Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘Every single German publisher has been after Pomp,’ Nancy informed Mrs. Ham, ‘and I’ve got a huge advance finally from one in Hamburg. I told Marie-Louise Bousquet who said, “au fond c’est le seul peuple qui nous aime”.’

  Her social life was often harried, as was mine in Florence, by the irrepressible Violet Trefusis, and we had this singular bugbear in common. We called her Auntie Vi and exchanged anecdotes about her for many years, interrupted, in my case, by a definite estrangement owing to Violet’s extreme rudeness. Though she possessed a facile wit which depended mainly on punning Violet was a law unto herself, perhaps the most selfish woman I have known, so selfish and inconsiderate that she became a joke, except to a tiny clique of blind adorers who believed she was a daughter of King Edward VII (a role she loved to assume) and treated her like capricious royalty. Mr. Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage was yet to be written, but if we believed what we were told then, Violet had been courted by all the world’s leading statesmen, musicians and poets. It is fitting that Philippe Jullian, author of The Snob Spotter’s Guide, should write the biography of this super-snob for whom literature was a mere hobby. She was one of those friends who made one prefer a foe. As Nancy, while engaged on her Pompadour, complained, ‘Violet is literally torturing me, she rings up all the time. I have to leave the telephone on because of various matters to do with the lease—nobody else telephones and I’ve begged her not to, she doesn’t pay the least attention. I’m really beginning to quite hate her.’ We had a rhyme:

  Violet Trefusis

  Never refuses

  But often confuses.

  ‘I’ve got a luncheon party today. Violet arrived for it yesterday,’ Nancy told Heywood Hill. ‘I was eating a little bit of fish. I said you MUST go away but she tottered to the table, scooped up all the fish and all the potatoes, left half and threw cigarette ash over it. I could have KILLED her. Lady Montdore exactly. Nothing left for Marie and hardly anything for me.’

  But there was no escape from the predatory Violet in the small circle Nancy frequented, and it was the same for me in Florence.

  ‘Old Auntie is being wonderful and keeps us all on the hop,’ she told Robin McDouall. ‘She is said to have bought a house without doors or windows and with only a skylight through which she comes and goes on a broomstick. This potin de Paris was recounted to me at luncheon today and I haven’t yet verified it. Also she rang up one of the partners at Jullian’s whom she has long known but seldom sees and warmly urged that he should spend May and June in Florence with her. He was reeling with amazement when she added she had sent him the manuscript of her novel which, she added, has been a coast to coast best seller in America. Alors il a compris. He asked me what her standing (this is a new French word) is in the English world of letters. I was really at a loss. I said she is very well known but I think more for her mémoires than her novels—?’

  To Alvilde Lees-Milne Nancy wrote (6th February, 1964): ‘Last night Philippe Jullian gave his first dinner party. It would have been intensely agreeable but for Violet and the cold. Honestly Violet is the ruin of a small evening—as for the cold, it took 3 hot water bottles to stop me shivering afterwards. He had Peyrefitte, a luscious, rather funny, rather horrible man, J-L Curtis the writer, and the nice fat Princesse de Croy. Violet made up her face 10 times at dinner. I counted.

  ‘Tonight is Beaton Night at the Embassy, a dinner of 38 we are told. So I can wear my ball-dress, oh good.’

  Cecil Beaton’s state visits were always red letter days. On a future occasion Nancy wrote: ‘I went to no fewer than five dinner parties for him—in fact my clothes completely gave out! At the Embassy I sat next to Cocteau who said that Rosamond [Lehmann] is translating something of his, “she must be a very old lady now.” I said well, yes, about my age. It turned out he has never seen her and thought she was about 80—don’t you find it odd? Of course she started very young, with Poussière [Dusty Answer]!’

  ‘Don’t you find it odd?’ had become one of Nancy’s regular refrains. ‘I’ve seen something of Willie [Somerset Maugham] while he’s been here—I’ve never known him so agreeable. But by a sort of wonderful magic he finds the same sort of people here with exactly the same drawing-rooms as those he frequents on the Riviera. Thumping jazz gramophone and bad modern pictures if you know what I mean. I find it too odd for words especially as he seems to like and enjoy serious conversation.’

