Poppy’s mental and physical condition had to accommodate plans. Salzburg was the place to be in August. Alan had arranged to meet there Evan Tredegar, his first love and now another of the visitors going native in Austrian costume. (In the summer of 1937, he took her to stay at Tredegar near Cardiff. Another guest was H.G. Wells who invited Poppy to row him on the lake while he corrected the proofs of his new book. In the boat he made a pass at her. Grabbing the proofs, she threatened to throw them into the water unless he stopped. He persisted; she threw.) They drove on into Germany, to a Kurhaus at Bad Reichenhall where another love, Bobby Pratt-Barlow, was staying. Poppy was suffering inexplicable pains. She might miscarry, Alan wrote to his mother, but there was a great specialist in the town who would advise whether to continue or return to Vienna. Changing the subject, he mentioned that Kenneth Rae, his previous publisher, had read the book of poems and his enthusiasm could be paraphrased: “Great as my admiration is for your earlier work, I never thought you capable…. [sic] Balm! Has anybody else reviewed my poems? I wouldn’t mind a few laurels there, because they are a much better lot than any of my prose.”
Towards the end of August, the first visit to Meidling of his parents and Adrian prompted some of the well-imagined observations that are the strongpoint of his style (the dots are his): “Papa’s cough … Not disagreeably thick, but uniquely caparisoned: a tasselled cough … Mama’s footstep, not exactly tired, but reticent, like a hall-clock ticking … Adrian’s slightly troubled air: the drawers don’t pull smoothly and the door handles, in his life, are too high.” Smothered by his parents and overshadowed by his elder brother, no wonder Adrian had a troubled air. But he was becoming an ice-skater at Olympic Games level, winning silver cups and gold medals. Photographs show him skating gracefully at St Moritz by himself or with Sonja Henie, the foremost skater of her time.
To Alan’s surprise, “Papa turns out to be such a very much nicer man than I had ever supposed, and Mama was divine.” One evening alone with his mother, “we really opened our feelings to one another.” On the same page of his diary he took stock of himself. “Too talented: too good at everything immediately. I could have been a notable dancer, painter, musician, artist of any kind. But, having no application, the thing would have stopped short at notability. I enjoy myself too much. After all, the consciousness of great powers is what one enjoys. That I have. The ability to exert them is another matter…. Contented, I love my wife. I like my books, food, wine, scenery. I enjoy being rich. I like being in a big car when others are on foot.” A letter of 25 October 1935 to Vere shows Alan in his element. “Our horse won the second biggest race of the year,” he rejoices. “We were quite beside ourselves, and led it in, and were congratulated by everyone, and quite lost our heads. I never thought I should live to see the day when a horse in which I had even the smallest interest would win a big race; and now of course, I think of nothing but racing.” He rounds the letter off with a caution: “There is no doubt the rich have little fun. The only thing to do is to try not to lose the riches.”
“My dearest Parents,” Poppy begins her letters to Harry and Vere. On September 29 she filled them in with some typical chat. The day after Harry and Vere had left, Max and Lily arrived. Off the four of them went to Piešt’any in Slovakia, where they were joined by Bubbles and Eduardo. Max had arranged a shoot on his property, Bucşani; Alan and Lily were proud of their shooting. “We bought lovely national costumes but had to have them made,” and also “We have all been sitting out in the park wearing our Tyrolean clothes for the last time this year.” Cyril and Jean Connolly had been to lunch; she had found them “rather extraordinary.” Reynaldo Hahn, the Argentine composer, was in Vienna (he and Alan seem to have collaborated but no trace remains of whatever this may have been). “Alan has begun to work again seriously, I am so pleased about that.”
