The Pursuit of Laughter Read online

  The diary is full of that evergreen favourite of gossip writers, the Royal Family. The author likes and admires all the right royal ladies and gentlemen, and is cold and disapproving about the duds, never putting a foot wrong or hazarding an original view about any of them.

  She is essentially naïve, and quite unconscious when England’s wittiest man, Lord Lambton, is sending her up. She may recognize evil, but doesn’t always see a joke.

  The diary ends in 1971, with the Gladwyns keen Liberals who are beginning to wonder whether their leader, Jeremy Thorpe, is truly in the Gladstone mould.

  Their son, Miles Jebb, has edited the diary, and described his mother’s old age in a preface.

  The Diaries of Cynthia Gladwyn, ed. Jebb, M. Evening Standard (1995)

  He Achieved a Rare Perfection

  ‘Envious dry blankets who did not know him, and those who read of his luxury and the world of beauty with which he could afford to protect himself… can think what they like, the dreary form-fillers… they cannot be expected to understand the pleasure and thankfulness those people feel who had the privilege of his friendship,’ wrote John Betjeman in The Listener when Gerald Berners died in 1950. He was the funniest, cleverest friend anyone could wish for, and the most loyal and sensitive. David Cecil said he was the best-read man he ever knew.

  As Mark Amory makes clear, he was never an intimate friend: reserved, shy, buttoned up. The only child of a dull, foxhunting mother and a clever, sarcastic father who was seldom at home, he was born in 1883 with a gift for music. Nobody sympathized; occasionally a guest played the piano and his first passion was for Chopin. His mother and his schoolmaster actively discouraged his music, hoping he might take to sport and games. At Eton he became ill, and these hated activities were forbidden by the doctor.

  His Dame allowed him to play the piano, and go out sketching. He loved the beauty of Eton, and after he read a synopsis of The Ring and acquired the score, he lived in a fantastic world of gods, dwarfs and heroes.

  A profession loomed. Diplomacy was chosen and Gerald was delighted to go abroad. He loved France, and in Dresden was taught how to write down his music. In his memoirs he describes a wonderful Christmas at Weimar, with glühwein, paper caps and the singing of Stille Nacht. Mark Amory has discovered he never spent Christmas in Germany; therefore much of what we think we know about his youth is fantasy, written when he was old. Perhaps his mother was not as dim as he pretends—it was she who bought Faringdon—the perfect small eighteenth-century house with a view of half England from its five drawing room windows.

  Gerald failed the Foreign Office exam, a blessing. Instead of being sent to some outlandish place he spent happy years in Rome as honorary attaché at our Embassy. He adored Italy and made friends with avant-garde artists in Rome and Paris. In the 20s he inherited Faringdon, but he kept a house in Rome.

  In about 1933 he met the Mad Boy, Robert Heber-Percy. Some said he first saw him swinging on a chandelier in a Munich hotel. Gerald was not fifty, a well-known composer from whom Diaghilev had commissioned ballets; his music was admired by Stravinsky. He invited Robert to bring his horses to Faringdon; Robert hunted, and efficiently ran Gerald’s farms. He was no longer lonely in the country; the Mad Boy was sometimes outrageous, but never dull.

  One year in Rome Gerald wrote a story about a girls’ school, The Girls of Radcliffe Hall. He was headmaster, the ‘girls’ were Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel, Peter Watson, and Robert, the heroine. The book has not worn well. It depended on the ‘girls’ crushes and jealousies, comic at the time.

  At Faringdon he painted, wrote memoirs and composed The Wedding Bouquet, with words by Gertrude Stein and choreography by Frederick Ashton. It was produced at Covent Garden, with Constant Lambert conducting. The war came, and made him sad. Europe, his paradise, tore itself to pieces. Music cannot be bombed, but everything else was at risk. He shut Faringdon and went to live in Oxford. His depression deepened, he had some sort of breakdown. He wrote Far From the Madding War, very funny but a biting satire.

