Conscientiously she pursued her new protagonist to Geneva whence she informed Mark in April: ‘I’m here to do a bit of work at the Musée Voltaire. This is a nice calm town rather like what I had imagined Athens to be before I went to that city of the plain… There’s a lot of new (unpublished and unsuspected) Voltaire stuff, very luckily for me ça tombe bien. I’ve been goggling over it. Also, as all can be said nowadays, there is the Hyde Parkery at Frederick’s court, details of which may surprise some people.’
Mr. Theodore Besterman gave Nancy his paternal blessing. ‘Besterman is NOBLE,’ she told Lady Redesdale. ‘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 and which he could have easily kept dark until I’d finished and nobody would have been the wiser. It must have been a temptation—I don’t know that I, in his place, would have behaved so well.’ And to Mrs. Ham she wrote ‘Besterman, who is noble, has read more than half my book (all I’ve done) and says greatly to his surprise he only found one error of fact. As I had suspected, the pleasure he took in the T.L.S. review of the letters was mitigated by the reviewer’s total ignorance of the subject. But I suppose of English people only he and I really do know the subject in tiny detail, it is so huge and so complex that nobody would trouble unless working on it… The new letters, to the niece, which prove he was sleeping with her for years, never suspected, are simply hair-raising!’ And again to Mrs. Ham she wrote on 3rd May: ‘I was sitting up in bed writing my book when I suddenly finished it! It has gone off to be typed and I am free to write a few letters at last… I feel the need of non-petrol air.’ Ten days later: ‘John Sutro has taken off my typescript to Hamish Hamilton so I feel like somebody who has lost a particularly tiresome child… Poor Madame Denis, she’ll turn in her grave as I’m awful about her.’
Unlike many a greater poet Voltaire drained the full cup of popular triumph during his long lifetime. Some have considered his seventeen-year liaison with Madame du Châtelet a great love affair, but romance shrivels in contact with a genius so icily intellectual. With Voltaire there were no delicate shades of emotion. The swiftness of his wit was winged but his nature was flawed by squalid pettiness. His relationship with Madame du Châtelet was mainly a matter of convenience and prestige. The Newtonian lady required more physical attention than the middle-aged poet was inclined to provide and Nancy portrayed her as a semi-comic bluestocking. While Voltaire cohabited with her he became the quintessential French homme de lettres whose influence spread far beyond his study and her bedroom. This was Nancy’s theme, though Voltaire escaped from the latter to that of his buxom niece Mme Denis—under the pretext of impotence.
It was no mean feat for a free-lance historian to depict such paradoxical celebrities—the ruthless opportunist, the cranky valetudinarian destined to prolong a premature old age, and the aristocratic highbrow of whom Frederick the Great was jealous. Nancy steered her way through the domestic labyrinth with colours flying. Her stronger partiality for Louis XV and Mme de Pompadour could not prejudice her against this less exalted pair but she failed to make either of them sympathetic. In this case she could not identify her protagonists with personal acquaintances though she detected certain traits of Voltaire in at least one contemporary littérateur. ‘I couldn’t get fond of Emily, try as I might,’ she told me. ‘To me she is like a much cleverer Violet [Trefusis]. I think the only woman in their set whom we would have liked was Mme de Boufflers. Can’t help loving Voltaire, for the jokes, and old Stani of course.’ She quoted Lord Chesterfield with approbation when he sent his son to Paris to learn ‘that ease, those manners, those graces which are certainly nowhere to be found but in France’. And she exclaimed with sincere fervour: ‘Oh happy age, when everything made by man was beautiful, when the furnishing of an Hôtel Lambert could as safely be left to a clergyman and a district-nurse as, nowadays, to a Ramsay or a Jansen!’
Like our friend James Lees-Milne (‘Old Furious’ or ‘Grumpikins’) Nancy found little to admire in modern art or architecture. Her Slade School enthusiasms for Epstein, the Spencers and the Nashes had waned: Coysevox and his successors had firmly supplanted them.
