Inside England
I
Tuesday, December 3, 1935. — Finished the damned monstrous thing last night! It runs about 190,000 words and I have done the actual writing in five months. I woke Frances up when I tottered in at five in the morning and we celebrated. The last section I wrote, on England, was the hardest, and I don’t like it, but it’s too late to do much about it now. I wrote the last chapter and a half, Hoare, British Foreign Policy, Eden, Simon, the Tories, and the whole ‘Left and Right’ chapter, in one final desperate spurt: about 8500 words in twelve or fourteen hours. It absolutely had to be done because Jamie Hamilton, my publisher, was sailing for New York, and, since the book is to be published before he returns, he wanted at least a glance at the English chapter, if only in first draft. His boy called for the MS. at 8 A.M., and took it to the boat train.
I felt very empty and exhilarated. I slept till noon and we had lunch at Lady Oxford’s. Margot was a joy to listen to; she described some pianist ■— Horowitz, I think — playing a pianissimo passage like a mouse darting across the keyboard, and she said of one of her friends that, although his jokes were good, his humor as a whole did n’t hang together: it was like a string of beads without the string. I like it best when she reminisces. Once she told me that she had met Lord Curzon, when he was foreign secretary, in Fortnum and Mason’s buying a ham. He could n’t depute authority even in the smallest things.
F. and I left at 3.15, she to shop, while I walked slowly to the office. It was hard for me to believe that the whole gigantic script was done. There was n’t much to do in the office. I met F. again at Harry Flory’s, where a large cocktail party was going on. Guest of honor was Hugh Baillie, the new chief of the United Press. Process of noisy conversation with many friends. I told a few that the book was finished. We left, late, to join Antony Asquith and Margot — the arrangement had been made at luncheon — at the ballet at Sadler’s Wells; I haven’t the faintest idea what the ballet was. We saw the leading lady after the performance. Then to Rule’s for supper and drink. Talk about music, sanctions, politics. I had about a dozen beers.
Friday, December 6. — This was a big day. I sent, a 600-word cable about Italy, the war, and the possibility of oil sanctions. Then luncheon at Lady Oxford’s to meet the Prince of Wales. There were only eight at table: Lady Oxford, the Prince, Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, Princess Elizabeth Bibesco, General Arthur Asquith, one of her late husband’s secretaries (Sir Roderick Meiklejohn), Mrs. Simpson, and myself. I was annoyed because I had been told to wear only a lounge suit, and everybody else was in striped trousers. However, I imagine it is better to be underthan over-dressed on such occasions.
The Prince, whom I had n’t seen close up for years, was smaller than I remembered him, blonder, and in much better physical shape than his pictures show. He was extremely brisk, charming, and vivacious; during the first twenty minutes he and Margot talked incessantly, the Prince laughing a great deal. He drank only iced water. The food was simple and perfect: silverside of beef and a lot of vegetables. Margot brought me into the conversation by asking if I skied. Apparently she and H. R. H. had been talking about vacations. I said that I skied a little, but that on the last occasion, in the Semmering, a landslip had taken place in the adjacent Alps the next day. He asked me if I knew Vienna well; Margot explained for me how long I had been there. The Prince asked if I worked for the Chicago Tribune or the Chicago Daily News. I explained the difference. Then he said, very vivid and brisk, that he had had one disappointment in Vienna last year; he could find no restaurant that served Lachsschinken. I burst into enthusiasm on the subject of Lachs-schinken (which, as the name indicates, is a sort of ham that both looks and tastes like salmon) and said that, unfortunately, the only places in Vienna where it might be procured were not the places he would be likely to visit.
We started talking Austrian politics. I told the story about Schuschnigg and the man who tolled the bells in Stefansplatz, waiting for the first Schuschnigg joke to be born; and then some of the little Dollfuss stories. Next thing we were deep into Mussolini and the Abyssinian war. The Prince was talkative and sensible. Returning to Austria, he said that among small things one detail had interested him very much: the room in the Ballhausplatz with five doors, arranged in this manner for the Congress of Vienna so that Metternich, Talleyrand, et cetera, could all enter at precisely the same moment, with no one suffering lack of precedence. We talked across the table for about a quarter of an hour. Then Margot, perfect in such things, turned him toward her other guests. I talked about Budapest to Mrs. Simpson. She’s alert, sensible, intelligent.
After lunch the Prince was very much at his ease and cordial. Did I know an Austrian journalist named P— in Central Europe? Did I not! ‘That fellow!’ the Prince said. It came as an extreme surprise to me that he should remember by name correspondents of newspapers who had attended his brief vacation trip in Vienna and Budapest the year before.
Lunch had begun at 1.37, precisely seven minutes after the Prince and Mrs. Simpson entered; at precisely 3.01 they left. Margot and Elizabeth curtsied them into the hall. They were pleased and thrilled by his extreme good temper. I talked a minute to Margot’s brother. He lost a leg after becoming a general. ‘Chic, I call that,’ Elizabeth said.