  Back at Faringdon once more he almost recovered, and lived for several years sharing delicious food and the beauty of his surroundings with many friends. In those days of rationing people such as Cyril Connolly, who lived in London, thought of nothing but food. Gerald and Faringdon achieved a rare perfection.

  Mark Amory has cleverly captured the essence of Gerald Berners: his professionalism in music, his generosity and genius for friendship, his teases and jokes and sure sense of values. He was broadminded about everything except pomposity.

  Lord Berners: the Last Eccentric, Amory, M. Sunday Times (1998)

  Battling for Beauty

  Are diaries ‘true’? Jim Lees-Milne’s are a long and fascinating novel, of which he is the charming, companionable and unpretentious hero. As he gives his characters their real names, and is as frank as he is observant, the diaries have probably wounded quite a few readers. They are sometimes true and sometimes invented, just as novels are. This sensitive man seems never to have imagined anyone might mind his strictures and jokes.

  Here he is in his late sixties, thinking death is just round the corner. So many friends died, hardly a week without a painful loss. Yet he had 20 years to live. Although fond of them, he never spared his old friends, freely expressing his horror at what age had done to them. Some were shrunken and bent, some immensely fat like collapsed puddings, nearly all smelt rather horrid. He resolved to be very clean, an antidote to inevitable change and decay. He himself remained an elegant figure, and when he was over 80 my sister Pamela, seeing him stride across a field, said, ‘Doesn’t Jim look just like an undergraduate when he walks!’

  As a young man, working for the National Trust, he did more to save England’s beautiful country houses than anyone else has ever done. He deserved every honour England has to bestow, but, needless to say, he was neglected. Deeply religious, he was a Roman Catholic convert, but returned to the Church of England after Vatican II and because the Pope forbade birth control, as he here explains.

  Those who knew him well are aware that he left huge chunks of his life out of his diaries; they are highly selective, like all novels. Pepys wrote his diary in shorthand so that ‘my wife, poor wretch’ should not know what he did with barmaids. Tolstoy hid his in his boot, he was taken ill, his boots were pulled off, Countess Tolstoy found it and read it and the fat was in the fire. Jim could have left his diary anywhere. If Alvilde had read it she would have found only eulogies and affection, all perfectly genuine. Theirs was a happy marriage; they liked the same things and, almost always, the same people.

  All through his diaries Jim relates jokes and oddities, and in this volume is a comic masterpiece: his journey to Mount Athos with Derek Hill. After the usual Greek buses and rocking boats stuffed with peasants and their livestock, there were customs and form-filling, Derek telephoning an important monk to little avail. Once on the magic mount the horror of the expedition became clear. Carrying heavy knapsacks, they struggled up steep rocky paths to the monasteries. They slept in dormitories with other pilgrims, in iron beds with dirty, hairy rugs. They washed in a trickle of cold water in a filthy basin with no plug. The lavatories were so terrible that Jim remained constipated. The refectories produced beans floating in oil and hunks of dry bread; no butter or eggs because cows and hens are forbidden on the sexist mountain. The few decrepit monks prayed all night, the churches were too dark for a glimpse of Byzantine treasures, and they were not allowed to see Mary Magdalen’s left hand, though an icon which had come on a beam from Palestine, taking 300 years, they did see. Tourists were few, and the beauty of Greek mountains and sea and ruins was like living in a Claude. But they squeezed themselves with alacrity into a jeep full of monks, to avoid a tiring climb. Sharp turns and bumps made the monks fall in heaps, losing their tall hats, their buns of hair coming down; it sounds worse than a vaporetto in the Venice rush hour. One monastery offered lumps of delicious Turkish delight: Derek took two. Jim liked the pious atmosphere, uncha
nged since the sixth century. But what about the jeep and the telephone? Robert Byron loved it 70 years ago despite fleas, but he was in his twenties.

  In November Jim came for a last visit to me in France with my sister Debo. We had a delightful evening, but next day he felt deathly ill and they had to rush home; he died a few weeks later. He was brave to come. He was nearly 90, and we had been friends since he was 11.

