Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  In June next year he returned her visit and she gave a party for him in ‘Mr. Street’—‘a cocktail party which Farve absolutely adores. It went on from five to eight solidly, but he was spryer than ever at the end. Old M. de Lasteyrie came. I said are you pleased about the elections. “Oh! you know when it isn’t the scaffold I’m always pleased.” He then told Farve about his two grandmothers being beheaded. Farve said “I rather liked that relation of Joan of Arc”.’

  Somebody having asked her if Lord Redesdale were connected with the Parisian Baron de Rede, this became a standard joke. ‘Barons Rede and Redesdale have but little in common,’ she told her mother. The former ‘lives but for luxury, beauty and social life—a less lively Cedric. He looks like a tie-pin, thin, stiff and correct with a weeny immovable head on a long stiff neck.’ Whereas Baron de Rede collected works of art her father was inclined to sell them. ‘I went last week to see one of the grandest collections of furniture, etc. here, belonging to Comte Niel,’ she wrote (18th May, 1951). ‘He showed me two celadon carp mounted for Mme de Pompadour (Mlle Poisson) and said “we’d give anything to know where the other two are.” “Sold by my father in 1919,” I said sadly. “How could Monsieur votre père have borne to sell them?” How indeed! I suppose you don’t remember who bought them?’ Nancy imagined that her father would have been far happier living in Canada than in the Cotswolds. ‘But how ghastly it would have been for us!’ she exclaimed. Farve writes every Xmas and every birthday saying how I wish I could give you a present but of course it’s impossible. Why?’

  Half in jest she had adopted many of his verbal expressions, as when she summarized Venetian life in August: ‘super-sewerage and a ball every night.’ Her affection for him was tinged with nostalgia and muffled in laughter: ‘I’ve found an old postcard from Farve addressed to Miss Blob M. e.g. Blob-Nose which he always called me. Reminds one of something?’

  When he died in March 1958 she wrote to Mrs. Hammersley: ‘I feel rather sad and mooney about the past, though I don’t think he enjoyed life very much latterly.’ And from Redesdale Cottage, Otterburn, 22nd March: ‘The cremation this after noon—by no means such a gruesome ceremony as I had imagined—the coffin goes down in a sort of food lift. Beautiful service, beautifully read in a real not parsonic voice by a canon something. It took twenty minutes. But everybody is rather cross now—I’ve got Carlyle’s French Revolution mercifully and retire into that… The will is quite dotty, but nothing much to leave…’

  Earlier in the year she had enjoyed what she described as her ‘visits to the major novelists’—L. P. Hartley, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. ‘The food of all three about equal (not good). Leslie had the warmest house and warmest heart. Evelyn by far the coldest house and Tony Powell the coldest heart but the most fascinating chats and a pâté de foie gras. He raked up some old characters from my past… that was all very interesting. I find all these writers take themselves very seriously and Tony Powell speaks of Punch, of which he is literary editor, as though it were an important vehicle of intellectual opinion…’ Nancy had not seen an adverse criticism in Punch. ‘When I went to stay with Tony he began by saying he was so relieved I’d suggested coming because afraid I might have minded the article. So I read it under his nose and of course shrieked—so he was relieved again. I love that sort of furious criticism showing that somebody is in a real temper. The Americans aren’t nearly so amusing, but intensely serious and favourable.’ Apropos of the latter, ‘I was asked to appear on American TV everything paid and 500 dollars and my publisher begged, for the sake of the book. No fear. I’m writing an article for Harper’s Magazine (not Bazaar) on Why I hate America. Their title. Enjoying it terribly, venom pours from pen.’

  Never having seen America, Nancy’s venom poured from blind prejudice. In this respect she was a chip off the old block: Lord Redesdale’s hatred of Germans had vanished as soon as he visited their country. Fortunately the Americans were more entertained than angered by her diatribe, which did not affect the sale of her books in the States. Nor did it affect her friend ships with several Americans, each of whom she insisted was a phenomenal exception. In April 1949 she wrote: ‘The beautiful, gay and charming Evangeline Bruce is to be American ambassadress here, we are all enchanted. I think she’ll make an Embassy rather like Diana’s was, a thing which is badly needed here.’

