BOOKS
The happy hedonist
Alastair Forbes
DUFF COOPER: THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY by John Charmley on't really like Cooper', there one day, under that statesman-diplomat's ever- hospitable roof at Chantilly, disobligingly remarked Evelyn Waugh, with characteris- tic churlishness, having chosen as interlo- cutor his fellow-guest Rupert Hart-Davis, Duff's distinguished publisher-nephew and literary executor, thus flagrantly dis- obeying the civilised rule in youth pre- scribed by the fastidious diarist James Lees-Milne: 'One must pull one's weight a bit in other people's houses when one has been such a fool as to visit them.' Someone else who evidently came to share Waugh's distaste for Cooper was the best-selling Popular biographer Philip Ziegler, to Whom Rupert, persuaded against his ori- ginal better judgment by John Julius Nor- wich (himself apparently bent on what one can only call a belated Oedipal act of literary parricide) had handed over Duff's Private diary as raw research material for his very vulgar portrait of the publicity- Prone 'celebrity' Diana, who had already caught a perfect likeness of herself in Inimitably perfect prose fortunately still in Print. Dr John Charmley's fashionably compact (250 pages) appreciation of his life and career, full of fresh disclosures from Plentiful documentary sources as well as the diary, will therefore be especially welcomed by the many who rightly re- sented Ziegler's failure to appreciate the manifold qualities that made Duff so many friends amongst men and women. Above all, it shows the perceptive understanding of the Coopers' peculiar but perfect mar- riage that was so distressingly absent from iegler's account of it. As Charmley sens- ibly sums up, 'Duff could not have endured a wife who insisted on fidelity and Diana, With her need to be admired, could not have lived with a jealous husband.' Charmley was not even born when, in the first hours of 1954, his subject had bled to death at sea, a full six years short of his biblical span, his weary, too-well-wined liver unable to go the full distance at the Pace it had, from carousing, Charles James Pox-aping undergraduate days onward, been set. After an Oxford first in modern history, Charmley went on to win his PhD With an impressive thesis on Anglo-French relations, his thorough preparation of which, taking him deep into the wasted Years between avoidable world wars, had revealed to him Duff Cooper as by far the best of an admittedly dim bunch of British Finally, as well as by far the most likeable. rinally, he saw in him 'the solitary hero of Munich', who, in his memorable resigna- tion speech, had reminded Chamberlain and the Commons that in 1914 Britain had Weidenfeld, £12.95 not gone to war for Serbia or Belgium but had fought, 'as we should have been fighting last week, in order that one Great Power should not be allowed, in disregard of Treaty obligations, of the laws of nations and the decrees of morality, to dominate by brutal force the continent of Europe.'
A lecturer at the University of East Anglia, Charmley lives in 'that fine and historic city of Norwich', whose burgesses had got so unreasonably shirty, not to say above their station, when Duff decided, out of filial piety — five generations of his Cooper ancestors having been born there — to take its name on receiving a vis- countcy 18 months before his death. (He would unquestionably have giggled at Charmley's introduction of his Norwich- born doctor father, whose 'lasting claim to fame' lay in his Jermyn Street practice's specialisation in treating. venereal diseases, which adds 'He was certainly a man of parts.') It would have been just as fitting for him to have called himself Lord Bushy Park, for it was in that Green Belt enclave adjoining Hampton Court that its Ranger, the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV, had fathered upon the enchanting actress Mrs Jordan the ten royal bastards from one of whom Duff's beloved mother was directly descended. The Jordan genes came out strongly in his consistently bril- liant performances in country-house char- ades, just as they have in the marathon media career of his son who seems to have outlived, or at any rate outspouted, every competitor and to have become for good or ill a permanent round-the-clock fixture on telly and radio and lecture platform. All the same, I always thought it rather lacking in family feeling that he should have so loathed Hanover when he was sent there to learn German, returning thence with an excessive hatred of the Hun barely soft- ened by his just idolatry of Heine, another Paris émigré. Incidentally, this is probably the right place to explode once and for all the old wives' tale that Diana Cooper ever refused to be called Lady Norwich. She in fact bore the name in public with good, though in private with ill, grace until a week after her husband's death, when, at her request, (after I had first cleared it with Buckingham Palace, where they can be touchy about such nomenclatural niceties, the Sovereign not sharing the slap-happy indifference to social solecisms of the good doctor Charmley and his baronial pub- lisher) I drafted an announcement for the Court pages of Times and Telegraph for their issues of 8 January 1954 to the effect that 'Diana, Viscountess Norwich has re- verted to the name and title of Lady Diana Cooper', the first and only intimation of the matter.
