“He was not a fellow of whom I thought very highly. But I suppose there was no harm in him.” – Operation Heartbreak, by Duff Cooper
After weeping over this sad, ironic little novel. I returned to the prologue, which is not just sad but cruel. One doesn’t understand it fully until the end of Duff Cooper’s sublime novel, Operation Heartbreak.
The short scene in the prologue is not dramatic, just a dull description of a long drive. A Military Attache is annoyed that he has to take a long trip to the coast to bury a soldier who was supposedly in his regiment. But Willie Maryington, the dead man, was not on the army lists, and to the Military Attache’s knowledge, he was not a major, but a captain in his army days. And so the Military Attache complains about Willie’s mediocrity and then jokingly plays with the Latin saying De mortuis nil nisi bonum… “Nothing except good [should be said] about the dead.” He changes it to De mortuis nil nisi bunkum… (“Nothing but bunk [should be said] about the dead].”)
And that is heartbreaking. Willie Maryington deserved a better eulogy.
Cooper’s understated, skillful style is barely noticeable, the perfect underpinning to the portrayal of Willie. The first sentence is: “Nobody ever had fewer relations than Willie Maryington.” And that is significant: he is adrift; he has no strong ties. After his father, a career soldier, died in 1914, Willie went to public school and was raised by the Osbornes, the family of one of his father’s fellow officers. And he dreamed about joining his father’s regiment as soon as he is old enough.
He is obsessed with his military training, but has one fear. Cooper writes, “What Willie feared was not defeat but that the war should end before he crossed the Channel.” This anxiety haunts him during his long army career, because the First World War ends before he can go overseas. He is anxious for combat, but where are the wars? Although he likes the army, and is stationed abroad for a while, there is no fighting and the work is all routine. He had expected to meet heroes, not ordinary men like himself.
But Willie has a sweet temperament. From boyhood to middle age, Willie is attractive, kind, and affable. Everyone likes him, and he especially is close to the Osbornes, the amusing Horry Osborne (short for Horace), who becomes an actor, and his younger sister Felicity, with whom Willie falls in love. Willie also loves the horses: he co-owns a small racing stable at one point. But is that enough for a warrior?
He would seem to be a natural paterfamilias, but doesn’t have much luck with women. He is jilted by his first fiancée, Daisy, who runs off with another man after a few days. Felicity says she loves him but she is rather like a woman in the novels of Michael Arlen or Aldous Huxley: she refuses to marry him, and honestly treats him very oddly: she seldom makes time to see him.
So Willie is a lonely man who has not achieved his goals. At 40, he has still not fought overseas, nor has he married Felicity. And because Felicity seldom agrees to see him, he has a brief affair with Daisy, the woman who jilted him. Felicity is annoyed, perhaps jealous, though Willie takes her at her word, which is that she is looking out for him.
Cooper explains Willie’s bewilderment and anger.
They parted coldly, as they had never parted before. At the last moment, Willie felt inclined to throw himself on his knees and implore her forgiveness. But he was too angry to do so, and he felt strongly that there was no reason why he should. He could not live forever on the scant charity that Felicity dispensed to him according to her unpredictable moods.
Felicity is a mystery, because we see her only through Willie’s eyes. We can’t imagine why she says she loves him when she can’t be bothered to go out with him. In fact, she sees other men. My only criticism of this otherwise perfect novel is that her character is less developed than any of the men’s. We understand the likable, witty Horry, but Felicity is an enigma. (So felicity – happiness – is an enigma?)
This slim, poignant novel is brilliant, charming, and a bit cynical. It is not only about the simplicity and frustration of Willie, but captures the irony of the concept of heroism. If only the Military Attache could have known his worth!
Duff Cooper’s story was based on an extraordinary real-life intelligence operation which fooled the Germans into believing that Allied forces in 1943 would be landing not in Sicily (as they did) but further east in the Peloponnese. To effect this, a corpse was dressed up in Royal Marine uniform with a briefcase full of faked letters, and dropped off the Spanish coast by submarine, ready for the Spanish to retrieve so that the briefcase might ‘accidentally’ fall into the hands of the local German intelligence agents. Which is exactly what happened.
Part of the story was told by Ewen Montagu, one of the original planners in London, in The Man Who Never Was in the early 1950s. It was made into a rather good film of the same name, scripted by Nigel Balchin. But the full story had to wait until Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat (2010), which revealed among other things that the floating body was that of a luckless Welsh tramp, dead of natural causes and appropriated by the British authorities. This version was also filmed recently, starring Colin Firth as Montagu. It’s also a musical now in London.
Philip, thank you for all this information. There is an Afterword in my edition which does explain this incident but you give much more detail. I read that Cooper had access to the documents as a Minister of Information and the government tried to block the publication of the book. Censorship of people who give away “military secrets” seemed to be prevalent at this time. The SF writer Philip Wylie was under house arrest after publishing a short story that released information about the atomic bomb before one of the tests.
Am really interested to hear there are other versions. The title The Man Who Never Was sounds familiar, but I’m sure I haven’t seen the film. Well, I’ve never heard of Montagu, but must suppose it came to the U.S. since Colin Firth is in it.
This is such a sad story, and so beautifully written. If only Cooper had written more novels! But I did see he wrote a memoir. Perhaps I’ll be able to find that.
Censorship about intelligence operations is/was probably stricter over here than in the US. Ian Fleming was also involved in the plan to plant a body at sea. He appears as a character (played by Johnny Flynn) in the recent film although his participation is probably overstated. In real life Fleming was wartime aide to Admiral Godfrey, chief of naval intelligence, and his role – perhaps self-created – seems to have been to come up with increasingly off-the-wall schemes and ploys.
Duff Cooper was the grandfather of the historian & biographer Artemis Cooper.
The appearance of Ian Fleming in the plot is an interesting detail. Operation MIncemeat is on Netflix, the go-to site for fans of the movies before the theaters were taken over by monster movies and cartoons!
Duff Cooper was married to the “legendary” society beauty Lady Diana Cooper (nee Manners) who appeared on stage in Reinhardt’s The Miracle (as the Madonna). She was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and knew everyone in 20s-50s society. She wrote 3 volumes of memoirs (the Rainbow Comes and Goes, the Light of Common Day, Trumpets from the Steep) and is the subject of a biography by Hugo Vickers (1981). Her memoirs have been reprinted and should be available. She was very lovely in a glacial blonde style and was on the cover of Time magazine 1n 1926. She’s worth googling!
Duff and Diana! Astonishing how everybody knows everybody, especially Waugh. The wit must have flown. So strange to think of a Society beauty, though I’m sure we have them. I don’t know of a single American Society Beauty, though.
I know! Do we have Society now in America? No more Capote Swans a-swimming in the American gene pool methinks! Taylor Swift? but no, she works for a living so she’s out, she’s in trade (haha).
Taylor Swift is probably more popular than any great society beauty, even among football fans. because she isdating a football player, I hear!.