She lunched and dined out a little more frequently since Voltaire in Love was off her chest. ‘There was a screamingly funny Anglo-French literary luncheon,’ she told Mrs. Hammersley (21st May, 1957). ‘All the Anglo ladies including Rebecca West and Mrs. Priestley were got up (freezing day) in chiffon and picture hats. It was supposed to be for young (sic) writers to exchange views. I had to exchange with young Priestley in a vile temper because Gram Greene was at the grand table and he wasn’t, and André Chamson (80) furious because Lacretelle was. I did have a horrid time, though I rigoléd intérieurement [giggled inwardly] like anything.’ The luncheon was followed by a performance of Titus Andronicus: ‘a more disgusting play I never saw, tortures, murders, mutilations in every scene, culminating in a woman eating her own children in a pie. The French, who of course didn’t understand a word, received it with wild enthusiasm. Couldn’t help thinking of Voltaire who said that Shakespeare was a great genius sans une étincelle de goût and that no people love a hanging so much as the English therefore naturally they also love his plays.’
During the tenure of Lord and Lady Gladwyn the British Embassy was again a second home, as in the heyday of the Duff Coopers, and Nancy particularly relished an exclusive dinner with Field-Marshal Montgomery. 2nd July, to Mrs. Hammersley: ‘Dined with Monty and the Jebbs, just the four of us, you know how he always rather fascinates me. We talked about generals having luck. He said, “I had luck when Gott was shot down.” N: “Perhaps it was lucky for us too.” M: “Yes it was. Gott was very much above his ceiling—he would have lost Egypt.” John Marriott says this is quite true and it was Providence who shot down Gott!’
In July, on her annual visit to Venice, she wrote to Hugh Thomas, ‘the sea there is warm like a bath and the only out of door water I can bear to swim in (in Europe, I mean). The social life, before the tourists begin to arrive, is extremely agreeable. You see the same people every day so conversation is no effort and their houses are of unparalleled beauty though not generally very well arranged. Then all that boat life is so good for the nerves. I think it’s far the best place for a holiday, it seems to combine tous les agriments.’ And to Mrs. Ham: ‘I’m having a lovely time, very social but that’s less tiring here than in Paris and I can bear it. An angel called Contessa Cicogna has taken me in charge, brings me every day to the beach in her launch, feeds me, this morning sent her maid to pack and unpack (change of hotels). It naturally makes all the difference to one’s pleasure… The Graham Sutherlands were here, they can talk of nothing but the Royal Family, I was surprised… He said he vastly prefers Simon Elwes as a painter to Annigoni. I think I do too. Willie [Maugham] turned up, very spry but deaf and that tires him. No Ear Aid. He’ll strike a hundred, I guess.’
From now on Anna Maria Cicogna became, as she said, ‘the pivot of her Venetian existence,’ and that her life there continued to be so agreeable was mainly due to her. ‘I always lunch and generally dine with her and all the nice Venetians are there, plus a few travellers. She is almost perfect I think. Calm, punctual, affectionate, clever, and sometimes very funny. The Venetians, like all Italians in my opinion, remind one of English people far more than the French do. Not as neurotic as the English though. Anna Maria said, which made me think of Farve, Andrew and so on, “My father [Count Volpi] used to say if only these young men would do nothing they would be very well off, but they will either gamble or go into business and then of course they lose everything.”—I must say they still seem very rich, living in their enormous palaces with thousands of nice servants… I went to the Biennale to see the modem pictures. The thing now is to tear a jagged hole in the canvas and then roughly darn it. I’m afraid I laughed—to the fury of the reverent young sight-seers.’
To be taken in charge by Contessa Cicogna was to enjoy Venice from the inside a
s it were. It was not the Venice that is usually seen by tourists staying in hotels. I can corroborate Nancy’s praise of this generous Venetian who contributes so much pleasure to those fortunate enough to know her. Nancy’s old crony Victor Cunard, a Venetian by adoption who was familiar with most aspects of Venetian life, with the genealogies and problems of the natives as well as of the foreign residents, was another magnet. His extra-dry humour appealed to Nancy’s, though it was fraught with infectious malice. He had read the proofs of Voltaire in Love and ‘removed many a dreadful gallicism’. And Prince Clary who had lost his great family estates in Bohemia during the war, was a beehive of recondite anecdote, especially about the Habsburgs and Central Europe. Here she invariably found a congenial and stimulating circle.
