Books: Heartbreak House

THE RAINBOW COMES AND GOES (271 pp.)—Diana Cooper—Hough-ton M/Y-flin ($5).

It is something to have had for a grandfather a duke who, after ringing a gold bell, was able to order his groom of the chambers: “Perfection round at a quarter before three, if you please.” Perfection was only a horse, but in Belvoir Castle, it might have seemed to young Diana Manners that the Seventh Duke of Rutland had only to ring his little gold bell to summon up perfection itself. Now 66 and the widow of gallant, talented Captain Alfred Duff Cooper, D.S.O., onetime First Lord of the Admiralty, Diana has written a story that might have been just another garrulous memoir in which an old lady shows her medals except for the familiarity with which she evokes the world of the pre-1914 British aristocracy. It was the era that G. B. Shaw in one of his plays dubbed Heartbreak House.

This is really a two-part book, a fairy tale with corpses. Lady Diana Duff Cooper is able to evoke a world as fragile and opulent as an Edwardian conservatory filled with orchids, and still face the time when the glass broke in 1914 and the killing four-year frost came in. Her personal story is romantic enough to make Ouida—lady laureate of the plush paradise—blush for modesty. It is offset by the tough self-knowledge of an aristocracy that called a pretty fast tune but was prepared to pay a stiff price for the piper. One-fourth of the book is occupied by the war diaries and letters of Alfred Duff Cooper, an infantry officer in France. After censoring a letter home from a soldier, he recorded that the man had written: “A lot of ships were needed to bring the British Army to France. Only two will be wanted to take it back, one for the men and the other for the identity disks.” Noted Duff Cooper: “So good.”

Rich Pixies. Before her rich and talented friends went, like Poet Rupert Brooke himself, “rose-crowned into the darkness,” life was a fabulous affair for little Lady Diana Manners. She spent part of her childhood in the “celestial light” of Bedfordshire, where “the clouds cast no shadows,” and at her grandfather’s Belvoir Castle. The plumbing there was not much, but there were “watermen” to bring hot and cold water along miles of corridors, watchmen to pace the battlements by night, and a “gong man,” who served as a perambulating clock. There was even an ancient serving-maid who was born before the Battle of Waterloo. (She was always shown to visitors.)

Lady Diana’s childhood was clouded by nothing worse than an unfortunate German governess, muscular trouble (treated with galvanism), and a feeling that she was not so pretty as her sisters. Actually, she grew up to be the most celebrated beauty of London society, later impressed the U.S. public by her appearances as the Virgin and as the Nun in Max Reinhardt’s 1924 production of The Miracle. She was spared the rigors of a formal education, and to this day claims that her spelling is so phonetic that when she has a cold she writes Bs for Ms. Her father, the Eighth Duke, seems to have been a dull dog. But this was England of two generations ago, and when a duke spoke, people listened. DUKE PRAYS FOR RAIN, ran a headline. After a suitable interval, there was another headline: DUKE’S PRAYERS ANSWERED.

In rich, philistine Edwardian society, the Manners family was an island of liberal, slightly wacky culture. Mother patronized that daring new thing, the Russian Ballet, and was a talented artist. Once Queen Victoria posed for her briefly. (The duchess had to finish the sketch by rigging out a servant in a pudding-basin and mantilla.) Diana’s sister-in-law took some pigs up in an airplane to prove that they could fly. Once in Venice the rich young pixies were visited by an old family friend, dressed him up as a doge and danced around him to celebrate his birthday. He was Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister of England. This seeing-eye doge was soon to help lead a blind generation into war.

Haloed Band. Reading the roll of long-dead parties, and seeing the photographs of her long-dead suitors (each marked by a common quality of good looks, bravery and a certain vulnerability), it is impossible not to believe that the “haloed band” did not sense what it was in for. Their parties, Lady Diana says, were “dances of death.” On one party, on a chartered boat on the Thames, young Denis Anson thought it would be a good idea to take a dip. He was never seen again. Diana held his watch, and later consoled herself that he probably would have been the first to be killed in the war. It was a scene for the historian —one a novelist would hardly dare to invent.

It may not have been an innocent world that perished in 1914, but on Lady Diana’s showing it might be said that true innocents inhabited it. Perfection would never again be waiting at the castle gate.