The Pursuit of Laughter (29 page)

The Duke of Wellington, who generously gave the house and its collection of glories
to the nation, must be pleased at how splendid it looks now.

Few people bother to go in to see the Goya portrait of the first Duke, although
thousands
went to the National Gallery to look at the empty space where the other Goya
portrait
, the one that was stolen, had been.

Mrs Kennedy is so fond of art that she arranged for the Most Famous Picture In The World to be shown in Washing ton. This picture, which is also supposed to be the Most Valuable Picture In The World, but was not for sale, so that the Richest Country In The World couldn’t buy it, is called by the French, who own it, ‘
La Joconde
,’ and by the
Anglo-Saxons
, the ‘Mona Lisa.’

When it arrived in Washington all the Best People were invited to see it unveiled. So were all the journalists, best and worst, and the television cameras. It was an occasion nobody was to be allowed to miss, because it was the outward and visible sign that the Kennedys were for art.

There were some complaints afterwards that everybody who was invited to see the
picture
had seen it before, without being half-crushed to death in the process.

Three Russian writers who sent their manuscripts to publishers abroad have been locked up in lunatic asylums by the Soviet authorities. The idea is that anyone in Russia who might come across some of their work would not be influenced by it because the authors are
certified
madmen.

The Russians have copied this straight from the Americans, who kept their poet, Ezra Pound, for many years in a madhouse in the most frightful conditions for the same bad reason: he disagreed with the government.

I see somebody wrote to the
Daily Express
urging people to spend their summer holidays at Waterloo. This was supposed to annoy the French, but I imagine it will annoy the Belgians more. It may end by annoying the holiday-makers most of all. There is nowhere to stay and nothing much to do at Waterloo but fight.

Probably most people were taken by surprise when they read that Sir Winston Churchill had been made an honorary citizen of the United States. They wrongly imagined that he
was one already. He has always seemed very much a part of his mother’s country, and has I suppose done more than any other single person to put it in the materially pre-eminent position it now occupies. From the American point of view he has earned citizenship many times over.

The message he sent across the Atlantic to be read at the ceremony is sad, in the
context
of today. It is over twenty years since Churchill proclaimed that he had not become first minister in order to preside over the break-up of the British Empire. Thus what happened was the opposite of his intentions, but many of us said at the time, if he lives long enough he will see it break up as a result of his policy: his ‘great allies,’ Soviet Russia and the United States, will make sure of it between them.

He has lived; he has observed the inevitable; and he emerges from his twilight to say: ‘I reject the view that Britain and the Commonwealth should now be relegated to a tame and minor role in the world.’

But for him and for the politicians who succeeded him there would never have been the smallest doubt of a ‘fertile and glorious’ future for Britain and the Commonwealth. There is no doubt of it now provided Britain will join with the rest of Europe to make the greatest nation the world has ever seen.

Mr Harold Wilson said in Parliament: ‘There is something nauseating about a system of society which pays a harlot* 25 times as much as it pays its Prime Minister, 250 times as much as it pays its Members of Parliament, and 500 times as much as it pays some of its ministers of religion.’ Dame Rebecca West, commenting on this in the
Sunday Telegraph
, writes: ‘Nobody sensible would go to a night club to see Members of Parliament coming down staircases dressed in sequins and tail feathers.’

Wouldn’t they? I am not sure. As a confirmed loather of night clubs even I might be tempted from my hearth for such a Roman holiday.

* Miss Christine Keeler, who wrote her life story.

Mr Nehru has never been one of the most beloved foreign politicians in this country, in spite of his command of our language, his long terms of imprisonment under the British Raj, and all his other advantages and accomplishments. Now, how ever, there is sure to be a great swing in his favour. An opposition leader in the Indian parliament has angrily accused him of spending 3/6d a day on food for his dog. English people are bound to approve of this little extravagance; dogs to them are what cows are to the Indians, and they would rather vote for somebody who spent too much on his dog than too little. It is unlucky that Mr Nehru’s dog has only just become a celebrity; there is no doubt that the
massive aid to India would have been more kindly looked upon here had people known that some of it might find its way into some dear doggie’s bowl.

The French wireless has a general knowledge programme. The other day I heard a boy who had chosen Napoleon as the greatest man of the nineteenth century asked his
reasons
for the choice. He replied after some hesitation: ‘Well, he managed to annoy a good few people.’

