The Pursuit of Laughter (18 page)

However, to be to the right of centre connotes the dread word Fascist, in this case
particularly
inept. A book published recently tries to make Hitler into a homosexual—the link is soon forged. Hitler committed terrible crimes. He was certainly not homosexual. What his sexual inclinations may have been remains a mystery. Perhaps they were not very important in his life. But such a simple explanation won’t do. In a world where sex is king, we cannot allow anyone, let alone anyone famous, not to have been actuated in an important way by sex. It would be too dull, too lacking in the dubious joys experienced by the voyeur.

The whole of Europe, at the present time, is nervous about the number of immigrants coming to our continent. What Pim Fortuyn said is what most people think. France, England, Germany, Holland, Belgium, all the rich countries have a problem, which can and should be shared, and if possible a solution found, by Europe as a whole. Henry Kissinger said: ‘If I want Europe, who do I call?’ Who indeed. Perhaps, if he had lived, Pim Fortuyn might have been the man who could unite Europe and make a reality of it.

What remains certain is that as long as the human race exists, so will sexual tastes differ. How could it be otherwise? What is important is to live and let live. Nobody should be
tolerant
about cruelty, but at least we can be tolerant about sex.

Spectator
2002

Many people like porn, and nearly everyone has heard of Sade, whose novels banned for
about 150 years are now available in paperback.

Sade’s taste, and the theme of his books, was flagellation and sodomy. Born in 1740, his was an extremely dangerous taste, because the penalty in eighteenth-century France for the crime of sodomy was death. Beating was another matter, and if he had confined
himself
to prostitutes, and paid them well, there might have been no trouble. But Paris
brothels
would not admit the little Marquis; he did too much damage.

Sade was an aristocrat with powerful relations; his aunts were abbesses, his uncle an abbé, his father a soldier and diplomat. He went to school at the Jesuit college Louis-le-Grand, married a girl of good family by whom he had three children, and he owned several châteaux in Provence. Yet because of his perverse tastes, he spent the best years of his life in prisons and fortresses all over France. Fatal to him was his love of orgies; one of the girls or boys who had taken part invariably gave him away, either to the police, or to his inexorable mother-in-law, who wanted him locked up to avoid further scandals for her daughter and grandchildren. It was she who got a
lettre de cachet
* from the King; once incarcerated, and a trial refused, there was no chance of release. His wife did her best for him, and she wrote endless letters to the authorities, to no avail.

The worst of his dungeons was Vincennes, dark and cold, where his health
deteriorated
and his eyes failed in the gloom. Ten years passed, and he was transferred to the Bastille; his cell was in a tower, and it was there that he wrote his fantasies. He based his stories on a few facts, and used his fevered imagination for the rest.

In July 1789 he saw from his cell there was a demonstration outside the prison and improvising a megaphone he shouted to the crowd below to break in and deliver the
prisoners
. On the 14 July the mob did storm the Bastille, killing the Governor and freeing the seven prisoners; but Sade had been moved. He was soon released, and by a strange quirk of fate became a revolutionary judge, who had to try his hated parents-in-law for the new crime of being aristocrats. Showing that he was not, after all, a bad old fellow, he
acquitted
them.

His freedom did not last long. He was imprisoned again because of his obscene books. As Donald Thomas points out in his well-written and well-researched book, the monster Marquis goes to such extremes in his novels that sometimes his readers are more inclined to laugh than anything else. Even Swinburne, whose tastes were similar, was convulsed with mirth when reading
Justine
aloud to Rossetti. Laughter is the deadly enemy of
eroticism
.

Sade spent his last years in the relative comfort of Charenton lunatic asylum. Was he mad? Donald Thomas shows there was no evidence to convict him of crimes. He was wildly eccentric, and, as they say, his own worst enemy. Today, he would make a fortune. He was born too soon.

* A royal order without appeal.

The Marquis de Sade
, Thomas, D.
Evening Standard
(1992)

Balfour* was by way of being the cleverest and wittiest of the Souls; his public life was at the summit of affairs as Foreign Secretary, Prime Minister and elder statesman, until the Treaty of Versailles when he was over 70. These letters ought to show him at his best in private life—nobody could have been more adored than he was by the charming Mary Wyndham, Lady Elcho, who loved and flattered him for so many years.

Yet his best is not up to very much. There seems to be something flabby and
bloodless
about the man, and Lady Elcho was infinitely more than he deserved. He was like a cat which has ‘been to the vet’.

The reader becomes so fond of Lady Elcho—rather stranded between a faithless husband and impossibly lukewarm lover—that it is a great relief when, in 1894 at the age of 32, accompanied by her three eldest children, she goes to stay with Wilfred Scawen Blunt and Lady Anne Blunt in the Egyptian desert.

