Life in a Cold Climate

by Laura Thompson

  ‘I’m in a very bad way’, she wrote to Raymond Mortimer, in April 1956 – ‘simply cannot work. What can it be, it’s not like me. I’ve cleared the decks to any extent... and then I sit playing the wireless & gazing sadly at La jeunesse de Voltaire & other tomes & simply can’t get on. Of course I’m sure really in my heart that Voltaire is too unattractive – il manque ce côté poètique de Dear Good [Louis XV] & du Châtelet is even worse. I can’t say they bore me exactly but they don’t inspire me. I don’t know whether to go pegging on or chuck the whole thing?’

  Things got better, of course; it would be a odd writer who did not know this feeling of Nancy’s, this sudden terrible urge, as Harold Pinter once put it, ‘to go out and buy a 40 watt lightbulb’. But there remained a distance between Nancy and the characters she wrote about, and she found this difficult to overcome. ‘Colonel Voltaire perhaps’, she wrote to Waugh, asking him to think of a title – ‘really no they aren’t very much alike & even I can’t make them. As for Emily heaven preserve ONE from being like her’ (an interesting aside. The Marquise was an extremely intelligent woman whom Nancy defended as ‘miles above’ the average; yet she could not bear any implication that this cleverness made Emilie less than feminine in other ways).

  It is too simple to say that Nancy could only bring characters to life when she identified with them. Lady Montdore was essentially a fictional creation, who strode light years clear of her factual origins, and no character has ever been more stupendously alive than she. Nonetheless Nancy knew exactly what she was doing with her. She was not of Lady Montdore’s world, but she knew it through and through. When the world was not one that she understood with her instinct, and she had instead to use her intellect, her rampaging vitality was naturally quietened.

  With Voltaire and Emilie, who lived together in his country house at Cirey, working in their separate quarters – she at her scientific and mathematical books, he at whatever piece of coruscating literature was engaging him at the time – Nancy had to start pretty much from scratch, and it is infinitely to her credit that she fought her way into this semi-lit world and gave it reality. She had touched upon Voltaire before, in Madame de Pompadour, where it must be said that he springs into instant life in a way that he does not in Voltaire in Love. Impressionistic little asides (‘Voltaire, always at his insufferable worst with the King’) were what Nancy shone at, and this she could do in the earlier book. As Evelyn Waugh had said to her, however, a writer must be allowed to grow up. And it is astonishing to think that within the uncertain upper-class girl, who had shown off her small facility for modish jokes in Highland Fling and had been published chiefly because she was pretty and posh, lay this truly accomplished woman, who thirty years on would be exchanging ideas with the academic Theodore Besterman, whose life’s work was the study of Voltaire (as well as editing vast numbers of letters, Besterman wrote a biography published in 1969). If this is auto-didactism, then there is a good deal to be said for it.

  Nancy’s correspondence with Besterman is a complete joy to read, and remarkably instructive about what she had become by 1956: industrious, incisive, rigorous. The amusing thing is that each clearly thought the other misguided in their opinions, and that it was they who understood Voltaire while the other was missing the point. (‘Can you imagine’, Nancy wrote to Diana, ‘giving your life to Voltaire without having one ray of sense of humour?’) At the same time there is a mutual respect, although beneath the politeness not much mutual liking, at least not at first: ‘Besterman is a very odd creature’, Nancy wrote to her mother in April 1957. ‘I’ve seldom disliked anybody so much, & yet he is NOBLE. 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 & which he could easily have kept dark... It must have been a temptation – I don’t know that I, in his place, would have behaved so well.’ Nancy was up against the kind of person she had not dealt with before: a disinterested scholar, to whom suppressing a fact would have been a kind of crime. She was, in a sense, better equipped than he to write about Voltaire, because she understood what he could not, the incongruities of human behaviour. She was better equipped, indeed, because she would have been tempted not to show the new letters: exactly the kind of temptation that Voltaire himself would have felt, and very likely given in to. Yet Besterman brought something out in Nancy that might not otherwise have emerged. It was not just that he showed her the letters (which concern an important love affair of Voltaire’s, with his niece Madame Denis, and were crucial to her book). It was that he revealed the intense and absorbing joy of scholarship, which in his naïve way he simply assumed her to feel; so much so that she did feel it, and lost her fretful doubts about the whole enterprise. She disagreed with him about almost everything. But in a strange way it was he who brought her book to life.