  Jim was a pessimist. He predicts here that we shall be living in a Marxist hell within ten years. There will be no more hawthorn in May, no hedgerows, the farmers will have bulldozed them. All the trees will have died, not just elms but oaks, beeches, sycamores. Twenty years on, none of these disasters has happened. But he lived for beauty, and his whole life was dedicated to saving what is left.

  Through Wood and Vale, Lees-Milne, J. Sunday Times (1998)

  High enough on the Ladder

  A gossip writer’s job is an intensely disagreeable one. He is abused either by his friends and acquaintances for betraying confidences, or else by the newspaper which employs him for failing to betray them. In this tricky school Mr Driberg learnt his métier, and his book about Lord Beaverbrook is a perfect illustration of the gossip writer’s dilemma. This time it is his readers who may complain that not enough is told, while it appears that the victim feels he has told too much—‘a hostile biography’. Over all hangs the threatening cloud of the English law of libel, which as usual spoils the fun.

  The two most interesting things in Lord Beaverbrook’s life are (1) how he became a millionaire before he was 30 and (2) how he built up his group of newspapers and made another vast fortune with them. Mr Driberg deals briefly with these matters, but at great length with his former employer’s pursuit of political power. Three times in his life Lord Beaverbrook enjoyed a modicum of power: when he was active in the intrigues which made Bonar Law leader of the Conservative Party in 1911 and replaced Asquith with Lloyd George in 1916, and again in 1940 when Churchill harnessed his energy (for he is a human dynamo) to aircraft production. During the remainder of his career he has been on the outskirts of politics, and while the autocratic rule he exercised over his newspaper empire was real enough, the power it conferred was illusory.

  For like Hearst in America, it was power he wanted, and, also like him, he apparently thought he could reach his objective through his newspapers. Both men imagined that X-million readers represented X-million supporters in the struggle for political influence. They were wrong. American politicians were terrified of Hearst’s support, which invariably proved fatal to them. Possibly at this moment Sir Anthony Eden would welcome a return to the time when he was daily abused in the Beaverbrook press. The more frenziedly the Daily Express shouts an opinion the more decisively (it sometimes seems) do its readers reject that opinion.

  Between the wars Lord Beaverbrook’s ambition soared. His invariably successful opponent in the Tory party was Mr Baldwin, who was neither so rich, nor so clever, nor so energetic as he, and who owned no newspapers. What had Baldwin got that Beaverbrook lacked? He was an educated man; but Lord Beaverbrook’s enemy of later years, Ernest Bevin, had probably less education than the press lord himself. Presumably the answer is that Baldwin’s character and principles were acceptable to the public, and that Lord Beaverbrook’s (even had he not hobbled himself with a peerage) were not.

  Many people, reading this book, will be amazed to learn that he ever for one moment set his hopes so high. Nevertheless, looking back over the years, it is no wonder if he feels surprised at the extent to which political influence eluded him. Possibly he even now imagines that his newspapers guide their readers’ thoughts and actions. Yet the fact remains that however good the racing tips, however witty the Osbert Lancaster drawing, however exciting the strips, however unconsciously funny Mr John Gordon may be, the readers of these delightful features pay no attention when they are ordered to vote for X, Y and Z, and are very apt instead to vote for A, B and C. As to the proprietor’s vendettas, his likes and dislikes and policies, they are so kaleidoscopic and unpredictable that the public, though much entertained by his newspapers, does not take them seriously.

  Mr Driberg’s book would probably have been more successful had it been less thoroughly bowdlerised. As it is, though cattiness pervades it, the scratches are slight. If (as is possible) he had the power and the desire to wound, he has been frustrated; thus the title of his book has a double meaning.

  Beaverbrook: A Study in Power and Frustration, Driberg, T. (1953)

  Fellow Travellers

  Evidently Mr Tom Driberg finds poor fat grubby chain-smoking communist Guy Burgess a more sympathetic subject for biography than he found rich energetic transatlantic bossy buccaneering Lord Beaverbrook. Nothing could exceed his tender regard for the former unless it be his spiteful resentment of the latter. Guy Burgess, of course, is not a man calculated to arouse either envy or malice; he is too far down the ladder.

