The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper
ed., Artemis Cooper
Sooner or later? 0 sion. But the Paris of bals musettes and give-a-chap-a-drink, the London of the Café Royal and Bright Young Things "baying for broken glass," have lapidesced in the popular...
...Diana became an actress to finance Duff's political career—as an MP and, later, first lord of the Admiralty, secretary of state for war, minister of information, and ambassador to Paris...
...The craving for leanness is one of the nastiest of America's contributions to modern folly...
...After the first very grave shock it was O.K...
...As old age laid their generation waste, she was still the maiden loth and he the melodist, though not a happy one...
...I never saw," her future husband would say, "so many swine cast before one pearl...
...The King of Spain tried to put his hand up her dress at a ball...
...The young Winston Churchill admired her...
...But few illuminated the English social landscape with greater radiance, and to THE LETTERS OF EVELYN WAUGH AND DIANA COOPER Edited by Artemis Cooper Ticknor & Fields/344 pages/$27.50 reviewed by RICHARD LAMB 72 The American Spectator May 1992 describe her is perforce to gush...
...Waugh had several...
...But the Paris of bals musettes and give-a-chap-a-drink, the London of the Café Royal and Bright Young Things "baying for broken glass," have lapidesced in the popular imagination and among what Gore Vidal aptly calls the "literature bureaucracy...
...He is irritable, fastidious, and perverse...
...She butters up Macmillan to get her diplomat son posted to Paris...
...Lord Wimborne, the Viceroy of Ireland, was a frequent and unwelcome visitor to her boudoir...
...Such was the clamorousness and tenacity of her admirers that her mother gave her a service revolver before a weekend at Blenheim Palace, which had a reputation for debauch...
...His life has episodes of accidie and broad comedy...
...These letters reveal a complex web of love, admiration, frustration, and devotion...
...She lies in bed surrounded by correspondence and admirers...
...The only human relationships I can abide are intimacy, formality, and servility...
...Waugh met Diana Cooper in 1932 when she was acting in The Miracle, a latter-day morality play done in mime...
...The footnotes are copious and fascinating, and drag out of the woodwork such characters as Brenda Dean Paul (1907-49), "daughter of Sir Aubrey Dean Paul of Rodburgh, 5th Bt...
...and Elizabeth Ponsonby, the model for Agatha Runcible in Vile Bodies...
...Waugh and Diana Cooper were friends for thirty years...
...She was 40 when Waugh first met her, eleven years his senior, a bit long in the tooth to be a Bright Young Thing...
...Besieged by rakes, she was courted by several clean-run poetical youths, sons of Souls, the flower of England's administrative class...
...This sexual reluctance on Diana Cooper's part was a source of great vexation...
...They reveled in moments together—he read his books aloud to her—and went to great trouble to see each other...
...He thought the play heretical, but was at-tracted by the whiff of Edwardian glamour that never left her...
...A renowned beauty, she was the daughter of the Duke of Rutland...
...After thirty years, their letters were still filled with the blandishments and pique of youthful infatuation...
...He was also briefly chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the dustbin of British power politics, a job Churchill refused in disgust after losing the Admiralty...
...The last thing I remember saying was 'How about some vodka with our caviar?' ") There are middling mots: "I think it The American Spectator May 1992 73 ought always to be disappointing to meet an artist...
...Among them were Baby Jungman, the "rather chocolate-box blonde" duchess of high bohemia, who dusted his fervent suit...
...Elisabeth Sempill (b...
...But social-climbing was precisely the charge that Waugh was most open to, and which would have been most wounding—unless exceeded by Diana's taking him to task for speaking knowingly of her supposed liaisons: "Just because I never responded to his dribbling dwarfish little amorous singeries, he need not be so sure...
...Diana's mother was outraged by the engagement, and required the Times to deny it, but finally agreed to the marriage...
...Ewan Forbes-Sempill in 1950 or 1951...
...How feeling-hurting...
...Her granddaughter has corrected all but the most egregious misspellings of both parties, and at their best these letters exhibit that blend of the catty and the lyrical that signals high epistolary art...
...Or the Hon...
...and telegraphs to notify total strangers of his arrival...
...Waugh fans, Cooper fans, devotees of choleric humor, and anyone with an interest in English society of the thirties, forties, and fifties will be delighted...
