The Pursuit of Laughter Read online

  When he writes about his mother the book lights up, but there is not nearly enough about her. After his parents were divorced she married a Mexican polo player, but the marriage did not last and she had a series of friends. During the war her friend was a handsome Albanian who was a marvellous cook. This in itself shows what a wonderfully clever woman she was, because marvellous cooks were rare and they were needed when spam and smog or whatever wartime foods were called were on the menu. Chatin Sarachi—we could have done with more about this delightful creature, and perhaps less about some of Lord Drogheda’s colleagues in Bracken House. (There is a photograph of St Paul’s seen from a window at Bracken House. But what about Bracken House from St Paul’s? The post-war business community has a lot to answer for in the way the space made by bombs was used.)

  This brings me to my chief complaint: the treatment accorded here to Brendan Bracken. It was through him that Lord Drogheda’s career in Fleet Street was made: they were friends and colleagues for twenty five years. Bracken had bluffed and shoved his way to the top with the most amazing mixture of talent, effrontery and mendacity. In spite of being hideously ugly he was very attractive because of his intelligence, wit and oddity. Almost none of this comes through. Working so closely with Brendan for so long, there must be dozens of hilarious stories hidden in Lord Drogheda’s memory. Loyalty is all very well, but there need have been nothing disloyal. Brendan destroyed his papers at his death, but this did not prevent his biography being written, more than once. To make him just another tycoon with his pockets full of directorships to shower on his favourites is not really doing him a service. At the end of his life he wrote Lord Drogheda a letter from South Africa with sound advice on how to make, and keep, money. On no account must it be held in sterling, said Brendan with commendable foresight.

  One episode in connection with Covent Garden remains unexplained. Why, after the war, was one of the very few authentic musical geniuses these islands have produced carefully excluded? Sir Thomas Beecham would have been a giant among pygmies, is probably the answer. It would not have been comfortable for the pygmies. In 1956 Beecham wrote a sensible letter to The Times, suggesting ‘a full and enlightened inquiry into every branch of its activities… undertaken by an independent body’. Lord Drogheda describes this letter as ‘disgraceful’. He adds that an article in the New Statesman by Desmond Shawe-Taylor put Sir Thomas in his place. Desmond Shawe-Taylor is an excellent critic, but surely Sir Thomas’s ‘place’ was at Covent Garden.

  Another small complaint: Lord Drogheda’s predecessor as chairman there was Sir John Anderson, with whom he worked for a long time, and who with his wife Ava was a source of endless amusement to friends. You would never guess it from this book; they are taken at their own, very high, valuation. (Imagine for one moment what Malcolm Muggeridge would have made of the Andersons, had he been harnessed to Sir John.)

  The number of committees Lord Drogheda served on makes you dizzy; plenty of praise and bouquets all round are bestowed.

  As Don Carlos, Jon Vickers added greatly to his budding stature. He was proving a real feather in David’s* cap.

  * Sir David Webster, general administrator of the ROH.

  Well, it is perfectly easy to see what is meant.

  Lord Drogheda has had an eminently useful life and he has enjoyed himself, which is admirable and disarming. His book could have been a bit shorter, and a bit cheaper, and jokes might not have been quite so strictly rationed; but it is not nearly as dull as the Edwardian lady’s country diary* which heads the best-seller list.

  * The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady (1978)

  Double Harness: Memoirs of Lord Drogheda, Earl of Drogheda, Books and Bookmen (1978)

  Old Men Forget

  To see ourselves as others see us—is it a gift? Or is it the very opposite, something we should on no account wish for anyone we care about? In his memoirs, Lord Norwich portrays himself, presumably, quite truthfully as he imagines himself to be—statesman, author, man of the world—and, as he writes well and almost succeeds in giving an impression of calm and balance, his book may be read in the future, and he taken at his own valuation, by those who seek to discover from contemporary sources why England finds herself in her present reduced circumstances.