  A little serious conversation went a long way with Maugham, who was really more interested in people who could provide him with another plot or a good game of bridge. But he had known Nancy’s great friend Violet Hammersley as a child in Paris and he shared Nancy’s amusement at outrageous conduct. He expected most people to behave badly, whereas Nancy, in spite of the failure of her marriage, was less cynical. Her hero, Captain Scott of the Antarctic, could not be fitted into Maugham’s formula of human caddishness and she remained a secret hero worshipper. She was too warm-hearted to swallow ready-made formulas but she always loved to tease.

  A grand opportunity to tease as many people as possible came from an unexpected quarter when Professor Alan Ross of Birmingham University produced an article on polite English usage in a scholarly Finnish journal. Its origin might be traced to Uncle Matthew’s dogmatic pronouncements on the subject in The Pursuit of Love. To quote Nancy’s letter to Heywood Hill, 1st May, 1954: ‘My crazy friend Prof. Ross has written such a lovely pamphlet for la Société Néo-philologique de Helsinki, printed in Finland but written in English, on upper class usage in England. Entitled LINGUISTIC CLASS INDICATORS IN PRESENT DAY ENGLISH. It has sentences like “The ideal U-address (U stands for Upper Class) is P, Q, R, where P is a place-name, Q a describer (manor, court, house, etc) and R the name of a county… but today few gentlemen can maintain this standard and they often live in houses with non-U names such as Fairmeads or El Nido.” (What will the Finns make of it?) Anyway it seems a natural for the Xmas market, illustrated by O. Lancaster and entitled Are You U? I’ve suggested this to the Prof (who may of course think it dreadfully infra dig) and I’ve told him, if the idea appeals to him to send you a copy and you would perhaps advise about a publisher. It is dreadfully funny throughout because written in a serious scientific style. I’m glad to say Pursuit of Love is one of his source books. He is a great new character in my life and a card if ever there was one—U himself, and in my expert opinion he has got everything right but one.’

  The first fruit of this was Nancy’s essay The English Aristocracy, published in Encounter, September, 1955. ‘I lovingly cook away at it all day and I think it the best thing I’ve ever done,’ she confided to Heywood. ‘It’s a sort of anthology of tease—something for everybody. I think it will be safer to be in Greece when it appears…’

  To illustrate the typical aristocratic outlook on money her case history of the imaginary Lord Fortinbras is like the synopsis of a novel which might have been written by Evelyn Waugh. She denounces those who ‘cheerfully sold their houses in London and “developed” their property without a thought for the visible result. Park Lane, most of Mayfair, the Adelphi, and so on bear witness to a barbarity which I, for one, cannot forgive.’ And there is an autobiographical undertone when she writes: ‘Divest, divest, is the order of the day. The nobleman used to study a map of his estate to see how it could be enlarged, filling out a corner here, extending a horizon there. Nowadays he has no such ambitions; he would much rather sell than buy. The family is not considered as it used to be; the ancestors are no longer revered, indeed they are wilfully for gotten, partly perhaps from a feeling of guilt when all that they so carefully amassed is being so carelessly scattered.’ Some of this is very near the knuckle.

  The September issue of Encounter was promptly sold out. Copies were annotated by ‘furious aristos’ and a spate of indignant letters proved that Nancy had hit the mark. ‘Oh my post!’ she exclaimed to Alvilde Lees-Milne, ‘Everybody now is furious—Frogs, Greeks and English—and Geoffrey [Gilmour] says the only place left for me
is America where they can’t read. One man wrote (to Encounter) “I often go to the Guards’ Club and there they generally say cheers or something before drinking. Since the article they still say it, but with some reference to Miss M.” Can’t you hear them: To hell with Miss M—!! Another wrote, to me, “my secretary has just read your article and is so furious she refuses to type a letter to you.” I wrote back is your secretary a Duchess?’

  The sequel was a booklet called Noblesse Oblige, with contributions by Evelyn Waugh, Peter Fleming, Christopher Sykes and Sir John Betjeman (a versification of non-U terminology in unforgettable stanzas), in addition to Nancy’s article and Professor Ross’s, illustrated by Osbert Lancaster in his happiest vein.

