Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘Peter… loves the idea of a peaceful life but when it comes to the point he never can get away from his club and so on!’

  ‘I’m doing a lot of business of various kinds—getting my book translated I think, giving an interview to a French paper and so on besides book business. All great fun. I am as happy as can be…’

  ‘On Sunday to the Fould Springers at Royaumont—perhaps the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen… At luncheon somebody said, and what are your politics? at which a clenched fist flew over the table. It has never been forgotten. P. enchanted. “La famille Mitford fait ma joie”…’

  ‘I’m doing business in a rather desultory way—writing one or two articles for French papers which pay frightfully well, selling and buying books etc, but really I’m having an absolute rest and the result is I feel so wonderful I don’t know it’s me. Enough to eat twice a day, always a glass of wine and staying in bed most of the morning have made a new woman of me… Oh the food. Every meal is a recurring pleasure. I don’t know how I shall be able to drag myself back to starving London. (The joke is the French think we’ve got everything in the world and simply don’t believe me when I try to tell the truth!) And always a verre de vin, so good for one.’ There is a hint of teasing here.

  Her friend Alvilde Lees-Milne has given me a bleaker account of material conditions when she was living outside Paris at Jouy-en-Josas: ‘In the winter of 1945 when we were both back in France, Nancy making do in cold hotels, I struggling in an unheated house with no help and precious little food, she would come and stay and all the horrors turned into jokes. The smoking damp wood, the staple diet of carrots and potatoes peeled and washed in a bidet and cooked on a primus in the bathroom (the kitchen was unusable), the long walks to Versailles and villages to cajole various black market people we had been told of to sell us some eggs or butter, and the endless blackouts through constant electricity cuts and so on, were turned into fun and there was a laugh to be got out of the gloomiest situation.’

  After two months when her permit had expired, Nancy could hardly bear to return to ‘Blighty’, as she called it.

  *

  In London she was comforted by the success of her Pursuit of Love and by the return of her faithful crony Mark Ogilvie-Grant, who had been a prisoner of war in Italy. ‘You will be glad to hear that Mark is back,’ she had written her mother in the previous April. ‘He looks like a horror-photograph, his knees are enormous lumps and his arms like sticks, but alive and well and immensely cheerful. He says in prison they dreamed of nothing but food and his dream was—do you remember that layer-cake with jam you used to have?—well that! Isn’t it too funny, I’d quite forgotten it but of course it used to be a feature in our lives. He has been in 13 prisons…’

  When Nancy’s house in Blomfield Road was let she often stayed with Mark at Kew Green. He made no mystery of his ‘special tastes’ and she often chaffed him about them. Since Oxford days when he dressed up as a comical cockney charlady at the Hypocrites Club I had not been privileged to see him in one of the wigs Nancy introduced into her Pigeon Pie, which was dedicated to Mark. The wig theme recurred in her letters to him even when he was a prisoner of war: ‘Thought you’d just like to know I take your wigs out and shake them every Sunday, the moths have been terrible this year and I don’t want you to come back to a bald (or patchy) wig.’ Mark’s nonsense just happened to suit her nonsense, which is reflected, often abstrusely, in their correspondence. Robert Byron, another bosom friend with a sense of humour on the same wave length, had been drowned by enemy action in 1941—a grievous loss to all who knew him, though Evelyn Waugh mis trusted the violence of his opinions. Robert jeered at Evelyn’s Catholicism; Evelyn sneered at Robert’s mosques and minarets.

  While in London Nancy wrote to Mark (8th February, 1946): ‘I got a postcard to send you of some thoughtful sheep in deevey Perthshire scenery but suppose I must answer your letter now. Glad you liked the book, it is doing well. I’ve already made £1,250 here and £100 in America so I have suddenly become la tante à l’héritage and lazy Daze [a nephew] has been most deferential of late. I’m hoping for big things in the States and film folk are nibbling.’

  ‘The talk is all of the BALL. Michael Duff’s—it was heaven on earth. I hitched an old white satin shirt (oyster with dirt) on to my best night dress—it was a wow and I’ve never enjoyed an evening more. All the old buddies—and a ghostly voice was heard in “She wore a wreath of roses”, it was very moving. Annie had to spend £200 in order to wear her jewels on account of the wave of crime, Daphne fell down, Daisy Fellowes arrived with her own magnum of champagne and Chips [Channon] said to Emerald [Cunard], “This is what we have been fighting for.” (We!) Emerald, very cross as she is at parties, replied, “Oh why dear, are they all Poles?”’