  This book is, of course, not only by, but also about, Mr Duff Cooper, who tells of his childhood, school, Oxford; of the years when he worked as a clerk in the Foreign Office, and the six months at the end of the First World War when he was in the army. He tells of his entry into politics, and the various ministerial offices he occupied; then his resignation after the Munich crisis, and how, on September 1st, 1939, when he heard that ‘the second World War had begun my heart felt lighter than it had felt for a year’. He describes his indignation and worry next day—‘we went to the Savoy Grill. I felt I could eat nothing, but dealt very successfully with a cold grouse’—lest, after all, the Allies should fail to declare war on Germany, and his relief when finally they did so.

  His praise of his own talents he reinforces with numerous quotations from his fan-mail: ‘I had a talent for public speaking’, he tells us. The present reviewer never heard him in the House of Commons, so cannot judge his parliamentary performances which are said to have been on a high level; on the public platform he was very poor, delivering not a speech but a rather dull lecture, and losing his temper with interrupters. That is the key to much of his character. ‘I am apt to become heated in argument,’ he says. At how many of the pleasant dinner parties and luncheons to which he refers did the veins on his forehead start out, as he seemed to approach apoplexy, as the result of some trivial difference of opinion? The interesting part about this performance was its effect on those present. Let no one imagine that the sight of a middle-aged Cabinet Minister raging in fury at a fellow-guest in a private house was alarming, for, unless an actual burst was feared, it was not. Any stranger present must have been rather amazed; but it was such an everyday occurrence that it aroused no more than a feeling of mildest irritation, embarrassment, or amusement, according to the temperament of the onlookers. ‘Little Duff did a veiners last night’ his companions would relate, and no one was in the least surprised to hear it. He tells much about his private, as a background to his public, life, so it is as well to get it in perspective; it is in the light of this rather excitable personality that the events described in his book should be read and judged.

  It is worth while to take a careful look at the photographs he has chosen to illustrate it—the neat little boy; the vulgar youth with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth; the cocky MP standing beside his beautiful wife, wearing her famous ‘Madonna’ expression but minus the decorative bandages; the ambassador in his library, looking very weary, as if he had just calmed down after a particularly violent veiners.

  Mr Duff Cooper first entered Parliament as Tory member for Oldham. He lost his seat in 1929, and was nursing the Winchester constituency when St George’s Westminster fell vacant and the Press lords put up an anti-Baldwin Conservative candidate of their own in the resulting bye-election. He decided to fight as official candidate. This was an election which tested the power of the popular press: the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Evening News and Evening Standard—‘every issue of each of them was devoted to damaging my cause’—had a good case. ‘Discontent with Baldwin’s leadership was not confined to those who doubted the wisdom of his Indian policy,’ writes the author. Lord Beaverbrook, who ‘fought hard and spoke daily’, sought to dissuade him from standing. ‘He felt sure I should lose.’ But ‘I won by more than five thousand votes’—and as to Baldwin ‘the Press lords by their attack had strengthened his position’.

  The highlight of Mr Duff Cooper’s political career was his resignation after Munich. He resigned, apparently, because he thought England should go to war then and there, though as First Lord of the Admiralty and a former Secretary of State for War he must have been fully aware of her unpreparedness. On 28 September, 1938, he notes in his diary: ‘I lunched at
Buck’s with Diana and the Cranbornes. They are of course boiling with anti-government indignation’. Lord Cranborne must have been longing to resign, but could not do so for the excellent reason that he had resigned already a few months before, over Abyssinia. (He had boiled when the Prime Minister decided to discuss our differences with Mussolini, he boiled again when he went to discuss our differences with Hitler, and more recently he seems to have simmered at the thought of the present Prime Minister discussing with Malenkov ways and means of ending the cold war. Nobody minds such ministers resigning; unfortunately this time he did not do so; both his chiefs were ill and he was able to do his worst as Acting Foreign Secretary.)