  ‘I loved your U piece,’ Nancy told Christopher Sykes. ‘I think you must moil a bit more, and invent future U and non-U expressions for things like journeys to the moon and horrid future things of that sort. Atom burns perhaps and tabloid meals… You can tease me a great deal more in it—I can take it… P.S. Artificial insemination non-U.’ But Evelyn Waugh’s contribution was rather double-edged, as Nancy complained to Patrick Leigh Fermor: ‘Evelyn is anti-one and begins, “We must remember that Miss M. only became a hon at the age of 12 and it went to her head and she has been a fearful snob ever since” and other cruel words. I said Evelyn do put a footnote to say that you love me in spite of all. “That is perfectly evident,” he replied. Only to the reader with second sight.’

  Evelyn’s chief pinprick was directed at Nancy’s socialism: ‘Alertly studied, your novels reveal themselves as revolutionary tracts and here, in your essay, you speak out boldly: “Hear me, comrades. I come from the heart of the enemy’s camp. You think they have lost heart for the fight. I have sat with them round their camp fires and heard them laughing. They are laughing at you. They are not beaten yet, comrades. Up and at them again”.’

  The squib fired off by Nancy in playful mood continued to send hissing sparks, long after Nancy became bored with it. Unfortunately the pother it caused helped to falsify the popular image of her character.

  Some of her U-shibboleths she came to take seriously nevertheless, not only in post-prandial argument, and I suspected that her stubborn prejudice against her early novels might partly be due to the inclusion of such non-U words as mirrors (‘Every mirror was besieged by women powdering their noses’), mantelpiece (‘over the mantelpiece hung a Victorian mirror’, ‘an enormous Gothic mantelpiece of pitch-pine,’ etc, in Highland Fling), and notepaper (‘Like most people who write for a living he hated writing letters, and moreover seldom had any notepaper in his lodgings,’ in Christmas Pudding.)

  As Evelyn Waugh pointed out, Nancy could be an agitator of genius. She could not resist a childish temptation to shock, more mischievous than malicious. When she was quoted in some newspaper as saying that John Wilkes Booth was her favourite character because he had killed Lincoln, ‘the most odious character in history,’ as many Europeans as Americans were incensed. Even in her cherished France she could not resist writing an article which infuriated many whose opinion she cared for. This was more than a tease, for she sought to justify the execution of Marie-Antoinette as a traitress. Prince Pierre of Monaco cut her dead and as her dear friend Princess Dolly Radziwill remarked, ‘Some doors will for ever be closed against her.’ Perhaps Rose Macaulay was thinking of her attack on the luckless Queen when she described Nancy as ‘deeply heartless’. Her spirited defence of Madame de Pompadour, whom Carlyle had dismissed as a ‘high rouged, unfortunate female of whom it is not proper to speak without necessity,’ may strike many as perverse by contrast. I suspect there was a neurotic dichotomy between Nancy’s barbed pen and her warm heart.

  *

  Though she protested that she hated travelling she was easily tempted by an invitation from the Ambassador Sir William and Lady Hayter to visit them in Moscow in 1954 when the Iron Curtain was impenetrable to tourists.

  ‘I still haven’t got my visa for Russia,’ she wrote to Heywood Hill (1st May, 1954); ‘Iris Hayter thinks they are busy reading my books, but one of the secretaries here says it all depends on Burgess!! They’ve had my passport for an absolute age…’ Then on 31st May, hurray! ‘Well, I’m off. The Soviets went to ground with my passport and the Embassy (ours) said there’s only one card left for us to play, you must go yourself and try and get it out of them. But take a book and make no plans for the rest of the day, they will keep you there for hours. So off I went—gave my name—was immediately ushered into a huge room, full of pictures of Stalin, whose occupant rose to his feet crying, “Je vous attend depuis des semaines.” It was quite sinister—come into my parlour. I was out in the street again, with visa, in 2 minutes. Then I went to Cook and said can you send me to Moscow, thinking perhaps there would be more difficulties. The man simply looked through a heap of brochures—“Come to sunny Monte Carlo” and so on, until he got to one saying “Come to lovely Russia” and sold me the ticket there and then…’