Poppy must have taken a New Year’s resolution on January 1, 1936 to keep a so-called Year-by-Year Diary in which the record of each day has to be crammed into just four lines. She was receiving and answering lots of letters. She went into the city centre; she was at the Burg Theater (Molnar), the opera (The Flying Dutchman and The Tales of Hoffmann), and a concert with Furtwängler conducting. She went for walks in the snowy parks of Meidling and Schönbrunn. Alan was having lessons in Czech. Beverley Nichols, Peter and Joan Hesketh, and Billa Creswell, later married to the economist Sir Roy Harrod, came for meals. (With a finger Billa had once inscribed, “Alan is a pansy,” on his dusty car – “a tease and not a comment,” he said, presumably in the expectation that at least some readers would believe him.) Erwein Gecman, Desy Fürstenberg, Wolly Seybel a well-known wit, were rare Austrian guests. Many years later Kari Schwarzenberg, destined to be Václav Havel’s Foreign Minister, took me to dine with his parents in their family palais. I asked if they had been to Meidling before the war. Since they appeared not to have heard of the place, I mentioned Alan’s name. Shocked, Prince Schwarzenberg said, “Jones? Aber in England das ist sehr vulgaire” – which needs no translation. On February 14, the day before my birth, Poppy’s cheerful little entries stop, and the rest of that diary is blank.
“Il n’y a que les riches qui se font mal soigner,” the Fould-Springers liked to say about doctors – only the rich get themselves bad medical treatment. In the practice of that day a woman having a child was treated as an invalid. Primarius Fleischmann, the family doctor, ordered Poppy to stay in bed. Phlebitis developed. For the rest of her life her ankles remained distended. She who had climbed for reassurance into her father’s bed, or sat crying all night on her own bed, now on top of her physical condition had to endure her special form of post-natal depression. Sheets of paper survive on which she has scribbled with a pencil in letters sometimes at least an inch high, repetitively but incoherently protesting her love for Alan, begging to be forgiven for unspecified faults and pleading to be loved in return. Here was something kept secret from me. The first I heard of it was in 1987 when Alan published The Bonus of Laughter. He had not shown me the proofs, so the revelation on the page of the finished copy was all the more stark. Poppy, he says there, had been “gripped by some force outside her will.” As the years went by, “this would recur every few weeks.” This, he posited, was the same anguish that Virginia Woolf had suffered from. Reflecting about his wife’s case, Leonard Woolf had ascribed her death to “loss of control over her mind.” The inference is that Poppy too might one day have committed suicide. Now and again I did find her crying, but for real reasons that had nothing to do with supposed mental confusion.
At Meidling she wrote at some length to Vere on 18 April, complimenting her as “my one and only true Mummy.” Apparently under the impression that she might die, she goes on, “With all my courage and God’s help I am struggling to win a very hard battle against my end. I am living in perpetual anguish, every day worse, not so for myself but for my adored Alan and my precious David, but if ever God did call me back to him, I know you would be the only one to really help him and understand him and love him as I do.” And then, “I suffer much more mental than physical pain.”
For the remainder of the year, Poppy was in a specialized clinic at Malmaison, outside Paris. I spent my first few months at Royaumont. Miss Cutmore, otherwise Cutty, took care of me. She is remembered for saying as tea was being served on the terrace, “Who would have thought a year ago when I was looking after little Prince Dietrichstein that today I would have a little commoner.” Writing from the clinic, Poppy continued to convey unhappiness without explanation or insight into the cause of it. An undated letter from that time again appeals to her mother-in-law rather than her mother. “I have been wanting to write to you since days but I have been feeling so much worse again that I couldn’t. I really begin to absolutely despair of ever getting any better! Alan is more and more wonderful, patient and adorable and it absolutely breaks my heart to make him so miserable. I think his book is brilliant, and so exactly like him and all the descriptions and summaries make me know and u
nderstand him even better and remind me of some of the many happy days in the past. I sometimes hardly recognize myself. I have become horrible not only in looks but specially in mind! Please, darling Mama, help me. I need so much help to give me more courage. I feel I can’t live here among much madness, doctors and nurses any longer and yet I know I can’t either live with those I love! It is all so terrible and so dreadfully long. If only I could sleep a little and sometimes forget. I have lost continually confidence in everything and which is worst of all I don’t believe any doctor because I see that there is not the slightest progress in my condition since two months. Please write to me, Mama darling, and give me courage.” She signed, “Your very sad Poppy.”