I walked back to the office, fiddled with proofs, and went to Claridge’s for the first reception of the American delegation to the Naval Conference, which opens — grief to me — next week. Greeted Bob Pell, the press secretary, whom I had n’t seen, except for a moment in Paris, since Madrid three years ago. He is the most capable press officer I ever met. This is because he understands a simple and elementary rule that newspaper men are happy if you give them news. Norman Davis spoke gravely and briefly, in his slow Southern voice. I rushed from Claridge’s to a cocktail party at the Russell Strausses’. He is a young Labor M. P., Morrison’s parliamentary secretary in the last parliament, who works with Morrison now (the cockney ‘ Boss of London’) on the London County Council. The house, very modern, was full of Labor M. P.’s, ex-M. P.’s, and would-be M. P.’s. F. was waiting for me and after an hour we went, late, and had dinner, oysters and a steak, in the Strand at Gow’s. In great detail I described the remarkable events of the day. She was pleased.
Saturday, December 7. — At John Balderston’s for dinner. Full of movie people — Clive Brook, for instance, a British director named Maurice Elvey, Antony Asquith, and an Austrian producer, Clement, for whom Balderston is working. Poker after. F. and I play only the most rudimentary kind of game; it was, I think, the fourth time in my life that I had played. So we sat at a separate table with John and Marion; I did something entirely unexpected, which I did not understand at all; apparently I ‘bluffed John out of a pat hand’ while holding absolutely nothing myself; John said that five years from now he would explain the enormity of my offense.
Sunday, December 8. — Edgar came over from Paris. He wants to see some of the Naval Conference people. Edgar Ansel Mowrer, our doyen and Paris correspondent, is, with perhaps one exception, the most persistently engaging conversationalist I know. He was in rare form this morning, passionate, gloomy, explosive with biases (the right kind), overwrought, and very sweet when he relaxed. He accuses himself sometimes of being a pedant; I think he is the best-educated American I ever met, Vincent Sheean possibly excepted. He is, unlike Sheean, a severe moralist. He looked very well, but browner and thinner. There is a touch of Lincoln in Edgar; and of Shelley; and of Mohammed. He believes in free speech so much that he would cheerfully slay any man who opposed it. Elizabeth Bibesco said of him once: ‘His eyes are so blue they make a blue reflection on the tablecloth.’
We lunched together, then had tea with Professor Laski out in Addison Grove, the end of the world.
II
Monday, December 9. — Edgar and I went to see the Naval Conference open. It was a dismal show. Only three tickets, I think, had been allotted to American newspapers for the plenary session, and we did n’t have one; Birchall of the New York Times volunteered to split his with me (they were drawn by lot in my office), but the attendants would n’t let him out of the council room. He sent his ticket out by Trilby Ewer; then I could n’t get in. But. we did n’t miss much. Baldwin spoke about twelve minutes, and then, to the astonishment of almost everyone, announced that he had some ‘important’ business and left the hall. Out in the corridors we talked of little but Abyssinia. News had come back from Paris that Hoare and Laval are working on a ‘formula.’
I sent 818 words of cable on the Naval Conference opening; Edgar covered the Abyssinian angle.
Edgar came to dinner, which was unspeakable.
Tuesday, December 10. — Woke up feeling fluish, and I decided to stay in all day; Edgar, before returning to Paris, did a story for me. This was the first day in over six years that I have missed my daily stint at the office through illness. Worked in bed on proofs all afternoon, desperately, then got up because we were having a small dinner party — the Kuhns and the Ewers. Kuhn is second man on the New York Times here; Ewer is diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Herald. All the talk was, of course, about Hoare in Paris and the ‘deal.’ A good many details have leaked out. Ewer was cynical, I was depressed. Ewer said, ‘They’ll be glad at the F. O. to have John Simon back again!’ After dinner a few people came in: Thomas Balogh, the economic adviser to a city firm; Claud Cockburn, who edits that remarkable sheet, The Week; Aneurin Bevan, the Welsh M. P., and his wife, Jennie Lee; Louise Morgan, who does feature work on the News-Chronicle; and two of the Hollywoodians who are invading London so tumultuously, Mrs. Schulberg, who is going to open a film agency here, and the scenario writer Herman J. Mankiewicz. Mank has been here about three days and is, of course, already in a fair way toward settling all the affairs of the British Empire. It was grand listening to him explain to Ewer, Bevan, and the others, who have spent their lives on these issues, exactly what British policy was, how it worked, how it should work, and so on. The remarkable thing was that Mank was as shrewd and sound as they.
Talk very violent. Cockburn and Ewer (and Bevan with his marvelous Welsh laugh) were somewhat complacent and victorious; they knew so absolutely that Hoare and Laval had been cooking up exactly this arrangement. I got more and more depressed as the evening went on; I suppose I am a bad newspaper man because I instinctively tend to believe people rather than disbelieve them; it seemed to me literally inconceivable that Baldwin could stand for any such patent betrayal of all he had been saying for months. Stubbornly I kept saying that the story was n’t finished yet.
