Her gossipy letters to me—(I would have received more of them had I not been in Mexico at the time)—showed that she was vastly enjoying her new life while searching for a suitable apartment. ‘Oh the potins,’ as she exclaimed. ‘Too long to describe.’ However, she described a good many, and though some of the protagonists are dead and gone they evoke Parisian smart society at that period and the background of her future writings.
From 19 Quai Malaquais she wrote to me in November 1947: ‘I’ve got this lovely flat, lent me by Audrey Bouverie, jusqu’à nouvel ordre—anyhow I think until February—which is really most lucky for me.’
‘There was an article in Samedi Soir a few weeks ago, made for you. It was called Les Nouveaux Pompadours and it began about how immediately after the war parachutists were all the go and then a long thing about two brothers who pretended to be parachutists and what has become of them. Then it told about that man who looks like a tie pin, X., and the flat Lopez has bought for him and how une jeune comtesse tried to buy him from Lopez with Louis XV’s microscope but Mrs. Lopez said, “he’s not worth it, I advise against…”’
‘I’m writing a novel [Love in a Cold Climate] but it’s so dull I’m in despair. One thing, masses of people must like dull novels that’s very sure.’
‘I saw Dolly Radziwill just now and she told me the following story. ‘Her vendeuse at Balmain had a new client, a M. Lecomte, who chose about six dresses and said, “My wife is not well, will you bring them round for her to see.” So round she goes—luxury flat, exquisite creature appears with a curtain of gold hair, darling little waist, long elegant legs and so on and they begin trying on the dresses. Suddenly the vendeuse becomes aware that the pretty little bosoms are not quite real—looks again at the face—horrors! M. Lecomte himself!! He sees that she is very much put out and says, “Jusqu’à présent je me suis habillé chez Jacques Fath, vous n’avez qu’à lui téléphoner pour des renseignements sur moi.” So as soon as she gets back Balmain himself gets through to Fath who says, “Vous êtes vraiment veinard, c’est un client comme il n’y en a peu, doux, gentil et riche à milliards.” The end of it is he has ordered several dresses including a shell pink ball-dress—!! The hair was a wonderful WIG. Do admit—!’
Before the end of 1947 she had the good fortune to discover an ideal apartment, the ground floor of an old mansion between courtyard and garden in the Rue Monsieur, which she referred to henceforth as ‘Mr. Street’. ‘I’ve got a perfectly blissful and more or less permanent flat,’ she informed me in December 1947. ‘Untouched I should think for 60 years. I spent my first evening removing the 25 lace mats with objects on them mostly from Far Japan (dainty). The furniture is qualité de musée—such wonderful pieces, now you can see them.’ Her individual taste was most evident in the arrangement of this luminous residence. One cannot imagine it without her, so intensely did it reflect her personality. I remember it as a serene emanation of the entente cordiale, French in its sophisticated simplicity yet English in a certain cosiness and feeling for privacy. As Lady Gladwyn wrote, Nancy ‘eliminated all that was unnecessary in her rooms, retaining only objects of intrinsic merit… From the large square grey salon, pink curtained on the crosslights, one could glimpse the white muslin on her bed and there, in that small bedroom in an arm chair by the window, her books were written.’ She was attended by a devoted elderly bonne, Marie, who guarded her against unwelcome intruders. To her mother Nancy wrote: ‘I’ve never liked any house I’ve lived in as much as this one or ever known even among your servants such a treasure as Marie. She simply literally never thinks of herself at all, never wants any time—let alone a whole day-off. She is an excellent and reliable without being wonderful cook…’
Later, when an English interviewer asked Nancy her reasons for living in France, ‘My maid Marie is at least half of it,’ she explained. ‘She’s the sort of person you find only in France. Maids are so much more important than men.’ The interviewer, who had expected revelations about ‘the bliss of love in France’, was slightly disappointed.
Some of Nancy’s furniture was sent from England. It arrived, she told Mark, ‘rather thin and wan as if it had been in a concentration camp. But the clever French are at work, mending and rubbing, and it will soon be all right again. I was pleased to see the well-known old faces after so many years.’ These included ‘my Sheraton writing table and Farve’s lovely Chinese screens and they all fit in very well. La politique du tapissier is in full swing, all great fun. Also a great deal (12 pairs) of Muv’s linen which is worth its weight in gold now, and my Dresden china clock. Yes, the verre de Nevers is my treasure, a great find, for nearly nothing too. I happened to know about it since I haunt the arts décoratifs at the Louvre.’ Later she ‘bought various pictures, notably a Longhi said by Francis Watson to be quite first class’. To Mrs. Hammersley she confided: ‘With infinite cunning I have made it impossible to have anybody to stay at Mr. because the only way now into the bathroom is through my bedroom. Perhaps I could have you however—I’m arranging a little summer bedroom the other side of the bathroom.’ And to her mother: ‘We bought a hen to eat, live, and now of course it has become our best friend and no doubt will live in the garden until death (natural) us do part.’
Her rooms in ‘Mr. Street’ were to become a cultural annexe to the British Embassy, a congenial rendezvous of French and English letters. At last, very cautiously, she was able to indulge her flair for clothes and replenish her wardrobe. ‘Went yesterday to order a suit at Dior. £120. Evening dresses start at £342. Impossible to get inside the building. I had to use INFLUENCE to be allowed to order. Why is everybody so rolling—they can’t all have written Pursuit of Love.’ (19th February, 1947 to Heywood Hill.)
Our friend Gillian Sutro reminds me that Nancy was ‘the first Englishwoman to catch on to Dior, and she bought clothes from him at the beginning when no one had heard of him in London. With her long lean frame she was a perfect clothes horse, like a Balenciaga model.’ Though the war had ended clothes rationing was still on in England, and Gillian remembers how stunning she appeared on a visit from Paris, ‘in a black wool Dior suit, with the new long skirt no one had seen before.’
A year later Nancy was writing: ‘I am now always torn between clothes and antiques but with me clothes are almost a matter of health, you know…’ They had become ‘a matter of health’ since settling in Paris where, for the time being, ‘I am seeing nobody but the Grand Old French—they make my joy and I long to write a book about them—but how to trans late the jokes? I don’t see how it can be done. “Depuis 40 ans je suis membre du Jockey et jamais je n’y ai entendu prononçé le nom d’un couturier—voilà que tout à coup on n’y parle que de Dior.” They think I’m awfully eccentric because I YELL with laughter every time they speak, but they don’t really seem to mind and go on asking me…’
6
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 writin
g 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…’
Nancy Mitford Page 10
