Life in a Cold Climate

by Laura Thompson

  Above all, the whole thing would be treated with the utmost seriousness, and it would carry on until everyone was utterly sick of it. ‘Can you get over them going on with U?’ wrote Nancy to Waugh in 1956. Her 1957 BBC television interview began with this excruciating interchange: ‘But what I want to talk about is U’; ‘But we are talking about me.’ In 1964 she was invited to translate a novel by Pierre Daninos, entitled Snobissimo (‘So kind of you to think of me...’). And it is not unthinkable that U and Non-U might be dredged up again, were for example Prince William to be seen holding his knife like a pencil.

  It did Nancy no favours, in the end. ‘The whole thing was complete rubbish,’ says her sister Deborah. ‘It had started as a joke, and then, you know, nobody could say notepaper [although, as the Telegraph delighted in pointing out at the time, Nancy had used that very word in her editing of The Ladies of Alderley]. It was just silly. A perfect pest. But it came back to haunt her.’ It always would. She was a writer of unusual talent and originality, yet when she died her obituary in the Telegraph was headed (inaccurately): ‘Nancy Mitford, “U and Non-U” creator, dies at 68’. She was also branded a ‘super-snob’. Her own mother was quoted as saying as much, by the BBC interviewer in 1957. And the Audience Research Report after the broadcast could not wait to judge her according to this dread criterion: ‘We could do with something more interesting than listening to a snobbish woman airing her views on class distinction’, said one viewer, while another offered the thought that ‘it is surely definitely Non-U to sniff as often and as audibly as she did’.

  More than forty years on, Nancy was still suffering for having dared to say the unsayable. When the BBC adapted her two great novels for a 2001 television series, much of its own publicity centred upon the question of ‘why in this age of equality would anyone want to read or watch the semi-biographical adventures of a self-confessed snob?’

  Did Nancy really commit the evil crime of snobbery? It is a question that still interests people, although its relevance to her worth as a writer is minimal. Certainly she was the product of her class and upbringing, and she wrote about the society of which she was a product (‘Novelists always write about the people they know, don’t they?’). This in itself does not, cannot, make her a snob, although the non-logic that so often passes for its opposite suggests that it does, that merely by dealing with the subject of class she was showing herself to approve of it. It is quite obvious that she preferred to be U; funny little asides do give her away. ‘A letter from Willie M[augham] saying he can’t be U as he says toilet paper’, she wrote to Raymond Mortimer: ‘Ugh.’ Then there were these remarks about Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair (1951), which she had admired, but: ‘Oh what a picture of terrible lives. Yet they are all quite rich in the book... And Bendrix wrote a novel every year lucky him yet he lives in a terrible bed-sitting room. And all that public house life, like poor people.’8 (Of course she was also digging at Greene for what she saw as self-conscious slumming.)

  There is not a saloon-bar gin and tonic to be had in her novels; yet the point of them, always, is that they show aristocrats to be ‘real’ people like any others. Even ‘The English Aristocracy’ never says that she believes that a lord is superior to a commoner. ‘It was just a difference of vocabulary, that was the point she was making,’ says Alexander Mosley. She admits her hatred of a word such as ‘cheers’, but equally she says that this is an instinct only, that in itself it means nothing. ‘I think she was being honest, yes, that it was just a question of language. At the same time she was very pleased to be on the U side –! But the thing is she was a very intelligent woman, and she could look at her own snobbery clinically.’

  Nancy knew what she was, she liked what she was, but she also could see it for what it was. ‘She was very conscious of her own class,’ says John Julius Norwich. ‘It amused her so much. If it hadn’t amused her so much those two great novels wouldn’t have been anything like as good as they are. Also, yes, she believed in it. I remember the nearest time she came to being cross with me was when I wrote my first book and she said, “How can you call yourself John Julius Norwich? You’re Lord Norwich, or you’re John Julius Cooper.” She was perfectly right. But that was simply the way things were fifty years ago.

