Fighting Words by Nancy F. Cott

Author:Nancy F. Cott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

AT THE FIRST crest of Personal History’s success in March 1935, Sheean acquired a “girlfriend,” in his own word. He fixed his eye on Diana Forbes-Robertson—called Dinah—daughter of a famous acting family and sister-in-law of Sheean’s British publisher Jamie (Hamish) Hamilton, who introduced them late in 1934. In March 1935, the two spent some time together when she traveled with friends to Naples, where Sheean was living because it was the setting for the novel he was writing. They then made a plan to meet in August (suitably chaperoned) at the Salzburg music festival. In late July, Sheean told Raymond Mortimer that he intended to marry Dinah. “There’s no doubt that I’m approaching a sort of Crisis in my existence,” he told his friend as August began. Mortimer may have been the only person he told. In several letters of the same weeks to John Gunther, Sheean made no mention of a girlfriend or plans to marry.22

Meeting in Salzburg for the festival, the couple suddenly went before the American consul and were married on August 24, 1935. Diana Forbes-Robertson was twenty, enthralled with Sheean’s worldly wisdom and playfully executed erudition. He was thirty-five, in the flush of new success. She was lovely, and her personality was called “electric,” but what else about her convinced Sheean he should marry her remains mysterious. Her extended family may have intrigued him. Her American mother, Gertrude Elliott, was a former actress, and her English father, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, was a renowned and beloved Shakespearean actor. Her mother’s sister Maxine Elliott was a glamorous and enterprising American former actress who gallivanted in her youth and captivated aristocratic celebrities who were still her friends in the 1930s, when she was in her seventies. More than once, luminaries such as Winston Churchill and even the Prince of Wales were guests at “Aunt Maxine’s” house in Cannes on the French Riviera when Sheean and his wife were also visiting. Sheean developed a personal acquaintance with Churchill that way, starting in 1935 when he was out of power. Churchill read Personal History and pronounced it “very subversive.”23

Sheean seemed heartily delighted with his bride, telling Gunther and other friends about his marriage: “Gal by the name of Dinah, nicest ever I saw, and why didn’t anybody ever tell me marriage was the Perfect State? Seems to me I’ve wasted a lot of time. Maybe it was because I never knew Dinah before.” The couple at first lived in Naples. Sheean had conceived a romantic historical tale set in the republic of Naples in 1799, when Jacobin revolutionaries briefly rose against their Habsburg overlords and would-be British captors, only to be brutally defeated and buried. Sheean meant the novel to illuminate “certain revolutionary impulses which are eternal in human nature,” as he told Jamie Hamilton, who would publish the novel in Britain. Failures such as the one in Naples, including the tragic fate of Sheean’s heroine Luisa Sanfelice, were only temporary halts in “the raising of further and further classes of people to the surface of life.

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