Nearly every day one sees in the papers that some school master or other has forbidden boys to wear their hair with Beatle-like fringes. The masters’ job is to impart learning and good manners, and it is not good manners to make personal remarks about other people’s fringes. The way you cut your hair is a matter of fashion, and anyone who lives long enough will have the amusement of hearing schoolmasters of the future, who were boys when the Beatles were boys, forbid their pupils to brush their hair off their foreheads.

Headline of the month:
LORDS IMPOTENT IN FACE OF FECUNDITY
. The House of Lords debated the population explosion, and suggested several ways of damping it down, to which, doubtless, no attention will be paid. Since their last debate on the subject two years ago the population of the world has increased by a hundred million.

Although I sometimes love the amusing expressions they invent, I am not very partial to the way Americans use our language. ‘He does not have’ in place of ‘He has not got’ strikes oddly on English ears. Worse even than that, however, is the barbarous expression, ‘as of now,’ which is constantly cropping up in articles and speeches in the US. It means ‘now,’ and one would have thought ‘now’ would do.

Sir Isaiah Berlin, writing on the subject of Sir Winston Churchill’s wartime speeches: ‘This is the kind of means by which dictators and demagogues transform peaceful populations into marching armies: it was Mr Churchill’s unique and unforgettable achievement that he created this necessary illusion within the framework of a free system without destroying or even twisting it.’

The trouble with newcomers who try to write about old England is that, no doubt through ignorance of our aged institutions, they perpetuate rubbish like the above. To
imprison hundreds of patriotic people without charge or trial, and hold them in prisons and concentration camps for periods of up to five years as Churchill and his government did, can hardly be described as neither destroying nor even twisting the framework of a free system. Possibly Sir Isaiah Berlin has never heard of habeas corpus during his sojourn among us.

A friend writes from New York saying that whereas three years ago he was warned not to walk in Central Park after dark, this time he was told on no account to risk walking there at all, even in the daytime. He adds that nobody in his senses would ‘ride the subway’ (American for ‘go by tube’) at night, because even in a crowded carriage you may be knifed, and your fellow passengers would bury themselves in their favourite comics,
pretending
not to notice the corpse in their midst.

The day after I got this letter, I read in a paper that in future every underground train is to carry an armed policeman, in an attempt to check the number of murders.

The strange thing about these killings is that they are apparently not done for any
special
reason, like robbery for example. In this they resemble the murder described by André Gide in
Les Caves du Vatican
. As far as I remember, Lafcadio kills a man in the train between Rome and Naples, in order to find out what it feels like to be a murderer.

The Tory candidate who won the by-election last month is supposed to have wrecked the new image of the Tory Party. His crime or worse, his blunder was that he was educated at Eton. I don’t imagine this was altogether his fault; most children have to go where they are told, and many of them would in fact much prefer to stay at home. An exception was the late Lord Bracken, who sent himself to school after interviewing various headmasters (or so he used to tell us).

In any case, the last three Conservative Prime Ministers all went to Eton, and the one before that to Harrow, and it is only during the past few months that it has been ordained that nothing less than grammar schools will do. To have been to Eton is as bad, almost, as to have been caught shooting grouse.

It is somehow typical of the poor old Tories that they should be taken in by rubbish of this kind. Although there are many better schools than Eton, and many more profitable sports than grouse shooting—bingo, for example—it is not Eton and grouse that make one despise the Conservatives, it is what they have done to England. Their African policy, the subservience to America, the refusal to go into Europe: none of these evil things has much to do with education or pastimes.

A Talent to Annoy

GERMANY

The author of
Eva and Adolf
tries to be a fly on the wall, for its subject is Hitler’s private life. According to the publisher the book has been ‘painstakingly researched’.

A clever man of my acquaintance uses a good formula when he is not certain of
something
: ‘Don’t know, so won’t say’. To get at the truth about the sexual life of any
individual
is difficult; in the case of a politician or public man anxious to keep his private life to himself it is almost impossible. Although I met Eva Braun a few times and thought her pretty and charming, as to her affair with Hitler I don’t know, so won’t say. On the other hand, when it comes to Unity Mitford I know a great deal. The short chapter devoted to her is inaccurate. I counted twelve errors of fact. It would be tedious to list the
inaccuracies
; the most important of them is a scene supposedly enacted at Wahnfried, the Wagners’ house in Bayreuth.

