Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  The next world: for the time being Nancy was perfectly satisfied with this one in spite of occasional grumblings, not meant to be taken seriously. Fundamentally sceptical, she longed for evidence of an after-life. Who better than Evelyn Waugh, a staunch Roman Catholic, would enlighten her about his faith? ‘I wrote and asked Evelyn exactly what happens to us when we die and he wrote four pages of minute detail,’ she informed Mrs. Hammersley (13th June, 1961). ‘I bet you don’t know. I asked a whole table of R.C.’s here and they hadn’t a clue (as English tourists always say about everything). Very interesting what he tells.’ (23rd June, 1961) ‘I’ve put Evelyn’s masterly exposé into the archives. Briefly it is this. We die and are judged at once. Saints (?) go straight to Heaven. Sinners straight to Hell. The rest of us get varying sentences in Purgatory. At the Last Trump those still remaining on earth are judged. Those who are serving their sentences have to join up with their bodies (like finding one’s coat after a party. I hope the arrangements are efficient). The only bodies who rose again at once are Our Lord’s and Our Lady’s. The body (the good) is US because we do not, like the Mahomedans, believe that body and spirit are two separate things. I wrote and asked Evelyn why, if the body is us, we are not told to take care of it but on the contrary encouraged to tease it. He said that Cyril Connolly’s idea that the body ought to be fed on foie gras and covered with kisses is not regular—the body must be mortified. Oh yes—the end of the world is also the end of time. Isn’t it interesting! I can hardly wait.’

  The unpalatable facts of death were forced upon her with disconcerting frequency. Much as she ‘minded’—and she was easily moved to tears—she deprecated the display of grief. ‘I shall be very much surprised, and rather cross, if you die before me,’ she told Mrs. Hammersley. ‘You know how you are always dreaming of my demise—well, I dreamt it the other day. Marie had laid me out and people were défiléing past my bed and I heard the Colonel’s faithful Pauline saying “elle n’a plus son joli sourire”. Are you in floods, heart of stone?’

  About her own demise she could speak light-heartedly, especially to one much older than herself. But from now on the consciousness of absences became intensified, for so many of her close friends, Mme Costa, Princess Dolly Radziwill, Tony Gandarillas and Mrs. Hammersley, were older than herself. Since ‘that Russian injection for eternal youth’ Tony Gandarillas had ‘suddenly begun to look a hundred’. The shock was greater when they were of the same age, or younger. To Alvilde Lees-Milne she wrote (8th February, 1962): ‘You will be sad to hear that George and Elizabeth Chavchavadze have been killed, motoring home from the funeral of Lulu’s brother. Thank goodness they were killed outright. Poor George had already had one bad accident and no doubt ought to have given up driving. Oh dear I mind. It so happens I’ve seen a lot of Elizabeth lately—she was such a comfortable friend—George seems to have run into the back of a lorry which braked suddenly to avoid two colliding lorries… (19th February) It was all very terrible—ghastly details—but the thing is they were killed at once. Poor Denise [Bourdet]. The only paper that could be found had her telephone number so she was rung up at 5 a.m. to be told two people were dead and who were they?

  ‘The funeral was the most beautiful I ever was at. Russian and R.C. priests together in perfect harmony. Russian choir. One felt transported and consoled. A huge turn-out of course, every friend, and true sadness. (When I think of C. of E. funerals—what Debo calls the utter ghastly drear of them—I feel it would be worth turning R.C. to have one like Elizabeth’s!) Of course the two coffins made it particularly moving. They were buried at Passy. Who next? Dolly without a doubt. I mind terribly.’

  ‘I shall have to go over soon and see Mama. The bother is they won’t let me back without being vaccinated which terrifies me. Stupid I know. So I must put by some days to be ill before coming… (17th March) It seems old Blighty, as well as everything else, is now a dangerous smallpox area and they won’t let me back unless I’m vaccinated… Marie is terribly against and keeps bringing in the paper to show me photo graphs of people who have died dans d’atroces souffrances of vaccination (not of smallpox!)… Our splendid Bardot got on to television and described exactly what happens in the slaughter houses and there’s a terrific fuss. 30,000 people wrote to her and the ministry is obliged to act. I love her for it.’

