The Pursuit of Laughter (44 page)

Mr Wyndham Lewis’ first novel for fourteen years is, on the human level, as bitter and
disillusioned
as its title suggests. There can be no doubt that the author dislikes and despises people in general and English people in particular. Almost every character is a savage
caricature
, a grotesque. The central figure, Professor René Harding, is half French, and (as war-time England is, in a sense, the villain of the novel) this half-foreignness is evidently meant to mark his superiority. When war approaches, in 1939, he throws up his history professorship, because he disapproves so deeply of the war and the trend of events in Europe that he decides to start a new life in Canada. Why does he not continue to teach, and try to convert others to his point of view? Because he is nervous, vain, touchy, and—in the last resort—conventional. Feeling an atmosphere so hostile to him he retires before the fight begins.

In Canada, he and his wife are virtually prisoners for three years. They inhabit a room in a cheap hotel which they are too poor to leave, with no friends, no work, and no
comfort
, where they suffer deeply from the Canadian climate, which according to Mr Wyndham Lewis consists of ten months of bitter freezing winds and two months of
glaring
,
panting heat accompanied by swarms of dangerous, stinging flies. Extremely
unpleasant
for both of them, these years are harder to bear for the wife than for the husband, as imprisonment must always be harder for those with empty heads than for those whose intellectual life is an unending adventure. Finally the dreadful squalid hotel is burned down; and when, soon after, René Harding is offered a chair of history at the local
university
, his wife, realising that Canada is to be their permanent lot and neurotically
homesick
for Kensington, chooses freedom by throwing herself under a lorry.

There are scenes which are so well described that they are unforgettable—the Hampstead dinner party, the hotel fire, the police morgue—but it is not these alone which are the point of the book. The loving care most writers lavish on their characters is reserved by Mr Wyndham Lewis for the ideas of his hero. Professor Harding, ‘outraged by the events of the past thirty years beyond endurance’, writes a book. In it he points out that: ‘History is the record of the quantitive… Unless the notion of significance can be detached from this misleading “quantity” association, no proper History can be written… If a new attitude were to be introduced, banishing the record of the silly, the criminal, or the commonplace (which, as it is, relegates History to the plane of a crime-yarn, a Western Story, or a body of statistics) then it would be necessary to attempt to expunge from our daily life, as far as possible, the things we condemn in History… He hoped that the
discredit
of a certain kind of event in the past would reflect forward (to some extent) to how we all acted today.’

He goes on: ‘We obviously would perish ignominiously if we continued as we were at present. We must train and compress ourselves in every way, and breed an animal
superior
to our present disorderly and untidy selves. He added that there was very little chance of our doing this, but that it was just worth stating that this is the only possible solution.’

The discussion of these neo-Nietzschean ideas makes this book unusual. For those who do not like didactic novels, perhaps it should be pointed out that they (the ideas) take up very little space; the remainder is full of dramas and melodramas; and of cads, mad charwomen, toughs, bearded Canadian pansies, thieves and murderers, revolving round the solitary figure of
homo sapiens
personified by Professor Harding. The result is an
intelligent
, funny, rather savage novel, deeply pessimistic about man as he is but with a gleam of hope for man as he might be.

Self Condemned
, Lewis, W. (1954)

Champs Elysées

FRANCE

The news that Michael Bloch, well known for his Windsor books and with access to the Windsor archives, had written a book to prove that the Duchess had been a man was
startling
. What had he discovered, and how? It conjured up the strangest vision among anyone who knew the Duchess (he did not know her) of a tiny man, a very thin midget,
beautifully
dressed in drag by Balenciaga, wearing a cleverly made wig, because few men could summon up enough hair for the bouffant style she favoured—but here the vision fades, and the real-life Duchess is remembered as she was, feminine and elegant.

The truth is, Michael Bloch does not say she was a man. He says she never had what other women have, but he doesn't say she had what men have. He says that her three marriages were unconsummated. Of course, he is only guessing. Perhaps he advanced his theory as an excuse for dishing up once again the whole Windsor story, from Mrs Simpson's meeting with the Prince of Wales, his passion for her, the abdication, their life together for thirty five years, her seemingly endless illness and her death ten years ago at the age of 90.