  As soon as Besterman replies to her first, slightly nervous letter, saying that he will lend his help, she is off: ‘I really long for a good gossip about them all!’ she writes, which must have frightened the life out of him. As for what she would have thought, when she asked him to translate Voltaire’s phrase ‘Vous me l’avez tuée’ and he offered ‘Man, you’ve done ’er’: one can only imagine. But he begins to send her the letters that he has already edited (‘it is like coming into a lighted room’ she wrote to him when the first book arrived, although after a while she would be exhausted by the way these exceedingly expensive volumes kept arriving: ‘ruin stares me in the face (not to speak of having to move into a larger flat)’. Then the correspondence begins in fascinated earnest.

  On Nancy’s side much of it is, indeed, gossip, conducted at the most intelligent level and leavened with spoonfuls of the honeyed, faintly ruthless Mitford charm: ‘Oh oh no he would never have written of Em as ma femme. This is a joke about one of the neighbours... oh do agree...’ she wrote in early 1957; and in May: ‘You can’t say the love affair had ordinary physical foundations... They (she and V) slept together of course but that wasn’t the basis. Do admit.’ Knowing Besterman’s near worship of the all-too-human Voltaire she could not resist a tease, and sent this postcard in March: ‘Would you say the letters to Mme Denis read like the pornographic outpourings of an old & impotent man? That’s what I guess he was.’ (Back came Besterman’s instant reply: ‘Yes I felt pornographic ravings would bring an answer by return of post...’)

  What also comes across is Nancy’s agonised absorption in her work, the like of which one suspects she had never yet known. In March 1957 she is deep in the book – ‘I’ve bitten off more than I can chew’, she flaps to Besterman – and asking for help as and when she needs it. This he gives, in the noble manner that managed to irritate her so much. For example she writes in a panic about the misdating in her book of the new letters: ‘You will understand’, he ponderously replies, ‘why I was so anxious for you not to see the letters until I had dated them.’ Panic is barely suppressed in Nancy at this time – ‘More & more overworked & flustered’ reads a straggly postscript to one letter – and she is horribly indecisive about whether or not to visit Besterman in Geneva: ‘The calme of total paralysis having descended upon me.’ She does visit, is ill and very bored (‘I go home today thank goodness’, she wrote to her mother in April), but no doubt would have felt that she had not done right by her book, had she not made the effort.

  Then, in a letter dated 3 May, she writes to Besterman: ‘I was sitting up in bed writing the book when suddenly I finished it!’ An extraordinary sensation; and a beautiful one. Whereas finishing Madame de Pompadour had been an exquisite wrench, there was nothing but relief in getting shot of Voltaire and his hideous complexities, as it were finally solving him (she hadn’t, of course, and went on discussing him for years with Besterman; but by then he was no longer her problem).

  She wrote to her mother a couple of weeks after finishing: ‘Travail & labour both come from words meaning torture & I’m afraid it generally is.’ The book had been desperately hard, not least because her ey
es had played up madly – ‘I realised last night that I have had a perpetual headache for a whole year’ – and because she had been writing the book at the same time as assimilating new material for it. Also, and although she was almost bilingual by this time, it would surely have been more relaxing to read sources in English, rather than to deal continually with niggling questions of translation (she and Besterman exchanged several letters on the meaning of Voltaire’s not very important phrase ‘voyage de Versailles’: ‘we seem to be divided by de’, Nancy wrote in the end, somewhat shattered by what she clearly saw as Besterman’s exigent obtuseness).