  Was Mr Duff Cooper’s resignation the wise act of a selfless and high-principled statesman? Was it a futile gesture, a sort of veiners in public? Or was there a resemblance to Georges Mandel, who, like him, knew the state of his country’s defences, but was quite happy at the prospect of war? He gives the following account of a visit to the latter in March 1940 when he was Minister for the Colonies: ‘I saw Mandel, who was gay and brave. I asked him about the French air force, of which I had heard disquieting reports. He laughed and said that every time he asked about it he was told there were fewer machines than when he last enquired. He seemed so cheerful I thought I had misheard him, but he had meant what he said.’ Very funny no doubt—for France; but considering everything, would not ‘frivolous and irresponsible’ meet the case better than ‘gay and brave’? However all this may be, Mr Duff Cooper is proud of his resignation, pleased with the speech he made, and altogether very much satisfied. Perhaps he imagines he was being gay and brave too—brave, because ‘political acquaintances cut me’ and because when he visited France ‘I was distressed to find that my French friends were even more enthusiastic in their support of the Munich policy than were the majority of my friends in England, and that there were fewer exceptions.’ The Prime Minister was relieved to see him go, and Hitler saw that the war party in England had gained another recruit. Mr Duff Cooper frankly admits that many of his contemporaries regarded him as a war-monger, and quotes some of their letters abusing him. He seems to be proud of it.

  So much for the statesman. Now for the writer. He has produced an excellent life of Talleyrand, a good life of Haig, and a novel with the embarrassing title Operation Heartbreak. He tells us that he has always loved poetry, and aspired to be a poet. He has composed verse on and off all his life, and is good enough to include a few examples of his work so that we may judge for ourselves the poetic talent of a man who, although he understands the German language, writes ‘Heine is the only German writer in whom I really delighted.’ Thus he dismisses Goethe, Schiller and Hölderlin—the very pinnacle of poetic genius. (He admits he is tone-deaf and does not like music.) Here are a couple of verses from a poem he wrote on the outbreak of war in 1939:

  Oh England, use us once again

  Mean tasks will match the old;

  Our twiddling thumbs can hold the skein

  From which the wool is roll’d.

  It may not be. Not ours to fight,

  Not unto us, O Lord,

  Shall twice in life be given the right

  To serve Thee with the sword.

  He sent this effort to the Editor of The Times, but ‘he neither published the verses nor answered the letter.’ He probably felt it was the kindest thing to do.

  The best part of Old Men Forget, and by far the most interesting, is about General de Gaulle and his relations with Sir Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt. It is an almost incredible story, from which Mr Duff Cooper, who served as Ambassador first in Algiers and later in Paris, emerges with great credit. He endured endless snubs, frustrations and rebuffs in his efforts to prevent England and France, or rather their capricious and huffy rulers, from quarrelling fatally at the end of the war. The fact that the two countries had every interest in common would not in itself have been enough to keep them united, given the characters of the men involved. Eight months after the end of the war, with Roosevelt dead and Churchill and de Gaulle out of office, this particular danger had passed. In 1947 Mr Duff Cooper was recalled, and an Ambassador whose views were more in accord with those of the English government of the day was installed in his place. He had, apparently, learnt nothing. Although in 1946 he wrote: ‘Today the mighty arm of Russia is paramount in the countries that are nearest to her borders, and the muscular fingers of that arm are busy in the lands that lie beyond. In no European country is there a Communist majority, but almost everywhere the Communists are gaining ground because of the support from abroad on which they know they can rely,’ yet in 1947 he says: ‘He (Bevin) said there was only one point on which he agreed with me, namely that the danger still came from Germany rather than from Russia’.

  Politician, author, man of the world—it is a far cry from the old song, referring to his famous wife, which went:

  Who is Mr Pankhurst? Who is Mr Humphrey Ward?

  Who is Duff Cooper—not Lady but Lord?

  Unfortunately however, it remains true, as a witty person remarked, that a little Norwich is a dangerous thing. Such little influence as he was able to exert in the 30s was a dangerous influence, for England and for Europe, as we can now all too clearly see.

  Lord Winterton’s memories of the House of Commons cover the period 1904 to 1951. The book is not, in its terms of reference, an autobiography; there are no cold grouse, no Miracle, no poems to beguile us. Lord Winterton is obviously not such a practised writer, and possibly not such a clever man as Lord Norwich, yet his book is of lasting value as a record of English politics.