  ‘Nowadays everybody’s embarrassed by class. Nancy wasn’t. She just saw it as a fact.’ And she knew that her class, and her lack of embarrassment about it, were key to her success, and to the fascination that she exerted over her audience. So she went along with it, thus creating the delicious irony of taking a populist stance on her own elitism. A paradox which was, and is, entirely Mitfordian.

  Also Mitfordian was the way in which Nancy said what she said. In the end it was her style, rather than her substance, that made her an ‘agitator of genius’. She was not the only person ever to comment on class, an issue to which almost nobody is truly indifferent. Yet the feeling was, and is, that this burningly interesting question must be handled in a very particular way, with certain assumptions made beforehand and certain things left unsaid. None of which Nancy did. She treated the whole, appallingly delicate subject exactly as she would anything else, placing down words in a clear and childlike way, refusing to infuse them with the correct feelings and to admit the tremendous ‘importance’ of what was being said.

  This drove readers mad; but what really incensed – and, of course, delighted – them was the fact that although Nancy obviously meant what she wrote, it was obvious that she was not being wholly serious about it. And it is this, above all, that sent everyone spiralling towards towering heights of solemnity, from where they frowned at the giggling person whose words – apparently mild, yet containing the semantic equivalent of a red-hot chilli pepper – had launched them there.

  Before she was cast in this role of Chief Tease, Nancy had once again performed her task of explaining the French to the English in her immaculate little novel The Blessing, published in 1951. She wrote it quickly, to judge by her letters in about four months, and as usual towards the end she went away; this time to Violet Hammersley’s house on the Isle of Wight, where she was taken ‘to the local bridge club & I heard “& of course when I was in London I went to Nancy Mitford’s naughty thing” [The Little Hut] – wasn’t it lovely for me.’ In February 1951 she wrote to Gaston Palewski: ‘The book gets on. Not quite as quick as I would like, I’m so longing to get back to you.’ She finished a month later. Then she sent the book to Evelyn Waugh, to whom it was dedicated, and who proclaimed it ‘admirable, deliciously funny, consistent & complete; by far the best of your writings; I do congratulate you with all my heart & thank you for the dedication.’

  Not everyone agreed. Indeed the general opinion is that The Blessing shows a falling off from its two predecessors: ‘it is’, wrote the TLS, ‘perhaps natural that she should have a slight relapse.’ Certainly the book is different, neater, set primarily in France although filtered through Englishness; it is less innately ambitious than Nancy’s two previous novels but it is, in its way, faultless. There is no Uncle Matthew, no Lady Montdore, none of the wild and magnificent vitality that burst through The Pursuit of Love, nor the comedic force that buzzed through Love in a Cold Climate; and there are those who think that Nancy wrote best when she was in close communion with the England she knew in her ‘blood and bones’, rather than taking on the dazzling new world of France. But that is not the point: at least not to those readers who love Nancy for herself, and for whom it is the voice, in the end, that does the magic. When the authentic Mitford note is sounding, when those funny, fervent phrases are unrolling, when Nancy is moving through the world of her imagination with all the assurance of which she is capable, resistance is futile. One is reminded, as before, of Muriel Spark, with whom the voice is paramount and who, like Nancy, is both fantastical and realistic: Spark’s vision is entirely idiosyncratic and yet she treats with life as it is, describing its good and bad aspects in identical authorial fashion. The Blessing may not be what readers most wa
nt from Nancy; ‘of course it’s not really funny like the Uncle M. ones’, she wrote to her sister Diana. But it is Nancy still, pure and calm and benevolent, utterly cosy and strangely shocking.

  The shock derives from the novel’s take on relations between the sexes, which is realistic to the point of cynicism, all the more disturbing for being delivered so lightly. The Blessing offers up its hard-won knowledge of life with all the grace of a pretty child handing a bouquet of roses to the Queen, and paints its tough truths in the colours of a Fragonard. People have affairs; other people put up with it; on the whole, the alternatives are even worse: that is what she tells us; and of course tells herself at the same time. If she is explaining France to the English then she is, at the same time, explaining Gaston Palewski to Nancy Mitford.

