Self-Portrait of a Lady

TRUMPETS FROM THE STEEP (268 pp.)--Diana Cooper--Houghfon Mifflin ($5).

When lovely woman stoops to the folly of autobiography, the enterprise is all too often flawed by malice, self-pity or a simple failure to grasp the fact that a book is not always interesting to others because its author is interesting to herself. Lady Diana Cooper escapes these dangers. From the first volume of her three-decker autobiography, The Rainbow Comes and Goes (TIME, Oct. 27, 1958), it was clear that Lady Diana is a natural if artless self-historian. Moreover, she has the great advantage that almost every one-she knows is Someone.

The reader can be sure that when she tells of making a frantic telephone call to "Clemmie," it will be Mrs. Winston Churchill who picks up the receiver, while "Duckling" is Winston himself, and "Wormwood" is none other than General Charles de Gaulle.* "Duff," of course, is Lady Diana's husband, who died as Lord Norwich in 1954 but who, during the period of the book, was plain Mr. Alfred Duff Cooper, successively army lieutenant, Minister of Information, civilian defense chief in Southeast Asia, liaison man in North Africa and, finally, Ambassador to France, writing the Treaty of Dunkirk, and at the embassy piano listening to "Ernie" Bevin sing cockney ballads. It is by a thousand such little cinema frame snippets that Lady Diana's book gains value as a personal portrait of a period--World War II and after--just as her other two volumes cover World War I, the twittering '20s and the fateful '30s.

Odd & British Birds. Apart from the high-level gossip, she gives a picture of the astonishing toughness of the British aristocracy. For all the physical grace and fragility that made her famous as an amateur actress playing madonna and nun in Max Reinhardt's The Miracle, in time of war no patrician matron of Imperial Rome could have been more intransigent, bellicose and stoic. Despite invincible fear of air travel, she flew with Duff in countless trips to zones of war, sometimes "hard-arse" (Lady Diana's phrase). She endured inconceivable official tedium, the horrors of the Indian "lu."/- saw a second English generation of her class face death (on Dday, "two Mannerses"), and for a time, in "dung-covered boots," fed swill to pigs on a Sussex farm. Her bits on the horrors of life under British austerity are done with sharp irony. Lady Dufferin's goldfinch was "frozen to death in her bedroom. A remarkable thing to happen to a British bird." Then there were the disgruntled mothers from Britain's bombed slums quartered in the Stately Homes of England. Said one: "I can stand anything but the trees. The trees get me down."

Lady Diana has a curious way of making real people seem like Waugh characters,* as she does in the cinematic glimpse of life in the Viceregal Lodge at Simla, where the "brontosaurian" viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow, maintained a dur-barlike protocol in the last days of the British raj. The edge was taken off the formality by the sight of His Excellency sidling about the vast building clutching his "catty" (catapult) for shooting crows on the rooftop.

Saints & Infidels. Most of her travel snapshots are brilliantly selective; the camera may tilt a bit, but the subject is in focus. In Townsville. she goes to bed to the noise of drunken sailors and wakes to the noise of "drunken birds with Australian accents"--a perfect description of the screech of the Australian cockatoo. Her quick picture of a high Soviet official, an abominable no-man if ever there was one, is a subject on which less modest writers would have done less well in many thousand more words.

Brave to the last. Lady Diana, at 68, still gets about the world with a passport photograph by Cecil Beaton representing her as "Tiepolo's idea of Cleopatra" ("The frontiers still let me through with that picture . . . When they won't I'll stay at home"). But. Lady Diana's being the age she is, this last volume of her autobiography is sadly also the obituary of many a friend, and thus of a generation. Hilaire Belloc makes a last appearance, "poor old saint, moves as slowly as a tortoise and is covered with gravy, ash and candlegrease" (and saying of papal politics: " 'What would you expect of a lot of clergymen?'"). Conrad Russell, a duke's nephew, whose correspondence makes up a good part of the book, dies a Catholic. "Emerald" (Lady Cunard), glittering literary hostess, dies an infidel ("I think Jesus Christ had a most unpleasant face"). Die most of them do. In her last pages, as the last and brightest of the Bright Young People of the Twenties bids goodbye to her beauty, she says wistfully: "The long custom of living disinclines one to dying, but great loss makes death less fearful. Besides, before the end, what light may shine?"

* Gall and wormwood, that is.

/- British U-type word for toilet, derived from l'eau.

* Connoisseurs of social and literary inbreeding might ponder the two-line appearance of Novelist Evelyn Waugh, dressed as an officer in the Royal Marines and wearing, Lady Diana remarks with fond malice, "as smart a little moustache as Errol Flynn." Would not this be the same moustache briefly cultivated by Captain Guy Crouchback in Waugh's Men at Arms? And would not Lady Diana herself be that recurrent Waugh character, Mrs. Stitch, beautiful, beloved, a friend of the great and talented, but wife of that rather dull stick, Mr. Stitch, a Cabinet minister?

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