We went up to bed late and gloomy. F. had, being a realist, taken the BevanCockburn line that some such deal as the Hoare-Laval plan was inevitable, and, indeed, a good thing; she has n’t much regard for the Abyssinians and thinks it would be silly to risk a European war to stop this one. We have been arguing over sanctions for months. She is far too good a gentleman, however, to be wise-after-the-event or boastful. She knew also that I was deeply hurt by this and we did n’t talk much. Very strange that two people who have been married for seven years can get into such a stew because the foreign policy of a great nation is dishonorable.
Wednesday, December 11. — A bit of flu still, so I stayed home and wrote my story from bed. It was a blazer. I opened with, ‘All the peace balloters, all the Left-Wingers and Laborites, all the people who believed in the League of Nations and trusted Stanley Baldwin, are seething in bewilderment and indignation to-day as details of the most dishonorable deal in the recent history of British policy became known.’ I ended, ‘So it looks like peace by Christmas — a peace which leaves a bitter taste.’
Worked on proofs all afternoon, until I was too tired to tell a comma from a semicolon. A patch in the early German section had worried me for months: I fixed it, a sudden flash, by changing the paragraphing; just two indentations altered, and — miracle!— it was all right. But I wonder if it is worth while to proceed with these maddening details. Does it really matter if I use the word ‘very’ twice in two sentences or if a dash looks better than a period? Of course it does. When he was here a few weeks ago Walter Duranty told me that he had sent some mail stories to New York and was uneasy in his soul for three days until he cabled to change one full stop to a semicolon.
Party again to-night for a few people. The Saerchingers and Russell Strausses came to dinner, and later Lilo Linke, Wells Lewis (Sinclair’s eldest son) and a pretty American girl, Fred and Renata Kuh, Martha Harris and Ian Coster, all dropped in. F. tickled Wells, who is seventeen and beginning to sprout, by telling him how nice his girl was. He is enjoying a year off from Harvard. Saerchinger is the European head of Columbia Broadcasting, and is forever hopping about the Continent getting birds to sing across the Atlantic for him, statesmen to speak, philosophers to whisper, generals to orate. He has, at the microphone, held the hands of everyone from Trotsky to assorted queens. Fred Kuh, the diplomatic correspondent of the United Press, pleased me by saying that he too had been shocked by the Hoare-Laval business. And he is certainly less gullible, less an ‘idealist’ (loathsome word) than I. Ian Coster is movie critic of the Evening Standard. There is a good story in this amazing South Seas Bubble of movie life in London. Miss Linke is a refugee from Germany, whose autobiography, Restless Days, I liked extremely: a grave handsome girl with a serious mind.
What annoys me most about the Abyssinian fiasco is that I have been —■ till now — dead right on the story all along. And judgment, as Raymond Swing once said, is what foreign correspondents are paid for.
Johnnie said this afternoon: ‘I will learn to read in six months.’ He added: ‘That’s half a year.’
Friday, December 13. — I spent all morning with one of Jamie’s lawyers. It was tiresome and tense, but I dare say worth the trouble. Among the cuts were the following. I say that the governess of young King Peter of Jugoslavia was not a professionally trained teacher. This might, the lawyer said, be grounds for libel. I say that Pilsudski divorced his first wife because she mistreated her husband by her first marriage. Dangerous, if she is still alive. Cuts like these I could n’t object to, English libel law being what it is. But some of the others! ‘Princip (the Sarajevo assassin) was doubtful of his mother’s virtue; thus the World War came.’ Dangerous libel on Mme. Princip! ‘Even Communism cannot make the porter of the Hotel Metropole in Moscow efficient, or his telephone.’ This porter is an identifiable individual and might sue for defamation! Joke about Mme. Lebrun, wife of the President of France: she told her husband that he should pardon Gorgulov, the assassin of his predecessor Doumer, ‘because otherwise we should n’t have this pleasant job.’ This joke shows Mme. Lebrun in ‘a cold heartless light,’ and must be removed. And so on. And my favorite phrase in the whole book has gone: ‘Goebbels never kicks a man until he’s down.’
Wrote my cable, having watched various straws in the wind, and went out flat to the effect that the HoareLaval plan, after its week of strenuous life, was dead. Risky.
Evening party at Louise Morgan’s, packed with female celebrities, Nancy Cunard, Ethel Mannin, Moura Budberg, Rebecca West, Clare Sheridan.