  ‘I spent yesterday at Brighton buying jet jewellery and postcards and once more the voice was heard, while an antique yellow wig could almost be seen whisking round the next corner. (By the way I really can’t dedicate all my books to you, you know.) I’m off to Paris again I hope in about a month.’

  ‘Darling Prince Peter of Greece has been here, he asked us (typical of foreign royalty) to dinner in a kind of Chinese ping pong room and there were some Chinks who luckily knew Harold my dear and some terrible little Greek insect women, one called Alice something ducky and one called Sitwell. I told Osbert and he said, “oh yes the jigga jigga Sitwells.”

  ‘It was a funny evening I must say but it went on too long and I was dead by the end of it…’

  ‘Prod went to see his mother and she began telling him about the allowances she gives the others… (she gives us 0). So Prod, goaded, at last said, “Well what about me?” “Oh you always manage to keep alive somehow.” Isn’t she bliss. She said “Sir Stafford Cripps likes Nancy’s book but he doesn’t like the subject and I don’t like the subject either.” Did it remind you of Swinbrook days? Brains.’

  Until she could find a permanent foothold in Paris Nancy stayed in various cheap hotels and borrowed flats. Early in June 1946 she wrote to her mother from the Hôtel de Bourgogne: ‘I generally get an hour or so sunbathing on the roof. I lie in the nude with my head flopping over into the Place du Palais Bourbon, watching the arrival of the Députés and with a view of all Paris up to Montmartre, it is heaven.’ And to Mark: ‘I am blissful here as usual and making plans to live here and let Blomfield Road… Love here is on a high plane. The 35-year-old husband of an 85-year-old Princess madly in love with the 7-stone husband of a 14-stone Princess (weight). Both Princesses furious—both husbands in tears but also in the throes of such unrestrainable love that their tears don’t avail much.’

  ‘I have so far cashed in £4,500 on the Pursuit of Love (a little more actually) and that’s before it comes out in America. So you see the pen is mightier than the sword. whatever that may mean.’

  ‘I’ve got a friend here called Mogens [Mogens Tvede, husband of Princess Dolly Radziwill], pronounced Moans. I keep saying why not Grogens, but nobody laughs…’ In a note entitled Smells she compared the French with the English to the latter’s disadvantage: ‘French smells: garlic, hot drains, hot sweat on poor people, bad petrol. Compensations: Perpetual whiffs of scent, chestnut flowers, wonderful cooking smells, flowers and fruit smell twice as strong. English smells: cold sweat, cold mutton, dirty hair, uncleaned woollen clothes. All this among the well-to-do. Nobody seems to use any scent at all.’

  ‘The rich French smell delicious always and all use scent and lotions. Admittedly all smells are stronger here, good and bad, but one never wants to retch, as in England, now.’

  ‘I am in full house-hunting campaign,’ she told Mark, ‘and trudge the streets following up clues sometimes with terrifying results as this morning when I had to go and see a lunatic and ask if he would unbrick a room of a prospective flat (what can he keep there—Prod thinks a nun). I had to go alone as all was said to depend on charm and an English accent which he is said to love. However he took one look at me and said h
e didn’t want any tapage. I said, hissing my SSes like l’Honorable Mrs. Pemberton in Lakmé that I wasn’t a tapeuse. He softened rather and may consider me—! But it’s always the same and always leads nowhere, so discouraging!’

  ‘Huge Gaullist meeting of 40,000 people the other day. I went, feeling awfully like my sisters. It was a wild success.’

  Peter, ‘full of the most nefarious plans for black marketing of all descriptions,’ had been offered a lucrative job in Abyssinia for four or five months, and Nancy wrote: ‘I now find I can deny myself nothing and of course that is an expensive frame of mind to be in.’ But ‘if I’m not careful I shall be turned into a train-meeter, money-lender and British restaurant.’

