The Diaries: 1918–38 by Henry “Chips” Channon, edited by Simon Heffer
The Diaries: 1918–38 by Henry “Chips” Channon, edited by Simon Heffer.
London: Hutchinson, 1,002 pp., £35.00
“I am very fond of Chips,” the London society hostess Maud Cunard declared in 1926, “and so is everyone else.” “I seem,” Chips himself remarked a few months earlier, “to be enormously popular.” Fondness and popularity are transient things, and Henry “Chips” Channon, a busy socialite and minor MP, would now be a mere footnote in political history, the fleeting flibbertigibbet of one or two other people’s diaries, if it weren’t for his own diary, the teeming, two-million-word monument to himself that he built up secretly, with occasional gaps, between 1918 and his death forty years later. The Diaries: 1918–38 is the first of three volumes that will present the text in as full a version as anyone is likely to need— its editor, Simon Heffer, says that cuts have been made “solely on the grounds of lack of interest,” and I guess he has included about 60 percent of the original. You might feel, even so, that such an edition gives Channon undue prominence, though the diary is a record of his follies as well as his successes—if the two can always be so clearly told apart.
“Chips” was the nickname he acquired at Oxford, though no one seems to know how. Perhaps it came out of some transatlantic joke about “fries,” or maybe it began as a mishearing of “Ships.” His father owed his fortune to a shipping business on the Great Lakes, and “Ships Channon” would have explained this well-off young Chicagoan to his fellow students at Christ Church, the poshest Oxford college.
The diary opens pre-Chips, in the last year of the Great War, with Henry, aged twenty, in Paris, where he’s a volunteer for the American Red Cross. He gives colorful accounts of the shelling of the city by German heavy artillery and the subsequent air raids, and he mentions “working hard, many long hours a day,” and later “overwork,” but the work itself remains vague. What excites him is that he’s living at the Ritz and is hugely in demand with the French aristocracy, on a typical day going “to luncheon with the Princesse d’Arenberg and to dine at the duchesse de Brissac’s.” When the air-raid sirens sound he takes shelter in the hotel’s cellars with a crowd of guests including Prince Luís of Spain (in mauve silk pajamas), the designer Elsie de Wolfe, the Duchess of Sutherland, and Winston Churchill. It’s a crowd that’s entirely characteristic of the vast social crush that the further three-thousand-odd pages of diary will describe. The index of volume 1 alone runs to fifty pages in triple columns. It is indispensable.
His friend Maurice de Rothschild attributes Channon’s “phenomenal” social success in Paris to his “extraordinary good looks and novelty”: he is “the embodiment of all that is young.” Channon was stocky, broad-faced, aquiline, with dark oiled-down hair parted off-center. Though he was born in 1897, he claimed for decades to be two years younger, until a mortifying exposure in the Sunday Express was published when he was forty-one.
His contempt for his father and mother, for Chicago (that “cauldron of horror”), and for America in general lent a special intensity to his identification with old Europe and its labyrinthine upper classes. I wish Heffer had said more in his introduction about Channon’s life before the diary opens—the time he had already spent in Europe, the schooling in Paris that must have made him fluently francophone but doesn’t explain how he came to be the darling of the faubourg SaintGermain eight years later. The short spell at Oxford, a year after the war ended, seems to have confirmed his taste for high, and preferably royal, society. Thereafter he made his home in England, and in 1933 became a British citizen. He lived all his life on money provided by his father and later by his father-in-law, though his terrific energy and excitability meant he was capable of hard work. He certainly saw himself as playing a significant part in the affairs of his adopted country.