Wallis Warfield's first marriage was to a very manly and rather brutal looking officer in the US airforce, Winfield Spencer. She was 20. If he had discovered on their wedding night that sexual intercourse was impossible because of some physical deformity, there can be little doubt he would have departed next day. He drank too much and was often violent; he would not have been violent to her had they been living as brother and sister. This is just a fact of life. The marriage failed because of his drinking, quite simply.

Mr Simpson was the sort of man who might well have married her in order to acquire an entertaining companion who was also a housekeeper of genius, but her marriage to Spencer was a love-match ruined by drink, hardly an unusual event.

The Duke's love for her was so deep, and so obvious to anyone who saw them
together
, that it is no good pretending it had some abnormal physical reason. It lasted until he died and she looked after him superbly.

There are happy married couples in the world, and the Windsors are an outstanding example of this. It seems just as perverse to pretend she was a freak as to have pretended that she was not a royal highness, when legally she was.

Bloch writes well and there are plenty of photographs for the fans. It is the non-fans who may be slightly disappointed by the flimsy evidence he advances for his fantasy.

The Duchess of Windsor
, Bloch, M.
Evening Standard
(1996)

Frances Donaldson's biography of Edward VIII was published a few years ago, and now
she has abridged the text, added many excellent illustrations, and given it the coffee table format. More than half the book is devoted to the abdication, the tone throughout being censorious. It is a book by a governess doing her best to be fair to her charge, and
sometimes
succeeding.

She describes the rather sad childhood, the aloof mother, the sergeant-major-like father, and the poor education bestowed upon the children of George V at York Cottage, the house Harold Nicolson called ‘a glum little villa'. She admits that the Prince of Wales had ‘a very real talent for natural feeling and natural behaviour in an impossibly artificial situation', for the ‘narrow, nice line that, pursued with increasing confidence, would soon carry him to amazing heights of popularity almost all round the world.' It is no
exaggeration
to say that he was idolised; in England, in the Dominions where he undertook exhausting tours and in fact everywhere he went. Many quotations here emphasise this. Lord Mountbatten said of him: ‘He had an absolutely magnetic charm.' Being an idol is probably not as easy as it sounds.

The abysmal failure of successive British governments in the 20s and early 30s to deal with the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty and of unemployment is notorious. The Prince of Wales, like other ex-servicemen of the First World War, saw the suffering of his fellow-countrymen and doubtless felt (and it was the truth) that it was due to the inadequacy of government. When, as King, he spoke the famous words ‘Something must be done', millions of people agreed and approved; but the politicians, disliking the implied rebuke, murmured about bringing the Crown into politics.

When he came to the throne as Edward VIII he was already deeply in love with Mrs Simpson; it was a love which lasted every day of his life for nearly forty years. A great deal has been written about the abdication, and about his selfishness, and dereliction of duty, and putting his private happiness before his duty to his country, and all this is stressed here. It is a theory which does not stand up.

The point is continually made, that in a constitutional monarchy the monarch cannot play any political role. He must be ‘above politics', in other words simply a figurehead and a living symbol. Suppose, for one moment, Edward VIII thought a war with Germany would be the disaster for us that it has proved to have been, he could have done nothing to prevent it had he remained on the throne. Even in purely domestic affairs he could not have interfered. ‘Something must be done' was a cry wrung from him at the sight of
ghastly
despair in the distressed areas caused by political failure, but even that was disapproved of (perhaps rather naturally so) by a government which was convinced that nothing either would or could be ‘done'.

If this point is agreed, that the sovereign must on no account intervene in any way at all, and that the word ‘reign' is nothing but a word left over from olden times, then it
follows
that it does not matter so much who the sovereign is, what matters is continuity. The proof is that six kings and queens in the last one hundred and forty years have all been popular and successful, yet all unlike one another.