  Two weeks later (14th June): ‘I’m back having had the most fascinating fortnight of my whole life. I ended up with 3 days alone in Leningrad (at the Astoria!) I think I must write it all down and send it to various buddies—no obligation to read. I can’t write for the papers. William (the Ambassador) has asked me not to and anyhow I think I couldn’t have. The Russians were more than kind to me and it would be a bad return to laugh at them, while if I managed to suppress the laughs everybody would say I am a fellow traveller and so on… Nobody knows what real excitement is who hasn’t flown in a Russian aeroplane and seen the Red Square parade…’

  Eight years later, when ‘much water had flown under the bridges,’ Nancy published her diary of this brief visit in The Water Beetle. It is studded with observations of significant details and the laughs are not suppressed. Of the aeroplane flight she wrote: ‘We shot into the air with the minimum of fuss—no revving, no voice bossing about safety belts—no safety belts either. But we never seemed to gain any height at all and it was—Oh do mind that tree—all the way to Moscow. So I was able to see the endless steppes very comfortably as from a train.’

  The Red Army parade was to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the union with the Ukraine. She was privileged to watch it from ‘a small stand in the Red Square for members of the Corps diplomatique and a few Russian officials… Massed bands punctuated by cannon fire instead of drums, endless marching troops, MIGS whizzing between two church steeples; Bulganin, like a toy, standing up in a motor which dashed about from regiment to regiment, greeted by Ra-ra-ra—all as exciting as an air raid and all laid on for the commercial travellers [Malenkov and Co] and me. No other audience allowed…’

  About the lack of tipping and the apparent lack of interest in money she observed: ‘If the love of money is the root of all evil, it is perhaps the root of a certain amount of humanity, too, and this total detachment has something frightening about it. It was the single thing about the Russians that struck me most. Have they always been like this—has communism produced it or is it because there is so little to buy?’ According to nineteenth-century travellers they had not always been like this. Lady Londonderry, who visited Russia in 1886 complained: ‘The cheating is terrible and possessors of hotels and lodgings seem to regard all foreigners, especially English, their lawful prey.’ Evidently cheating has been sublimated into the realm of inter national politics: it has risen in scale and prestige.

  Nancy’s comments on Russian women—‘super-govs’—; on a dress show in one of the big shops; on the pictures in a gallery of Russian art; on Lenin’s tomb; and her conversation with a woman from the State publishing house, are hilariously Mitfordian. ‘“How many copies would you sell here of a popular novel?” I asked. She replied fifty million. N: “How absolutely wonderful. I can’t wait to come and be a Soviet writer.”

  ‘Super-gov (clearly not taking to the idea): “This has its good side and its bad.”

  ‘N: “Well it can’t have a bad side for the writer. Do tell me the name of a book which ha
s sold like this.”

  ‘Super-gov.: “Cement.”’

  A far cry indeed from The Pursuit of Love!

  Back in ‘Mr. Street’, Nancy summoned a few friends to a caviar feast but nobody ventured to ask her about her recent voyage. Paradoxically, caviar produces an atmosphere of luxe, calme et volupté in which it is almost painful to introduce the subject of Soviet Russia. In any case Parisians are more parochial than we are and prefer to converse about topics

  It was suggested that she print her Russian diary for private circulation but she was warned that some unscrupulous journalist might get hold of it and use it. She told Heywood Hill, ‘as nearly all my friends are unscrupulous journalists this seems a danger which I can’t risk’. And as Nancy was very much ‘in the news’ her diary had to wait.

  Having visited Prince Yussupov’s country house, now a museum near Moscow, she was interested to meet him at dinner with Dior. ‘Goodness the lies that man tells,’ she exclaimed to Heywood. ‘He pretends his house—the one I saw—was looted and all the objects sold abroad and that he has often seen his furniture etc in museums and shops. But you can plainly see that everything in that house has always been there, nothing missing and all is of wretched quality. I sat listening with great impatience to a stream of obvious inventions and a lot of dreary mystical stuff thrown in. I must say he is exceedingly handsome…’