In another letter to Vere on 3 September she is still rehearsing her self-reproaches. “My son came to see me, he is lovely and so very sun-burnt which makes his blue eyes seem bluer than ever. I went for a little drive with Alan, it was a real treat to leave this horrid place for a hour. I haven’t slept more than five minutes since a few days, but I am very pleased because Mummy saw my Viennese doctor … and he will be passing through Paris in September. I am already counting the days because he is really the only doctor in whom I have confidence…. I am trying very hard to be better but alas I don’t think I will be.” Four days later, she is still heaping obsessive reproach on to herself, while excusing Alan. Throughout this emotional breakdown, he is blameless in her eyes, “more and more and more perfect each second and no husband has ever been like him.”
“Now that all is over,” she was able to tell Vere on 7 November,
I feel really grateful to have gone through all that, because it only makes one appreciate one’s existence so much more. I suppose no couple in the world are quite as happy as Alan and me and really each day now I feel I am getting better. I wrote you before leaving Malmaison…. My sweet son came to see me today, he is too adorable now and tries so hard to talk! I hope it is quite decided that you are all coming to Vienna in January! How marvellous. Alan has begun to take Czech lessons again. All my friends are so nice, it is really such a joy to see them all after so many months. I went to Lulu’s wedding yesterday [this childhood friend had married Geoffroy de Waldner].
“I want to be in a large house in England,” she confided to Alan a wish-fulfillment fostered by childhood in Meidling and Royaumont, “with lots of wonderful old servants and a French cook and four children in the nursery and lots of delightful neighbours and you working in the library on your masterpiece and me on my carpet and nothing but peace of every kind surrounding us.” Petit-point tapestry was her pastime.
The book that Poppy thought brilliant was Private Opinion, published by Kenneth Rae of Cobden-Sanderson that June; its dedication to her must have been some consolation in her clinic. Subtitled A Commonplace Book, it is a collection of observations on everything and anything that Alan has been reading, enlivened with recollections of important influences and events in his upbringing. Already in the book’s second paragraph he lets drop that a cousin has married a duke. A high point is the description of the shoot at Bucşani to which Max had recently invited him. Some judgements are amusing: “There is too much in Gide of mittens,” or in the case of Aldous Huxley, manifestations of the intellect have been turned out “half asleep, like his applauding readers.” The style is opinionated, thickened by resort to unusual words: ataxic, paregoric and such-like. Many of his targets are minor writers and Alan’s familiarity with their work risks either seeming precious or making the reader feel small. In a review in the Sunday Times, Edward Shanks objected to Alan’s projected superiority. “There seems to be no one whom he cannot patronize when he is in the mood.”
TEN
Storm Clouds
“I GO MAD in this country,” Alan told himself after walking in the mountains from Berchtesgaden to the Hintersee, “wanting to crush and distil each valley into its essence and carry it round with me.” The pleasure of “bead-blue lakes, the mossy parks among rocks and pines” was so intense that he could express it as a positive torture. Poppy was pleased but slightly bewildered that his response to her Austria should be so aesthetic. When someone climbed into the park at Meidling and carved swastikas on trees, Alan found nothing stronger to say than this was an “obscure threat.”
The moment Hitler came to power in January 1933, Mitzi had to confront a threat that was not obscure. The disposition of her fortune became a preoccupation. Always abreast of events, she read newspapers thoroughly in at least three languages, and she also read journalistic books of the day by the likes of G. E. R.Gedye, László Hatvany, Berta Szeps and Ferdinand Czernin, annotating them with her own observations. Friends and acquaintances, some of them actively political – Philippe Berthelot of the Quai d’Orsay, Robert Vansittart the strongly anti-Hitler permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office – kept her informed. Wherever she was, she was regularly in touch with the staff she employed to manage her interests. In addition to Brüll in Vienna, Hans Mailath-Pokorny moved between Budapest and Prague overseeing her affairs. In Paris, George Hickman ran an office for her, conveniently situated on the floors below her apartment in the Rue de Surène. Known as Hickie, or Mr Hickie, he was a model of tact and good humour, an efficient bureaucrat willing and able to stand up to Mitzi and to give way gracefully. A light growl in his voice suggested something was wrong with his vocal cords. Where he was all restraint, Gladys, his wife, was all exuberance. In the war, he was a Group Captain engaged in staff work at Biggin Hill, the R.A.F. base. At Mr Hickie’s insistence, Mitzi moved a small amount of money to Canada. To deal with expenses that Frank might incur in sterling, she also opened an account at Hambros Bank in London. By way of investment, she purchased founder shares in Singer and Friedlander, a merchant bank just launched in London by two men, both refugees, whom she had known in Vienna. Her father’s daughter, she could not bring herself to take advice to sell inherited properties. Awareness of the approaching storm did not overcome a lifetime’s cast of mind.