  Charles-Edouard du Valhubert – the Colonel in many ways, including his ‘guilty inward laugh’ and his habit of singing little snatches of songs – marries Grace, a beautiful English girl with the looks of Diana Mosley and the romantic innocence of Nancy. He loves his wife but he continues to be unfaithful: with the irresistible Albertine, with the pretty little idiot Juliette Novembre de la Ferté and, it is implied, with others also. Grace – who is overwhelmingly in love with her husband – is unable to bear the jealousy and returns to her father, Sir Conrad Allingham, whom the reader expects to take the poor girl’s side. But Sir Conrad is a man of the world, French rather than English in his liking for women and love of sleeping with them: a man who understands the nature of other men and tells it as it is. Instead of sympathy Grace gets a pep talk, which has the unmistakable air of Nancy talking to herself. And it jolts the reader: because it treats not with things as they ought to be, but as they are. ‘Now he is a man’, says Sir Conrad of Charles-Edouard, ‘who likes women in the French way of liking them, that is he likes everything about them, including hours of their company and going to bed with them. I suppose you would admit that this is part of his charm for you. But you hardly find a man, or anyhow a young man, with his liking for women who can be faithful to one woman.’ When Grace replies that she is, nonetheless, unable to endure the infidelities, her father replies: ‘My dear child, I always thought you had a healthy outlook on life, but this is positively morbid. You really must pull yourself together.’

  This cold comfort is rather terrifying; but refreshing, too, in the face of confused contemporary maunderings. What Nancy writes is difficult to accept and few women today would dream of doing so; but they would be wrong to dismiss it as vieux jeu, inappropriate to the independent female of today. Not so much has changed since Nancy described the pursuit of love as the be-all and end-all of a woman’s existence. What she does is try to understand how the pursuit of love can end in the achievement of happiness. Nancy sees, all too clearly, what nowadays is denied: that in order to achieve one kind of happiness, other kinds may have to be sacrificed.

  So we find, at the end of The Blessing, the septuagenarian sex bomb Madame Rocher des Innouïs (a distant literary cousine of Amabelle Fortescue in Christmas Pudding) visiting Grace in London, and gently telling her, ‘my child, it is your duty to return to Paris’. Of Charles-Edouard, she says:

  ‘Picture this unfortunate man, lonely, unhappy, reduced to pursuing the wives of all his friends, forced to go to bed at the most inconvenient times... I know the English are fond of duty, it is their great speciality. We all admire you so much for having no black market, but what is the good of no black market if you will not do your duty by your own family, Grace?’

  Grace, sick to death of living alone, longing day and night for Charles-Edouard, was unable to conceal from Madame Rocher’s experienced eye the happiness these words gave her...

  Nonetheless Grace asks her aunt-by-marriage how she is supposed to fit happiness into the reality of Juliette and Albertine and, it is again implied, all the others.

  ‘Charles-Edouard was sleeping with you, I suppose?... Well then, that’s alright. Why not look upon these others as his hobby?... Could you not try to see this whole problem rather differently, Grace? More like a Frenchwoman and less like a film star?’

  Grace felt that she could, and knew that she longed to, since the different vision was clearly essential if she were to go home to Charles-Edouard.

  And nowadays this is heresy, it is frankly impossible, it is contrary to the tenets of the sisterhood and it puts Nancy, firmly, in a lavender-scented box bought only for its charming evocation of a dead era. Today’s women would probably think far more of the Crew, the bohemian English theatre workers who also feature in The Blessing (one of Grace’s post-Paris suitors, The Captain, owns a theatre). These women think of Grace as a ‘spineless creature who, unable to get on with her husband, had run back to her father like a spoilt child. When the various members of the Crew had been unable to get on with their husbands they had struck out proudly on their own, taken rooms near the Deux Magots, hitch-hiked to Lithuania, or stowed away on the Caribbean.’

  This sounds far more appropriate for a self-respecting woman. If only it were that simple –! In fact the Crew are wildly satirised as a bunch of bare-footed groupies completely in thrall to The Captain (‘they hopped to it at the merest glance from him, emptying ashtrays and bringing more water off the ice’). And few women today would rather be a Crew member, with her ‘dusty, blonde hair... and bare feet, blue and rather large’, than the beautiful Grace, with her ‘stiff Paris dresses’ and her ‘sad, romantic look’.