Saturday, December 14. — Æsthetic conundrum. We say, reading a great writer, — Tolstoi, for instance, or Proust, — that he is ‘true to life.’ Yet we gauge his ‘trueness to life’ by his capacity to reveal something about human nature with which, often as not, we are unfamiliar. We feel a special pleasure when the artist communicates something which we know nothing concrete about, but which we accept as true. For instance, few people can have actually had the experience of watching the amputation of a rival’s leg, as did Prince Andrey in War and Peace. But we accept implicitly Tolstoy’s account of Andrey’s evoked emotion, and it enlarges for us the entire sphere of human nature. How does the artist do this? Of course a really great artist includes all of us in himself. The same essential resources are common to all intelligent human beings. But to most of us they are mysterious because not stated articulately in our own minds. When an artist with deeper insight does state them, we recognize them in ourselves, agree that they are true, because they correspond, roughly, to awarenesses and perceptions that we are latently capable of appreciating, but simply have not appreciated. But the conundrum remains: How do we know that what an artist writes is ‘true,’ if we ourselves have never previously experienced it?
Sunday, December 15. — Slept till noon, when Johnnie pulled me out of bed. Tea with Sir Walter Layton, the editor of the News-Chronicle and the Economist; then cocktails with Jascha Heifetz the violinist, and a pleasant talk with him; then dinner with Ted and Elizabeth Acheson. I was tired. Beautiful supper, which Elizabeth cooked herself; she was very pretty and glossy, Ted delightful.
Masaryk resigned the Presidency of Czechoslovakia to-day. I admired him more than almost any other European political personage I ever met.
I seem to be very gregarious these days. But after all, from July till December, I worked night and day, hardly saw a soul.
III
Monday, December 10. — The papers came in from Chicago, and I saw that a couple of those Naval Conference stories I had worked so hard on did n’t get in the paper. This never happened in the old days. I know what a Procrustes bed a composing room is, but nevertheless I was disappointed and annoyed enough to send no cable today.
We had a small sherry party at six, for a lot of young people — Tanya Benckendorff, Wells Lewis, Anthony West, Sonya Schulberg. Several small romances started. Johnnie was in the seventh heaven because one of the guests, Bingy Saxon-Mills, pilots his own airplane — the first actual fleshand-blood pilot my young son had ever seen. He was so excited that he turned perfectly white and shy.
Tuesday, December 17. — My office routine is more or less the following. I am the London correspondent of an American newspaper, one of the very few American papers which still maintain a foreign staff, and my job is to get news of the British Isles and transmit it to the United States. Specifically I am supposed to cover only England (with a bow to the Irish Free State), but almost all international stories have a British ’angle,’— indeed it is usually the British angle which is the point of the story, — and thus about 60 per cent of my cables are incidentally concerned with things as far afield as Abyssinia, Danzig, the Far East, the foreign policy of the United States, Geneva, Spain, Egypt, what you will.
My paper is a serious one, and also cables cost money; thus our service is in general restricted to ‘serious’ news — that is, politics. I send very few features; I pay no attention to crime; economics and politics are my business. Moreover I do not, as a rule, have to send what is called ‘spot’ news, unless the matter is very urgent and comes within the circumscription of our cable period. What is expected from me, and from everybody in our service, is color, judgment, interpretation.
I get down to the office about eleven and get my cable off by one-thirty or two; this is because we are an afternoon newspaper and our leased wire service from New York (we serve about thirty American newspapers with foreign news) closes, I think, at 10 a.m. American time. In exceptional cases I can file till 4 P.M. or even later. but this usually means that only Chicago gets the story, not the syndicate. I send a cable very nearly every day. They range from 250 to 600 words on ordinary days, sometimes longer.
I have no assistant, no tie-up with a London newspaper, and no ticker. Thus my sources of news are three: (a) what is in the English papers, used by all correspondents as essential background; (b) what I can get from friends; (c) what is in my head. Nine tenths of European journalism — that is, American journalism from Europe — is a combination of private ingenuity and public friendship. You are helpless unless you know a lot of people, and unless you can interpret with some freshness and stability of judgment what they tell you. Most of my job is done outside the office. A great deal of it is done at lunch or dinner.
I have been in this London post just over six months, and, aside from a good deal of study, my major effort has been to meet people, all kinds of people, who can tell me (over the telephone) what I want to know, about anything from French financial policy to the history of coal royalties, from the price of cotton in Liverpool to the reasons the I. L. P. split from the Labor Party. Most of what I have to get has to be obtained by telephone, since between reading the morning papers and sending my story there is only an hour or so. I should have friends in every camp, Labor, Tory, Liberal, in every foreign legation, in the City, in the government bureaus. I should see people incessantly, not only to get the actual news of the day (and the news that is behind the news, which sometimes we print), but to meet new sources of information and to irrigate old ones. Also, I should equip myself to be able to give information, since it is always easier to ask for something if you offer something in exchange. Journalism is realty a process of barter between people who each know something and find it to their advantage to exchange or pool their knowledge. Finally there are regular ‘ beats ' which we ought to cover. Just now I should be going to Claridge’s every day to see our naval delegation; and I ought to go to the Foreign Office every afternoon. I have been very slack lately about such visiting.
