For the Time Being (23 page)

There was absolutely no room in his life for ‘second best'. He would not tolerate it at any price, even among those in the circle closest to him. And that was close. Very few of us got that near. He was a hellish taskmaster.

Apart from his mother, whom he adored, it would appear the two people who had the most effect on him in his early days were Coco Chanel and Jean Renoir.

Chanel introduced the two men, she intrigued carefully, and very soon Visconti became Renoir's assistant director and costume designer on
A Day in the Country.
His career had commenced. Chanel, naturally enough, fell deeply in love with the handsome aristocrat and sent bunches of red roses every day. ‘For
weeks!
he once said despairingly. A wonderful woman, but not for him, she was one of the favoured few who knew the life in the Erba family villa at Cernobbio where all the most glorious and brilliant gathered. The Noailles, the Beaumonts, Diaghilev, Misia Sert and so on. Chanel was very much a part of this life. Her chic, her simplicity, discipline in design, knowledge in art and everything else were food and drink to the young man. He learned assiduously.

From Jean Renoir he entered a different life. Darker perhaps, closer to real life, a life which at first surprised him and which later he would embrace. Communism and the anti-fascists. He was a bitter anti-fascist, and joined, with Renoir, the tight group of young intellectuals who milled about the fringes of the Experimental Film Centre and a famous Left magazine,
Cinema.
This was a protest against his government and, strangely, against his own heritage. He never changed.

On the death of his father he inherited a villa on the Via Salaria in Rome and moved there for almost the rest of his life. In the villa he held court among his roses in the lovely garden and his paintings and porcelain. During the war it became a safe-house for members of the Resistance movement, and a haven for escaping members of the British and American forces. He was eventually arrested, but after some months in prison he was freed the day before the
Americans liberated Rome. And life, the life he was to make so notable, began.

He directed everything from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams, from opera to ballet, from films about starving fishermen in Sicily to
The Leopard.
He worked in America, in France, in Italy and in Germany and he lived furiously.

Was he decadent? Not that I ever saw. Homosexual? I never held the lantern, but it was always supposed that he was. Cruel? There were times. And arrogant? Seriously. Kind? Often. Generous? Very. Amusing? I really don't think that he was. I seldom heard his laughter. Only saw a vague smile, a raised eyebrow. Sometimes, and this usually with a good cook, for he was passionate about food. I would hear him give a great bark of laughter, and then speak rapidly in whatever dialect the cook spoke. But I don't think that I have ever known anyone, and certainly not in the cinema-world, who could speak of Klimt and Karajan, Proust and Peanuts, Mozart and Mantovani (he adored the Eurovision Song Contests), Duse
and
Doris Day.

After his stroke I was permitted to see him in the villa at Cernobbio. For ten minutes only.

The drive up was illuminated by rows of figures holding high-burning flambeaux. He was sitting in a wheelchair, wrapped in a tartan rug, small, shrivelled almost, the lion reduced to the size of a crippled whippet. I embraced him, and he took my hand with his good one. I stayed there for two hours while footmen carried great albums filled with photographs of his latest epic,
Ludwig.
He was instantly animated, alert, full of excitement turning the pages. I was the one who wilted under the long car journey from Munich.

When, next day, I had reached home there was a little note written on the square-page of an exercise book. ‘Thank you,' it read. ‘For coming so far out of your way to see me, now that I am no longer any use to you.'

He had signed it simply ‘Papa'.

This was a word which I used, behind his back, to his crew, and had no idea that he knew. He understood that it was used with warmth and affection.

Shortly before he died we spoke on the telephone together about the chances of doing
The Magic Mountain
… or, perhaps, the Proust. ‘Olivier will be Charlus, you can take Swann, Garbo says that she will play the Queen of Naples, and Signoret, maybe, as Odette … we see. Come to Rome next week? When I have got rid of this damned ‘flu bug. Telephone me next Monday. Ciao.'

Next Monday was too late.

The Mountain and the Magic had gone.

