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 DIARIES&MEMOIRS

didn’t love her, but after a glass of champagne she cheered up, or so he thought. The humiliation must have been acute at times – some embarrassing moments are recorded here, when Diana and the mistresses come face to face. They were a surprisingly modern couple. Duff wrote Diana’s newspaper articles, which were very highly paid, and she used her celebrity to help him get into Parliament and put him on the social and political map. He was clever and hard-working and never scrounged off her rich relations. Duff entered Parliament in 1924, and after that the diaries change. Politics kept him so busy that he had less time for mistresses and even less for writing his diary. He was right over appeasement, and his diary records the divisions in the Chamberlain government over Munich.

F RANCES W ILSON Confessions of a Chav

S TRANGELAND

★By Tracey Emin (Sceptre 212pp £14.99)

T HEPSYCHO -SLUTIS back (‘body from Baywatch, face from Crimewatch’), and the latest incarnation of ‘Mad Tracey from Margate’, as she calls herself, comes in the form of literary, rather than visual, confessions. Strangeland appears ten years after Emin hit notoriety with another form of autobiography, ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963–1995’, the tent on which she sewed the names of all those who had ever shared her bed, including members of her family and her aborted foetus. In the intervening decade Emin’s style has not ‘developed’ so much as reinforced itself. In ‘My Bed’, a reconstruction of the unmade bed in which she resided for three weeks in a suicidal depression, she once again used herself as her art, presenting us with a crumpled and stained set of sheets and accompanying debris, a work which has only as much meaning as we are prepared to give to the experiences of the artist. Tracey’s bed was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999 and bought for £150,000 by Charles Saatchi, but still the most memorable introduction for many to Traceyland was her appearance in December 1997 to discuss ‘The Death of Painting’ on a late-night Channel 4 chat show. Pissed out of her tree, Emin had no idea what was going on (she tells us in Strangeland she thought by the comfy sofas and soft lighting that she was in someone’s house). Having been ignored through most of the show she then

His most fulfilling job was Ambassador to Paris, where he was posted by Churchill in 1944. Here he and Diana could operate as a partnership, which is what they did best. In his diary Duff chronicled the Nancy Mitfordish Paris of grand and glamorous French aristos whom Diana and he entertained. Duff had a mistress named Loulou, but Diana was by now so reconciled to his unfaithfulness that she happily tucked the ailing Loulou up in bed when she came down with flu. The diary is beautifully edited, with notes which provide just the right amount of information, and John Julius Norwich has written a perfectly judged introduction. As a candid record of an extraordinary marriage, this book is gripping. To order this book at £16, see order form on page 78

stole it, declaring to the august company, before staggering out into the night, that she wanted to be with ‘real people’ like her friends and her mum. Next day she awoke with a head like a Chinese burn to find herself transformed from one of many artworld enfants terribles into a national treasure, an antetype of Big Brother’s Jade Goody and the hooligan queen of Chav Art. While art critics are divided as to whether she is a great artist or a con artist, literary critics will no doubt unanimously agree that, as a writer, Tracey Emin stinks. We’ve seen her writing before of course; she often suggests that her visual art is a kind of text, but writing on a tent is not the same as writing on a page. Coming to such a sure conclusion about anything produced by Tracey Emin is dangerous; it could be that the crude naivety of her book will be seen by some as precisely its brilliance. But it is easier to sniff out weakness in the literary world than in the world of contemporary art, and most of those who can’t tell the difference between a good and a bad installation can spot the difference between good and bad prose. What’s interesting is that Emin’s writing stinks in precisely those areas which make her visual art refreshing. For example, the persistent belief in romance which rests so touchingly with the sluttishness of her tent or her bed is simply mawkish here: ‘This is a love story – a True love story,’ Emin writes in one chapter – ‘of the deep and burning passion between me and a man old enough to be my father: a Turkish man, a fisherman, a mountain man. It was wrong for us to be lovers.’ And while the

Emin: the face of modern art

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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