There are mail stories to do, of course, as well as cables. I used to write more ‘mailers’ than anyone on the paper. In the old days I never covered a story by cable without trying to assemble enough stuff for a mail series subsequently. Being very bad on spot news, I always enjoyed the afterthe-fact mail reports much more than the original dispatches. I’ve done mail series for the paper, at one time or other, on Egypt, Syria, Trans-Jordan, Sweden, Poland, the Nazi regime in Germany, the Caucasus, the Latin Quarter in Paris, the Spanish Revolution, the U. S. S. R., Greece, Albania, Rumania, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Austria. These series ran six or seven thousand words each, sometimes more. Lately I have fallen down badly on mail stuff. I don’t know enough about England yet to do a series, and minor feature stories are a bore. Now that the book is done I will try to revive my ancient industry.
Lunch with Mankiewicz. This Hollywoodian has great grasp of politics. His prediction: the Emperor of Abyssinia will be a forlorn and forgotten refugee in a pension on the French Riviera within a year.
Home. More proofs. More commas. Dinner, and charming, chez Mrs. Belloc Lowndes. One of the guests was a young art critic, Pope Hennessy, the other an Irish peer whose name I did n’t get. Extraordinary, the ambiguity of British introductions.
Wednesday, December 18. — I sent a brief story on the Naval Conference. At about 2.15 I began to rewrite, in proof, the first two British chapters, because they did seem so terribly thin and hollow. I had to do them differently for U. S. A. and England; all afternoon I snipped galleys apart and pasted up new typescript inserts. The stuff had absolutely to go to the printer to-night. A boy came over from Hamilton’s at five. I said he would have to wait and did not finish till 7.30. He took one set of proofs for U. S. A., one for England, and rushed them off. I calculated that I cut about 1500 words and added about 2500 in those five and a quarter hours. Some of the paragraphs I seriously weakened by changing them over and over again. They would not come out right. Home, so tired I started to shout at the taxi driver when he did n’t have change; I showed F. what I had cut and she was horrified, thinking that I had taken out some of the best stuff. I sat through dinner, mortally exhausted. We forgot to turn on the radio for the news bulletin. At 11.20 P.M. Elizabeth Bibesco telephoned to say that Hoare had resigned.
By God! F. and I stared at each other. But I am a poor winner; this proved, after all, that I had been right on the story, and that the Abyssinian deal was doomed; but straightway I was too sorry for Hoare to be glad.
Thursday, December 19. — Claud Cockburn was in the office when I got in. This often happens, since my hours get steadily later. We talked an hour. Claud is my steadiest visitor, and his visits are extremely valuable. He edits The Week, a mimeographed information sheet, in his spare time; altogether he probably writes eight or nine thousand words from Sunday to Sunday, a terrific total, most of it pseudonymously. He looks worn-out as a result. He is tireless, eager, and full of humor. Sometimes he is wish-father-tothe-thoughtish, and sometimes too doctrinaire and even gullible. There is no one, all in all, I like better in England.
The House of Commons is always one of the finest dramatic shows to be seen anywhere. On a day like this, follow ing the resignation of a minister under such circumstances, the drama is terrific. The government had pitched Hoare overboard; Baldwin was going to explain why; then Hoare was to offer his self-justification. The House was, of course, jammed; restlessness made question time seem interminable. Baldwin was a disappointment, and yet, when he rose to speak with a sort of electric rubbery defensive aliveness, I thought that he showed a type of peculiarly British greatness, the summoning of all forces when self-preservation is at stake. He said nothing new, except to confess that there had been a lack of liaison the fatal Sunday when Hoare went to Paris. Hoare’s message, he said, arrived (in the post apparently!) on the Monday. So now we know why Baldwin hurriedly and rather cavalierly left the Naval Conference that day. He did not ‘unseal’ his lips. (During the first debate last week he said that if he told the whole story no member of the House would vote against him.) Hoare struck the perfect note at once. He was not apologetic or evasive; he put forward the best defense possible of his plan; when at the end, his career seemingly ended, he wept, the House was tremendously moved.
I had to leave the House at about eight to go to Cesar Saerchinger’s for dinner, with Emma Goldman. F. (this was her day with Johnnie) could n’t be there. It was amusing to have begun the morning with a Communist, listened all afternoon to Tories, Liberals, and Laborites, and ended the day in conversation with the world’s most famous Anarchist. Emma was hopelessly parochial, I thought. We talked around and about a favorite question of mine: What will happen in a state — for instance, Germany — when serious discontent begins to simmer, although an immense opposition is stifled by police power? How can a revolution be successful without arms? And how can an opposition obtain arms in a police state?