Channon published three books in his thirties, all forgotten now—a couple of novels and The Ludwigs of Bavaria, a study of the Wittelsbach royal family. His posthumous fame as a writer began in 1967, when a heavily censored reduction of his diaries was published, edited by the political historian and biographer Robert Rhodes James. One dimension of its interest was self-evident. At the age of thirty-six, after a decade of gallivanting, Channon married Lady Honor Guinness, daughter of the 2nd Earl of Iveagh, with an almost limitless brewing fortune on tap. Two years later he went into politics, following his mother-in-law as Conservative MP for Southend. His diary painted a crowded picture of London high society between the wars and gave a ringside view of British political affairs during the rise of fascism in Europe. Channon was strongly “pro-dictator” and worshiped Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler. He had a marvelous time as a guest of the Third Reich at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and was a fierce advocate of appeasement. His pages were almost comically thick with “royalties”—the British royal family, of course, but also a large number of European kings, queens, princes, and princesses, often dislodged or in exile. The prince regent of Yugoslavia and Crown Prince “Fritzi” of Prussia were special friends. He was provided a riveting insider’s account of the romance of Wallis Simpson and the Prince of Wales, leading up to the high drama of the king’s abdication in December 1936.
The Rhodes James edition omitted the Paris and 1920s diaries entirely, and began in 1934, with the entries organized in narrative chapters. Its omission of the scandalous and the libelous was to be expected, since it appeared only nine years after Channon’s death, but the reader could not have been aware of the trimming, editing, and liberal rewriting of countless quite ordinary passages, or had more than a vague suspicion that a complex confessional picture of Channon’s private life had been suppressed. As Heffer reveals, Rhodes James was not allowed to see the original diaries at all and was obliged to work from bowdlerized transcripts prepared by Peter Coats, the writer and garden designer who was Channon’s boyfriend in the latter part of his life. The year 1967 may have brought the decriminalization of homosexual acts in England and Wales, but it was much too soon for anyone involved to want to come clean about Channon’s affairs with men, before, during, and after his marriage. As this new edition shows, Chips flirted with girls, found sexual relief with female prostitutes, and had friendships of “violent intimacy” with a number of grand and wealthy women, but the deep pull of his emotional life was toward men, male friendships, and masculine environments. The diary thus gives fascinating glimpses of queer desires and practices mixed in with a hectic narrative of social and political life, and of a failing marriage.
The new sexual details create their own surprise—not at the acts or fantasies themselves, but at the idea of a person you thought you knew performing or entertaining them. Sometimes everyone else was doing it too—going off to Paris with some rich pals for a weekend tour of the brothels or arriving at a country house party knowing that the hosts’ lovely daughters are “steeped in every vice” and that Sunday night will be an “orgy à quatre” until 4:30 in the morning. Other things are far more private. In Amsterdam Channon and a friend paid a couple of prostitutes and “soundly smacked their bottoms until they resembled large tomatoes.” But his interest in being spanked himself involved more furtive expeditions—so furtive that he traveled out to Richmond in southwest London by Underground, a very rare engagement with public transport. There he paid a sequence of visits to the critic, demonologist, and self-styled Catholic priest Montague Summers, who took him upstairs after dinner to his private chapel and beat him with his slipper, and on a later occasion with a dog whip. This answered a lack Channon felt of never having been beaten by a schoolmaster, and by extension of not having had the English boarding school experience that had shaped so many of his male friends.
Before his marriage Channon lived in two all-male ménages, first for a “gloriously exuberantly happy” two years in Mayfair with his Oxford friends Prince Paul of Serbia, “the love of my life,” and Henry, 6th Viscount Gage, always known for some reason as George. This sort of setup, of “‘chaps’ together,” was Chips’s ideal. When Paul went off to get married, Channon and Gage took a house near Buckingham Palace, where they lived in great but unequal inti
macy for several years. Over a span of 150 pages of the diary we have a daily portrait of a kind of balked marriage, Chips ever more achingly in love with Gage, and Gage putting up with the adoration in a bemused, generally cheerful but sometimes grumpy manner.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a situation between two men described in any detail before—the practical niceties of cohabitation overlaid by Channon’s agonized but exhilarated feelings: “I think only of him . . . . I sometimes wish he would go blind so that I might show him and the rest of the world my love for him.” An entire culture of tacit understandings about gay feelings in this milieu and period glimmers just out of reach. To Gage, the bachelor twosome seems to have been happily homosocial; there was much lying round naked, chatting in the bath, and so on. Unlike Chips he had a job to go to, as lord in waiting to George V. He was always getting into uniform and dashing around the corner to the palace, and having a housemate who was also a doting slave must have been useful. He told Chips that he “wished I were a woman and then he would marry me,” and that he thought him “the best wife a man could possibly have.” They went on two trips together, each described by Chips as a “honeymoon,” but forlornly of course without the preceding nuptials.