  He has the rare gift, so valuable in a Parliamentarian, of being able to judge a speech, a debating point, or even a rude retort with himself as target, strictly on its merits, and distributes praise among the talented on both sides of the House. He also realises, which is very clever of him, and unusual in a real House of Commons’un, that House of Commons jokes generally seem much less funny when repeated outside than they did at the time they were made, so much do they depend on atmosphere and timing. He frequently compares the House with a school presided over by the Speaker-headmaster; (a Speaker like Colonel Clifton Brown was not nearly severe enough with the unruly boys, he tells us, and looked far too benign) and on 2 May, 1940, he notes in his diary: ‘Very grave news. The Boches have now taken… Amiens and Abbeville. Notwithstanding these events, the House of Commons at its very worst at question time—frivolity, foolish chaff and indulgence in ridiculous arguments…’ and he adds: ‘I have remarked before that the House of Commons sometimes shows its anxiety and nervousness on great and serious occasions during question time by behaviour reminiscent of an infants’ school.’

  The pages of Hansard for the last half century are sprinkled with Lord Winterton’s interruptions and ejaculations; nobody was in more rows, and he was quick to anger. In moments of tension, he says, ‘the centre vein of my forehead swells—a characteristic I share with Sir Alfred Duff Cooper.’ Nevertheless he remained through it all a well-mannered, public-spirited English gentleman, without a trace of spite in his character.

  His fault, as an historian, is that he is often too generous. After writing a passage eulogising President Roosevelt he showed it to an American friend, who said: ‘Yes, I know, it’s the same story with everyone who meets him for the first time… that is his harlot’s charm.’ Lord Winterton was very much annoyed by this, and writes: ‘It is easy to be cynical about Presidents and Prime Ministers…. But I prefer not to be cynical about Franklin D. Roosevelt.’ There is virtue in this naïve approach, for it demonstrates a fact so often ignored by the historian who has never left his study—namely, the power of charm in a politician to dazzle even such an old hand at the game as the author of this book. It is a quality shared by all who rise to the very top in politics in every country in the world, and nothing is harder to explain or to define.

  Lord Winterton visited another famous charmer, Lloyd George, in 1941. ‘His main theme was that, whoever
won the war, the end of it would see Western civilisation in ruins, with little chance of the re-emergence of Britain as a great Power within the lifetime of the youngest person alive. Though it was a dark and gloomy day, with deep snow on the ground, I left Mr Lloyd George’s house without any great feeling of depression about what he had said to me, because I thought it represented the views of an old and tired man who would be naturally inclined to look at matters in a pessimistic way; but I have often pondered on his words since then. It was not a fashionable view at the time, as everyone forced themselves to believe that when Nazism and Fascism were destroyed a great new era of hope would begin for the world,’ he writes.

  Mr Lloyd George’s plea in the House of Commons, early in the war, that we should negotiate peace while there was yet time to save England and Europe from disaster, had called forth a furious speech from Mr Duff Cooper, denouncing the old war leader for defeatism. It is easy enough now to see which of these two men was right; but the counsels of sanity, balance and foresight were disregarded, while silliness and hysteria triumphed.

  Orders of the Day contains much that is interesting and much that is amusing; also the best defence of the Munich settlement and the most intelligent attack on Socialist policy in Africa yet written by any Tory. It is worth reading for these alone; let no one be put off this book by the rather unappetizing extracts which have been appearing in a Sunday paper.

  Old Men Forget: The Autobiography of Duff Cooper, Cooper, D. (1953)

  Orders of the Day, The Rt. Hon. Earl Winterton, P.C. (1953)

  Kindly Con Man

  Self-made men are two a penny, but whoever heard of a self-made boy? The answer is, everyone who knew Brendan Bracken. One was told: ‘Brendan, an Australian orphan, sent himself to school in England and paid the fee out of money he had made.’ The truth about his beginnings, which Andrew Boyle has so cleverly searched out, is much stranger than any of his friends can have imagined, and much stranger than the assorted fictions he himself indulged in. Who could have guessed that he was one of a large family who were alive and well and living only a few hundred miles away across the Irish Sea? ‘Everything about the man is phoney. Why, even his hair, which looks like a wig, is real!’ exclaimed an American who did not take to Brendan.