Daily Telegraph,
24 November 1990

A bit late, a cruelly neglected book was brought to my attention by the excellent John Sandoe of Blacklands Terrace. In a year of reviewing, P. Y. Betts's
People Who Say Goodbye: Memories of Childhood
(Souvenir) was a read for sheer pleasure and gave me intense delight. It is haunting, unforgettable and one longs for a second-helping. It nudges memory wonderfully, sadly, with great hilarity.

Daily Telegraph,
24 November 1990

This modest little book had been under a great pile at Sandoe's. Johnny de Falbe handed it to me with the words: ‘Have a look at this. You might enjoy it.' I did, and obviously a lot of other readers did too: by the end of the year, it had gone into a second printing. A paperback edition was reprinted three or four times.

Eels with Dill Sauce
by Countess von Bredow (Peter Owen)

Those glittering emporia of literature which we find now in almost every town are all very well. Glossy, rich, super-stocked.
But.

There they stand, a million books gleaming on the shelves, very often piped Mozart to assail the browsing customer, and a mass of smiling, eager young people who can find, by pressing buttons, any book you require.
But.
No one will suggest that you might
like
a book: no one will offer you Mrs Gaskell's collected Victorian short stories, no one will say that such and such a book, almost unreviewed but very much worth a look, is at hand. You are therefore in dire danger of missing out on some excellent books which, for one reason or another, have slipped through the nets into oblivion.

I would have missed Mrs Gaskell had I not been guided by a Real Bookseller who also brought to my notice this poorly titled but perfectly glorious book about an eccentric German family of impoverished aristocrats living just outside Berlin in the early thirties.

Eels with Dill Sauce
is an unalloyed joy. It has sold over 500,000 copies in Germany alone, gone into the
Guinness Book of Records,
and was the top bestseller in Germany for forty-two weeks. It is subtitled
Memories of an Eccentric Childhood,
and, through the eyes of the youngest daughter, a wise, observant and funny child, the whole family comes alive: so too does the evocation of a time sliding quietly into the shadows.

Use, Countess von Bredow, recalls, without a trace of nostalgia or sentimentality, a life now lost to us for good.

Here we have a splendid cast of lunatics: the Count, engrossed in his impoverished lands, cherishing his trees with an all-consuming
passion; the Countess, prone at times to giggle, caring for her children. And their friends: crippled Bruno, who lives with his spinster mother in the woods; Otto, his cousin, who teaches everyone how to fish, trap and steal; and
their
'Grandpa', the most respected man in the area after the Count, for the simple reason that he has a permanent job as a nightwatchman, a well-groomed beard and wears a pinstriped suit to church.

There are hated governesses, an adored cook and the jolliest maid in current literature. Lore is always on the point of getting married, but never quite makes the summit of bliss. Happiness, irreverence and good manners run throughout the book. The memory is jogged so often one sighs at the end with regret.

There is no sadness here, no wistfulness. Although the reader is well aware that the end is very near, that the flight to the West will take place, the family uprooted, dispersed, it never disturbs the funny, happy existence of those final golden summers and snowy winters. All was safe, all secure. It is splendid to have it here in the hand as a reminder.

Daily Telegraph,
29 December 1990

Captain Gronow: His Reminiscences of Regency and Victorian Life
1810-60,
edited by Christopher Hibbert (Kyle Cathie)

It is quite possible you are not in the least like me where writing is concerned, in that I am a kind of sleeve-grabber. By that I mean I really do prefer the eyewitness account, however badly written, to the elegance of NW5 biography. There is a terrible immediacy about the former which is totally absent years later when distilled by a writer who, for all the research he or she may have done, never quite hits the elbow of one's emotion. There
are
exceptions of course, but precious few.

This is a modest book, a truthful, beautifully edited put-together-job of some very remarkable reports from the pen of the man Who Was There and saw, and met, and was among the people, battles and events which he describes with such eloquence.

