Nancy Mitford (17 page)

Nancy’s
Encounter
mail continued to harp on the same string. ‘Furious Scotchmen, furious Baronets, furious friends saying how vulgar I am. Willie Maugham always says toilet paper, so realizes HE is not U, etc…’ But Nancy also received ‘perfectly serious letters from people
saying
things like, “I am descended from Alfred the Great’s sister and I would like to
congratulate
you on your splendid stand for people of our sort”.’

To Mrs. Hammersley she wrote: ‘As for U everybody I see says how tired they are of it, etc, to which I reply then leave it alone. But they can’t. It’s really too extraordinary.’ ‘No,’ she declared, ‘I’m not got down by U, only the cuttings which have got out of control since every sort of local or trade paper speaks of U and me on any and every pretext.’ It was a relief to turn to Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet.

Between ‘working like a maniac’ and getting to grips with Monsieur de Voltaire, Nancy was also being televised in January 1957: ‘I’m having such a time with the television people. They’ve already spent two whole afternoons here, and the French Eurovision two more and coming again today (cables and so on). It’s to last half an hour, did you ever hear such a thing? I’m dying of fear. The men are very nice to you, rather I suppose as the warders who hang you are nice, and they may have to drag me in the end like Mrs. Thompson. One of them said, “My father sends his love.” “Who is your father?” “The Archbishop of Canterbury”. Colonel says he’d better say nephew, in France!… Oh the TX. What to wear is such a
problem
.
No black or white allowed and nearly all colours look black except sky blue, which of course I haven’t got.’

Nancy was titillated willy nilly by the parerga of her profession. To her mother she
confessed
: ‘I really don’t think I’ve ever been so frightened—the preparations were simply
terrific
. Nobody allowed to park at this end of the street from mid night the day before, police in the street for 24 hours, twenty men in the flat and courtyard all day from 9 a.m., a sort of railway from the street (I had to send flowers to all the neighbours). A huge crowd in the street all day, Mme Brand [the concierge]
dans tous ses états
explaining what it was for (I wish I’d heard her). I had a terrific tummy upset and couldn’t eat anything all day. But once it had begun I didn’t mind in the least! What was very unnerving, all the people concerned,
interviewer
, producer and so on were at least as nervous as I was and showed it more. Somebody said the life of one of them is about that of a bomber pilot—after four years they can’t do any more, the strain is too great. It is supposed to be a technical triumph to get it over from France… Ouf! Thank goodness it’s done.’

Conscientiously she pursued her new protagonist to Geneva whence she informed Mark in April: ‘I’m here to do a bit of work at the Musée Voltaire. This is a nice calm town rather like what I had imagined Athens to be before I went to that city of the plain… There’s a lot of new (unpublished and unsuspected) Voltaire stuff, very luckily for me
ça tombe bien
. I’ve been goggling over it. Also, as all can be said nowadays, there is the Hyde Parkery at Frederick’s court, details of which may surprise some people.’

Mr. Theodore Besterman gave Nancy his paternal blessing. ‘Besterman is NOBLE,’ she told Lady Redesdale. ‘In spite of the fact that he himself is to write a life of Voltaire he has let me see all the new letters which entirely change the story and which he could have easily kept dark until I’d finished and nobody would have been the wiser. It must have been a
temptation
—I don’t know that I, in his place, would have behaved so well.’ And to Mrs. Ham she wrote ‘Besterman, who is noble, has read more than half my book (all I’ve done) and says greatly to his surprise he only found one error of fact. As I had suspected, the pleasure he took in the T.L.S. review of the letters was mitigated by the reviewer’s total ignorance of the subject. But I suppose of English people only he and I really do know the subject in tiny detail, it is so huge and so complex that nobody would trouble unless working on it… The new letters, to the niece, which prove he was sleeping with her for years, never suspected, are simply hair-raising!’ And again to Mrs. Ham she wrote on 3rd May: ‘I was sitting up in bed writing my book when I suddenly finished it! It has gone off to be typed and I am free to write a few letters at last… I feel the need of non-petrol air.’ Ten days later: ‘John Sutro has taken off my typescript to Hamish Hamilton so I feel like somebody who has lost a
particularly
tiresome child… Poor Madame Denis, she’ll turn in her grave as I’m awful about her.’

