Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  The theme was frothy enough; the situation what used to be called risqué. Owing to a felicitous blend of talents and Nancy’s tactful treatment of the dialogue, it was saved from crudity, but its three rollicking acts struck me personally as overblown. Bedroom farces even when transferred to the tropics have their hackneyed limitations.

  At first it was exciting to make her début in the theatrical world which was new to her. But being a very private person in spite of the publicity she had given her family in The Pursuit of Love, she did not take kindly to actors. Their narcissism and blinkered absorption in their profession bored her. Theatrical gossip was the only gossip she could not endure. After dining with the influential manager Binkie Beaumont, whose party included ‘Noël Coward, who kisses me now, Gladys Cooper, Robert Morley, Athene Seyler and the Kaufmans and a lot of stage hangers-on’, she exclaimed: ‘It’s dreadful how dull they all are but don’t say I said. Also Communists I note…’

  From Edinburgh she wrote (25th July, 1950): ‘After a day of terrible nerves and disastrous dress rehearsals the play was an absolute whizz and even the old Scotsman is on its side. Oh what a relief. Oliver Messel had privately informed me that he was deeply shocked by it and quite expected the audience to get up and demonstrate, and I must say when I saw the dress rehearsal I quite agreed and very nearly didn’t go to the theatre at all I was so terrified. But the fact is nothing shocks anybody nowadays—they screamed with laughter throughout and clapped and cheered for ten minutes at the end. Now there is a lot of work to be done on it… What we do is this. Certain bits fall very flat. I sit, with script, and note which ones, and next day I rewrite them. Then see how that goes. And so on. I doubt if it will be à point by next week, very much. It is a most laborious, and I see most necessary process… The actors are dreams of funniness and egocentricity, so exaggerated you can hardly believe it.’ A woman in the audience was heard saying: ‘It’s all quite mad but of course Mitfords are.’

  To Mark she wrote in trepidation from ‘Caledonia (stern and wild)’, before the first performance: ‘I am so ground down by physical miseries I can think of 0 else. Tired (went from the train at 8 to rehearsal till past 2) and hungry. Then some brute in human form opened my door saying 8 o’clock this morning, after which I never got off again. Do spend your holidays in Britain. Then after two meals in the train of a sort of sub spam I thought anyway Scotch breakfast—well I won’t go on, such a bore. Then I’m low about the play. The girl is simply awful. I thought so when I came for the rehearsal but they all said she’d wake up, which in my view she hasn’t. However she’s quite lovely looking which is a help. Morley is blissful. But I rather dread tonight.’

  ‘Edinburgh is beautiful in its black way. Freezing cold. Every man woman and child I’ve spoken to says awfully close, so think what it must be like as a rule! Poor poor poor Marie Stuart, I feel for her…’

  From Glasgow: ‘Yes well the Glasgow papers say “this play may be screamingly witty in Paris and if so poor Miss Mitford hasn’t quite seen the point.” Leading lady ill and off for a week so we are all rather lowered. Vive I’Ecosse. Money rather tight… I’m overtired from rewriting scene after scene and watching rehearsals and the play every night. However, I’ve seldom been so fascinated in my life… You don’t know how famous I am, people come to my bedroom with Pursuit (Penguin) for me to sign do be impressed. Mobbed at the stage door too.’

  After the preliminary tour of the provinces she wrote (28th July, 1950): ‘Well, it was touch and go, and the second night not good, last night better again, but really ACTORS!!!! “Sorry, you know, but I can’t say that line.” “Then, what about MY EXIT?” and the girl talks for two hours about what she calls her “hair-do”.’ From Newcastle, however, she wrote (11th August): ‘Wonderful reception of the play here so we are all happy again…’

  While in London she proposed to stay with Mark at Kew Green. About the play’s début there she wrote: ‘Well I understand my first night (sounds so indecent at my age) is August 21st and I thought of staying on another ten days and seeing a few pals. But dearest if inconvenient don’t think of me… P.S. Please conserve my post which is very valuable—no need to peep however.’