...And there is some pleasing spleen...
...Diana Guinness (née Mitford), who later married the Punchinello-faced English fascist Sir Oswald Mosley...
...Later: "I go to Spain for the first 3 weeks of October to avoid democracy...
...Diana Cooper's letters are wonderful...
...It might be observed that Duff himself had been considered "a contemptible parvenu" at the time of his marriage, and that he is a justly unremembered author...
...Now that lacuna has been filled by Artemis Cooper, granddaughter of Diana and editor, previously, of The Diana Cooper Scrapbook and A Durable Fire: The Letters of Duff and Diana Cooper, 1913-1950...
...She thinks looking in the rearview mirror is "common...
...And always lurking is the reality that he was a Hampstead boy on the make, soaring on wings of wit and celebrity...
...The crest of his coat of arms (matriculated in 1963) is a cock proper...
...On the Abyssinian war: "I hope the organmen gas them to buggery...
...Duff Cooper, whom Waugh admired as a man of affairs and former rakehell, viewed him with resentment and disdain, once calling him "a common little man . . . who happens to have written one or two amusing novels...
...She was "Pug," or "Baby...
...They were lifelong friends and sedulous correspondents, but the bulk of their letters had been thought lost, and few appear in Mark Amory's excellent Letters of Evelyn Waugh...
...he was "Wu...
...Forbes of Craigievar in 1965...
...She liked his manic and anarchic sense of humor...
...She couldn't spell (neither could Waugh), but she had a rare, sharp turn of phrase that Raymond Asquith described as an "electric illiteracy...
...His novel Operation Heartbreak was referred to as "Operation Sickmake...
...T he Waugh of this book is well known from novels, diaries, and other letters...
...for thirty years Waugh was doomed to be correspondent, not co-respondent...
...They were killed one by one in the Great War...
...In 1919 she decided to marry Duff Cooper, poor, promiscuous, a passionate gambler, and the son of Alfred Cooper, a surgeon specializing in venereal complaints...
...She was forced to brandish it before the Viceroy...
...B ut Waugh's most lasting infatua- tion was Lady Diana Cooper...
...In the 1950s, while writing his biography of Ronald Knox, he dines with a boyhood friend of the priest, who regales him with stories, but Waugh gets so plastered that in the morning he has no memory beyond meeting the man...
...asks around, "Who is a pretty, fair-haired woman married to a diplomat...
...The surprise—and it is a pleasant one—is Lady Diana...
...Hemingway's was Lady Duff Twysden, an irresistible combination of misery, drunkenness, and a body like a racing yacht's...
...I have formed an attachment for a young lady named Fatima . . .") Invited to visit by the wife of a diplomat, whose name he has forgotten, he arrives in Baghdad...
...The prime minister resigned and her son was sent to Beirut...
...and he succeeded his brother as the 11th Bt...
...She would not take him into her bed, though she was reputed to havehad many lovers...
...Misfortune has empire over me . . ." wrote Lady Diana...
...1912), "daughter of the 18th Baron Sempill, changed sex and became the Hon...
...and they laughed a lot and I had quite a funny week-end...
...She was a cocaine addict, and a flamboyant member of the Gargoyle Club...
...He adored her, she doted on him...
...Her husband joked that between them they had examined the private parts of half the peerage...
...T his isn't a book with universal appeal, but the Waugh industry is proving a surprisingly durable one...
...In Tangier, writing A Handful of Dust, he has a concubine with a tattooed face...
...She is recognizable as the inspiration for the batty, blithe, intriguing Mrs...
...But her mother wanted her to be Princess of Wales and considered one of them "drunk and dangerous," another "a gasp of horror...
...Stitch in Scoop and the Sword of Honour books...
...Duff Cooper's mother was the sister of a duke, but had become a pariah after two elopements and a divorce...
...For both men, this time was embodied by women, in both cases aristocratic Englishwomen, who have the world's most undeserved reputation for dowdiness and bad teeth...
...But Waugh's fictionalized portrait is a caricature, for she was also a passionate and neurotic woman, prone to angst and Churchillian "mealancholly...
...In 1952, he married Isabella Mitchell...
Vol. 25 • May 1992 • No. 5
