“If my unfortunate brethren only knew it,” he said, “I’m sure they would feel most obliged. Did the Speaker stand up as well?”
“Yes.”
“How very moving.”
The Jewish capacity for cynicism is really insufferable. Although I loathe anti-Semites, I do dislike Jews.
June 8, 1950
Lunch at the Reform Club. The beastly Sir Hyman is there with Guy and Tom Driberg. Driberg is carrying on about his favoured “cottages” in Soho.
“Why municipal vandals,” he said, “should have thought it necessary to destroy so many of them I do not know. I suppose it is one expression of antihomosexual prejudice. Yet no homo, cottage-cruising, ever prevented a hetero from merely having a whiz. While to do one’s rounds of the cottages—the alley by the Astoria, the dog-leg lane opposite the Garrick Club, the one near the Ivy, the one off Wardour Street—provided homos, not all of whom are given to rougher sports, with healthy exercise.”
June 7,1951
Dinner at the Savoy. Sir Hyman Kaplansky at another table, entertaining some of the old Tots and Quots. Zuckerman, Bernal, and Haldane. Everybody is discussing the Burgess-Maclean affair. Sir Hyman says, “I know Guy to be a coward and a Bolshie and I’m not surprised he did a bunk.”
The next entry for Sir Hyman dealt at length with that infamous dinner party in his Cumberland Terrace flat. A Passover seder, of all things, to which Sir Hyman—much to Lady Olivia’s horror—had invited the MP and other noted anti-Semites. Among them, a couple of survivors of the Cliveden set, an unabashed admirer of Sir Oswald Mosley, a famous novelist, a celebrated actress, a West End impresario, a Polish count and a rambunctious cabinet minister who was an adamant opponent of further Jewish settlement in troubled Palestine. Why did they come?
The novelist, arguably the most gifted of his time, wrote in his diary:
March 21, 1953
All in order for our trip to Menton. I am assured that the villa has been furnished to my taste, the servants will be adequate, and there will be no Americans to be seen. We travel in a filthy carriage to Dover and then board the boat. The usual drunken commercial travellers and this time a number of Jews, presumably tax-evaders. This reminds Sybil that we are expected to dine at Sir Hyman Kaplansky’s the evening after our return. The food and wine will be excellent. Certainly no problems with ration coupons in that quarter.
Another diary, this one kept by the actress, reminded her many admirers of exactly what she was wearing (an outfit especially created for her by Norman Hartnell) on the day the Bomb fell on Hiroshima. On another page she revealed for the first time that her only child lay dying in Charing Cross Hospital on the night theatrical tradition obliged her to open in Peonies for Penelope, a musical that ran for three years at the Haymarket in spite of the posh critics. An entry dated three days before Sir Hyman’s dinner party described a lunch at the Ivy with the West End impresario, a noted sybarite.
April 12, 1953
Signs of the times. At one table a loud infestation of newly affluent proles. GI brides, Cockney accents. But I could hardly afford to eat here any more—if not for Hugh’s kindness. Hugh is in a snit about the dinner party at Sir Hyman’s.
“Will I be expected to put on one of those silly black beanies I’ve seen the men wear in Whitechapel?”
“Think of the caviar. He gets it from their embassy. Consider the endless bottles of Dom P. I am told there will be a whole baby lamb.”
“Kosher, I daresay.”
Hugh confessed how deeply he regretted casting Kitty rather than little me in The Dancing Duchess. Stuff and nonsense, I told him. I wouldn’t hear a word against Kitty. She tries so hard.
Other diaries, memoirs, letter collections and biographies of the period were rich in details of that disastrous night. There were contradictions, of course, each memoir writer laying claim to the evening’s most memorable bons mots. Other discrepancies related to Lady Olivia, who had been born and raised an Anglican. Some charged that she had treacherously been a party to the insult, but others were equally certain that she was its true victim. Both groups agreed that the Polish count was her lover, but they split again on whether Sir Hyman condoned the relationship, was ignorant of it, or—just possibly—had planned the scandal to avenge himself on both of them. Whatever the case, there was no disputing the main thrust of events, only their interpretation.
Including Sir Hyman and Lady Olivia, there were thirteen at the refectory table, which made for much light-hearted bantering, the mood darkening only when Sir Hyman—insensitive or vindictive, depending on the witness—pointed out that that had been the precise number gathered at the most famous of all Passover noshes.
Every diary and memoir writer mentioned the table setting, describing it either as opulent or all too typically reeking of Levantine ostentation. The wine goblets and decanters were made of late-Georgian flint glass, their hue Waterford blue. The seventeenth-century candelabra were of a French design, with classic heads and overlapping scales and foliated strapwork. The heavy, ornate silverware was of the same period. Other artifacts were of Jewish origin. There was, for instance, a silver Passover condiment set, its style German Baroque, stamped with fruit and foliage. The seder tray itself, the platter on which the offending matzohs would lie, was made of pewter. It was eighteenth-century Dutch in origin, unusually large, engraved with Haggadah liturgies, artfully combining the pictorial and calligraphic.
An ebullient Sir Hyman welcomed his guests to the table with a prepared little speech that some would later condemn as grovelling and others, given the shocking turn of events, as a damned impertinence. In the first place, he said, he wished to say how grateful he was that everyone had accepted his invitation, because he knew how prejudiced they were against some of his kind. He hardly blamed them. Some of his kind, especially those sprung from eastern Europe, were insufferably pushy and did in fact drive a hard bargain, and to prove his point he quoted some lines of T.S. Eliot:
Such people, Sir Hyman said, embarrassed him and other gentlemen of Hebraic origin even more than they were an affront to decent Christians. In a lighter vein, Sir Hyman went on to say that he hoped his guests would find the rituals essential to the Passover feast a welcome little frisson. Each of them would find a little book at their place. It was called a Haggadah and they should think of it as a libretto. We should tell—that is to say, “hagged”—of our exodus from Egypt, not the last time the Jews did a midnight flit. The Haggadah—like the libretto of any musical in trouble in Boston or Manchester—was being constantly revised to keep pace with the latest Jewish bad patch. He had seen one, for instance, that included a child’s drawing of the last seder held in Theresienstadt. The drawing, alas, was without any artistic merit, but—it could be argued—did have a certain maudlin charm. He had seen another one that made much of the fact that the Nazi all-out artillery attack on the grouchy Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had begun on the eve of Passover. A man who had survived that kerfuffle only to perish in a concentration camp later on had written, “We are faced with a Passover of hunger and poverty, without even ‘the bread of affliction’. For eating and drinking there is neither matzoh nor wine. For prayer there are no synagogues or houses of study. Their doors are closed and darkness reigns in the dwelling-places of Israel.” However, Sir Hyman hastily pointed out, we have come here not to mourn but to be jolly. He beamed at Lady Olivia, who responded by jiggling a little bell. Servants refilled the champagne glasses at once.