Creditable, Surprising, Abundantly and Elegantly Good: Michael Hofmann on Duff Cooper's Only Novel
© National Portrait Gallery
From the Afterword to Operation Heartbreak, by Duff Cooper
By Michael Hofmann
Alfred Duff Cooper (1890–1953)—the “Alfred” is silent—is an example of a type the British used once to produce in far greater quantities than now, when he has practically become extinct: the “all-rounder.” You could put them anywhere, set them any task, and they would perform, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes merely capably, rarely catastrophically, usually distinctively. There was a spirit of fun, of amateurism, of sport, in what they did. The Battle of Waterloo was won, supposedly, “on the playing fields of Eton.” The famous/notorious Victorian poem “Vitaï Lampada” (“Play up! play up! and play the game!”) by Sir Henry Newbolt has cricket in its first stanza, colonial warfare in its second, and a conclusion in its third. The three things are continuous, co-extensive, inevitable, irresistible. The Antipodean Clive James—a lifelong student of English frailty and himself something of an all-rounder—jeered: “It is not easy, at this distance, to be sure of what it was that Duff Cooper actually did,” but this is exactly the point. The style is greater than the man, and the man is greater than his CV.
So much of what one thinks of as Britishness—or, as I would say, that used to be Britishness—is invested in that type: anti-professionalism, unpreparedness, improvisation, flippancy, grace under pressure (Hemingway’s definition of courage), pleasantness, wit. You wouldn’t know what they were going to say—heck, they might themselves not know what they were going to say—but you would turn out to hear them speak, in Parliament, on the hustings, at the club. It was all rather eighteenth century, rather personal, rather C. J. Fox, that world of “brilliant success without undue application.” Along with a feeling of mild disdain for public work, a condescension towards duty, and an unhesitating patriotism, went an ironic acceptance that one’s very best offerings would evaporate in a puff of wit in front of a handful of witnesses generally the worse for wear. Duff Cooper’s very good biographer, the historian John Charmley, laments that there is no way of doing justice to the reported brilliance of Duff Cooper’s conversation in small intimate groups of friends. “A Pierrot of the moment,” was someone’s beautiful description of the man and the ethos. This too is part of the type. There is almost something Nietzschean—and hence unexpectedly Continental—about them, an inversion of values, so that the permanent is temporary, the temporary is permanent, the serious is silly, and having fun is what matters. They expected to be in over their heads, but they fought and won two world wars and carried an empire for a few hundred years. Their descendants no longer seem capable of running a country. And, moving on to serious matters, it’s hard to think of any British cabinet minister in the last thirty, even fifty years, from whom one would care to commission a novel. (Answers on a postcard, please.)
Duff Cooper, then: soldier, diplomat, parliamentarian, cabinet minister, man of letters. Also gambler, lover, and bon viveur. He came from a family flecked with elopements and illegitimacies, though also (“a dash of Hanoverian blood”) with ancestral ties to the British royal family; Lady Erroll, his great-grandmother, “was one of the brood of nine FitzClarences who were the offspring of the liaison between the future William IV and the actress Mrs. Jordan.” Duff Cooper was a product of Eton and New College, Oxford; a war hero, in what appears to have been a somewhat chaotic solitary action in the so-called “Battle of the Mist” on the Albert Canal, for which he received a DSO; and a celebrity husband as the successful wooer of a famous British beauty, Lady Diana Cooper, all by 1920. Restored to civilian life, he first occupied a niche in the Foreign Office before entering politics. He was a conservative member of parliament for twenty years, later a junior minister in the War Office, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Constants in his thinking—and, unlike too many of his successors, he did think—were a suspicion of Russia and Germany, a sense of the coming war, a deep Francophilia, and an espousal, ultimately, of Western European union as the only guarantee of continued British independence. (Brexit would have horrified him, as it would Churchill.)
He resigned in protest at Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, then returned to government under Churchill as a somewhat redundant and ill-defined Minister of Information (it’s hard to say whether he was for or against). Churchill also sent him on special errands to Indonesia in 1942 and Algiers in 1944. His apotheosis and his last detail came as His Majesty’s ambassador to France, where the post-1945 Labour government left him in post for another couple of years, in token of what were perceived to be his close ties to the country and to de Gaulle. When he was let go, he accepted the title of Viscount Norwich (“a little Norwich is a dangerous thing,” he liked to quip), bought a ravishing little chateau in Chantilly, took a job on the board of the International Wagons-Lits, and was an early tax exile, twenty years before the Rolling Stones. Having written well-received books earlier on Talleyrand, on Field Marshal Earl Haig, on the biblical King David, and on the young Shakespeare, he published his one novel, Operation Heartbreak in 1950. His brisk and entertaining memoir Old Men Forget came out in 1953, just before he died, on New Year’s Day 1954, on a cruise liner on the way to the West Indies, for his health. John Charmley writes: “Few men can have enjoyed life more than Duff.”