Captain Gronow is not a man of great profundity. He is no politician, and seems to care little for the people who are. Sensibly, in my opinion. But in a strange way he sets down some of the most extraordinary events ofhis time and, without a mass of clever writing, persuades the reader that what he has seen or heard is exactly as it was. Any man who can claim personal knowledge of Marietta Alboni, Napoleon, Brummell and Waterloo deserves our attention.

These reminiscences were first published in 1867. The sprightly author claimed, with reason, that he had lived through the greater part of one of the most eventful centuries in England's history. And so he did. In the days when he lived in Paris, a French journalist wrote of him thus:

He was small, spare and about fifty years of age – always wore a blue tight-fitting coat closely buttoned, just allowing a white
line of waistcoat to be visible – with his hair well arranged, scented, cold and phlegmatic [he] knew the best people in Paris, visited all the diplomats and was evidently intimate with everybody of note in Europe.

But do not be deceived. This little man, who joined the Guards in 1813, was present on the field of Waterloo and wrote this:

There is nothing perhaps in the episodes of a great battle more striking than the debris of a cavalry charge, where men and horses are seen scattered and wounded on the ground in every variety of painful attitude. Many a time the heart sickened at the moaning tones of agony which came from man, and scarcely less intelligent horse, as they lay in fearful agony upon the field of battle.

And this before Miss Nightingale started to busy herself. The flat, unsensational account is, to my mind, more vivid and cruel than the lusher writing of those who only imagined the battle, and were not present. The very simplicity and understatement shocks: ‘…
every variety of painful attitude'
cannot, I think, be sadder-written.

But Gronow did not only observe war and its brutalities. He also noted the food and fashions of the day; he commented on Lord Byron being caught in bed ‘in his curlers' and begging that the cat be not let out of the bag – for, said he, ‘I am as vain of my curls as a girl of sixteen.' And there you have Byron. Or anyway a very key part of the fellow.

Gronow knew intimately the elegance of fashionable London, attending all the very best balls and suppers. A weekly ticket to the ball at Almacks on a Wednesday was deemed to be ‘the seventh heaven of the fashionable world'; and the great hostesses, such as Lady Jersey, Lady Castlereagh, the Princess Esterhazy (whose servants denied Wellington entry to her ball because he was wearing trousers, not breeches) and Madame de Lieven, ruled fashionable society – for not all society
was
fashionable – with rods of iron. And vast purses.

Gronow knew of the Pig Faced Lady of Grosvenor Square, and
a writer who had recently written a famous bestseller, who was bidden to Lady Holland's for supper and sent away because he had no bridge to his nose. ‘I conjure you,' she said to the unhappy guest who had brought him to the evening, ‘never bring any more of your friends to Holland House who are not blessed with bridges to their noses.'

Of course, all this is trivia – but what excellent trivia it is, and how much more attractive than our own versions of the same put before us in today's glossy magazines, which are altogether grubbier and far less amusing. Have we a Brummell going about? When asked by an envious young beau where he obtained the fine blacking for his exquisite boots, he replied: ‘My blacking positively ruins me. I will tell you in confidence: it is made with the finest champagne.' How elegant! Today, footballers and racing drivers shake it up to spray at journalists.

If you don't think it amusing to know that Queen Charlotte took such enormous quantities from her gold snuff-box ‘that her nose quivered within and without on the terrace at Windsor'; that a Colonel Disney was disgraced for the sin of'putting the Queen's gold toilet vase to a use that cannot be named “in ears polite”'; or even that politics of the day have little altered when one reads: ‘[I] set to work “to bribe every man, woman and child” in the ancient borough of Stafford – gave suppers every night to my supporters, kissed all their wives and children, drank their health in every sort of abominable mixture' – if all this kind of tittle-tattle is of little interest to you, ignore my strong recommendation to buy this diverting book.

You'll miss a lot of fun if you don't.

Daily Telegraph,
23 February 1991

Beloved and Darling Child: Last Letters between Queen Victoria
and Her Eldest Daughter 1886–1901,
edited by Agatha Ramm
(Alan Sutton)