Bevis Hillier
In 100 years' time I think the period of Eng. Lit. from 1959 (when the first volume of George Painter's life of Proust appeared) to now will be regarded as the Age of Biography. With her books on Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Vita Sackville-West and Rebecca West, Victoria Glendinning has been one of the finest exponents of the genre, along with Peter Ackroyd, Robert Caro, Peter Conradi, P. N. Furbank, Michael Holroyd, Fiona MacCarthy, Peter Parker, Robert Skidelsky, Hilary Spurling, Judith Thurman and many others.
Glendinning's biography Leonard Woolf was published in 2006 but came out in paperback this year (Simon & Schuster, £9.99). Until I read it, I had had two conflicting views of Woolf. The first was a naturally favourable one from his volumes of autobiography, which I lapped up in the 1960s, when I was in my twenties and he was still alive. The other was the jaundiced view of him as an irascible, humourless figure in Richard Kennedy's A Boy at the Hogarth Press (1972), the first book of the Whittington Press, to which I wrote the introduction. Now Glendinning's balanced, lucid biography has enabled me to steer my way between Scylla and Charybdis: Woolf was a goodie with a few baddie traits.
I've enjoyed Horses & Husbands: The Memoirs of Etti Plesch, edited by Hugo Vickers (Dovecote Press, £17.95). Etti was born an Austrian countess; married six times, thrice to counts (two of whom were seduced away by the femme fatale writer Louise de Vilmorin); and is the only woman ever to have won the Derby twice. This spoilt, calculating minx must have been pretty intolerable to know; and not Max Beerbohm, not Craig Brown, could contrive a parody of her more glorious and hilarious than the one she creates of herself. Take the opening of her book: Recently I was in London lunching at the Connaught. The man at the next table was eating caviar ... I did not envy him. His caviar was black. This seemed to me typical of life today, in which so few high standards are maintained. There is no good caviar today. The best caviar I ever ate was at the wedding of Karim (the Aga Khan). It was grey with just a hint of pink.
To be fair to Etti, she does have a few amusing anecdotes and some juicy morsels of gossip, among them Louise de Vilmorin's boast about the Duff Coopers — 'I had Duff, I had Diana, but never together' — but there are so many unconsciously priceless fragments, way beyond parody. Page 71: 'Pali [Count Pali Palffy, her second husband] was kind and easy to get along with.' Page 72: 'One night ... Pali got so annoyed that he picked up one of the musicians and threw him out of the window.' I thought [Hermann] Goring was charming if fat, while Goebbels I must say, was likeable and intelligent.' It is only about 10 years ago that I realised that servants had days off.' I have always advised girls that if they want to marry a rich man they must go to the best hotel in the city.' [Rosemarie Kanzler] and I came from very different backgrounds, which is to say that Rosemarie had no background at all.' And: Enid, Lady Kenmare was a great friend with an intriguing past. Willie Maugham nicknamed her 'Lady Killmore' as she was rumoured to have murdered as many as three former husbands.
I think Countess Etti should have written a book called Etti-quette.
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