Portrait of a lady
Clarissa Eden’s father was the younger brother of Winston Churchill. Her mother was the daughter of the seventh Earl of Abingdon. She was born into an upper-class society which still, as in Trollope’s novels, was organised to bring daughters into contact with eligible husbands at summer balls. A beauty, with her mother’s blue eyes, she would have triumphed as a debutante. But she soon got bored with the social rituals of the season; ‘one dance, ‘ she wrote, ‘was very much like another’. Always independent-minded, Clarissa struck out on her own and sought her chosen friends among artists and writers. She attended Ben Nicolson’s parties where a drunken Philip Toynbee sang communist songs. To the astonishment of her friends, in 1952 she married Sir Anthony Eden, foreign secretary in Churchill’s government formed in 1951. This opened what she calls the ’second phase of my life’. Thus her memoirs fall into two distinct parts. Her account of her life before her marriage is based on her correspondence in the days when friends still wrote copious, often daily, letters to each other, a habit finally killed by the mobile phone. The second part contains extracts from the diary she kept after her marriage, skilfully sewn together and put in context by her learned and lively editor.
Going to university in the 1930s was almost inconceivable for a girl of her class, so she embarked instead on a process of selfeducation. Sent to Paris to ‘finish’ at the age of 16, she discovered Braque and attended Paul Valéry’s lectures at the Sorbonne. She ignored her mother’s warning that she was getting into the wrong set. In London she studied art at the Courtauld and began her interest in philosophy. Dissatisfied with her ‘useless, dilettante academicism’, in October 1938 she settled in Oxford, which, she writes, ‘changed my life’.
At Oxford she continued her philosophical studies as a private pupil of the flamboyant A. J. Ayer. She renewed her friendship with Lord David Cecil, then teaching English literature at Wadham. New friends included the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the eccentric Lord Berners. Much lower down the social scale she became a friend of mine. We listened to records of Mozart in my rooms at Christ Church and at coffee in the Cadena Café forced the orchestra to play Beethoven quartets.
In Berners’s novel Far from the Madding Wa r Emeline is based on Clarissa:
Her manner was aloof and dignified. In fact she was not the sort of girl with whom you might be tempted to take liberties without encouragement.
I got no encouragement.
When war broke out she left Oxford and returned to London in order to work in the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Information. Living at first in the Dorchester, she remained in the foyer during bombing raids while others fled to the underground air-raid shelter. After the war she took up journalism for Vogue and, when that did not pay her well enough, she worked for the film director Alexander Korda, becoming an admirer of the notoriously unpunctual Orson Welles. Her friends and acquaintances ranged from the relatively unknown poet and artist David Jones to social grandees like the millionaire hostess Daisy Fellowes. She stayed in Paris with Duff Cooper, the British ambassador to France. She had admired his biography of Talleyrand. Her friends came to be a selection of literary eminences: Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Cyril Connolly and George Weidenfeld, the publisher who brought the provincial British into contact with European culture. She gives sharp portraits of them all. Perhaps her closest friend and constant correspondent was the photographer Cecil Beaton who introduced her to her oddest friend, Greta Garbo. She found her boring but still glamorous: the woman who publicly professed that she wished to be left alone turns out to have been a compulsive window-shopper. By 1952 and her marriage to Anthony Eden her process of self-education and her friendships had made her one of the most widely travelled members of the social establishment.
Clarissa’s aunt, Winston’s wife, regarded the marriage as a potential disaster: Clarissa was too independent-minded to make a good wife for a politician. This was to prove a wild misjudgment. She was totally loyal to Eden.
She supported him when her uncle Winston refused ten times to resign to make way for Anthony, his chosen heir, as prime minister.
The ‘old man’ resigned at last in the spring of 1955. Eden wrote in his diary, ‘My wife enormously eased the burden of the campaign’ (of the election of May 1955). Unlike our present prime minister, Eden did not long brood on the statistical chances of victory at the polls. The election turned out to be a personal triumph for him: the conservative majority rose from 17 to 60.
Author: Carr, Raymond
