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| Lady Diana Cooper |
Everyone is connected to everyone, the saying goes,
by no more than six degrees of separation.
Between your uncle the cardiologist and Vladimir Putin, between Michael
Jordan and a kid working a shoeshine stand in Istanbul, there are chains of
relation and acquaintance much shorter than we might expect. This notion is the premise of Clive James’
poem “Six Degrees of Separation from Shelley,” in which he seeks degrees of
connection back through time to the poet Percy Shelley. But the real theme of the poem isn’t
connection: it’s whether life is worth living.
And his answer, just barely, is “yes.”
The poem begins with this:
In the last year of her life I dined with Diana
Cooper
Who told me she thought the best thing to do with
the poor
Was to kill them.
I think her tongue was in her cheek
But with that much plastic surgery it was hard to
tell.
That’s Lady Diana Cooper to you, pal. Largely forgotten now, she was much-lauded as
the most beautiful woman in England during and after the first world war, and
was certainly among the most glamorous: the (possibly illegitimate) daughter of the Earl of Rutland, she shone among a smart set of artists and
intellectuals who perished in the war, glimmered on the silver screen, and
moved from the center of London society only after the second world war, when
she flew to Paris as the wife of the English ambassador and became that city’s
most celebrated hostess, and event eluded to in the stanzas that follow:
As a child she had sat on the knee of George
Meredith
More than forty years after he published Modern Love.
Though she must have been as pretty as any poppet
Who challenged the trousers of Dowson or Lewis
Carroll,
We can bet Meredith wasn’t as modern as that.
By then the old boy wouldn’t have felt a twinge
Even had he foreseen she would one day arrive
In Paris with an escort of two dozen Spitfires.
Glamor aside, we’re not much encouraged to like her
in James’ poem, are we? She died in
1986, so that nasty remark about the poor was made in an era of nastiness
regarding the poor, the years when Margaret Thatcher bestrode England like a
smug colossus. Was the aging aristocrat
really as horrible as her remark makes her sound? Did she really think the poor better off dead? The poem leaves the question open, but in the
process refers to Diana Cooper in such a way as to emphasize her shallow
vanity, so even if we choose to believe she wasn’t expressing elitist disdain,
and only making a joke in bad taste, she appears in an unflattering light.
She’s far from alone in this, though. As we move back in time through a chain of
notable literary acquaintance, those we meet tend not to come off well. Ernest Dowson and Lewis Carroll are mentioned
in their least-likeable aspects, and the aged George Meredith is pretty much
shorn of dignity with the suggestion of impotence.
As we continue to trace the path connecting James
to Shelley, we meet Thomas Love Peacock and his daughter, both of whom escape
savaging, though Shelley himself is made to look a bit of a fool:
The book lamented his marriage to one of the
daughters
Of Peacock.
Peacock when young rescued Shelley
From a coma brought on by an excess of
vegetarianism
By waving a steak under his sensitive nose.
The portrait of Shelley takes a dark turn in the
next, and penultimate, stanza:
Shelley never quite said that the best thing to do
with the rich
Was to kill them, but he probably thought so.
Whether the steak was cooked or raw I can’t
remember.
I should, of course: I was practically there:
Here’s where the poem starts to become something
more than an interesting little list of biographical linkages. The inverted parallel’s the thing: if Diana
Cooper may have wanted a mass killing of the poor, Shelley may have wanted a
mass killing of the rich. What are we to
make of this? One’s first instinct might
be to see it as a historical degeneration from an era of populist revolutionary
hope to one of cynical reaction. Or
perhaps one’s first instinct is sigh and think “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” at the sight of a
civilization that grows no less bloodthirsty as it grows older. Is it all really as bad as this, we
wonder? Did Shelley, who wouldn't eat the flesh of any animal, really wish the death of whole classes of people? James’ answer in this poem is “probably,”
which introduces an element of doubt, and with that doubt, of hope. He drives the point home in the final stanza:
The blaze of his funeral pyre on the beach at night
Was still in her eyes. At her age I hope to recall
The phial of poison she carried but never used
Against the day there was nothing left to live for.
From Shelley’s death to the fire in Diana Cooper’s
eyes seems, suddenly, a short leap. But
there’s more to the stanza than that. We
get a powerful sense of life set against death.
We see those last flames of Shelley’s funeral on an Italian beach, where
Trelawny famously clutched Shelley’s heart from amid the flames to show how
his spirit lived on. We get Shelley’s
passionate life living in the eyes of Diana Cooper, and a sense of the
continuous pulse of all our little lives, linked together across the centuries
that bury us. We get, most importantly,
Diana Cooper’s readiness to take her life, her readiness to believe, after
surviving so many people whom she loved, that life is empty—and her final
refusal, even in her aged cynicism, to take her life.
In the end, James’ poem is a narrowly-run race
between cynicism and the affirmation of life.
We’re given just enough hope that Lady Diana Cooper didn’t really
believe the poor should die, just enough hope to believe that Shelley didn’t wish
death on multitudes, and we’re given a bit of proof, in that unused phial, that
someone, even in a world of hate and human folly, found life worth living.