According to Mr Infield, Eva Braun and Unity both stayed there as guests of Hitler, in the house and in the annexe, for the festival. One evening Hitler and Unity were seen by a maid in a ‘compromising position’ on a veranda sofa. While the maid watched, Eva Braun, passing by, saw what was going on. She ‘stared for a full minute then turned and disappeared into the darkness.’ Everything about this tale is bogus. Anyone who knew Wahnfried would see its inherent implausibility, for during the Festspiele it is full of
people
, the family, musicians and other guests; a busy Bayreuth street would have been as good a choice for the scene described. But in fact neither Unity nor Eva Braun ever stayed at Wahnfried in their lives. Frau Winifred Wagner (the distinguished daughter-in law of the great composer) directed the festival and was hostess of Wahnfried in those days. She writes:

Therefore whatever and whoever was seen by the ‘maid’ it was certainly not Unity Mitford or Eva Braun. When the
Sunday Express
announced its serialization of
Eva and Adolf
, I wrote to the editor telling him there were numerous mistakes in the chapter about Unity. On 9 September I expressed a letter to him with Frau Wagner’s words, showing that the Bayreuth episode never in fact happened. He acknowledged this in a letter dated 11 September, but nevertheless published the story in the
Sunday Express
on 14 September. In a second, subsequent letter Frau Wagner is categoric: she never had such a maid. Mr

Infield’s book has some rather interesting passages; all the more curious that he should
include the silly story of ‘what the maid saw’.

Eva and Adolf
, Infield, G.
Books and Bookmen
(1975)

Otto Dietrich, German
Reichspressechef
, was a pleasant, mild, well-mannered, modest little man, with (as was once said with less reason of an English politician) plenty to be
modest
about. After the war, finding himself in an English prison camp, he wrote this gossipy book about his twelve years at Hitler’s court. It was meant, presumably, to explain away his past.

Apart from a few disobliging references to various colleagues he devotes himself to a lengthy attack on the Führer, whom he suddenly discovered, while he sat in prison, to have been the devil incarnate. His book would not be worth mentioning were it not that the gossipy facts it contains are true. Dr Dietrich’s
opinions
, on the other hand, are of no
interest
, except to show how far sycophancy can go. Unfortunately they make up the bulk of his apology.

Many of them are incredibly naive. For example, he gives as his reasons for thinking democracy the best form of government the fact that Hitler did not consult the German electorate before he went to war. Perhaps he imagined that the English voters were
consulted
before Chamberlain declared war on Germany? If so, he was ignorant of the
democratic
way of life. The Americans, of course, had the benefit of a presidential election in November 1940, but Roosevelt, the successful candidate, pledged himself not to send American ‘boys’ overseas to fight in Europe’s quarrels. He may have been determined to bring his country into the war, but he had to pretend that he was determined to keep it neutral.

Dr Dietrich says that Hitler’s suicide was a shirking of his responsibility. ‘His
departure
from life was in terms of: After me the deluge. Europeans all through history have chosen what Germans call the
Freitod
in like circumstances, and this judgment in itself clearly shows that Dr Dietrich’s conception of honour and of duty is faulty, even if his whole book did not demonstrate this.

The translators have done an excellent job, though they appear to be unaware that
daemon
and demon are not the same thing.

The Hitler I Knew
, Dietrich, O. (1955)

‘Hanfstaengl was a gay and amusing companion,’ writes Mr Brian Connell, the man who has set down these reminiscences in English. ‘People have said I was Hitler’s court jester,’ adds Dr [Putzi] Hanfstaengl himself.

The Hanfstaengl family belong to Germany’s intellectual middle class; they print art reproductions and sell them in a Munich shop. Putzi’s mother was American: he was sent to Harvard and remained in America to manage the New York branch of the business. He was 27 when the first war began; he stayed on in the shop in Fifth Avenue. During and after the second war he spent seven years of considerable hardship in English, Canadian and American concentration camps, except for a short time when his offer to help the Allies in their ‘psychological warfare’ against Germany was rather half-heartedly taken up by Roosevelt. (The Central European Jews who ran this side of the war never cared much for Putzi.)