  That first night was resoundingly successful and Mark gave an exultant party in his cosy house after the performance with the sort of English breakfast food that Nancy relished. I remember the kedgeree, which I explained to Monsieur Roussin was our substitute for bouillabaisse. Though wreathed in smiles he looked rather puzzled throughout. He must have expected a more boisterous gathering and this was so placid. In thanking ‘Dear Old Gentry’ for his hospitality, Nancy remarked: ‘The comfort of your household—well trust a bachelor for that! Did you see your fellow countryman in the News Chronicle, he went for me tooth and nail and ended up I should like to beat Miss M. So I’m dashing for home. Also I’ve received enough letters to fill a British railway. Fancy, I went into an antique shop in Henley and the two dear pansies who keep it (one a major) dashed at me with my books for me to sign. Do admit.’

  She felt more elated after the London production. (24th August): ‘I absolutely adored the first night,’ she told Robin McDouall, ‘so amusing to see a London audience after those old stodges in the provinces! In fact I have enjoyed the whole thing like mad.’

  With Robert Morley, Joan Tetzel and David Tomlinson in the leading roles and with ravishing child’s picture book scenery by Oliver Messel, The Little Hut became a hit in England. Nancy could announce in October: ‘I’m entirely taken up with clothes, on account of successful Hut…’ Once bitten twice shy, however, though the bite had proved profitable, and she returned to fiction refreshed by this experimental digression. In March 1951 she wrote to Heywood Hill: ‘I’m offered every French play under the sun now! But never again until workhouse looms, because of that awful going on tour…’

  Home in ‘Mr. Street’ she resumed the quieter rhythm of work and leisure. She was always ready to see close friends of whom ‘the Colonel’ was her Parisian mainstay. Evelyn Waugh was assured of a warm welcome though the ‘cloven hoof and forked tongue’ might appear at awkward moments. ‘Evelyn Waugh has been here,’ she told her mother (21st May, 1949). ‘We went to Chantilly where he quarrelled violently with the Coopers. I just managed to keep out of it I am glad to say and although he had every meal with me except a luncheon with Claudel we ended up on the best of terms. I breathe a faint sigh of relief now he has gone, though I really love him and his company. Diana says I am far too weak minded with him, but of course it is the only way to keep on terms! He is a real oddity…’

  ‘Evelyn is here,’ she wrote Heywood Hill (14th May, 1950): ‘I was forced by his dreadful behaviour to enquire how he reconciles so much wickedness with being a Christian, to which he rather sadly replied that I didn’t realize how much worse he would be if he wasn’t one—added to which that he would long ago have committed suicide but for his religion. But I find that he is quite all right with Duchesses so that in future will be my clue. It’s middle class intellectuals who come in for the full horror of his bloodiness. His new book sounds lovely…’ And, a year later (8th July, 1951), ‘Evelyn got a cable while I was with him asking for 800 words about me for U.S.A. He wrote it at once and it was so beautiful I blubbed, nothing but pure distilled honey. He speaks of the shop “at least one American Sergeant will remember”…’ (The Sergeant in question was Stuart Preston, much lionized in London towards the end of the war, an ultra-sociable habitué of Heywood Hill’s and a cultured devotee of Nancy. Like me, he wilfully discounted her anti-Americanism). Evelyn’s dis tilled honey, however, was not without a drop of acid, for he wrote that, ‘having voted socialist and so done her best to make England uninhabitable, Nancy broke from her chrysalis, took wing and settled lightly in the heart of Paris.’

  To her mother she wrote of another visit from Evelyn (15th March, 1952) ‘in a very good and mellow mood… always wanting to seem very old, cupping his ear whenever you speak and holding letters at arm’s length and
hobbling on a thick stick. It’s so unlike my other contemporaries with their pathetic desire for youth. Well, I must say I should like to keep my waist, my face having more or less gone already.’