Blunt did not care for the Souls, he said their coat of arms should be ‘two flat fish osculant all proper’. Within a week he had seduced Lady Elcho; he called her his Bedouin wife. By the time the party went back to England, she was expecting his child. Lord Elcho accepted the situation, perhaps more easily than did Arthur Balfour. However, the
amitié amoureuse
went on as before, Wilfred Blunt fading right out of the picture. From then on, Lady Elcho seems self-assured; there is no doubt the adventure was exactly what she
needed
.

Balfour’s letters are a mixture of social and political gossip, a good deal of
emphasis
on his philosophical writing, concerned with a synthesis between science and
religion
, and descriptions of endless games of golf.

His philosophy is as forgotten today as his golf, but it was considered rather
wonderful
for a politician to aspire to such heights, and it gave him additional cachet in the eyes of intelligent women friends like Lady Desborough and Lady Elcho.

He loved music, and a visit to Bayreuth was looked upon as amiable eccentricity. His letters are not witty, and they breathe the boredom he affected to suffer from. Everything except golf was a dreadful bore: country house parties, cabinet meetings, the chore of Balmoral or Windsor, all evoke yawns.

Lady Elcho was exactly the opposite, she enjoyed life. She loved her children and beautiful Stanway, simple and grand parties, her friends, art, nature, travel and home. As the years go by and her children grow up and marry, 1914 approaches.

Two of her sons were killed in the war, losses she never recovered from. There is an unforgettable description of these tragedies in the diary of her daughter, Lady Cynthia Asquith, most poignant being the death in action of Yvo, just finished school and dying before he had lived.

Whether Lady Elcho and Balfour were lovers is anybody’s guess. Even if they were, it must have been less than satisfactory and not of the first importance to either of them.

Hints of his masochism cause no surprise. Why she loved him is a mystery unsolved by this amusing and cleverly edited book, which is illustrated by wonderfully funny photographs.

* Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister 1902-1905.

The Letters of Arthur Balfour and Mary Wyndham 1885-1917
, Balfour, A. and Lady Elcho
Evening Standard
(1992)

A short time ago a friend who was for many years a Conservative MP told me that he had just been reading—or re-reading—the Denning Report on the Profumo case. He said it was almost impossible to believe that only fifteen years had passed since the whole country was seized with wild hysteria about something so essentially trivial and
unimportant
, and he added that such a fuss would be inconceivable now. Myself, I was in France at the time it was all going on, and found it extremely difficult to make the French understand why everyone had become so excited.

There is a saying in America: ‘Nobody died at Watergate.’ This is not true of the Profumo case. Dr Ward had been arrested and charged with living on the immoral
earnings
of prostitutes; he was out on bail. The judge’s summing-up made him think (
rightly
) that he was going to be convicted, therefore he committed suicide. And when Lord Astor died less than three years later aged 58 his wife said his death had been hastened by evil gossip. His crime: he had lent a cottage near Cliveden to Dr Ward, who was his osteopath.

Maurice Collis was also a near neighbour at Cliveden. In his diary he describes Dr Ward as ‘a most friendly and charming man.’ He sheds light on the whole wretched
business
from the Astor point of view, and undoubtedly Lord Astor was very badly treated. The whole pack was in full cry. He should not have minded, but apparently he did.

The diaries have been edited by Collis’s daughter; they were probably far too long for publication and she therefore picked out the days when Maurice Collis mentioned
something
to do with one or other of several themes: the Astors, or Cookham and Stanley Spencer, or Burma, where he had worked in the Civil Service as a young man, are among the themes. Perhaps this method of selection was inevitable, but it detracts from the essential diary quality when you skip weeks and even months between entries.

If a great deal is left out, things are left in which should not have been. Private
conversations
about intimate subjects recorded in a diary should not appear in print a very
few years later, or at least if they do the person quoted is bound to be hurt and annoyed. The diarist sometimes gets the wrong end of the stick, as for example when he says that Sir Osbert Sitwell, opening an exhibition, was so nervous during his speech that his hands trembled. In fact, they trembled because he had Parkinson’s disease.

A rather curious man emerges from these diaries, not at all attractive but with some of the talents which make a good diarist. He was observant, and clever. He was a prolific writer, and many of his books are excellent.
Cortes and Montezuma
,* the fascinating life of Stanley Spencer, and above all Somerville and Ross, come to mind. In each case he probed to the heart of the matter, whether Mexico at the time of the conquest or the wild west of nineteenth-century Ireland among hunting Protestants.