And if we were really rich it would make it terribly hard to work properly. The urge for £100 just supplies the spur.”
A month later, on October 15, Alan was able to rejoice. “We are to have Meidling plus the two cars and about five servants. We shall only want a cook and a chauffeur-valet. Poppy is being given a maid, and we have one wing – with about four rooms, two bathrooms, and the big central hall of the house for a dining-room (Our living is practically free). We shall have about £2,000 a year, clear, and allowances for children if any.” The house was hideous but Poppy adored it, he told his mother, and the money would be enough “for us just to live on.”
A letter from the jilted Joan that November is brief: “I’m so sorry you find it impossible even to see me. I thought that we should remain friends which is all I want.”
NINE
The Only Duty
THE FIRST NIGHT of Alan and Poppy’s married life was spent in the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris. Next morning, Erwein Gecman came to breakfast with them – one of the young men in lederhosen and white stockings who featured in the holiday photographs, he made the most of his youthful good looks and title of Baron. The Hotel Quirinale in Rome, the Grand Bretagne in Athens, the Pera Park Hotel in Istanbul, Sofia – the honeymoon continued in the most luxurious style. “It is unlucky that we look so very very rich,” Alan pointed out with more pride than regret. “We arrive, with a mountain of luggage, in huge fur coats of obviously the best fur.”
At Meidling on 28 January 1935 he gave some glimpses of his new lifestyle to Patrick Kinross, his correspondent from former travels and his recent best man. After a grand ball in Athens, he wrote, they had taken a Turkish liner to Smyrna. Soldiers in the custom-house there had “arrested” (Alan’s word) a teddy bear of his, “a peaceable, non-political bear,” as well as a small glass elephant and an ever smaller fibre horse found in his dressing-case. “They made a hole in the bear’s arse, too, to see if he was carrying any heroin up it.” Exorbitant bribery was needed “to bail them all out.” In Istanbul, though, he had found much to admire. (In the market they bought an eighteenth-century timepiece with Arabic numerals that was an ornament in every house they were to live in; round and in a case, it was just too big for a hand or a pocket.)
“I wish you could have seen our arrival here,” he continued, pulling out the stops. “We were met at the station by the Director of the Fould-Springersche Verwaltung [Management], with a humbler director and a quite little director. They had roses tied up in gold ribbon and electrified the whole platform. At the lodge gates there was a great deal of hand-kissing, and bowing, and a few tears from the more emotional gardeners. In the hall, there was a line of elderly, very elderly servants, with more roses; and, on the gallery a great expanse of purple velvet, framed, to which were pinned crowns of gilded laurel, and an entire rose garden, crazily hung with gold cords and horseshoes. Here, the Director, bowing, left us; and the humbler directors scuttled about….” He insists that Patrick Kinross should come and stay. He could make the Connollys drive him out, or even Mitzi. “It was almost as much to be her son-in-law as to be Poppy’s husband, that I married the girl. That, by the way, could not possibly be going better. Not only are the mechanics of marriage most satisfactory, but we don’t bore each other; indeed, we find each other more and more interesting and self-sufficient, which is very gratifying.”
He was almost as exuberant to his parents. “You don’t know how nice it is to be well taken care of: to have one’s pyjamas ironed every evening, to have an office which automatically sends architects, electricians, gardeners, decorators, at one moment’s notice, cashes cheques and sends messengers out to one, pays bills without one knowing they exist, and says as Brüll [Dr Siegfried Brüll, in charge of the Verwaltung] did yesterday, ‘Votre seul devoir ici c’est de vivre bien.’” (Your only duty here is to live well.) Gusti was the head housemaid and Poppy had Mali, short for Amalia, to look after her. For the Opera Ball at the height of the season in Vienna, Franz the butler mounted a footman on the box “as we couldn’t go simply with a chauffeur.”
Twenty-Seven Poems, the dust-jacket as insipid as the title, was published by Heinemann in April 1935, three short months after the couple had settled into Meidling. Some of the poems had appeared previously in The London Mercury or the New Statesman. His itinerant life could be reconstructed from dates and place-names attached to many poems – Moustier-Sainte-Marie 1929, for instance, Belgrade 1930, St. Florent 1931. Allusive, composed of images rather than narrative, linguistic skill standing in for emotions, no scansion but rhymes and half-rhymes, the poems are very much the work of someone determined to prove that his literary taste has m
oved on from the Georgians of the previous generation and is properly à la page. “Perhaps Mr Pryce-Jones is worth watching after all,” ran the review in The London Mercury. Coming from a friendly source, Alan took this back-handed compliment as “the most wounding sentence I have ever read about myself.”
“I have already made my wife a present of my life; So, as I have nothing better to offer, she must expect things like this,” is the inscription he wrote for Poppy in her copy of the poems. For her twenty-first birthday on May 2, he gave her an unexpected diamond bracelet costing £300 – “which I have not got” – and they drank one of the last remaining bottles of 50-year-old Imperial Tokay which must once have been laid down by Baron Gustav. They had already forged pet names and terms of endearment for one another. Poppy called him Min; Alan called her Boule. Borrowing from Beatrix Potter, she signed her letters Pigling. Both sometimes started or ended letters with the drawing of a mouse. Their sheets were pink, with white mice embroidered on them as a monogram. As tokens of love, they were in the habit of personalizing gifts to one another by having these pet names engraved or stamped in their own handwriting on anything suitable such as photograph frames or leather wallets.
Soon after that birthday, still in May, they visited London, and out walking one afternoon there Poppy said she thought she was pregnant. She had been taken by surprise, she felt ill and foretold disaster, Alan writes, because “a child should be planned for, dreamed of, aspired to.” Seemingly no member of the family had told him that in childhood Poppy might sit on her bed and cry all night unaccountably and inconsolably. What they had become used to he was now to discover for himself. At Meidling again, and at night when she was tired, she would suddenly begin crying. “I have never known anybody with such wet tears: everything is soaked in a moment, and my pyjama jacket is glued to my chest – and then to be remorseful. ‘I’m horrible. I’m not worth your love.’” This was all for no reason, he speculated, unless she was feeling alone or frightened.
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