  Those of us living abroad are accustomed to periodical invasions from England. Hospitable though Nancy was, she managed to defend her privacy. ‘A flood of English. One woman said to me “It’s very funny, when I ring up my friends here they are awfully pleased to hear my voice but they seem to have engagements every day for a week. I believe the English think that Paris is a social desert where nobody knows anybody else and sits waiting for the visitors to cheer them up. Like some little port in the Red Sea. It’s very odd, I must say. Actually there’s more going on than I can remember…”’

  Dinner with the Windsors, for instance, ‘in a terrible fix as it is tenue de ville, i.e. jewelled jacket costing £600 which I do not possess. All my horrible clothes laid out like a jumble sale and I in tears. (My mother’s great saying better be under-than over-dressed is no consolation at all.) As I wrote those words the secretary rang up and said now it’s short evening dresses. Well, supposing I hadn’t got one? As it happens I HAVE. (Next day) Duchess in a crocheted straw dress, utter knockout, saying “Oh just the sort of thing you pick up in the village, you know.” What village?’

  After another dinner with the Windsors she reported to her mother: ‘We were only eight and I had another long talk with him [the Duke], mostly about King Edward. “Not very nice what that boy wrote about my grandfather1—Christopher Sykes was it—do you know him? Who are the Sykeses?”’

  ‘“Well,” I said, “the present one is Sir Richard, his father was Sir Mark and his father was Sir Tatton.”’

  ‘“Tatton is a Yorkshire name. Do you know how I know that? Well, I was in the Navy with Commander Bower and we were confirmed together and his name was Robert Tatton Bower and it seems that Tatton is a Yorkshire name.” “Oh yes,” he said, “It was always ‘send for Lord Redesdale’ at Sandringham if they wanted to cut the trees or anything. What happened to Batsford?”’

  ‘“Sold.”’

  ‘“So where were you raised?”’

  ‘“Went into White’s the other day and saw a face I thought I knew and by Jove it was Bruce—snow-white and very thin…”’

  ‘“Yes, I can’t remember the time when there wasn’t Lady Airlie—now when I saw my mother last week she said, ‘I can’t take Mabel about any more she’s too deaf—I ask who’s that? And all she says is what. So I’ve told her she can sweep in after me at the big functions, but when it’s picture galleries and things like that she can’t come.” “Not bad”, he said, “from 82 to 83 is it.”’

  ‘He’s writing his memoirs. I said, “Do tell where you’ve got to.” “Just coming to the deadline.”’

  ‘Duff [Cooper] went to see him with a compte rendu he wrote at the time (he was in the Cabinet) and they spent the afternoon over it. As Duff got up to go he said, “Well, any way you’ve never regretted it, Sir, have you?”’

  ‘“No by God I haven’t. When I see poor Bertie surrounded by all that muck—at least in the old days the Government were one’s friends”—’

  ‘I’m really too busy to write letters but thought all this would amuse you.’

  When Burgess and Maclean decamped to Russia, Nancy wrote again to Heywood: ‘Did you LOVE the diplomats? Everybody here thinks they came over to see about their dresses for Charlie’s [de Beistegui’s] ball and have been too busy with fittings ever since to notice the fuss…’ In the mean time a French newspaper reported that La Princesse de Clèves had had a great success in America under the title of Love in a Cold Climate.

  1 Four Studies in Loyalty, by Christopher Sykes. 1946. Referring to the first study, ‘Behind the Tablet’.

  7

  NANCY’S MOST ACCOMPLISHED novel, The Blessing, was published in 1951, and it is permeated with her joyous love of France and her vision of a sophisticated section of French society. Indeed it is the consummate product of Nancy’s liaison with contemporary France. She described it as ‘a roman de moeurs—and what moeurs—those I see around me’. The plot—how mischievous little Sigi contrives to keep his French father and English mother apart for his own material profit though both his parents are deeply attached to each other—provides a loom for Nancy to weave her funniest jokes and human observations.