Unlike many a greater poet Voltaire drained the full cup of popular triumph during his long lifetime. Some have considered his seventeen-year liaison with Madame du Châtelet a great love affair, but romance shrivels in contact with a genius so icily intellectual. With Voltaire there were no delicate shades of emotion. The swiftness of his wit was winged but
his nature was flawed by squalid pettiness. His relationship with Madame du Châtelet was mainly a matter of convenience and prestige. The Newtonian lady required more physical attention than the middle-aged poet was inclined to provide and Nancy portrayed her as a semi-comic bluestocking. While Voltaire cohabited with her he became the quintessential French
homme de lettres
whose influence spread far beyond his study and her bedroom. This was Nancy’s theme, though Voltaire escaped from the latter to that of his buxom niece Mme Denis—under the pretext of impotence.

It was no mean feat for a free-lance historian to depict such paradoxical celebrities—the ruthless opportunist, the cranky valetudinarian destined to prolong a premature old age, and the aristocratic highbrow of whom Frederick the Great was jealous. Nancy steered her way through the domestic labyrinth with colours flying. Her stronger partiality for Louis XV and Mme de Pompadour could not prejudice her against this less exalted pair but she failed to make either of them sympathetic. In this case she could not identify her protagonists with personal acquaintances though she detected certain traits of Voltaire in at least one contemporary littérateur. ‘I couldn’t get fond of Emily, try as I might,’ she told me. ‘To me she is like a much cleverer Violet [Trefusis]. I think the only woman in their set whom we would have liked was Mme de Boufflers. Can’t help loving Voltaire, for the jokes, and old Stani of course.’ She quoted Lord Chesterfield with approbation when he sent his son to Paris to learn ‘that ease, those manners, those graces which are certainly nowhere to be found but in France’. And she exclaimed with sincere fervour: ‘Oh happy age, when everything made by man was beautiful, when the furnishing of an Hôtel Lambert could as safely be left to a clergyman and a district-nurse as, nowadays, to a Ramsay or a Jansen!’

Like our friend James Lees-Milne (‘Old Furious’ or ‘Grumpikins’) Nancy found little to admire in modern art or architecture. Her Slade School enthusiasms for Epstein, the Spencers and the Nashes had waned: Coysevox and his successors had firmly supplanted them.

She lunched and dined out a little more frequently since
Voltaire in Love
was off her chest. ‘There was a screamingly funny Anglo-French literary luncheon,’ she told Mrs. Hammersley (21st May, 1957). ‘All the Anglo ladies including Rebecca West and Mrs. Priestley were got up (freezing day) in chiffon and picture hats. It was supposed to be for young (
sic
) writers to exchange views. I had to exchange with young Priestley in a vile temper because Gram Greene was at the grand table and he wasn’t, and André Chamson (80) furious because Lacretelle was. I did have a horrid time, though I rigoléd
intérieurement
[giggled inwardly] like anything.’ The luncheon was followed by a performance of
Titus Andronicus
: ‘a more disgusting play I never saw, tortures, murders, mutilations in every scene, culminating in a woman eating her own children in a pie. The French, who of course didn’t understand a word, received it with wild enthusiasm. Couldn’t help thinking of Voltaire who said that Shakespeare was a great genius
sans une étincelle de goût
and that no people love a hanging so much as the English therefore naturally they also love his plays.’

During the tenure of Lord and Lady Gladwyn the British Embassy was again a second home, as in the heyday of the Duff Coopers, and Nancy particularly relished an exclusive
dinner
with Field-Marshal Montgomery. 2nd July, to Mrs. Hammersley: ‘Dined with Monty and the Jebbs, just the four of us, you know how he always rather fascinates me. We talked about generals having luck. He said, “I had luck when Gott was shot down.” N: “Perhaps it was lucky for us too.” M: “Yes it was. Gott was very much above his ceiling—he would have lost Egypt.” John Marriott says this is quite true and it was Providence who shot down Gott!’