Friday, December 20. — It is literally true that since the first of July I have not had so much as half an hour free to go to a bookshop. To-day I dropped in at Bumpus’s and called on Mr. Wilson. I walked down Bond Street, looking for Christmas presents. I have never seen a city so rich, so craggy, so utterly compact with purchasing power as London. I bought F. an evening bag and a mess of Elizabeth Arden stuff, and myself two sweaters, and the house a clock. At Fortnum and Mason’s I ordered Christmas puddings for the John Wileys in Antwerp, the Shirers in Berlin, and the Fodors in Vienna.
We had a small dinner party in the evening: Bob Pell, Aneurin Bevan, M.P., Rebecca West and Henry Andrews. Rebecca was very late. It worried Henry. After dinner came the Ewers, Cecil and Sylvia Sprigge, Faie Jarmel (lovely orange dress), Kingsley Martin (editor of the New Statesman), Alexander Werth, who is Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, one or two others. Perfectly violent conversation. Kingsley and Aneurin above themselves. Main item: Will there be a new deal, and how, and when ?
Saturday, December 21. — I wrote about twenty letters, telling various friends to whom I owe correspondence that at long last I am coming up for air. Went to Woolworth’s with F. to buy ornaments for the Christmas tree. Lunched at the Blue Train with Faie. She’s a remarkable girl who had to go to work for a living after a domestic bust-up; she started selling hats at Macy’s for twelve dollars a week five years ago, and now has an enormous job there, head of a merchandising department. Took a walk in the afternoon and had a Turkish bath. Too tired to sleep at night, grazed till 3 A.M. in a lot of books, among them Arnold Bennett’s Whom God Hath Joined (an admirable, very ‘French’ novel), Bruce Lockhart’s Retreat from Glory, David Low’s Lions and Lambs.
Sunday, December 22. — Slept the entire day, till 7 P.M. F. and Faie went to the movies. In the evening, for the third time, I went through page proofs, which are now complete, checking sources and tidying final odds and ends. This is really the last job of work on the book. It goes finally to the printer on Tuesday. As I was working I heard over the radio that Eden has been appointed Foreign Minister. My heart leapt; then sank. This may conceivably mean war with Italy. I inserted the last Hoare stuff and Eden’s appointment in the proofs. Too late to change anything — thank goodness — now. One solid year of work finished. I drank three whiskeys and then a lot of beer.
IV
Tuesday, December 24. — No cable. Reports in the papers of a general amnesty in Austria; this may mean that several friends of ours will get out of jail. Remarkable lunch, Ted Acheson the host, at Quaglino’s. The fare was delightful: hot hors d’oeuvres, including some of the best sausage meat I ever ate; sole àla écrevisse; then a steak slim as a rose leaf grilled in a chafing dish at the table. Guests and conversation also notable: Carl Brandt, the literary agent, who is here from New York, and Webb Miller, correspondent of the United Press, who is just back from the Italian Front in Ethiopia.
Webb tells a story astonishingly different from all that we get from official and semi-official sources here. The Italians are not going to lose, he says, but win; the idea of an Abyssinian victory is preposterous; the Italians are going slow, but their army is magnificent, and it is only a question of time before they get to Addis Ababa. Webb, who is one of the most level-headed folk I know, told harrowing details of the terrible state of the roads in Eritrea and to the front; he was the first correspondent to get to Adowa (he walked there), and the ardors of the campaign were enough to give him, of all people, a nervous breakdown.
Wednesday, December 25. — Johnnie’s chief gift is a Meccano airplane. As we distributed things under the tree, he was much less interested in what we had given him than in seeing us open the things he (with Milla’s help) had made for us. Then got busy with the Meccano, and produced a trimotor seaplane by 4 P.M. Pause while we listened to King George’s Empire broadcast. This was inordinately impressive, and the B. B. C. staged it in a manner that must make the little twisted mouth of Dr. Goebbels turn with envy. The idea is simple: the King speaks (his voice was very faltering, I thought) and then various parts of the Empire answer: a ranchman in Alberta, a little girl in New Zealand, a miner in South Africa, some fishermen in the Shetlands, a chap on lonely outpost in India. England responds: the Empire is knit together. This is, of course, propaganda of the most superlative and subtle sort.
F. and Milla meantime beating up eggs. About a dozen people came in to have Christmas eggnog with us. It was fun, as all Christmas parties are fun; and the guests admirably suited the spirit of the occasion. Webb and his wife, Carl and Carol Brandt, the Balderstons, the Achesons, Howard Young, the Schulbergs, and Louise Morgan and Otto Theis. Everybody got very gay. Some, in fact, refused to leave. F. and I were booked for Christmas evening with Rebecca West and Henry Andrews; we could n’t get away. Finally Ted and Webb grandly told us to go on and leave our own party, if we wished to be so foolish; they would take care of it in our unfortunate absence. So we got to Rebecca’s at last, but very late. Ruby Melville, a character out of fantasy, was there. She looks like Mae West. Henry, as always, I liked very much. They gave us for Christmas an enchanting little palette of five different kinds of French mustard. Home, wondering what wreckage Ted, Webb, and the rest had left. But all was in good order. The lights, however, did not work. Milla said a fuse had blown out at about 10.30 P.M., plunging the flat in total darkness; Webb and Ted took this as a sign from On High and precipitately and surreptitiously fled.