Edward VIII had a strong sense of duty; he would undoubtedly have sacrificed his
private
happiness had he been an only son, for he was a firm believer in monarchy. Since he had three brothers, all of them married and each with a wife eminently suitable to be queen consort, there was no reason for his doing so. It was perfectly true that he could not fulfil the role of King without the help and support of the woman he loved (as he put it). A royal family is needed. He knew that the brother who was to succeed him, the future George VI, with Queen Elizabeth and the Princesses, would be ideal for England and for what was then the Empire; and so it proved.

King George V is quoted as having ‘exclaimed passionately' a few weeks before he died:

We are not told to whom he is supposed to have made this observation. It could,
presumably
, only have been to Queen Mary, and in strict privacy, and she is unlikely to have repeated it. However, there is no reason to doubt that such were indeed the thoughts of the old King. Edward VIII made sure that his father's prayer was answered.

Nevertheless, many people, Churchill and Lloyd George among them, were very sorry to see him go. At the time of the abdication Lloyd George was in the West Indies; in those days the journey took weeks and he could not get home to take part in the House of Commons debate. He cabled to his MP son and his MP daughter: ‘… Had King not as prince and sovereign exposed continued neglect by government of chronic distress,
poverty
and bad housing conditions amongst his people in realm, convinced they would not have shown such alacrity to dethrone him. You may make any use you like of this telegram.'

With such high-powered statesmen on his side there must have been a temptation for the King to sit tight, but he was resolved not to divide the nation. In the interest of
continuity
, he abdicated. Sir Colin Coote, in his obituary of the Duke wrote: ‘It was very largely due to him that his going was not cataclysmic. His determination that what he did should not be politically upsetting was as strong as his resolve to do it.'

The Duke himself shall have the last word: ‘I played fair in 1936,' he said, ‘but I was bloody shabbily treated.' The late James Pope-Hennessy quoted this. He had planned a biography of the Duke of Windsor, and it is a thousand pities that he did not live to write it. The Duke is apt to bring out the governess in people, but there was no trace of the
governess
in James Pope-Hennessy's make-up; only vivid intelligence and humour.

Edward VIII: The Road to Abdication
, Donaldson, F.
Books and Bookmen
(1978)

In the last war Lady Donaldson had a farm; the description of her experiences is the best part of this memoir. Apparently she has already published two farming books, so there may be readers aware of her courage and skill in the enterprise. Her last venture, battery hens, seems less admirable.

She and her husband were lifelong members of the Labour Party, but left for the more seductive ‘Alliance'. Far from breaking the mould of British politics it was so fragile that it came to pieces in their hands, losing handle and spout like an eggshell china teapot. She writes as if we were still living in 1988, before the world completely changed after the fall of communism, praising Crosland's book
The Future of Socialism
. Would there not now be more point in reading Taine?

It is sad to be told how nearly the biography of the Duke of Windsor was written by James Pope-Hennessy, so witty and perceptive. Frances Donaldson's book was a bestseller and she goes through the story again here. It is a pedestrian affair compared with what it might have been. Both Donaldsons were what Churchill used to call goody-goodies, which though very nice is somewhat inhibiting for writing on Edward VIII. Where
Pope-Hennessy
in the fragments that remain, makes the reader laugh aloud, but always with a scene of pathos and waste, she is unconsciously comic, as when she says the Duke
cruelly
left his assistant Major Metcalfe behind in Paris when France was falling. It would have been much more unkind to drag him south, Metcalfe's goal being England where his wife lived. From Paris to London was easy compared with sailing from Bordeaux or Nice.

As to Freda Dudley-Ward, a very charming person, if she felt about the then Prince of Wales in the way described, what was she doing as his greatest friend for sixteen years? Could there have been a touch of snobbishness? Followed by a hint of the woman scorned? The account somehow fails to add up. It is an abiding mystery why people who find the Duke of Windsor unsympathetic and feel he would have made a ‘bad king' (whatever that may be) should nevertheless be so critical of his abdication. They ought to be delighted that he gave them the slip.