  The Gladwyn Jebbs (Lord and Lady Gladwyn) who in Nancy’s opinion transformed the British Embassy in Paris, did not arrive till later. Nancy informed Mrs. Hammersley on 4th July, 1954: ‘The Jebbs are a success beyond all hope. I’ve never heard the French—the monde, the intellectuals, the politicians, and the man in the street so united in praise of anybody. They can’t do wrong. You don’t know the pleasure this is to me, apart from the fact that the Embassy is fast becoming the centre of all fun. Under the Coopers it was brilliant, but fearfully criticized too, whereas the Jebbs seem to have the knack of pleasing everybody. Cynthia has developed in an extraordinary way you know. I’ve seen a lot of her alone she is so good and at the same time surprisingly worldly wise. Really she and Iris Hayter are something to be proud of. I see your eye glazing with boredom as you read this.’

  While in Paris Nancy did not consort with many French writers. A few she met now and then at social gatherings: Jean Cocteau was the most ubiquitous of these. She sat next to him at embassy dinners but never became intimate with him. Prodigal of poetic images in iridescent flights of conversation as well as in ballets, films and dramas, it was remarkable how long this verbal magician had woven his spells in the Parisian limelight. While he seldom failed to scintillate, embassy dinners must have been to him what pub-crawling would have been to Nancy, who could only see his funny side, a fraction of the real Cocteau: ‘he told me he has a godson and at Christmas he felt rather guilty about this child to whom he had never sent a present, so he went off and bought a beautiful big pink mechanical rabbit. He received a very cold letter—il parait que mon filleul est colonel.’ She saw more of Philippe Jullian, the talented Anglophile writer and illustrator who designed modish covers for her books, and Philippe’s rarefied circle of dilettanti. When she spoke of ‘the monde, the intellectuals, the politicians’, it was chiefly of ‘the Colonel’ she was thinking.

  Did English writers take themselves more seriously than their colleagues across the Channel? The first thing that always strikes me about France, even in railway stations, is that literature is taken far more seriously there than in England: you need only glance at the publications on display. Most French writers even subconsciously aspire to become members of their classical Academy. Their social behaviour may be flippant but when they speak of their métier they become earnest, with a profound respect for the precise values of words and shades of meaning. Their conversation is usually more sparkling than that of English writers but they are unlikely to ‘talk shop’ at embassy dinners.

  How seriously did Nancy take her own writings? Despite her distaste for solemnity she devoted immense patience, care and industry to the composition of her books. Her innate modesty should not deceive us. In the brief articles she wrote for news papers she remained an expert agitator: she stung if she did not draw blood. This was just what editors wanted, but readers have developed thicker skins in the last decade.

  We happened to share an exceptional interest in the Bourbon family, of whom she wrote with perspicacity: ‘Licentious or bigoted, noble or ignoble, there has seldom been a dull Bourbon. They were nearly all odd, original men of strong passions, unaccountable in their behaviour… Bourbons steal the picture whenever they are in it.’

  She had been engaged on a bracing introduction to Miss Lucy Norton’s selection and translation of the Duc de Saint Simon’s Memoirs when she was overjoyed by General de Gaulle’s return to power. Her letters to Mrs. Hammersley bubbled over with excitement: ‘We cried with happiness after so long it seems unbelievable…’ 12th June, 1958: ‘I dined in the company of La Tour du Pin who smuggled Soustelle out of Paris. His line of talk made my
hair stand on end. “We are all going into the Maquis against the General”. It’s the old story—no human beings are so idiotic as the French right. I dined with the Bourbon-Bussets last night, all the gilded youth (never have I seen such diamonds) all strongly for the General and I think underestimating the fascist danger. I know something about fascists and feel exceedingly nervous. The next few months are going to be tricky.

  ‘They say Chevigny wanted to go to Colombey and arrest the General. The army told him don’t count on us, the police the same, the garde républicain the same, and finally the local gendarmerie. They say, like Ney bringing Napoleon in an iron cage. It has all been very much like the retour d’Elbe—the enormous shadow looming—everybody saying no no and then crumbling at the sight of the man.’

