Nancy Mitford (12 page)

ARISTOCRATICALLY ENGLISH TO the French, Nancy began to seem rather Frenchified to her English friends, but she never acquired the chameleon quality of a Violet Trefusis whose performance of the idiom reminded one of Max Beerbohm’s essay ‘On Speaking French’. In Violet’s virtuosity there was a supercilious ostentation com mensurable with her linguistic advantage. Having lived in Paris before the war, she fancied herself a Paul Morand character, whether from
Ouvert la Nuit
or
Fermé la Nuit
one could not make out. She had published fiction both in French and English, wore the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur night and day, and owing to her prolonged intimacy with Princess Edmond de Polignac she could claim familiarity with the painters, poets and musicians of the avant-garde as well as with prominent politicians. In her heart she resented Nancy as a poacher on her preserves. The resentment swelled with the growing popularity of Nancy’s Francophile novels and burst when she turned to historical biography. Superficially they were on amicable terms. Nancy was glad to see friends but she withdrew from them when she wanted to write. Violet, who posed as a professional
femme de lettres
, preferred to be surrounded at all times; her
writing
was no more than an exhibitionistic exercise. Unlike Nancy she had a fat independent income.

Since Violet also had a villa in Florence I often heard her attribute Nancy’s knowledge of French society to her own guidance and intervention while she poured ridicule on her general attitude and accent. But the society they both frequented was narrow enough for them to collide with comic results. Nancy used to say, ‘Never tell me anything in confidence,’ as it made her want to pass it on immediately. Violet passed on everything she heard with rococo embellishments of her own. Many of her traits contributed to the character of Lady Montdore in Nancy’s next novel,
Love in a Cold Climate
. One can almost hear Violet remarking, like Lady Montdore, ‘I think I may say we put India on the map. Hardly any of one’s friends in England had ever even heard of India before we went there, you know.’

Love in a Cold Climate
is far from dull—Nancy was exaggerating her modesty. Raymond
Mortimer considers it the best of her novels. The conquest of tough Lady Montdore by Cedric Hampton, ‘a terrible creature from Sodom, from Gomorrah, from Paris,’ was what reviewers used to call audacious, but many dowagers whose names I could mention found youthful companions like Cedric who subjected them to a course of rejuvenation. Nancy herself was drawn to the ornamental type of homosexual, whose preoccupations were
feminine
apart from sex. She described Brian Howard as ‘blissikins’ and in Paris there were many others who brought grist to her comedic mill. (‘I had 12 people yesterday in be fore dinner and afterwards I thought I was the only normal one,’ she told Alvilde. ‘It is rather strange one must admit. Nature’s form of birth control in an overcrowded world I daresay.’)

The scene with Uncle Matthew when Cedric bought
Vogue
on the platform of Oxford station and was shaken like a rat; the alarm of hearty Jock who expected Cedric to pounce on him in the train when they were ‘quite alone together after Reading’ and maintained that he had been hypnotized into moving Cedric’s heavy suitcase off the rack—such incidents were based on real happenings. The narrative ripples along in the brisk and colloquial style Nancy had made her own.

Love in a Cold Climate
was selected by the Book Society, the
Daily Mail
, and the
Evening Standard
as book of the month for July. Gay, clever, witty, startling, brilliant, enchanting, extravagant, adroit, spirited, joyous, pungent, piquant, frisky, post-Waugh, were among the adjectives applied to it by reviewers, though a few complained of its lack of moral
indignation
. To certain Americans it appealed as a portrayal of aristocratic England in full decadence and of pedigreed poodles in a corrupt menagerie. Nancy was described as ‘the prettiest
novelist
in Burke’s Peerage’.

The novel was most original, perhaps, in depicting the dragonfly Cedric as a beneficent rather than as a pernicious influence: here for a change was a harmless fairy wand. Since then some of the social stigma attached to Cedric’s type has faded and Nancy’s witty tolerance might have helped the fading process. At the time, however, Cedric was generally considered an affront to normality by the English novel reading public, less sophisticated than the French. The atmosphere of prosperity was faintly overshadowed by a sense of doom and there is more than a hint of nostalgia—a tear for the passing of incorrigible individualists, however ludicrous. Choleric Uncle Matthew reappeared with a fresh superstition. If you wrote a bugbear’s name on a scrap of paper, the creature would expire within a year.