Another falsehood has continued to circulate since it was first put about by jealous colleagues in the Foreign Office and Quai D'Orsay. This was that Duff and his wife, from the moment of their arrival in Paris in September 1944, had spent much of their time entertaining 'notorious traitors and collaborators' to the embar- rassment of General de Gaulle and his government. Their French guest list was in fact always vetted for them by the Gener- al's sociable right-hand-man who, besides possessing the magnanimity that came easi- ly to a man with an unimpeachable war record, well knew that Gaullism had willy- nilly been diluted with copious draughts of Vichy water. It is true that, as Duff noted in his diary, a young diplomatic friend from Algiers days, 'rotor' de Lesseps, did once call upon him unofficially bearing a list of peclerastes et collabos allegedly deemed undesirable by the host government, but an immediate apology for this maverick intrusion was demanded and offered. It had been occasioned, so an embarrassed de Lesseps admitted to me the other day, by pressure put upon him by a rather fanatical and overzealous contemporary of his who had allowed his recent recruitment by the Surete to go to his silly head. Of course, British prestige had then never stood higher and not since the Iron Duke had acquired it from saucy Pauline Bona- parte had that most beautiful of embassies had such a pair within as a draw. Of course all Paris wanted to be asked there, not least perhaps for its warmth and whisky, both elsewhere unobtainable in those freezing days of coal famine and short commons. Nor were the poets Eluard and Aragon the only communists I saw there, there being plenty more, besides fellow-travellers ga- lore, among the writers, musicians, pro- ducers, directors and actors (the Paris studios and theatres, like London's sole Windmill, 'never closed') who thronged the Yellow drawing room on formal and the Green drawing room on informal occasions. Even Proust, had he not been dead, would have come to call. (Had not Duff been the only English politician to admire him when he was alive, leaving Baldwin to admire Mary Webb?) Somebody who did emphatically come to call and who, taking long refuge there when in her unheated family home at Verrieres a return of her TB threatened, became literally The Woman Who Came To Dinner, was the talented and imagina- tive poet and writer Louise de Vilmorin. It is fair to say that, over and above her vocational role of maitresse en titre et affichee, she proved a useful assistant for Duff's French speeches. That chaste but greedy dineur-en-ville, Confessor to the Faubourg St Germain as well as the intel- ligentsia, l'Abbe Mugnier, (he had at Proust's previously expressed wish knelt in prayer at his bedside within minutes of his death) who had himself died just before he could get his feet under the Coopers' table, had in 1923 described as 'tout a fait delicieux mon tete-a-tete avec Loulou, qui a 19 ans . . . elle aurait voulu etre Iseult. Sa figure blanche mail expressive, sa voix prenante, son elocution pleine de grace, ses jolis gestes me tenaient la, pres d'elle sous le charme. Elle va genre. Elle lit des vers.' (Her prose was to turn out as good as Duff s, her verse better.) In 1938, divorced from her first husband, an American im- probably called Leigh Hunt, she had fulfil- led another girlhood dream and become the sixth wife of the Magyar nobleman, the white hunter and Hortobagy horseman Count Paly Palffy, so that she had been free to travel about occupied Europe with- out hindrance and a fortiori without any question of treasonable collaboration. As it happened, Duff's coup-de-foudre for her (her own passion for him being, for my money, `but mad north-north-west') had begun with a sudden embrace in the hall of the Soviet embassy and he was soon not just epris but as near as I ever saw him to besotted — not altogether without reason, for in common they had real love of literature as well as what Diana, congeni- tally frigid save in heart, called 'conspi- cuous sensuality'. After a while, though Diana herself had meantime developed a touching crush on her, Louise's histrionic jealousy and possessiveness turned for Duff into what he referred to as 'a fearful cockdrop' and Loulou had to look else- where, though she turned up at Belvoir for his funeral. I last saw her alive at Verrieres where she had taken in Malraux as a live-in lover she repeatedly referred to as mon marl, he surviving her by several years but without ever leaving her house.