  In May 1947: ‘Awful Peter [back from Ethiopia] went and lost £50 worth of francs (stolen), it’s his fault and not my lack of foresight… Meanwhile I’ve got a job here as English adviser and translation supervisor to a new publisher—£400 a year and (even more precious because it means I can’t be forced back into the tunnel) a carte d’identité de travailleur. Now I must find a flat…’

  ‘Very funny letter from Evelyn [Waugh] back from Holly wood where he seems to have spent the whole time in the cemetery. It’s called South Lawn, organ music peals from the flower beds and the loved ones (as they call the corpses) are frozen and kept in drawers. The children’s section is called Slumber Land. The keeper of it said to Evelyn, “We have great trouble keeping pince-nez on the loved ones’ noses”.’

  To Mark she wrote in July: ‘The season here has become giddy, people are doing all sorts of things they will regret later. Someone we all know at a party the other night took off his collar and tie and revealed on his bronzed neck a collar of rubies, three rows, with a ruby and emerald tassel hanging down HIS back. His protector who was present remarked drily, ‘X is a very good chap but he can’t expect to live on his charm for ever” (X having said, on showing the rubies, “not bad for a working girl”). Are you jealous?

  ‘I’ve found and practically got the most divine flat you ever saw—oh how I pray it comes off. I’d far sooner have it than the Moulin—bathed in sunlight… I shall be here all August—come and stay. Only August is so dull, every cat leaves the town. I like it… Any flying saucepans at Kew?’

  Evidently due to currency restrictions she wrote in September: ‘Utter parsimony is now the note and I live on teeny bits of cat when not asked out. I’ve given up baths, coffee and wine, buses and even the metro and find one can exist (in this very cheap hotel) for £1 a day in all, which amazes me I must say. But I don’t know that one could keep it up for long in the winter.’ At the same time she was considering a flat ‘rejected as too expensive by Doris Duke, in which I am planning to camp out. It is three vast frescoed state rooms aucun confort (i.e. no loo).’

  Nancy’s open-air English charm was appreciated by the Anglophile denizens of the Faubourg St. Germain and she was quick to realize that this was a theatre whose comedies and tragedies could afford her perennial entertainment as well as literary pabulum. Through her closest confidante, Mrs. Hammersley, she was all but adopted by the old Comtesse Costa de Beauregard, who lived in eighteenth-century style at Fontaines les Nonnes par Puisieux. Fontaines was to provide the emotional resources of a French family back ground. In a remarkably short time she discovered, like George Moore, ‘the delicate delight of owning un pays ami—a country where you may go when you are weary to madness of the routine of life, sure of finding there all the sensations of home, plus those of irresponsible caprice.’

  Violet Hammersley, to whom Nancy was indebted for her introduction to Fontaines les Nonnes (‘my treat of the whole year’), had an extremely subtle and original fascination. Her husband had been a prosperous banker and she had been accustomed to a life of generous affluence surrounded by a court of writers and artists. Wilson Steer painted a masterly portrait of her in her heyday when she was compared to a Siamese princess, seated in a billowy gown under flickering leaves. Duncan Grant had also depicted her in later years. Slight and dark with an olive complexion, she had cavernous black eyes over high cheekbones and an expression of sad resignation illumined by Mona Lisa smiles. Her colouring and intensity evoked an El Greco. Somerset Maugham jestingly described her as Philip W’s mistress, and Osbert Sitwell caricatured her as a germ-carrier in his story ‘… That Flesh is Heir to…’

  Her wealth had evaporated and this blow darkened her out look: she became a prey to neurotic anxieties and fears. Her voice was a musical sigh when it was not a gentle moan and she dwelt more and more on life’s miseries as she grew older, not without a soupçon of relish. Since the loss of her fortune she lived quietly at Totland Bay on the Isle of Wight, but she paid frequent visits to the mainland and stayed periodically with her half-sister Comtesse Costa at Fontaines, where she was cherished as well as dreaded, for she could be very exacting and had a tendency to dramatize domestic situations. Invariably dressed in black, wrapped in shawls and veils, she glided about like a mournful spectre, observing everything with an ironic sense of humour.

  Though genuinely fond of her Nancy teased her unmercifully. Her letters to ‘Mrs. Ham’, alias ‘the Wid’, who called her ‘Child’, were often signed ‘Fiend’ and ‘Horror comic’. ‘Cystitis indeed!’ she wrote, ‘I heard of you, arriving at the island with a 20 lb. salmon in that black net which sometimes drapes the hats taken from my cupboard. Salmonitis, you can tell Dr. Broadbent with my compliments.’