‘With the Italians,’ she wrote, ‘rather like the French at Fontaines, I absolutely love them and then I do long for some body to discuss them with you know. I went to Freya Stark for the week-end at Asolo but she’s only interested in Arabs. She says Asolo is peopled with Pen Browning’s illegitimates, isn’t that amusing!’ (Pen was the only son of Robert and Elizabeth.)
Usually she stayed in ‘Anna Maria’s garden house which is a dream of comfort and has a view of San Giorgio Maggiore from the bed’, and she prepared to leave ‘when all the smart folks are crowding in and the nice little family beach life broke up’. ‘How I love this place,’ she exclaimed, ‘more and more. I feel so well here too. I’m sure Venice and Paris are the only towns one could bear to live in nowadays.’ Always sensitive to literary and historical associations, she wrote that it had been ‘very moving to dine in Lord Byron’s lovely stuccoed rooms by candle light in Palazzo Mocenigo, quite unchanged, with a lot of jolly, rather silly Italians, just as he so often did, and see the same view from the balcony [whence one of his mistresses threw herself into the canal]. How I thought of him, longing for Brookses!’
Local gossip was fomented by farcical rows between wealthy women of a certain age, but these were scarcely Venetian. ‘A dinner given by Momo, [Lady Marriott] and sabotaged by Daisy [Fellowes], who is supposed to have got Momo so jittery that the placement was quite mad. Three women too many. Our Betters. Then Momo riposted by stealing Daisy’s hair appointment and trying to steal her evening coat. As they are all too old for love now it’s the best they can do I suppose. What will they steal and sabotage in the Next World? “She took my appointment with St Pete!”’
Undeniably it was a Venice de luxe that Nancy revelled in with a novelist’s eye and a wistful appreciation of all the beauty now being threatened by so many factors, such as soil subsidence, a rise in the sea level, and a diminished hydraulic resistance at the lagoon’s three outlets in the Adriatic.
‘Though I suppose Venice is less spoilt than almost any where in the world, horrors assail one on every hand,’ Nancy wrote to Sir Hugh Jackson in 1962. ‘The silence broken by splashing noises is replaced by the engines of motor boats which stink of petrol, and then no young Italian would think of walking about without a small wireless in his pocket bellowing jazz at full blast. Oh dear, I do think that when we die we shan’t have nearly so many regrets as somebody like Mazarin, the world is becoming so vile. There is no English colony left here, rather sad, I should think almost the first time in history. There are some delightful Russians and Austrians washed up here after the wars and a very agreeable small society…’ The society, she told Alvilde Lees-Milne, ‘is a hard nut to crack, as everybody is rich enough not to be impressed by good cooks and so on. At the same time they simply love a new face if it pleases them…’
She was alarmed by prevalent rumours of a motor road along the Zattere and skyscrapers between the Carmine and Piazzale Roma. ‘They say it’s almost certain now. I think Unesco ought to do something, but of course they would only get excited if the works of Henry Moore were threatened. Alphy [Clary] says the more foreigners protest the more the Itis say we are not a fusty old museum, we are a great wonderful modern country like America. Oh the brutes.’ And in another letter (17th April, 1961): ‘While the English mourn over thirsty doggies Venice is doomed. Bauer, pushed by Colonel (pushed I like to think by me) has been conducting a resounding campaign in the Figaro. Alphy is very pessimistic, but perhaps the circumstances of his life make him so. The motor road will run under his nose…’
Nancy also visited Contessa Cicogna in Tripoli, where she reigned over a ravishing little oasis from which she has been ousted by the present régime. ‘The house and garden are a sort of Paradise, and the garden the only one I have ever fully approved of—about three acres I suppose of brilliant flowers in squares, like a Persian carpet or a patchwork. But I was awfully ill there as a result of vaccination and the Arabs gave me the creeps… We were always about fourteen and when I wasn’t languishing—seven days of high fever and I’m still very thin—I adored it.’