  Mr Driberg relates of him that he so much dislikes violence and cruelty that he ostentatiously turned his back when a boy was beaten at school. It may seem strange that someone so sensitive about the barbarous practices of his own countrymen should be so insensitive to the vast organised cruelties of Soviet Russia; but perhaps he simply turns his back again. The child father to the man?

  Burgess appears to have disclosed little or nothing that we did not know already from Cyril Connolly’s book, from Petrov, and from the reluctant Foreign Office White Paper, about the case of the ‘missing diplomats’. It is curious that the Daily Mail should consider extracts from Mr Driberg’s book the scoop of the decade, or of the century, I cannot remember which it was supposed to be. Surely not on account of Burgess’s sentimental and amateurish little sketch of a night view of Eton College chapel from Luxmoore’s garden—likely, no doubt, to evoke tender memories in some of the Daily Mail’s Etonian readers, but of small interest to those educated at other schools?

  As to his visit to Sir Winston Churchill at Chartwell during the Munich crisis, we do not require to be told by Mr Guy Burgess what Sir Winston thought about war with Germany. It will come as a surprise to nobody. ‘I hope to be employed again,’ he is quoted as saying, and Mr Driberg comments: ‘it has been forgotten how completely down and out politically, Churchill at that time seemed.’

  ‘You know, Tom, living in a socialist country does have a therapeutic effect on one,’ says Mr Burgess, and he goes on: ‘In London I was lonely for the important things—I was lonely for Socialism.’

  I hope Mr Driberg’s bad luck in having his little whitewashing effort published just now (he could not have been expected to guess what his Russian socialist friends would be about)* will not put him off trying to get another scoop next time he spends his summer holidays in Moscow. Maclean’s story might be interesting, if he would tell it. But perhaps he is not seedy enough, or silly enough, to arouse Mr Driberg’s sympathetic interest.

  * Burgess and Maclean emerged in Moscow in 1956 after vanishing 5 years earlier. Burgess: A Portrait with Background, Driberg, T. (1956)

  Inches Apart

  In the 20s it was fashionable to attack modern youth (the grandparents of today). Whenever news was scarce, journalists filled up their paper with articles about short hair, long hair, short skirts, outsize trousers—all, according to them, symbols of decadence and immorality. Undergraduates outraged the older generation by having their trousers made several inches wider than had hitherto been thought modish for men, and this was supposed to be the outward and visible sign of their unmanliness, irresponsibility and laziness. What a contrast, said the journalists, with their elder brothers and uncles who had fought in the war a few years before.

  Christian Scientists have a theory that to speak of illness, or of pain, brings it about by ‘making a reality’ of it; similarly, believers in magic are careful not to mention undesirable phenomena for fear of attracting them, of the word becoming flesh. Perhaps these ideas are not so fanciful after all. Certain it is, that modern youth in the 30s made a realit
y of the reputation which had been given to the post-war generation; though strangely enough they were not much attacked for it, the newspapers were bored with the subject by the time they arrived on the scene.

  Mr Toynbee, in his memoir of two friends both of whom were killed in the Second World War, makes the period 1934-40 (so near in time, so different in essence, to the 50s) live again. Friends Apart is a text-book for parent-baiters; but it was not only their parents and respectable acquaintances who were exasperated by the uninhibited anti-social behaviour of Mr Toynbee and Esmond Romilly. The highly disciplined Communist party, to which they naturally turned in their revolt from bourgeois society, also failed to make them conform and found them intractable material, useless for its own purposes. Perhaps they did not become Communists because of any positive ideological agreement with Communist political theory, but for the same reason that they stole dozens of top hats from Eton boys while they were in chapel. He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases….

  Years have passed since then; the Toynbee parents’ ugly duckling has grown into a swan. He writes so well, remembers so accurately, is so Rousseau-esque in his candour that his book is, in its way, a minor work of art. The two friends are dead; Esmond Romilly was only 22 when he was killed, Jasper Ridley not much more. Who can say what would have become of them, how they would have developed? The child is father to the man, and neither can be judged by the years of Sturm und Drang which link them.