His claim to fame is that he knew Hitler well, and saw a good deal of him between 1923 and the middle 30s. More than twelve years have passed since Hitler died, and it may seem astonishing that Dr Hanfstaengl should still feel obliged to write with such exaggerated spite about the man he was once so proud to call his friend. But in so far as he was a close associate of the Führer (and ‘court jester’ neatly sums up this
association
) or in so far as he was a National Socialist, he evidently feels bound to excuse
himself
to his Anglo-Saxon readers. It is as if he imagined they were lying in wait to see what he would say, ready to pop him back behind bars if he is not abusive enough. This
attitude
of his places him in a dilemma. He wishes to sell his memoirs, therefore he must write about the only interesting thing that ever happened to him—his connection with Hitler. He has to have been an intimate, yet the Führer must be a monster; he has to have been an influential counsellor, whose courageously sharp criticisms and sage
foresight
were nevertheless ignored; he has to have been prominent in the Nazi hierarchy, yet all the time devoted to the American way of life. Thus he calls upon memory for fact, upon imagination for fiction, and the unity of his book suffers in consequence.

It is a safe guess that most readers will skip the pages about the Hanfstaengl pedigree to get to the man in the shabby suit, spell-binding his Munich audiences and charming Putzi’s dollars out of his pocket to pay for a printing press for the Party newspaper. It is the eye-witness account of the famous Bürgerbräukeller meeting, the Putsch, Hitler’s trial and his imprisonment in Landsberg which, historically, is the valuable part of the book.

On the 9th of November 1923 the marching column of demonstrators, led by Ludendorff and Hitler, was fired on by the police in the narrow street near the Feldherrnhalle; sixteen men were killed, among them Scheubner-Richter whose arm was linked in Hitler’s. His fall dislocated Hitler’s shoulder, and it was in this condition that he made his way to the Hanfstaengls’ country cottage at Uffing. Putzi, along with many
others
including the badly wounded Goering, had fled to Austria. Frau Hanfstaengl took Hitler in, and it was at the Uffing villa that the police arrested him two days later.

Dr Hanfstaengl’s was far from being the only family of substance to support Hitler at
that time. On the eve of his trial, for example, Frau Bechstein* visited him in prison. She gave him a bouquet of flowers and embraced him, saying:
‘Wolf! Wir stehen immer zu Dir!’
[‘We shall always stand by you.’] Back in his cell, Hitler discovered half a bottle of
champagne
concealed among the flowers, which he drank next morning before going into court. The Führer told me this story himself.

Months later, when Putzi visited him in Landsberg, ‘the place looked like a delicatessen store. You could have opened up a flower and fruit and a wine shop with all the stuff stacked there. People were sending presents from all over Germany.’

Apart from the loan of his invaluable dollars at a time of galloping inflation Hitler liked Dr Hanfstaengl’s company and his piano-playing and his drollery. Hitler himself, as Putzi relates, ‘was a gifted mimic with a sharp sense of the ridiculous. His star turn was a sort of symposium of the type of patriotic orator then very common in Germany, and by no means extinct since—the politically conscious, semi-professorial figure with a Wotan-like beard. Hitler’s nationalism was practical and direct, but they would boom away about Siegfried’s sword being drawn out of its scabbard and lightning playing round the German eagle and so forth. He could invent this mock rhodomontade
ad infinitum
and be very funny about it.’ He would also recite a poem written to him by one of his admirers ‘with embellishments of his own, and have us in tears of laughter.’ But Hanfstaengl, not content with being the boon companion of a leisure hour, hoped (so he says) to influence Hitler politically; an idea which anyone who knew both men would find grotesque.

When the National Socialists came to power he was given the job of foreign press
relations
officer. In a way he was well fitted for this; he spoke excellent English, knew many American newspaper men, and was popular and hail-fellow-well-met. What, then, went wrong with this enthusiastic Nazi, wearing a smart uniform he designed himself, enjoying his new status to the full (he says his telephone never stopped ringing, even the barest acquaintances were anxious to claim friendship with the man who was the Führer’s friend), and playing the part—this I can vouch for myself—of
der treueste aller Treuen
[the most faithful of the faithful]—what went wrong?