Evelyn Waugh wrote laconically on a postcard from Piers Court: ‘I have finished the book. The last half is not as good as the first but there is more construction than I
remembered
. The climax is very bad, so is the unnecessary scene of Lady Montdore dining in North Oxford, but her transformation is plausible and excellently written and Cedric is
genuinely
funny all through. Of course whenever the Radletts appear, all is splendidly well. They are
genial
. E.’

To Mark Nancy wrote from the Château de Montredan, Marseille, 30th July, 1949: ‘Dear old Hyde, I’m so glad you liked it—the American reviews so terrible I am flattered, “no
message
or meaning” they rightly say. But the English are for it and I’d rather it was that way
round on account of ONE’s friends not gloating over these cruel words.’

‘I am in perfect happiness here with Dolly Radziwill, been here a month with a week off on the Mosley yacht at Cannes, and go back to them next week, back here and so on, but I shall be in Paris waiting with open arms in September. I long for ye… The bliss of Marseille it is made for you in both capacities (Jekyll and Hyde).’ And again, on 21st August: ‘Having lived here for most of my days, it seems, I am off in about a week to Paris, dreading the cold rather, as my blood (oh that word, forget it) must be rather thin after these weeks of
torridity
.’

‘My book is a great best seller so are you impressed? Even in America, where the reviews are positively insulting, it is on the best seller list. I have a secret feeling that the other
novels
on the market can’t be very fascinating at present, but this may be my native modesty. Anyhow I shall never write about normal love again as I see there is a far larger and more enthusiastic public for the
other sort
.’

‘America is taking exception to Cedric the sweet pansy’, she told her friend Billa [Lady Harrod], who had suggested ‘the Waynflete Professor of Moral Theology’ and perhaps his future as Ambassador. ‘It seems in America you can have pederasts in books so long as they are fearfully gloomy and end by committing suicide. A cheerful one who goes from strength to strength like Cedric horrifies them. They say “Cedric is too revolting for any enjoyment of the book”. So I write back “how can you hate Cedric when he is such a love?”’

If not exactly a love, one must agree with Evelyn Waugh that Cedric was genuinely funny. While studying the type Nancy for once was prejudiced in favour of her compatriots. ‘The pansies here,’ she informed Billa, ‘are all so pompous in comparison with our darling English ones. Brian [Howard] came here with a terrible creature called S.—I thought I would hurt myself with laughing. Brian must have been a gov. in a former life.’ With regard to
readers
who tried to recognize her models she confessed: ‘It is the worst of taking bits of
houses
, circumstances, and so on, that people then begin to see other resemblances, and yet I don’t know how it is to be avoided by somebody who must write about what she knows like me… I thought Alfred un-Roy [Sir Roy Harrod] might go to Paris in some capacity—Ambassador even (Franks) but this is all pretty nebulous in my mind and will take years to work out. I must go on with Fanny. I work much more easily like that—I started this book without an I, but couldn’t get along at all.’ Here we have the germ of Nancy’s last novel
Don’t tell Alfred
.

Personally I prefer
The Blessing
, but before this was published in 1961 Nancy began to experiment with translation. She tackled
La Princesse de Clèves
, that pioneer of modern
psychological
fiction which was her favourite, perhaps because it is so limpidly French, though it is profoundly sad and disillusioned. Nothing could seem farther from Nancy’s
temperament
, yet the dignity and refinement of the heroine’s emotions must have appealed to
hidden
depths in her own character. Under her smiling mask there was undoubtedly a vein of repressed melancholy.

Her family loyalty was too intense to be hidden, and strong political dissent could not
weaken her devotion. When her sister Unity eventually died of her head wound in 1948 she wrote to James Lees-Milne (8th June): ‘We are all dreadfully sad and cast down. Lately she had been so very much better and had become quite thin and pretty again, and seemed to enjoy her life again. But her real happiness in life was over—she was a victim of the war as much as anybody wasn’t she.’

‘Mabel said “I sent for the Church Worker of our district and I said is Miss Unity with Mr. Tom
now
and she said yes she thought so.” Wasn’t it touching—as though the Church Worker kept an ABC of trains to Heaven.’

‘I must tell of X’s behaviour, Not one word of sympathy but when I arrived here
from the funeral
a telegram saying will you dine on Wednesday followed by a spate of furious
telephone
calls when I said I wouldn’t. “But I’ve asked the Hamish Hamiltons
specially
to meet you.” Can you beat it!’