On 14 February 1933 she and Frank were in London dining in the Savoy Grill. Also there was Leopold Hoesch, the skeptical but pliant German ambassador who was soon replaced by Joachim von Ribbentrop, a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi. He came over to sit with them. “He told us that the country had such a strong longing for Hitler that he had to come.” On another occasion at that time, Prince Philip of Hesse described to her how he had told Hitler that he himself had Jewish friends and could never do anything against them. Hitler had answered that this was right, that he had nothing against Jews already settled in Germany but wanted to stop immigrants from Poland. “Hesse of course believes Hitler,” Mitzi concluded, adding with obvious disbelief, “qui vivra verra.” (He who lives will see.)
Visiting Nazi Germany in the summer of 1933, Mitzi was shocked by the swastikas everywhere. She and Frank stopped at Baden-Baden. “I never thought Germany wanted war, now I believe everything is possible. I admire some things in Hitler, I believe him to be sincere, but all the nation seems as if gone mad…. I fear we may all face the same situation in Austria even if their temperament makes them say, ‘Ja, wir wollen zu Hitler halten, aber unsere Juden muss er uns lassen.’” (Yes, we’d like to go along with Hitler but he must leave us our Jews. Elsewhere she reproduces an alternative version, “unsere Juden muss er nie fressen,” he must never gobble up our Jews.) “Who can understand Hitler?” is a rhetorical question in her diary. “These Germans behave again like badly brought up children. The anti-Jewish movement is very cruel though I can understand the reasons that have taken hold of Hitler and his men.” Then they spent a night at Heidelberg, catching up with Max Springer, a cousin who had just been deprived of his post as a professor at the university of Mannheim. “All the professors there and all his students asked him to come back; he did so but of course could not get paid. His wife and children are born Christians, but the boys after 15 will not be able to go to school like Christian boys whose four grandparents are or were Christians.”
As they did every au
tumn, they drove on to Venice, a city that she sentimentalized because it had been a backdrop while she was convincing herself that her triangle of love with Eugène and Frank was sincere and innocent. The Dollfuss crisis was erupting and Mitzi wrote that Austria could be lost to Germany any day: “The Nazis will finally win but the country will not be anti-Semitic like Germany. It will be Nazism à l’autrichienne.” Now Frank met a young German boy who was a friend of Paul Goldschmidt, and he told them that Hitler was a real god and not a bit anti-Jewish. Another encounter was with Lord Lloyd, whom Frank had known since Gallipoli where Lloyd had been on the staff of General Sir Ian Hamilton. A Conservative member of Parliament, he had been High Commissioner in Egypt, and was just publishing a political book about it. Like Frank, he moved in the company of handsome young men. Following a telephone call from Hitler, Lloyd left Venice for Berlin, “one of those who think Hitler a saviour,” as Mitzi put it. (She may have been assuming mistakenly that because he was a notorious anti-Semite he had to be a Nazi too. In 1940 Churchill appointed him Secretary of State for the colonies and then Leader of the House of Lords.) The First World War had shaken Sir Ian Hamilton into pacifism and appeasement of Germany. At a lunch, he was to recount to Mitzi and Frank that on his recent visit to Germany “all seemed contented there.” At the Adlon Hotel in Berlin he had observed 30 or 40 Jews happily dining together. According to Mitzi, he said, “Nations ought to leave Germany alone these days. I should not like to be the nation to attack her now. She is capable of everything.” Robert Vansittart at the Foreign Office had taken the trouble to ask Sir Ian not to see Hitler.
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