  18th June: ‘I thought of you, Mme Costa and the Maison Dior during La Tour du Pin’s récit of how he smuggled Soustelle out of Paris. A young Mme du Four, living in the same immeuble as Soustelle, was induced to hide him in the back of her motor and drive him out. She goes in and out many times a day and the police knew her by sight. So when all was fixed she said (so French) “what shall I wear? My tailleur from Dior hasn’t come yet!” However, it did come, in time to figure. When they’d got him out they made one of the chaps in the plot take her to a film so that for at least two hours she wouldn’t be able to tell her friends!’

  20th June: ‘J. telephoned, “Vous êtes contente des êvênements—comme nous tous?” Do you remember the face she used to make if one mentioned the General? “Surtout pas” and so on? And always cracking up le Maréchal? Oh do admit. Now she pretends they’ve all longed for de Gaulle with an aching passion ever since the war. I said O but I did feel rather furious! Colonel is here for the 18th June of course. He looks so well and happy. I went to the Champs Elysées—an immense crowd crying “Merci” as the General passed. The Colonel says “he is amusing himself”. Malraux said to Cocteau: “il est devenu si rusé [cunning]” But Colonel says nonsense, he always has been rusé…’

  Nancy’s aged friend Mme Costa was a firm Gaullist, but this was ‘most unusual in her world, Catholic, royalist, bien pensant, Action Française… The cry generally goes up: “I vote for the General with both my hands so as to avoid shaking his”. They vote for him because “who else is there?” But they hate.’ Nancy concluded ‘it’s not the jeunesse dorée who are against the General but sort of forty-year-old ultra-Conservatives.’ This was probably true of her fellow guests at Fontaines.

  After July in Venice and Rome, where the temperature rose to 101 degrees and Nancy saw two women carried out of the Vatican, ‘evidently dead’, she confessed: ‘I sigh for the land of the cypress and myrtle—I loathe the oak and the ash.’ In August she visited her mother at Inch Kenneth, Isle of Mull, where she ‘caught a powerful Scotch germ which simply floored me and drove away the health so expensively acquired in Venice. I must say northern climes do not suit me.’ To Mrs. Hammersley she confided: ‘Muv says she lives here because there are no tourists. But her eye is glued to a telescope and as soon as a tent appears on Mull she sends a boat and the amazed occupants are press-ganged over and given a vast tea. Yesterday two jolly Lesbians in trousers were the bag… The deaf aid has been discarded for good and so it is yelling and even then hardly being heard. But anyhow she never used to listen to one, so not much change.’

  With her mother an exchange of letters was easier than conversation. They wrote to each other often and Lady Redesdale kept Nancy’s letters in separate envelopes. She must have enjoyed them, for it is obvious that Nancy took trouble to amuse her with descriptions of the people she was seeing and comments on what she was writing and reading as well as current events. They were the best substitutes for talk, and they read like talk: ‘Did I tell you about the lady who dis covered her maid had never been to a theatre and sent her off for a treat to one. “Eh bien Madame—n’est ce pas—le rideau se lève et voilà des gens qui discutent leurs affaires de famille. Moi je suis partie.” I told Mme Costa who said when she had a box at the opera she used always to take a seat for her valet de pied until he begged her to excuse him and let him wait outside with the others because he found it so ennuyeux!’

  Mindful of her mother’s views on health and distrust of modern medicine, for ‘she did not really believe in illness’, Nancy fed her with tit-bits about doctors and medical fads: ‘Louis XIV’s doctor, who lived to be over a hundred, always said the reason fish live to be so old is that they are never exposed to courants d’air. He slept in a sort of leather envelope head and all so as to be quite away from them…’

  ‘About doctors. I heard a woman in the Ritz saying: “on lui a fait des soins si terribles qu’il en est mort dans la nuit.” I’ve just read a life of Louis XIII who was literally killed by doctors at the age of 42. Several times he seemed on his death bed and they gave up their “soins” upon which he always rallied. This was put down to the prayers of the Paris convents—nobody put two and two together. Richelieu who adored him urged the doctors to more and more terrible soins and stood over him to see that he did all they said. You know he was married for 23 years before Louis XIV was born. At the beginning Anne of Austria had several miscarriages—then they became very much estranged. Finally the courtiers got them into the same bed by a trick and alerted all the convents within reach—the nuns prayed all night and Louis XIV was the result!…’

  ‘Momo [Marriott] just back from U.S., tells me that as well as a blood bank they now have a bone bank and you can ring up for a big toe joint or a new collar bone. I knew you’d enjoy that…

  ‘Have you heard of Gaylord Hauser. He’s an American who, like Uncle Geoff, lives on wheat germ and honey and, unlike Uncle Geoff, has made a fortune out of it. The menus are to make you cry, all the things ONE hates most, but I’ve no doubt there’s a lot in it. He’s having a wild success here in the American set—can’t believe the French would ever take it up. I do think it’s a shame Uncle Geoff didn’t cash in first.’

