Diana Mitford - A Life of Contrasts: The Autobiography

THE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF

Diana Mosley

G IBSON S QUARE

London

I first met Diana Mosley when in 1980 I was sent by a newspaper to interview her about her book on the Duchess of Windsor. Her husband, Sir Oswald, was alive then, and the Mosleys were living in their ravishing early 19th-century house, Le Temple de la Gloire, just outside Paris. For me it was a memorable encounter, and I was bowled over by this extraordinary woman, not only by the celebrated beauty, formidable intelligence and blazing instinct for the truth, but by the fact that during the three or four hours we spent together she made me laugh almost more than I had ever done.

Diana was then in her sixties, but her exceptional qualities were apparent from an early age. In 1929, when she was just 19, Evelyn Waugh wrote to the novelist Henry Green, Do you and Dig share my admiration for Diana? She seems to me the one encouraging figure in this generation. At that period it was Diana of all the six remarkable Mitford sisters who was most prominently in the public eye, her elder sister Nancy not yet having written the novels which made her name, her younger sisters, Unity, Decca and Debo, still enclosed in the schoolroom. At 18 Diana had married Bryan Guinness, a gentle, literary young man of romantic good looks and an immense fortune, and it was through this marriage that Diana was released into the world to which she ardently aspired, that of the literary and artistic intelligentsia.

Young Mrs Guinness with her loveliness, her wit and her engaging enthusiasm, made friends everywhere, and not only among her youthful contemporaries: Lytton Strachey adored her, as did Augustus John, Gerald Berners and Osbert Sitwell. With Bryans riches at her disposal, Diana filled their country house, Biddesden in Wiltshire, with paintings by artists both new and established, commissioned a carpet from the modernist Marion Dorn, and sculpture from Stephen Tomlin. Dora Carrington painted a trompe loeil and Boris Anrep executed a mosaic for the swimming-pool. (Anreps mosaic portrait of Diana, as one of the nine Muses, still adorns the entrance of the National Gallery in London.)

At Biddesden, in London, and at the Guinnesses house in Ireland, Bryan and Diana entertained and with panache, among the most regular beneficiaries of their lavish hospitality the Sitwells, Henry and Pansy Lamb, Henry Yorke (Henry Green), Robert Byron, Harold and William Acton, John Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh. Betjeman wrote a poem beginning, I too could be arty, I too could get on/ With Sickert, the Guinnesses, Gertler and John, while Waugh dedicated two books to Bryan and Diana Guinness and used Diana as a model for Lucy Simmonds, the heroine of Work Suspended. To Lucy Simmonds is attributed generosity, an unaffected goodness and sincerity, and a pale beauty which rang through the room like a peal of bells.

To Diana the most revered member of the older generation was Lytton Stracheynicknamed Mr Oh-Indeed, as those were the words with which he most frequently punctuated his conversation. It was Strachey who became her mentor, directing her reading and doing a great deal to fill in the gaps left by a somewhat patchy education. She loved him not only for his wisdom and originality but for his unerring ability to see the comic side, as she puts it, a virtue prized almost above all others in Mitford eyes. For as a family Diana and her sisters regard it as an essential politeness to present life, wherever possible, as delightful and amusing, and thus seeing the comic side constitutes a basic requirement of this courteous philosophy.

Wit and humour are notoriously difficult to convey in retrospect, especially here without the advantage of the Mitford drawl and familiarity with the Mitford habit of oblique approach. (An example of this unconventional perspective occured when in 1981 I visited Diana in hospital in London where she was recovering from a life-threatening operation. Laying aside my proffered copies of Tatler and Vogue, she asked me instead to bring her from the London Library two dusty tomes in German Schrift of the life of the Kaiser. How could you bear to wade through such boring stuff? I asked her. Oh, darling, came the reply, the jokes!) But if regrettably I am unable to remember exactly what was said, I know that I came away enchanted from that first meeting nearly a quarter of a century ago, and the warm and stimulating friendship that developed remains one of the delights of my life.

I envy any reader coming for the first time to A Life of Contrasts, Dianas own account of her eventful past, for he has a rare treat in front of him.

Selina Hastings