  ‘Oh if I could draw, I would write an illustrated Life of You. The nets, the veils, the shawls, the scarves, the crêpe, the cape, the wildly waving weeds, the unvarying get-up of cliff and turf and cresson and rue de la Paix. Who could do justice to it?’

  ‘I’m having a day in bed which I love more than anything on earth, and do about once a month. “She’s been in bed 17 years.” “Oh Mrs. Ham how lucky!”’

  ‘I so love Fontaines when you are there to tease and torture,’ she exclaimed. ‘I see you are better. The ink is a darker blue, not grey on grey as when you were ill.’ ‘Whenever one thinks you really ill it always turns out you are on a spree some where… I really think you ought to stay quiet for a bit, but of course you’ve got so many lovers that your life is a perpetual balancing trick. You should settle down with a Totland Totterer—what about a Lesbian affair with Lady Tottenham? It’s all the go now, and I hear X has left Y and their 7 children for a woman.’

  Mrs. Ham was sensitive on the subject of her reduced circumstances, so Nancy would tease her about her ‘unearned income’: ‘I’m not a Wealthy Widow but a Working Woman.’ When Mrs. Ham hoped to supplement her income by translating Madame de Sévigné’s letters she was exposed to more teasing. ‘How the text of Sévigné seems to have been altered in the 19th century. Somebody said yesterday, “I hope your friend has left in all the naughty bits.” I said, “you can be sure she hasn’t”.’ And when the translation was published: ‘How mercenary you are. Book Society recommendation (I am always Choice) does not bring money, only a modified laurel wreath, which surely you prefer? It is the enormous sales which will pour unlimited gold into your lap—perhaps. I shall expect un cadeau important, a jewel at least…’ (since Nancy was to contribute the introduction).

  Nancy offered various suggestions for other translations. No Scott-Moncrieff had turned Saint-Simon into an English classic, ‘so I hope the publishers will be knocking at your door. I rather foresee that you’ll live to be 100 so there’s heaps of time. When I’m 75 shall I still be Child?’ Evidently Mrs. Ham had considered Mlle. de Lespinasse for Nancy objected: ‘Lespinasse is the Queen of Bores. Why not blissful du Deffand? But if you do letters in your highly personal style, they’ll read like more Sévigné.’ Later, ‘if La Tour du Pin has been done, how about Boigne? In some ways more amusing, she’s so much nastier.’

  Nancy’s letters to Mrs. Ham, who belonged to her mother’s generation, were among her sprightliest for Mrs. Ham remained resilient in spite of her misfortunes. Perhaps Nancy’s secret intention was to cheer her soli
tude. Telling her that she had seen several advertisements in The New Statesman of people wanting ‘help’ in interesting households, she suggested: ‘You should advertise. Draft for advert. Really interesting fairly progr. widow, godmother of John Lehmann, requires help in bungalow stuffed with Camden School works and valuable bibelots. Mine of inf. on progr. subjects ancient and modern. Rendezvous of Huxleys and Priestleys. A.J.P. Taylor drops in. Days off for Aldermaston. (Think better not mention the word Mitford).’

  ‘I think you ought to dress like Mme de Maintenon from the age of fifty, in dark brown and white with a cross of enormous diamonds the only ornament. Well you do practically, only no cross.’

  In a way Mrs. Ham supplanted her mother, always some what distant, in her affections. She had an all-round cosmopolitan culture and a consuming curiosity even if, as Nancy wrote to her: ‘Your letters are always full of mysterious informants who, hooded I imagine, like Spanish penitents, lean over you whispering woe…’ Above all she shared Nancy’s devotion to France and the French, whom she under stood instinctively since she had grown up in Paris. In England she seemed faintly exotic.

  On one of her fleeting visits to England Nancy wrote (to James Lees-Milne, 27th February, 1947): ‘I felt like darling Captain Oates, leaving Paris, but find London isn’t nearly as Beardmore as I was led to suppose—I’m quite disappointed by the warmth the luxury the gaiety and the enormous masses of food which seems to abound (not to speak of blazing lights I thought we were down to whale blubber).’ The saga of Captain Scott and his comrades was still part and parcel of Mitford imagery.