  Evelyn Waugh had dedicated The Loved One to Nancy, knowing that she shared his appreciation of the horror-comic, an English blend of the farcical and the macabre—in her case at a discreet distance. She recoiled from the formal lying in state of friends and shunned the chapelle ardente for which the practical French had a cult she could not comprehend. It amused her none the less. When the famous Misia Sert died her friend Princess Dolly Radziwill had reported: ‘Mlle Chanel was there doing up the corpse. “Alors, Coco était en train de faire ses ongles—j’ai trouvé ça très bien de Coco, seulement je te dirai—elle I’avait un rien trop maquilée.” Literal Loved One.’ And after the demise of Comtesse Edith de Beaumont, ‘she lay in her ballroom in white lace and everybody popped in here after. “Pour moi c’était le dernier des bals”, said one, and another, “White lace, such a good way of using it up. I never know what to do with old lace.”’

  If she were plunged in gloom, she quickly rose to the surface: no use repining. The reticulated pattern of her existence varied slightly from year to year: visits to her mother and sisters in England, Scotland or Ireland, to Mark Ogilvie-Grant in Greece, to Contessa Cicogna in Venice, to Mme. Costa at Fontaines, and sometimes to Princess Dolly Radziwill or Tony Gandarillas in the South of France.

  All of Nancy’s friends remarked that she and her sisters seemed never so happy as when they were united: they would rush together with screams of delight and with neither eyes nor care for anyone else. Patrick Leigh Fermor recalls: ‘It was tremendous fun being with three of the sisters together. They would gang up by twos against the remaining one for teasing purposes—more in pious commemoration of schoolroom usage and custom than anything else. When it was Debo and “Woman” (Pam) against Nancy, they would call her “the Old French Lady” or “Poor Nancy, she’s a frog you know!” If Nancy should ever use a French word in conversation, automatically and expressionlessly Debo would say “Ah oui!” or “Quelle horrible surprise!” often both, e.g.: Debo: “Come on, old French lady!” Nancy (appealing to a third party with a sigh): “Poor child, she’s wanting, you know. Un peu toqué…’ Debo “Ah oui? Quelle horrible surprise!”’

  ‘When Nancy and Debo combined against Woman, both would imitate her rather idiosyncratic way of talking, which I think she loved. The basis of Nancy’s onslaughts on Debo, when her turn came, were accusations of illiteracy (unfounded, in my theory, because, though never seen to read, she’s so full of surprises that Xan Fielding and I determined long ago that she must be a secret reader: cupboards full of books discovered after decease, we suspect, like all the empty bottles found after a secret drinker dies.)’

  ‘When young the great thing was, by appealing to Debo’s love of animals, to wring her heart until tears rose to her eyes “welling up” was the expression used, just as “mantling” means to blush (“Did you well up?” “I’m not sure, but I think I mantled.”) Debo was nicknamed “Nine”, as if she had not developed since that age. Nancy would wring her heart and make her well up about a poor little spent match, alone and unloved in a match box, etc.’

  ‘At Lismore Nancy found a postcard in the village shop, depicting in sombre colours an old Irish peasant sitting sadly and pensively on the right side of a grate. “Look, Whistler’s Father!” she exclaimed. It was wonderfully apt in colouring, style and position, and Nancy sent off a score or so to various friends.’