Operation Heartbreak is as creditable, as surprising, as abundantly and elegantly good, as anything else Duff Cooper turned his mind and hand to. While I don’t believe that everyone has a novel inside them, this one is well worth rediscovering and makes me wish its author had written more of the things. It has a keen sense of shape and pace, coaxes an effortless and uncoercive plot out of Garnet and Horry, Felicity and Daisy, Hamilton and Maryngton, and ends most if not all its chapters with a sonorous droop. Duff Cooper manages his mostly short, often ironic, and sometimes profound sentences with the purposeful dexterity of a croupier raking in the errant tokens:
Horatio, Mrs. Osborne’s second son, was nothing so serious, or so foolish, as a pacifist.
‘Here, give me your pencil,’ she said to the young man, who sulkily produced a gold one.
But, because men can never be quite happy for long, he suffered during these years from one continual source of irritation and experienced one great sorrow.
Self-consciousness, the curse of English youth, fell from them, and they found words coming to them easily.
It is a book with information, even wisdom, to burn: that spilt champagne should be dabbed behind the ears; that something happens to men at fifty; that a promotion to the rank of major can be called getting a majority (and Felicity got her name because she was born the day her father came into one); that Scots make the best spymasters.
The eponymous “Operation Heartbreak” is based on the historical “Operation Mincemeat” from 1943—which would have come under his auspices when Duff Cooper was Minister of Information. The corpse of a dead British officer, one Major Martin, was dropped in the Mediterranean by a British submarine, expressly for the enemy to find. Sealed in waterproofed covers he was carrying top-secret documents relating to an imminent British attack on Yugoslavia. The documents were false, a classic piece of British misdirection; the operation worked a treat; and the British and Americans met with far less resistance when they—in fact—invaded Sicily instead. The post-War British government, addicted like most governments, even in those more innocent times, to secrecy, was unhappy to have the operation put in a novel; it’s as well their efforts to suppress the book failed.
But this, if you like, is a diversion, the book’s trick ending, a redemptive play on the uses of uselessness, a burst of posthumous heroism. It only gets going in the last twenty pages, when the hero—or anti-hero?—is dead. There is a case for saying that there was another “Operation Heartbreak,” sustained not for a few weeks but for over forty years, every bit as successful, whose object was not the Axis powers, but the “man who never was,” Willie Maryngton. It was mounted—intentionally, unintentionally, implacably, it hardly matters—by the society that taught him to talk to men but not women, and to ride horses but not drive tanks; by the family that was not his but in which he grew up; by the army that did not want to make true use of him; and by the women who, even after being kissed, respectively slept with, did not think to marry him. This is the other, perhaps the true “Operation Heartbreak.” A social comedy of manners that is radiant with loneliness. The story of someone who qualifies for his posthumous heroism by the utter lack of connections he is born into; an orphan gifted with just enough insight to see himself as “a soldier who never went to war, and a lover who never lay with his mistress.”
Yes, Willie Maryngton is a kind of cipher, a man with no blood ties, no successes, and no real abilities, a man without qualities except for a temporary popularity which wears out as he ages into disappointment, as old as the century in which he feels entirely wrong. He works both as a twentieth century phenotype, not far from those of leftwing writers, the Winston Smith of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or the Diederich Hessling of Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan, and a representative British character, struggling with the immemorial British difficulties, all to do with deviousness and indirectness and frankness: the difficulty of speech, the difficulty of comprehending the speech of others, the difficulty of dissembling, the difficulty of sincerity, the difficulty of finding a subject. The failure to speak unambiguously (“This was not quite what Felicity had meant”) is matched in this book only by the failure to understand (“So Willie’s conversation with Horry ended, as had his conversation with Garnet, with a remark that he couldn’t understand”). Clarity, at such moments when it comes—Hamilton’s, Felicity’s—is only ever destructive. It is something much more to be feared than sought after.
It is perhaps a little astonishing that a man so blessed with talent and facility as Duff Cooper should have been granted such insight into the predicament of his tongue tied and monoglot and club-bound countrymen, and one wouldn’t look nowadays for any such empathy or analysis. But as the late critic John Bayley nobly surmised in an essay on Duff Cooper in the London Review of Books: “Successful people often understand unusually well the true nature of disappointment and failure, for it is implicit in their success, and it is this realisation which moves in the background of the short novel. Perhaps to have done brilliantly and achieved much, but not quite so much as some people professed to have thought you would, is harder than to fail.”
In 1953, a couple of years after Operation Heartbreak, another writer, enabled by the shattering success of his new project to move to those West Indies that Duff Cooper set sail for but failed to reach alive, came up with a different phenotype of British hero, and the all-action Etonian James Bond was launched by Ian Fleming in a book called Casino Royale. At which point, threescore and ten years ago, one might say the British finally and irrevocably parted company with the reality that is so gently and persistently and compassionately adumbrated in Operation Heartbreak—and with it the qualities of sadness and sympathy and mortality and thoughtfulness—and entered the garish and straightforward new world of violent fantasy.
Michael Hofmann
Gainesville, FL, 2023