In Old Men Forget, still in my opinion the best autobiography of a public man written in my lifetime, Duff, referring to the period before his appointment to the French, recounted how in wartime
I used to get easily annoyed with people who, genuinely sharing my love of France and my conviction that the re-establishment of a strong France must be to the interest of Britain, would yet persist in denigrating de Gaulle. After one particularly heated argu- ment on the subject, in the course of which I doubtless expressed myself with unnecessary violence, ['Wine', he elsewhere wrote, 'has induced me to say silly things . . . under its influence words have often come too easily which had better not to have been spoken'] the other party to the altercation thought it well to warn the Prime Minister against sending as British representative to Algiers a devoted adherent to the General.
Charmley reveals me as 'the other party' (though I had not for at least seven years been, as he says I was, a Chartwell neighbour) who had gone down to 'dine and sleep' at Bognor in the company of Moura Boudberg, lovable, bear-hugging Russian mistress of, amongst others, Max- im Gorki and H. G. Wells who, as I did, then spent much time collaborating with Raymond Aron and a brilliant team at France Libre. Both Duff and I got drunk, he apologising the next morning at break- fast for 'warming to his topic', his euphem- ism for having at one point asked me how much I was paid by the Germans. But by the time I greeted him in Algiers two and a half months later, unaware of how nearly my intervention with Churchill had come to costing him the job, we were and remained in complete agreement on Anglo-French affairs and British foreign policy generally (we had both been adhe- rents before the war of Coundenhove- Kalergi's Pan-Europa movement). In Mar- rakesh I had tried to explain my change of view to the PM but without success. And Duff thought it wise in 1945 to conceal from Churchill and Eden, though not from me, that during the Syrian crisis de Gaulle had told him that, had he not been a personal friend, he would not have offered hifti a chair and had he but had an army, navy and airforce he would have handed him, still standing, France's declaration of war on Britain. I was pleased to find quoted my own tribute to Duff as 'the best of talkers and most lovable of companions and to his 'positive genius for friendship', which I was lucky enough to enjoy for a decade. I think he would have been de- lighted to find in one so young as Charmley such a fan, though I dare say he would have raised an eyebrow at the occasional infelicities of his style, allegedly passed bY the perfectionist Rupert Hart-Davis. As to the captions to the photographs, he would have laughed to see his beautiful niece Liz Paget identified as merely 'a lady-friend, and to see, in an obviously early Twenties picture, that world-famous middle-aged artist Max Reinhardt captioned in front of his Leopoldskron at Salzburg as Liz's later husband Raimund von Hofmannsthal, then aged 16 and unknown to either Cooper. There were no such editing and publishing mistakes or solecisms in Duff's day: it was a time, now, alas, remembered by few, of what Talleyrand might have called douceur de lire.
I should add that some of CharmleY's juiciest personal and political titbits con- cern Anthony Eden, whose official biogra- phy by Robert Rhodes James, due in the autumn, will be all the more eagerly awaited, as will Charmley's own editing of Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh's diaries of the worst of the Eden era from the inside. That `he doesn't like me — but also that be loathes Winston' Duff knew both from los close friend Clarissa Eden and also from his fascinating femme fatale niece and occasional mistress Caroline Paget (cor- rectly captioned by the Spectator in its Christmas number's rather Eau-de-Ng" suffused reproduction of Rex Whistler s portrait of her), herself the Duchesse de Dino to Duff's Talleyrand but also brieflY a flame of the jealous Eden, though bY preference principally loving and loved bY, women. Recalling that I had been criticised some quarters at Suez time for asking 111 print if Eden really thought that his collo', try could live, as he did, without friends! I- was interested to discover that years earlier Duff had noted of him, `What a curious man he is — he has no friends and 0°, interests outside politics.' Duff having bad both in plenty (he even enjoyed entering; and often winning, Spectator competitions) thoroughly deserved his lifetime of hapi* ness.
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