  Nor is Grace’s situation easy, for all her appearance of cosseted wealth. Beneath the clean, controlled language there is turmoil; she does not want to think of her husband’s philandering as a pursuit like ‘hunting or racing’, she wants him to be with only her, she wants the ideal of love to yield a daily contentment; but that was not the way of the world. Nor is it now. Nancy’s stony, stoical philosophy is only irrelevant today because we have chosen to ignore the truths of relations between the sexes, which do not change all that much. Nowadays, when our illusions of love fail us, we move on to construct another set of illusions; but Grace is braver, and tries to live in a way that can hold both romance and reality. What, says Nancy, is the alternative course? That of the Crew members, who strike out for freedom only to end up enslaved again, but with worse clothes? Or of the Bolter, Fanny’s feckless mother, who drifts through the novels like a shingle-headed nomad, moving from husband to husband (‘eight or nine at least’) and ending up with a twenty-two-year-old travel agent?

  The Bolter ought to be a sad figure, according to conventional morality. In fact she is fine and at sixty-five looks not a day over forty: ‘it was easy to see that her heart had never been involved’, writes Nancy, an interesting sideline. As Fanny’s husband says: ‘Deeply as I disapprove of your mother and her activities I don’t think she could be described as unhappy... You should try to see things as they are, Fanny.’

  Nancy is not making the tired point that men have affairs and women put up with it, although this is part of her point. She knows quite well that women are also capable of infidelity. Grace has a devoted admirer of her own in Don’t Tell Alfred; it is assumed that she resists him mainly because he is not quite sexy enough. Fanny speculates as to whether one of her cousins might have gone astray, but dismisses the idea – ‘surely good Louisa – oh no, perish the thought!’ – not so much on moral grounds but because Louisa ‘was incapable of inventing such a wealth of detail to cover up a sin’. This is hard-edged stuff, once again, beneath the smooth veneer.

  Nancy’s real point is this: it is all very well for the Bolter – who, like Northey, the little fascinator in Don’t Tell Alfred, is completely unromantic – to have scores of love affairs. Likewise Charles-Edouard de Valhubert, to whom sex really is a sort of recreation. Someone like Linda Radlett, however, whose belief in love is total and whose overwhelming fear is that she might become like the Bolter (whom she tellingly loathes), is very different. Then one has to be realistic about romance, and accept that it is best integrated into the rest of one’s life: not
easy, as Nancy herself knew. But she gives us a picture of Grace after she has left Charles-Edouard, and although it is extremely funny it is also bleak. Perhaps one ought to think it wrong to show Grace so dependent upon an unfaithful man; but then Nancy did not moralise, she simply showed things as they were.

  And she did so with a smiling grasp of reality that the more ‘down-to-earth’ writer – who scorns her concealing charm and whose plots are concerned with poorer, plainer people – cannot match. It is cruelly accurate to write that Grace was sustained ‘by the mental picture of an idealised anglicised Charles-Edouard, whom she was to meet and marry in an incredibly short space of time’. This is just what a woman would try to imagine, and it is shattered by the even crueller and more accurate words of Grace’s father. ‘I’m afraid an ordinary faithful English husband will seem very plain pudding after the extraordinarily fascinating French one you are throwing away so carelessly... The fact is women must choose in life what sort of a man it is they do want – whether what is called a good husband... or one that really loves women, loves his wife, probably, best and longest, but who also and inevitably feels the need for other relationships with other women.’

  So Grace decides; and her decision is vindicated when the Valhuberts reappear, perfectly happy, in Don’t Tell Alfred. Charles-Edouard is still attractive and his eye still irresistibly roves; but ten years on Grace’s attitude has changed. An odd little moment sees her husband sitting on a sofa with Northey, ‘laughing very much’, while Grace watches ‘imperturbably, quizzically, even’. It is as if the idiocy of the philanderer has revealed itself to her. One wonders if Nancy ever looked at Gaston Palewski in this way, as he bounced on assorted Faubourg chaise longues; one cannot but hope that she did.