Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [71]
Arthur’s attraction to Diana Wyndham has characteristically been portrayed as one generated by social ambition alone: his “new” money in union with tradition. The one thing Arthur, or his mistress Gabrielle, could never achieve was Diana Wyndham’s noble heritage. But in Arthur’s long-hidden and recently discovered letters to Diana11 we see that both his sincerity of feeling and his transparency about his doubts are considerably more subtle than pure ambition. In that period of great flux, Arthur longed, like so many others, for some kind of certainty. However obscurely, he saw it in the rootedness Diana and her well-established family appeared to represent.
If, by chance, Diana hadn’t heard of Arthur Capel before they met, she would soon have got wind of his long-standing affair with the ultrafashion-able Coco Chanel. Arthur didn’t hide from Diana that, at thirty-five, he sometimes felt himself world-weary. Yet while he confessed to her that she had reawakened his dormant heart and he no longer wished to stray, a strand of lingering doubt is evident in these letters. He writes:
I re-read your letters in which you say things that are very true—it is a bore to love too many people. It has in fact been the principal bore of my life, in fact poisoned the butterfly’s honey, but now I don’t long any more to explore new countries, unless it be to see the setting sun in your blue eyes.12
And then, almost in spite of himself, Arthur displays that note of ambivalence : “Perhaps this is only a mood & will get stale, perhaps it won’t.”13 Other letters reveal not only Arthur’s but also Diana’s doubts, and were to become typical of their affair. Above all, for months, Arthur was endlessly torn between Diana and Gabrielle.
He knew Gabrielle was one of the most unusual women he would ever meet. But moving in the most urbane of French circles, Arthur was captivated by Diana’s simplicity. And she, while herself moving easily in London society, where her friends were among the most polished in England, felt more comfortable on an English country estate than mixing with the archsophisticates of Paris. She was wary of the great differences between her own life and Arthur’s, 14 and her uncertainty was confirmed by friends’ telling her that Arthur was sometimes seen with Gabrielle when she, Diana, was not in Paris. If our knowledge of Gabrielle’s feelings during this period is limited, we do know that Arthur and Diana’s mutual doubts led them several times to call off their liaison. In one particularly poignant letter, he tells her:
I stepped into hell the morning we parted . . . & only just kept my head. Yesterday morning the reaction came. I saw my life as it used to be before I met you & resolved to take up its threads again and carry out its obligations . . . Fate as usual stepped in and I put my resolution into execution yesterday. Then for 24 hours I found peace at last from all these perishing doubts & hesitations. This morning comes your letter one day too late. It would be long & useless to explain but the position is that now I cannot marry.
. . . feel quite sure that we could not be happy with so little confidence in ourselves... Put the whole thing out of your mind for the time being, let me work out my salvation (or the other thing) & I shall go on loving you just the same, although I know now that it is no use trying to build our house upon sand.
Au revoir mon petit Buggins . . . I want no more of it...
Boy 15
While Arthur had returned to Gabrielle and clearly felt unable to renege on whatever promises he had made her, this sad episode was not to be the conclusion of his affair with Diana, and they would return yet again to their seesawing indecision. In the letter perhaps most revealing of Arthur’s philosophy, he wrote:
I’ve slid down every cursed slope and the hills. I hate the main road & the crowd. The world I know is of my own making, the other makes me sick. Their morals, their