DIARIES&MEMOIRS

J ANE R IDLEY

A FIRST-CLASS PHILANDERER

T HE D UFF C OOPER D IARIES 1915–1951

★

Edited by John Julius Norwich (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 512pp £20)

D UFF C OOPER (1890–1964) is remembered today as the husband of Lady Diana Cooper. He was a Conservative politician and ambassador to Paris; he was also a writer and biographer, and he wrote an enchanting memoir called OldMenForget, but he was always overshadowed by his glamorous and successful wife. These diaries are a revelation, especially for the light they shed on Duff and Diana’s remarkable marriage. In 1915 Duff Cooper made a pact with Cynthia Asquith to start writing a diary and see who could keep it up the longest. Cynthia filled her book much quicker than Duff did. Hers turned into one of the great diaries of the First World War – the brilliant, selfaware memoir of a brittle society beauty whose world was torn apart by loss and grief. Duff’s diary is less detailed, less emotional, but equally riveting. When the diary begins Duff is twenty-five and a Foreign Office clerk. Most of his male friends are away at the war, and he is bored with the day job, but his evenings are spent frantically partying with the gilded youth of the so-called Corrupt Coterie. Here are Bongy and Kakoo and Bim, Raymond and Katherine, Ego and Yvo and, above all, Diana. Duff had a weakness, rather a large one, for good champagne, and he could never resist a gambling table, but his greatest love was for pretty women. He is engagingly frank about all three of these and especially the women, whom he regularly seduced. ‘It’s an extraordinary thing, but nobody begins to be really fond of me until ... I cease being quite so fond of them.’ But the centre of his emotional life was Diana – beautiful, clever, but above all confident and strong-minded. Unlike the others she wouldn’t let him get away with bad behaviour. She didn’t mind his infidelities (much): or at least, she thought that she ought not to mind them but she did. When they rowed she punched him in the face or refused to see him, and he had to seek forgiveness on bended knee (this happened quite regularly). Diana’s real love was not Duff but Raymond Asquith,

Diana dulls Duff

the glamorous leader of the clique. His death in 1916 was perhaps the most traumatic of all for both Duff and Diana. ‘When I think of Oxford now I see nothing but ghosts,’ wrote Duff. He found that the carnage made him grow callous, but Diana was reduced to a nearhysterical state of tears and laughter, and she treated her grief like an illness, taking morphia to blunt the pain. Raymond’s death meant that Diana liked Duff the best of the living. He was the only one of his generation still alive – he had no men friends left. Duff joined up right at the end of the war. Incredibly, in spite of the danger, he actually wanted to go to France because he felt that he had missed out on the adventure. He was a brave and good soldier, winning the DSO. Fortunately, the war ended just in time to stop him from being brave one time too many and getting killed. Duff and Diana married after the war, overcoming the resistance of her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, and especially her termagant mother, who thought that Duff was not nearly good enough for her. (The Duke was softer. When he at last gave his consent, he told Diana: ‘Don’t go upstairs for a little as I don’t want your Mother to think I gave in at once.’) Diana by now was a celebrity, recognised in the street, a silent star of screen and stage, and famous for her role as the Madonna in the mystery play The Miracle, which took her to America. To his credit, Duff was not jealous of her success. But marriage made no difference to his infidelities; if anything it gave them an extra edge of excitement. Intrigue, for Duff, had a fatal fascination. He couldn’t live without it. However, he insisted: ‘My infidelities are entirely of the flesh’. Rather like Alan Clark, he always loved his wife best, and in his own way he was loyal to her. So Duff pursued Poppy (Baring) and Daisy (Fellowes) and Vita (Sackville-West) and Dollie (Warrender) and Betty (Cranborne) and many, many others – the turnover is so rapid and there are so many that one gets a little muddled at times about which is which. He seems to have been completely irresistible, and no one ever said No. Sleeping with them was OK, he reckoned, and in an odd way it made him feel less guilty because once he had seduced them he tired of them; but ‘real love for another is the only crime against Diana that I could never forgive myself and that she could never forgive me’. Diana always got to find out about the mistresses, though Duff didn’t tell her. She would cry and say he

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006