Having wholeheartedly identified herself with the Nazi movement before she was
twenty
, Unity had barely survived near suicide when her ideals were shattered by war. Nancy had made fun of her in her novel
Wigs on the Green
(1935) but she always spoke of her with
special
tenderness and denied the popular assumption that she wanted to marry Hitler. Her
letters
to Unity, whom she called ‘Head of Bone’ and ‘Heart of Stone’, are puzzling in their blend of mockery and affection, for instance (29th June, 1936):

‘Darling Stonyheart, We were all very interested to see that you were the Queen of the May this year at Hesselberg.

Call me early, Goering dear,

For I’m to be Queen of the May!

Good gracious, that interview you sent us, fantasia, fantasia.’

No doubt fantasy had played a preponderant role in her short and ultimately tragic life. Twenty years later Nancy told Christopher Sykes: ‘About dying, I have always found that one minds terribly when they are the ones of whom everybody else says far the best. I minded when Bobo [Unity] died much more than when Tom did who had had a happy life and
little
sorrow…’

Translation from the French served as a creative stopgap between writing novels and, sporadically, when applied to the theatre and films, it promised lucrative possibilities. Nancy’s talent for dialogue became sharpened and polished in the process. It seemed a curious
coincidence
that Nancy, always haunted by The Hut of Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition, should have won her single success in the theatre with a version of André Roussin’s
frivolous
farce
The Little Hut
, then still running in Paris after 1,000 performances.

Would it run in London? She described it to her mother as a terribly funny play about husband, lover and wife on a desert island-lover gets very low all alone in the little hut while the husband and wife sleep in the big one, insists on taking turns. Husband not absolutely delighted but sees the logic, that they have shared her for six years and might as well go on doing so. Then a handsome young negro appears ties up husband and lover by a trick and indicates that he will only let them go if Susan will go into the hut with him, which she’s only
too pleased to do as he is very good looking.—Disgusting,—I hear you say. And so on—you see the form. It is terribly funny, I think, but I never counted on it much as everybody said the Lord Chamberlain wouldn’t pass it. Here it has run over three years, a wild success. I’ve skated over the worst indecencies, in fact the reason I was asked to do it was that I’m supposed to be good at making outrageous situations seem all right. Roussin the author, an utter love, doesn’t know a word of English so I’ve got away with altering it a great deal…’

The theme was frothy enough; the situation what used to be called risqué. Owing to a felicitous blend of talents and Nancy’s tactful treatment of the dialogue, it was saved from crudity, but its three rollicking acts struck me personally as overblown. Bedroom farces even when transferred to the tropics have their hackneyed limitations.

At first it was exciting to make her début in the theatrical world which was new to her. But being a very private person in spite of the publicity she had given her family in
The Pursuit of Love
, she did not take kindly to actors. Their narcissism and blinkered absorption in their profession bored her. Theatrical gossip was the only gossip she could not endure. After dining with the influential manager Binkie Beaumont, whose party included ‘Noël Coward, who kisses me now, Gladys Cooper, Robert Morley, Athene Seyler and the Kaufmans and a lot of stage hangers-on’, she exclaimed: ‘It’s dreadful how dull they all are but don’t say I said. Also Communists I note…’

From Edinburgh she wrote (25th July, 1950): ‘After a day of terrible nerves and
disastrous
dress rehearsals the play was an absolute whizz and even the old Scotsman is on its side. Oh what a relief. Oliver Messel had privately informed me that he was deeply shocked by it and quite expected the audience to get up and demonstrate, and I must say when I saw the dress rehearsal I quite agreed and very nearly didn’t go to the theatre at all I was so
terrified
. But the fact is nothing shocks anybody nowadays—they screamed with laughter throughout and clapped and cheered for ten minutes at the end. Now there is a lot of work to be done on it… What we do is this. Certain bits fall very flat. I sit, with script, and note which ones, and next day I rewrite them. Then see how that goes. And so on. I doubt if it will be à point by next week, very much. It is a most laborious, and I see most necessary process… The actors are dreams of funniness and egocentricity, so exaggerated you can hardly believe it.’ A woman in the audience was heard saying: ‘It’s all quite mad but of course Mitfords are.’