Sexual tension was reduced by visits to a prostitute called Josephine, also frequented by Gage, and thus offering a further vicarious excitement. On occasion they went to a brothel together; Chips clearly liked seeing his male friends in action, and being seen. (“I am very attractive naked, as handsome as my face is dull.”) The great threat to this painfully pleasurable status quo was Imogen “Mogs” Grenfell, daughter of the detested Lady Desborough, a famous hostess who took a dim view of Chips’s habit of waiting to write thankyou letters until he could use the stationery of the even grander house he’d gone to stay in next. Gage announced his engagement to Mogs while Channon was on one of his reluctant visits to his family in Chicago, and on the back of his telegram Chips wrote, “Le coeur cas[s]é”—the heart broken. He pulled himself together to be Gage’s best man, but after that the spell was broken too: “How could I once have been fond of him?—gauche, rude, unfeeling and dull”; “Never again will I do anything for him.”
The meeting with and marriage to Honor Guinness occurred during a five-year gap with no diary, and we’re pitched back into the story six months after their wedding, fairly curious to know how it happened. Did Gage’s marriage to Mogs both free him and set an example? Honor was twelve years younger than Chips, and in photographs has a long-faced, somewhat absent look that you feel might turn actively mutinous. Their son, Paul, was born two years into the marriage. Honor must have been swept along on Chips’s social energy, through the incessant round of parties and dinners, many at their own house in St James’s, and then in the much grander house her parents bought for them in Belgrave Square, where their glamorous neighbors were the Duke and Duchess of Kent.
After a while, though, Honor is leaving parties earlier than her husband, and after three and a half years of the marriage she’s showing signs of leaving that too. When Chips comes home after two weeks’ skiing in the Italian Alps, Honor remains there for a further two months. Is she having an affair with her skiing instructor? Before the truth comes out, she breaks off conjugal relations—“never in our case particularly successful”; he mourns the rupture above all because he longs for a second child. The next three hundred pages give a muddled and grimly convincing picture of an estrangement, carried on under a strained performance of marital normality. Chips asks himself constant questions. Is she mad? Is she handicapped by her vast wealth? She’s “heartless,” “incapable of warmth,” and moreover “not helpful to me in my career.” He rarely seems to wonder what his own responsibility might be in all this. When a doctor at the end of this volume explains that “she manufactures too much thyroid,” a diagnostic light falls over the misery of the previous year, though evidently does not explain all that has gone wrong. “People are never truthful in regard to their sexual kinks,” Channon observes in the period after Honor has “dropped the matrimonial portcullis,” when he feels the lure of male intimacy all the more strongly. Soon he is falling for his fellow Tory MP Jim Thomas, the “dark, vague, selfish, self-centred, faun-like young man whom I find irresistible,” driving lovestruck past his house late at night, “talking” till 3 AM, “nights of drink and lechery.” The diary is truthful but not the whole truth—there’s a sense of desires peeping out but shy to be named, even here. One night Chips puts Jim to bed; a bit later he records that Jim has crabs. The next morning “I feel anti-Jim . . . . I wish friendships were not so hazardous.” His feelings seesaw like a teenager’s for the best part of a year, until he comes to think that Jim has “the heart of a cocotte,” “the soul of a courtesan,” and at last, with the special scorn reserved for his own amatory mistakes, “not enough brains to fill a mouse’s French letter.” There’s something touching as well as funny in these glimpses of a covert gay romance. It’s an attraction without the usual aphrodisiac of rank, an office affair born out of the House of Commons, the “brown, smelly, tawny, male paradise” that Chips adores.