  One goggles, frankly, at how far Nancy pushed herself with this book – much, much further than Madame de Pompadour, which itself had been more taxing than it appeared. Her abilities were revealed by necessity rather than intention: did she, indeed, know how hard it was going to be? Perhaps one should not be so full of amazed admiration – other people write fine historical biographies, after all – but there is something about her that inspires it: she was so game, so untutored, so unprepared. Her tremendous natural talents were so remote, really, from this kind of work. She brought them to bear upon it, and through them brought her historical books to life, yet she did so with humility: charm, she knew, was useful, but it was not a substitute for knowing one’s stuff.

  One imagines her, at her desk or in her bed, where she liked to write for the warmth, outwardly as correct as ever (impossible to think of her slobbing around in a dressing-gown and eating out of a tin), papers strewn about her impeccable person, endless books marked with endless reminder slips, her hands flicking to and fro, searching for a reference then picking up her pen, her eyes painful and screwed, her ear waiting always for a telephone call (‘ma chère Nancy...’), her mind cluttered as one of Pompadour’s rooms at Versailles yet remaining, despite it all, clear and bright. What a clever, clever girl; and, as with her friend Noël Coward11 – in whom she had instantly found a kindred spirit – what grit lay beneath the veneer. They had real substance, these brittle jokers, these entertainers, these weavers of fantasy who knew so much more of life than many a ‘serious’ writer; how odd that they should be dismissed as lightweights, purely because of the obligation that they felt to hide their efforts: because they felt it bad manners, as much as anything, to let their public ever guess how hard they had worked.

  But the reviews did take her seriously, on the whole; no doubt more so than they would today, when the leap from Noblesse Oblige to scholarly biography would be a bit too much to take (as if Ian McEwan had suddenly written a joke book). Nevertheless the Manchester Guardian could not resist a puritanical mention of the ‘stately homes’ in which Nancy had written Voltaire in Love. In fact, as she told Besterman, these were ‘a tiny pub near Venice, a 2 roomed cottage at Hyères and a small château in Seine et Marne’: U and Non-U was still rearing its head, jangling its cap and bells at Nancy’s reputation. But her book was admired by Bertrand Russell and Harold Nicolson – exigent critics both – and positively adored by Evelyn Waugh, who wrote to praise Nancy’s ‘unique gift of making the reader feel physically in the presence of your characters’. He went on to say that ‘the book should correct two popular heresies 1) Cinema-born, that only beautiful people enjoy fucking 2) Spender-born, that the arts flourish best in a liberal society.’

  Meanwhile Theodore Besterman was behaving with utter correctness towards the whirlwind that had blown so violently around his precious manor. Although he complained that he had had ‘little acknowledgment’ in the reviews (which he was entitled to have expected) he retained his disinterested, essentially benevolent attitude toward Nancy, and by late 1957 she had come to appreciate it. He, in his turn, seems to have fallen sous le charme. Their letters grew into expressions of dry fondness, and were about more than just Voltaire; although the presence of ‘our friend’ continued to prance elusively through them. What Besterman thought of Nancy’s book is a mystery; certainly she didn’t think much of his; and what she wrote to him in 1961, after he had sent her the first chapter, is intriguing, firstly in that she dared to do it but also because it sketches her author’s philosophy.

  But for what public do you write?... I think you MUST prune. Remember the old boy himself said ‘if you want to bore the public tell it everything’... Just an example of what I mean:... Richelieu – all you say perfectly true, but he was screamingly funny, that’s why they all forgave everything.

  There – I’m really very impertinent... I’m only thinking of the book as a work of art – it’s awfully important to keep your eye on the whole wood & not describe minutely every tree...

  A couple of weeks later, she continues:

  No no Theodore you must not give up. We all (said she presumptuously) have to overcome difficulties when writing any sort of book even dotty ones like mine... Only you mustn’t confound the letters, which tell all, & the book which tells the essential.