Friday, December 27. — Lunched at the Café Royal with Cesar Saerchinger, Ted Acheson, and a young man, Joseph Israels II, who has just come back from the Abyssinian front, and who is on route to New York as the Emperor’s counselor for public relations. Israels was bright, plausible, and, of course, strongly pro-Abyssinian. All his political impressions are in the most remarkable contrast to Webb’s. It was strange to recall the lunch with Webb a few days ago. These two competent observers were a few hundred miles away from each other, on opposite sides of the same ‘front.’ Yet they had utterly opposite reports to make on the same phenomena — for instance, the ability of the Abyssinians to fight, the character of the northern Rases, and so on.
Tuesday, December 31. — Because there was nothing else in sight, I sent a weather story, something I don’t often do: ‘Year 1935 departed England with big wet splash.’ Lunch alone. Turkish bath. New Year’s Eve dinner, grand, with the Carl Brandts and Vincent and Dinah Sheean. I had n’t seen Sheean since 1929 in Palestine, except for a brief glimpse in New York last year. He is older, grayer, watching his poise; his lower lip still curls like Maurice Chevalier’s.
Wednesday, January 1, 1936. — Small evening party at Dr. Letitia Fairfield’s. She is Rebecca West’s elder sister, one of the few women in the world who hold an authentic doctorate in both medicine and law; her career has been almost unique. Some Labor Party people were there, also Rebecca and Henry. R. looked gorgeous and her talk was, as always, a golden dusky flow, flawless in wit and rhythm. She reminisced about her childhood, something I’ve seldom heard her do; her father wanted to be a painter, and the rest of her family, for such were Scottish families in those days, were as shocked ‘ as if he had begun to rouge.’ About someone else, she said he was as conspicuous ‘as a black tooth in your mouth.’
V
Tuesday, January 7. — Wrote a 360word cable on the naval talks, which resumed yesterday. At noon arrived an advance copy of the book. This was very smart publishing by Hamilton; after all the thing runs 510 pages and the printers did n’t get page proofs till Christmas; to get it out so quickly was a brilliant achievement, in fact a record. Actual publication date is January 13. Lunch alone. The book burned my fingers, of course. I went to the R. A. C. to read it and felt that the jacket was horribly conspicuous: I could n’t quite bear to be seen with it, so I carefully took the jacket off and folded and hid it in my pocket.
Thursday, January 9. — At the Embassy at 10.30, to discuss American neutrality legislation with William Butterworth, our first secretary and exceptionally knowledgeable. Wrote two fairly long cables, about the FrancoBritish proposals for naval coöperation in the Mediterranean, and (once again) on the pathetic and wearisome Naval Conference. Incidentally, some of my best stuff on Hoare-Laval did not get into the paper. Lunched with X. He has information, which I trust, that King George is ill. Good story, but I can’t touch it with a ten-foot pole until there is some official or semi-official confirmation.
Friday, January 10. — Another long story about the Naval Conference, after a talk at Claridge’s with Pell and Fred Kuh. They stared quizzically when I came in; leaving the flat in a hurry, I had forgotten to comb my hair. Typical. Luncheon with Lady Oxford. We talked about Henry Ford, Kitchener, prospects of mutiny in the Italian army (a Sudanese civil servant was there, who knew Abyssinia well), Mark Twain, and why King George V sent that telegram to Hitler on his birthday early last year. Margot was so horrified that he had done so that she protested directly to the Queen. The King did it on his own hook, it appears; the F. O. was not informed. Such things do happen, incredible as it may seem, in this most puzzling country, which obeys no ordinary rules.
The talk drifted to money. Margot turned to me suddenly and said, ‘Are you rich?’ This astonished me, because it never occurred to me that anyone who knew us at all well could have imagined that we were in anything but very moderate circumstances. She thought that I should get a lot of money for my book. But her ideas, I promptly saw, were astronomical. For her autobiography she told me that she had received $55,000, but I did not understand whether this was an outright payment or an advance on royalties. The story of the way it was commissioned was curious. Later she got fantastic sums for journalism; for a time she was ‘Atticus’ in the Sunday Times. This seemed to me remarkably and typically British — that a great newspaper should have Margot Oxford as its columnist and print her in cloaklike anonymity!
