French Without Tears

I have read many diaries and memoirs from the first half of the twentieth century. I have long had an interest in the interwar period and WWII. I am currently reading the memoir Bound for Diplomacy by Valentine Lawford, who was private secretary to the head of the Foreign Office during WWII, first Lord Halifax and then Anthony Eden.

I have read some famous diaries and memoirs, such as those of Harold Nicolson or Victor Klemperer, and some I think of as relatively obscure, such as those of Marie Vassiltchikov. Lawford’s memoir is definitely on the obscure end of the spectrum, at least these days. The book had to be retrieved from a storage annex at the library, and appears to have been untouched for years. Lawford was the longtime partner of the fashion photographer Horst P. Horst, so he certainly knew many celebrities and socialites, but I don’t know how much of a splash his own work made when it was published.

I have often gravitated toward the diaries and memoirs of diplomats, mostly because they have a good vantage point from which to write personal histories. They are good observers who often have a personal angle on important events, yet are not usually the main force behind them and therefore have a bit of critical distance. For instance, Nicolson was part of the British delegation during the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles before becoming an MP close to Eden and Churchill, and so could comment on on the effects of the treaty with some authority. The daughter of the American ambassador to Germany in the 1930s, Martha Dodd, who was most likely a Soviet spy, dated a Nazi who was targeted in the Night of the Long Knives, and certainly had some interesting stories to tell.

I expected something of the sort from Lawford. However, when he’s talking about being “bound” for a diplomatic career, he’s first and foremost talking about a disposition in his youth, when he was originally drawn to other places and languages. He spent four summers abroad in his teen years, first in Hamburg, Germany, and then in Rouen, France. He became very attached to the host families he stayed with, and describes feeling very torn and melancholy at the end of these summers, when he has to go back to England. No doubt some of this has to do with the freedom to express himself in these other places, since he was gay and had to spend most of his time suppressing his less masculine characteristics all the rest of the year, at boarding school.

Lawford’s stay in Rouen was with a family who hosted several English students at a time. Many upper class English people sent their children over to France in these kind of establishments. I took the title of this essay from the play by Terence Rattigan, from 1936, which has a similar setting. Lawford described a funny incident from the first night in the Rouen house, when he declared his loyalty to France over England. At first he is thrown together with an English girl, Evelyn, who is very suspicious of their French hosts:

The group ahead of them, including their hostess, her son, and another English girl, Gwen, break into song, beginning a popular French round about “la clo-che du vieux manoir.” Lawford did not know it, but it was easy enough to pick up:

Having been on both sides of the Evelyn/Valentine divide, about other countries and my own, not to mention other group dynamics, the passage captured something elemental about childhood and loyalty for me.

I respond to his clear memories of youth and the associated emotions, but I am curious whether the rest of the memoir takes more of the usual form. I will see.