  ‘I’m told Americans now have blood transfusions for every thing, even after a late night. I’m sure it’s just what I need: horrors!’

  When Lady Redesdale went to assist a pregnant neighbour in an emergency Nancy gave full rein to her fantasy: ‘I so screamed at the idea of you, dissembling your nervousness, acting as midwife to this poor lady. (Knowing your aversion to antiseptics I see she is foredoomed to death by septicaemia.) Then of course you must shake the child to make it breathe and if it is a blue baby send to Oban for an iron lung—if a monster (elephant head or three legs) it’s your duty to do away with it, if quins, your fortune will be made. Goodness! In any event I should think there will be a lot of unwelcome publicity. Coroner’s frank words to peeress, mother of seven. Were the instruments boiled? Unfortunately no provision for so-called mercy killing exists in the law of this land. Etc, etc. If I were you I should hurry her into a clinic now, before it’s too late.’

  Presumably Nancy had sent her mother the Gide-Claudel letters, for she wrote: ‘I must admit the idea of your being entirely on Gide’s side is the funniest thing I ever heard in a long life. Well I have no moral feelings, specially, about all that, but I couldn’t help being on Claudel’s side for his strength, single-mindedness and the beautiful French he writes.’

  ‘The Marquise d’Harcourt was a hundred this month. She said to her daughter, “What are pederasts?” “Oh Mother I really can’t tell you.” “If you can’t tell me when I’m a hundred when can you tell me?” She was ordering a dress for the birthday party and said to the dressmaker, “I expect my clothes to last quite ten years”.’

  Characteristically there were intermittent teases: ‘I did love the photograph (of self as child). What a furious face—of course everybody was so unkind to me it’s a wonder my temper wasn’t ruined for ever. When I think of modern children—how the voice must never be raised and how they are hurried to the psycho-analyst’s sofa for the least thing, I don’t know why I’m not raving in an asylum. You know how my childhood is hid
den in a cloud (so terribly unhappy that Nature has mercifully caused me to forget it).’

  But Nancy’s teasing could go too far in print, and Lady Redesdale was offended by the references to herself in Blor, the portrait of Nancy’s Nanny which she considered one of her best writings. By way of apology Nancy wrote to her mother: ‘Oh goodness I thought it would make you laugh. I always feel one’s young self is like a completely different person one can view quite objectively and laugh at—in my case at least this is true. Of course one can’t very well write about a Nanny and leave out the mother and for the modern reader one must explain the complete difference between mothers and children in those far off days from now. If I did a portrait of you (which I won’t) you would come out quite different from the oblique view seen, as it were, across Nanny. In any case everybody knows you are Aunt Sadie [in The Pursuit of Love] who is a character in the round and is you in middle life exactly as you were… It’s one’s eccentricities people love one for.’

  Did Nancy’s conscience prick her? She continued in a second letter: ‘I’ve read the piece again. Of course the trouble is that I see my childhood (in fact most of my life) as a hilarious joke. But nobody could take this seriously—bobby in the nursery—Titanic—and so on—all clearly a caricature, what’s called Meant to be Funny. If you seem to have been rather frivolous so was everybody at that time. Edwardian women are famous for having been lighthearted. The tone of the whole book is meant to be light, frivolous and satirical… Voltaire used to say qui plume a, guerre a, too true.’

  Lady Redesdale was not instantly mollified, for Nancy wrote again: ‘Anything which now seems odd or unfortunate in my childhood wasn’t your fault it was that of the age we lived in. Children were not considered then—or at least girls weren’t. The Duc Decazes and my neighbour Bagneux (French equivalents of Farve) loathe Paris. They both live here, groaning, in order to educate their children. This could not have happened in the England of your (and my) young days. To state that it did not happen is not to reproach you but the whole social structure. I carefully said in the essay that the relationship of parents and children is quite different now.’