  Nancy later confessed (to Peter Quennell) that she found Besterman’s biography ‘fascinating’ but fundamentally wrong: ‘It is written with Voltaire himself considered as the only reliable source & without a scrap of fun. The old boy, if he reads it in the Elysian Fields, must be surprised at the way all his wickedness is not only justified but positively sanctified...’ But these two were such different people, it was inevitable that they would see Voltaire as two different people also. And Nancy found a real satisfaction in having Besterman’s solid, irreproachable, unworldly mind to bounce off. Although she was about the least boring person who ever lived, her passions easily became obsessions that not everyone could share; and it gave her intense pleasure to pick them over in what was, indeed, a highly elevated form of gossip. She continued to do it pretty much until she died, taxing Besterman up to THE END with her thoughts on the relationship between Voltaire and Frederick the Great, and on Frederick himself. ‘Of course B... is absurdly unfair to F & compares him to Hitler’, she wrote to Peter Quennell; and then, to Besterman himself: ‘But surely Hitler’s philosophy was bolstered up by cruelty & the suppression of freedom, two things Frederick abominated? Certainly he was not always true to his ideals – are any of us?’

  Besterman wrote in 1970 to tell Nancy how much he had enjoyed Frederick the Great. ‘Thank you very much for your kind and praising letter’, she replied, before launching for the last time into a small flurry of opinions about Voltaire. ‘I can’t help thinking that he used Frederick too much & loved him not enough’, she wrote; an opinion that may have contained other, more personal thoughts. At the end of her letter Nancy says that she hopes to see Besterman in London, but it does not happen. In fact they met only a couple of times. Which was of no importance at all; the friendships that she conducted by letter – the one with Evelyn Waugh being by far the most important – were Nancy’s most perfect relationships.

  In late 1957, when Voltaire in Love had just been published, Nancy wrote to Besterman to take him to task over his interpretation of Voltaire’s relationship with his niece. ‘Mme Denis. If she was really so much to Voltaire how could he have left her for two whole years?’

  For this was the moment when Gaston Palewski left for Rome; and Nancy was left with her finished book, her intellectual triumphs and a Rue Monsieur no longer painfully enlivened by her lover’s sensual, bustling and – of late – occasional presence. She was left, too, without a husband: a strange thing to happen at such a time, that Peter Rodd should agree at last to the divorce that he had resisted for so long.

  He had been living a rackety life. In 1953 Nancy reported to Evelyn Waugh that he was on a yacht ‘usually tied up at Golfe Juan. He is a perfectly happy human being and the idol of the local population there. He looks exactly like some ancient pirate – bone thin, pitch black, white hair & beard & dressed in literal rags... Just at the moment I am on cool terms with the old boy because a form which he must sign in 2 places so that I can recover about £3000 in tax rebate, has just come back after 18 months signed in one place. It’s almost too much to bear...’ Nancy’
s success had struck a blow at Peter; while she sailed ever more triumphantly through the civilised world, he abnegated himself from it. It is Basil Seal, from Black Mischief, whom he is said to resemble among Waugh’s characters, yet there is also a distinct touch of Sebastian Flyte, the beautiful blond boy who cuts adrift from his failure to live up to himself, moves to Morocco, and spends his days drunk, wrecked, not unhappy.

  But Peter was not quite done with yet; and by the end of 1957 he had found a new woman. The divorce, Nancy wrote to Theodore Besterman, was ‘in aid of Peter marrying some nice rich person... I’m all for it.’ Besterman had written to offer sympathy after newspapers reported the proceedings; right up to the end, Nancy’s marriage was leading her into farcical situations. ‘The fact is that 4 judges refused to hear the case because they said they knew me (old dancers I suppose – I had no idea I knew 4 judges!)... It all went through yesterday with no trouble.’ She must have wished that it had gone through ten years earlier, when she first moved to Rue Monsieur; possibly she had regrets about the whole business, although it had really dragged on too long for that kind of emotion. Above all, Nancy was surely glad that it was over. The long-drawn-out ambivalence of her situation had been symbolised in a funny little feature of her letters to Besterman, some of which are signed ‘Mitford’ and some ‘Rodd’: ‘Rodd or Mitford absolutely indiscriminately’, she told her correspondent, who was clearly bemused as to correct usage – ‘I’m equally used to both.’ But on a postcard sent in March 1957 she crossed out THE HON. MRS RODD, printed at the top, and wrote ‘Nancy Mitford’ instead. Perhaps, by then, she had heard about the ‘nice rich person’?