  Fabrice, Duc de Sauveterre, is resuscitated as Charles Edouard, Marquis de Valhubert, ‘who cannot—he really cannot—see a pretty woman without immediately wanting to sleep with her.’ He was also a polished dilettante who had ‘a charming collection of minor masters with one or two high spots, an important Fragonard, a pair of Hubert Roberts, and so on. He was always adding to it, and had bought more than half the pictures himself… He knew the long, intricate histories of all the palaces of the Faubourg St. Germain and exactly where to find each one, hidden behind huge walls and carriage doorways.’ Grace is a more mature version of Linda, for whom ‘Charles Edouard was the forty kings of France rolled into one ‘the French race in person walking and breathing’. She sees the French through rose-tinted spectacles—how unlike Uncle Matthew! ‘She even loved their snobbishness, it seemed to her such a tremendous joke, so particularly funny, somehow, nowadays. She was beginning to love the critical spirit of all and sundry. It kept people up to the mark, no doubt, and had filled her with the desire to improve her mind and sharpen her wits.’ At times the mondaine Nancy waxes lyrical: ‘It was one of those Paris afternoons when, by some trick of the light, the buildings look as if they are made of opaque, blue glass. Grace wondered how much Carolyn really did love the stones of Paris. She seemed not to notice, as they went by, the blue glass façade of the Invalides surmounted by its dome powdered with gold…’

  The screen of the narrative flickers with idiosyncratic sketches. ‘By the way, Tante Régine is coming to luncheon. When I told her you were here she screamed like a peacock and rushed off to buy a new hat.’ Tante Régine musing on modern youth: ‘Poor little things! I’m glad it’s not me growing up now. What a world for them! Atom bombs, and no brothels. What will their parents do about that—after all you can’t very well ask your own friends, can you? I suppose they’ll all end up as pederasts.’

  The superbly drawn English nanny is, as Nancy admitted, a caricature of her Blor; Ed Spain, ‘the Captain’, a leading London intellectual, is based on Cyril Connolly; Mrs. O’Donovan who ‘liked everything French, indiscriminately and unreasonably’, is based on Mrs. Hammersley, whose father had been connected with the British Embassy under Lord Lyons. But one is at a loss to account for the grotesque windbag Hector Dexter: in his case Nancy’s anti-Americanism cantered away with her.

  ‘I’m so delighted you like The Blessing,’ she wrote to me (15th September, 1951). ‘Most of my friends do, but many of the reviews have been terrible, not one good word. It is selling pretty well nevertheless, and is book of the month, next month, in America so we’ll see how they take to it. Up to now my books have done very badly there, with awful reviews…’

  ‘… I didn’t go to the [Beistegui] ball. From early years I’ve had a horror of being an unattached woman in Venice. “Oh look, here comes old so and so, what’s the betting she’s going to cram into our gondola—there, I told you so.” Besides the Colonel, now a deputy, had to be here and it seemed a shame to leave him all alone in an empty Paris.’

  ‘I saw Winston who talked about a “Mr. Bistinguay”. It seems that Winston was cheered, but much less than “Carlos di Spagna”… As I write I receive the U.S.A. Book of the Month magazine with a pen portrait of me by Evelyn. Terribly eulogistic, but one or two digs. I don’t quite like “bright but patchy culture”!!! An American came to interview me and said did I know many of her compatriots and I said only two, Sergeant Preston and Lady Marriott. Won’t they be surprised.’

  ‘Oh the pros and antis, why didn’t you keep a list?’ she wrote to Heywood in November. ‘Princess Olga [of Yugoslavia] who never spares one the cold douche, said
the other day “I loved your book—moost people doon’t you noo!…—It’s still selling a thousand a week…’

  Because The Blessing was concerned with fashionable society in France and England Nancy was accused of snobbishness by the inverted snobs. But she had written about the fraction of the world she knew intimately: she was not tempted to investigate its outskirts. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf’s remark about Jane Austen, Nancy ‘would not alter a hair on anybody’s head, or move one brick or one blade of grass in a world which provided her with such exquisite delight’. Whatever arrows a jaundiced reviewer might sling, Evelyn Waugh, her most fastidious critic, had telegraphed ‘deep homage’. His soothing message was followed by lavish sales.

  In October for a change, she enjoyed a short visit to Rome—‘so much to look at in the warm sunshine, it was heavenly. But I am made for France, and fidget when away from Paris. Also there was nobody but D’Arcy [Osborne, ex-Minister to the Holy See, later Duke of Leeds] to take me sightseeing and he, though very faithful, on the doorstep every morning at eleven, is analphabet and this sort of thing went on: “Now these frescoes are by some very well-known artist whose name I have forgotten.”—I look in my Baedeker: Raphael. But he is a dear and I mustn’t complain.’