‘But the high spot was the Bosphorus where I went from there and spent a week with my great new friend Ostrorog. He has got a pink wooden palace with its feet in the sea, a cross between Venice and Russia, and he showed me Constantinople which I suppose nobody alive knows as he does since he has lived there all his life. I can safely say I’ve never enjoyed a visit more. He is on the Asiatic side, next village to Scutari (which is utterly unchanged since the Lady of the Lamp) and you go everywhere by boat and the Bosphorus is unspoilt—nothing but large villas and palaces in parks and little wooden villages on the sea. Such pretty boats, never a speed boat. Then there is such a charming life there, all based on French civilization—servants, the lingère from Scutari who looked after me (he has only men in the house) all brought up by les bonnes soeurs. The neighbours sit about like in Russian plays, languidly reading the Figaro… As much as I detested the Arabs I loved the Turks.
‘Then I had a nice week in Athens though a bit too mondaine. Lovely bathing. Now the grindstone and I don’t move again until I’ve handed in the m.s.—around Christmas I guess… Saw Auntie [Violet Trefusis] yesterday… As she always has to go one better she said she once had a burning affair with Ostrorog and got in the family way. I said goodness Violet, where is it? She muttered something about a bumpy taxi.’ (26th June, 1964, to Alvilde Lees-Milne).
*
Peter Rodd had faded into the background of Nancy’s existence. He had followed many a circuitous trail in directions ever more remote from Nancy’s and they no longer had more than mixed memories in common, bitter rather than sweet. ‘To enable old Prod to get married, which he seems to want,’ Nancy was willing to divorce him as secretly as possible ‘in the hopes of avoiding much publicity’. Her marriage was dissolved without regret, probably with relief, in 1958. All her love had been lavished on ‘the Colonel’, since their meeting in London during the war. Absent or present, and he was often absent on behalf of General de Gaulle, he remained the centre of her life until she died. He admired Nancy and was deeply attached to her, but he had always been candid about not falling in love with her. He was a devoted comrade on whose sympathy, advice and intellectual refreshment she could steadfastly rely. Theirs was a very special and happy liaison—so happy that the thought of marriage did not enter into it except, perhaps, in dreams. For Nancy, in her heart of hearts, was also a bachelor in spite of her marriage. She often repeated that she preferred to live alone and I think she was sincere.’ I suspect that she would have subscribed to La Rochefoucauld’s maxim: ‘Il’y a de bons mariages, mais il n’y en a point de délicieux.’
9
NANCY PAID ANNUAL visits to her parents who had chosen to live apart in their old age—Lord Redesdale in a cottage at Otterburn, Northumberland, and Lady Redesdale at lonely Inch Kenneth off the Isle of Mull in Scotland. True to form, her father had borne his misfortunes stoically. The loss of his only son Tom, the sad end of his daughter Unity, the break with Jessica, and the disintegration of the British Empire, were sorrows that had left their scars on this rugged old soldier. Besides he had grown very deaf. But he was proud of Nancy’s meteoric success. He enjoyed her jokes even wryly at
his expense, as she enjoyed his eccentricities, though she said she felt like Captain Scott of the Antarctic when she crossed the Channel to visit him. She could still laugh at his ‘Uncle Matthew’ mannerisms. ‘Have you read the Queensberry book on Oscar Wilde?’ she asked her mother (9th January, 1950). ‘It’s the best of any I think and would amuse you as old Lord Queensberry is so exactly like Farve, or what he would have been under those circumstances.’ ‘My old father-in-law [Lord Rennell]’, she added, ‘a terrible prig, knew Wilde well (and pretended that he knew nothing of les moeurs which I don’t believe) but said nobody has ever been so brilliant in the world.’
Already in May 1949 she had written Lady Redesdale: ‘I had a letter from Farve saying he is waiting for the end in great comfort, well I suppose we all are, in a sense, waiting for the end, but I was so impressed that I wrote and offered to go, but he says don’t. I wonder if I ought to really as he seems to have quarrelled with everybody else almost and is lonely I suppose.’
In September she decided to fly to Redesdale Cottage, whence she wrote: ‘Farve has become a good time boy—nothing but cocktail parties. One was given for me here last night—ten neighbours—can you beat it. More in character: “I was showing a blasted woman over the garden”—pause—“I thought it was Lady N”—long pause—“Well it was Lady N. She rang about twenty times—at last I went to see what it was and I said oh I thought you were a van.” However she didn’t come to the party.’
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