Saturday, January 11. — Two cables again to-day, one on the naval talks (the Japs are going to walk out next week, which will mean the end of naval disarmament, so-called), the other on the picturesque Ross and Cromarty by-election where young Malcolm MacDonald is trying to save his skin. Lunch with Fred Kuh. He wanted to know why F. was n’t doing any work of her own, why she was no longer interested in anything except taking care of me. I assured him that this latter observation was to some extent a distortion of the truth. But he had disapproved, lunching with her a couple of weeks ago, when she said that being a wife, mother, and housekeeper exhausted all her energy. We lunched leisurely, which is unusual; and, leaving Rule’s at three, I suddenly discovered that, for the first time in six months at least, I had absolutely nothing to do. This was an extraordinary sensation. So I took a walk in the Green Park, loafed at the club for an hour, and dropped in for tea with John W. Wheeler-Bennett. I was glad to see him (he has been out of town all winter, busy finishing his biography of Hindenburg), not only because I like and admire him, but because most of my friends here are Left-Wingers or Liberals, and it was refreshing to have conversation with an intelligent and honest Tory.
VI
Monday, January 13. — Inside Europe was published to-day. Sent a story about Abyssinia, and another on Kipling’s illness. His being ill means very little to me, nothing, for instance, to what I should feel if Wells or Thomas Mann or Freud or André Gide or Sinclair Lewis were ill. Lunch with Sheean. Ho had just seen G. B. Shaw. Sheean very amusing and agreeable, though still inclined to be moony about his precious Arabs. In the afternoon went to the Foreign Office, first time I’ve been there in months. General impression is that the Italians are licked; in fact, I heard fears of an Italian debacle, like Adowa. But I keep remembering all that Webb so convincingly reported.
Tuesday, January 14. — My attitude toward sanctions is roughly this. I quite agree that it would be foolish to stop one war by starting another. But I think that Mussolini is bluffing, and has n’t the faintest idea of greeting an oil embargo as a casus belli. I want the Abyssinian war stopped, and I hope the Italians are beaten, because (1) I am a good pro-Leaguer and this is a test case for the Covenant, for the survival of public law in Europe; (2) I hate Fascism, and a defeat for the Italians would be a thumping blow at the forces of reaction everywhere; (3) successful sanctions might be an effective precedent against aggression by Hitler later.
F. does n’t agree with me. She is against sanctions. She does n’t think that Italy should be humiliated; she does n’t want to risk a blowup in Central Europe; she thinks that the Abyssinians are a damned miserable people and, like Shaw, is on the side of the road builders; and she does n’t think Hitler is historically-minded enough to be checked by precedents. Yet she hates Fascism and smash-and-grab politics as much as I do.
Wednesday, January 15. — We dined at Schmidt’s, on Tottenham Court Road, with Aneurin and Jennie, full of life and beans.
Aneurin Bevan, compact and powerful, should be Prime Minister of England some day. Some people think he will. But he is an inveterate lone wolf, and often wrong-headed. And he lacks elasticity. Aneurin was born in Wales and worked underground in the mines for years. The courage and resourcefulness by which he managed to educate himself are remarkable. He got a job in the miners’ union and is now so impregnable in his constituency, Ebbw Vale, that ordinarily the conservatives don’t bother to put up a candidate against him. In the last elections, however, they did, in order to tie him up, keep him from speaking in other parts of the country. In drawing-room or platform, he is contagiously brilliant. His rich laugh and Welsh accent help. Aneurin, hot, humorous, impish, frank, forward, vivacious, has given us some of the best times we’ve had in England.
F. and I decided on the way home to give up parties for a while. They are too expensive. A dinner party costs $80 to $35, a cocktail or evening party $40 to $50, depending on how much people drink. We are very broke. We have, by modest standards, a decent enough salary; but we cannot live on it. In Vienna we did; here it is impossible. This is because, of course, we like to do nice things, buy books, see people, go out a lot. The last two or three years I have made a good deal each year by outside writing, and while we were in Vienna we saved this; here, at about a rate of $100 a month, we have to cut into it. The office allows me £10 per month for all entertainment, taxis, and so on, which is very little indeed. I spend at least six to eight shillings a day on taxis alone, and nine out of ten for Daily News purposes.
Thursday, January 16. — Johnnie has developed a remarkable ideological concept which he calls Smoky. An imaginary means of conveyance, Smoky is an obvious compensation for his own littleness and inability to travel. Smoky is at one and the same time the most powerful locomotive in the world, the biggest Zeppelin, the fastest steamboat, the largest automobile, and the finest aeroplane. As a boat, it crosses the Atlantic in two and a half days; as a train, it gets from Bognor Regis to Vienna in fourteen hours; as an airplane, it goes to Australia in a night. Johnnie has gone all around the world in Smoky; as a result he has learned a remarkable lot of geography for a boy of six. He traces each trip on his maps or on a globe. Smoky nowadays goes to either the North or the South Pole every night, and his customary parking place during the day is Mount Everest.
When F. took him to a pantomime the other day, he announced suddenly that he was on the Abyssinian side in the war.
Saturday, January 18. — The King is seriously ill. So the Welsh trip is off. This will be a tremendous story.
(To be concluded)