As a diarist, and as a stylist, uncensored Channon veers between the caustic and the idolatrous. He was by temperament a hero-worshiper and a fluent coiner of corny epithets that give an added frisson to his close contact with the famous: “Mrs Keppel, ever an enchantress of kings”; Prince Paul of Serbia, “the arbiter of Europe”; George V, “the monarch of the world.” But this novelettish sensibility, the tone of cheap historical romance, is combined with a sharp eye and tongue. The prompt epigrammatic obituaries worked into the diary prove his acquaintance with the dead while seizing the chance to say what he thought about them: Earl Haig, the British commander on the Western Front for most of the Great War, “was an unimpressive, uninspiring man. No one knew, loved or disliked him.” J. M. Barrie may have added Peter Pan to our literature, but he was “snobbish, boring and petulant.” Boredom was no doubt a constant hazard in Chips’s milieu, and he calls out bores whenever he can. Arthur Colefax, the husband of the interior designer Sybil Colefax, “was a good man, talented, high-idealled, kind and boring beyond belief.”
For a passionate royalist like Channon, the heir to the throne is naturally a great prize, his boringness as a man overlaid by imperial-scale glamour. At Lady Curzon’s ball in February 1926, “the Prince of Wales was charming and we had a long talk about our American friends. Everyone noticed...” But this enhanced mood is far from constant. He can find the prince “surly and ill at ease,” and repeatedly “looking rather vulgar.” On one occasion he looks “like a racing tout”; he has a “dentist smile.” Yet as Edward VIII he inspires Chips’s loftiest gush: he is the “adored Apollo,” the “world’s idol,” the “beautiful boy King” (he was forty-two at the time, two years older than Chips himself). His affair with Wallis Simpson is “one of the greatest romances in all history.” What a “temptation for a Baltimore girl! To espouse the Emperor of the earth.”
It was of course a supreme instance of the American assimilation into British society that Chips had devoted his life to—or could have been, if only the king had played his cards more adroitly, had his coronation, and then married the love of his life. Here Channon’s American common sense fails to get the measure of the powerful reasons of state and church preventing such a plan. The insight he has into the case is more psychological. He notes how Mrs. Simpson “enormously improved” the prince, and thinks her good, kindly, and clever; he sees how Edward, who was marvelous at being Prince of Wales, “will mind so terribly being King. His loneliness, his seclusion, his isolation will be almost more than his highly strung and not imaginative nature can bear.” Also, if the king abdicates Chips will no longer be in favor with the royal family, and this adds to his gloom at the prospect of the new king, George VI, who is “completely uninteresting, undistinguished and a godawful bore!”
The change of regime threatens the end of an age of fun conjured up in the previous six-hundred-odd diary pages: a world both crowded and strangely confined. The fun is relentless. An average day might see a long large lunch, an early-evening drinks party before dinner at 9, then on to the Duchess of York’s, perhaps, for her party starting at 11:30 PM, or maybe to a ball, home anytime between 3 and 6:30 AM— this several times a week. In the 1920s fancy-dress balls are all the rage. The Prince of Wales comes as a sheik and changes costume several times during the night; at the end he is “dressed as a girl in a pink gingham frock, socks and drawers...very painted and wearing a yellow wig”; Chips can only tell it’s him from “a nervous mannerism he has with his right hand.” A sense of telltale nervous twitches largely hidden by a life in masquerade emerges almost inadvertently as the vast gossip column of the diary rolls on. Chips’s desire to be known and seen is shot through now and then by disillusion at the world of “fashionable cretins . . . but then am I not one?” Eventually it takes its toll: “I’m tired of being ‘tiddly’ by night and ‘gaga’ by day”; and from time to time, the tired socialite exclaims, “I am