In July, on her annual visit to Venice, she wrote to Hugh Thomas, ‘the sea there is warm like a bath and the only out of door water I can bear to swim in (in Europe, I mean). The social life, before the tourists begin to arrive, is extremely agreeable. You see the same people every day so conversation is no effort and their houses are of unparalleled beauty though not generally very well arranged. Then all that boat life is so good for the nerves. I think it’s far the best place for a holiday, it seems to combine
tous les agriments
.’ And to Mrs. Ham: ‘I’m
having
a lovely time, very social but that’s less tiring here than in Paris and I can bear it. An angel called Contessa Cicogna has taken me in charge, brings me every day to the beach in her launch, feeds me, this morning sent her maid to pack and unpack (change of hotels). It
naturally
makes all the difference to one’s pleasure… The Graham Sutherlands were here, they can talk of nothing but the Royal Family, I was surprised… He said he vastly prefers Simon Elwes as a painter to Annigoni. I think I do too. Willie [Maugham] turned up, very spry but deaf and that tires him. No Ear Aid. He’ll strike a hundred, I guess.’

From now on Anna Maria Cicogna became, as she said, ‘the pivot of her Venetian
existence
,’ and that her life there continued to be so agreeable was mainly due to her. ‘I always lunch and generally dine with her and all the nice Venetians are there, plus a few travellers. She is almost perfect I think. Calm, punctual, affectionate, clever, and sometimes very funny. The Venetians, like all Italians in my opinion, remind one of English people far more than the French do. Not as neurotic as the English though. Anna Maria said, which made me think of Farve, Andrew and so on, “My father [Count Volpi] used to say if only these young men would do nothing they would be very well off, but they will either gamble or go into business and then of course they lose everything.”—I must say they still seem very rich, living in their enormous palaces with thousands of nice servants… I went to the Biennale to see the modem pictures. The thing now is to tear a jagged hole in the canvas and then roughly darn it. I’m afraid I laughed—to the fury of the reverent young sight-seers.’

To be taken in charge by Contessa Cicogna was to enjoy Venice from the inside as it were. It was not the Venice that is usually seen by tourists staying in hotels. I can corroborate Nancy’s praise of this generous Venetian who contributes so much pleasure to those
fortunate
enough to know her. Nancy’s old crony Victor Cunard, a Venetian by adoption who was familiar with most aspects of Venetian life, with the genealogies and problems of the natives as well as of the foreign residents, was another magnet. His extra-dry humour appealed to Nancy’s, though it was fraught with infectious malice. He had read the proofs of
Voltaire in Love
and ‘removed many a dreadful gallicism’. And Prince Clary who had lost his great
family
estates in Bohemia during the war, was a beehive of recondite anecdote, especially about the Habsburgs and Central Europe. Here she invariably found a congenial and stimulating
circle
.

‘With the Italians,’ she wrote, ‘rather like the French at Fontaines, I absolutely love them and then I do long for some body to discuss them with you know. I went to Freya Stark for the week-end at Asolo but she’s only interested in Arabs. She says Asolo is peopled with Pen Browning’s illegitimates, isn’t that amusing!’ (Pen was the only son of Robert and Elizabeth.)

Usually she stayed in ‘Anna Maria’s garden house which is a dream of comfort and has a view of San Giorgio Maggiore from the bed’, and she prepared to leave ‘when all the smart folks are crowding in and the nice little family beach life broke up’. ‘How I love this place,’ she exclaimed, ‘more and more. I feel so well here too. I’m sure Venice and Paris are the only towns one could bear to live in nowadays.’ Always sensitive to literary and historical
associations
, she wrote that it had been ‘very moving to dine in Lord Byron’s lovely stuccoed rooms by candle light in Palazzo Mocenigo, quite unchanged, with a lot of jolly, rather silly Italians, just as he so often did, and see the same view from the balcony [whence one of his mistresses threw herself into the canal]. How I thought of him, longing for Brookses!’

Local gossip was fomented by farcical rows between wealthy women of a certain age, but these were scarcely Venetian. ‘A dinner given by Momo, [Lady Marriott] and sabotaged by Daisy [Fellowes], who is supposed to have got Momo so jittery that the
placement
was quite mad. Three women too many. Our Betters. Then Momo riposted by stealing Daisy’s hair appointment and trying to steal her evening coat. As they are all too old for love now it’s the best they can do I suppose. What will they steal and sabotage in the Next World? “She took my appointment with St Pete!”’

Undeniably it was a Venice de luxe that Nancy revelled in with a novelist’s eye and a
wistful
appreciation of all the beauty now being threatened by so many factors, such as soil
subsidence
, a rise in the sea level, and a diminished hydraulic resistance at the lagoon’s three
outlets
in the Adriatic.