Clarissa Eden - a memoir
The Times, December 14th 2007
Clarissa Eden: A Memoir edited by Cate Haste
Beautiful, clever and well connected, Clarissa Churchill (she was Winston’s niece) needed only a conventional marriage to ensure an enviable position in English society. But she was too intellectually restless to find fulfilment in debutante balls and draughty country houses. Instead she pursued her own path, one that proved just as enigmatic as her beguiling looks.
It was easier “to know everyone” in Clarissa’s era, but few lives can have touched so many social worlds, or graced them so elegantly. At Oxford, she took up with A.J. Ayer, Isaiah Berlin and David Cecil. In London, she moved effortlessly between intellectuals, aesthetes, socialites and film stars. How did she do it? Perhaps only someone whose interests transcend society can master it so completely.
Clarissa wrote a cultural column for Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine, and these memoirs reveal a sharp journalistic eye. The pyramids are dismissed as like “gasworks on the way out of town”.
People are captured even more pithily. Connolly emerges as a brilliant, loveable coward, who planned suicide if Germany won the war. Uncle Winston was seductively confident. Film stars are pitied as “tragic figures — with their small bones, discontented little faces and their utter, complete egocentricity”. The one world that Clarissa rarely mentions is politics. Perhaps that is why her friends were shocked when she became engaged to Anthony Eden, the handsome Foreign Secretary.
By tortuous coincidence, Eden’s career was blocked by Clarissa’s uncle, Churchill, who had promised his long-serving deputy nine times that he would resign. Even a stroke in 1953 did not remove him, so insistent was he that the world needed one last bark from the bulldog. While Churchill considered whether he really trusted his deputy to become the top man, Eden was increasingly tainted by the long wait for power. When Churchill finally did hand over, Clarissa, at the age of 34, found herself in No10 supporting a husband 20 years her senior and with failing health. She has little patience with self-analysis. That would be far too vulgar. But her character bounds off every page — wry, steely, inscrutable — and emerges all the stronger for being revealed rather than described.
It is Eden who seems the hardest for Clarissa to pin down. She writes unblinkingly about him — despite being a brilliant linguist, he was “not an intellectual”, “not a complex man”, and when he announced that he would resign, she “did not pay much attention, as he frequently said he was going to resign”. What, then, did she see in Eden, apart from decency, class and conventional worldly success — qualities that do not seem to satisfy her needs elsewhere?
That question, as much as the Suez Crisis, which ruined her husband’s health and career, gives this memoir an irresistible wistfulness. Perhaps Clarissa was always too interesting to be blissfully happy.