  ‘In Fermoy, Co Cork, she was spell-bound by a wax dummy in a dress-shop window, discoloured, flyblown, with horse-hair shingle moulting, wearing a 1925 cloche hat and a low-waisted short skirt of the period, and half-melted, so that the figure was stooping over in a drunken lurch. Whenever plans were dis cussed she said, “D
o let’s go and have another look at that lady in Leigh Fermoy!” She and Eddy Sackville and I went to see a marvellous garden belonging to Mrs Annesly at Annsgrove (Cork). There was some giant gunnera like mammoth rhubarb, dangerous, man-eating looking plants. Later, when someone came under unfavourable comment, Nancy said, “The fiend! Let’s throw him to the gunnera!” In the same garden I sat on a bench which promptly came to bits. “Look what the boy’s done now!” Nancy said. I pointed out that both legs were rotted hollow. She looked and said, “Ah well, perhaps there were faults on both sides…”’

  ‘It was nice hearing Mitfordese in so unpolluted a flow “When do they loom, the fiends?” “No sewers to dinner today, I trust.” “It’ll all loom in the wash, I dare say.” The fire was getting low. Nancy peered at the grate and said weakly, “I note no bellows.” At a picnic on the edge of a wood a huge fire was built whereupon Nancy gathered a small handful of sticks, threw them on and sat down firmly, saying “No Mohican me”.’

  In a short article about Ireland Nancy wrote that she had not been prepared for the primness of Dublin, nor for the plainness of the colleens. ‘Where are the shawls and petticoats and pretty bare feet? They must have gone to Hollywood.’ In reply to her enquiries about the Little People a keeper told her that the Russians were driving them away and nobody saw them now. But she found the country-house life unremittingly pleasant ‘the guests move in for a long stay with their dogs, their children, their fishing rods and needlework’—and concluded: ‘One is happily back in the nineteenth century.’

  Already she was consulting Sir Hugh Jackson about another subject she had in mind, the embryo of her Frederick the Great. 12th October, 1961: ‘Might not Frederick’s Frenchmen make an amusing book? Of course the démêlés with Voltaire have been described, better than I could, by Carlyle and Macaulay, still the modern public may not know much about them and there are other very funny episodes one could describe (rather improper I fear, but still—!) I think if I went slowly my eyes would stand up to it. Do tell me if you like the idea.’

  In April 1962 she wrote to Mark: ‘Stoker’s [her nephew Peregrine Hartington’s] reports from Eton… say he seems to think he is a character in one of his aunt’s old world books [Don’t Tell Alfred]. Debo couldn’t think who this aunt was. I go to Lismore on 27th and oh would that ye were there.’

  ‘Have you read Isherwood [Down There on a Visit]? Now at last we know what goes on in Greece. Unworthy, to say the least… I’m muddled about plans. I dined with Turkish Fred—got a cab to go home—said allez à la rue Monsieur, to which the cabby said numéro 7 et vous êtes la célèbre Nancy Quelquechose. It’s all right—old Tony had once taken me back in that cab and done a bit of boasting on the way home. Are you shrieking?’

  ‘Colonel is back in the Government goody gum trees as Ole Nole [Coward] would say. I went to a farewell for your large handsome café society friend whose name I have never understood. Too late now. Busy with my book (thoughts on Greece etc.) so adieu.’ The little book of great thoughts, as she described it, was being ‘cooked up’ for the autumn.

  In May she wrote again from Derreen in Killarney: ‘Have you ever been here it is beautiful beyond compare. A thousand trees lost in the gale seem to have made no impression whatever—the ones which haven’t been cleared away have got rhododendrons and ferns growing out of their trunks. What a climate!… Went to a shopping centre and purchased a china plaque with in Irish lettering—Everybody’s Queer but Thee and Me—. Now who can I give it to? Takes a bit of thought.’

  To Mark again, from Paris, 27th. June: ‘Busy correcting Homer Thompson proofs which can’t fail I think to annoy that wretched old Philistine. I go to Venice tomorrow till end of July… I’ll be here I hope all August when Decca comes.’

  As usual ‘Venice was divine, only the time whizzed at a terrifying speed and I seemed only just to have arrived when five weeks had gone and it was time to come back.’ Paris in August was ‘heavenly, hot and empty though not quite as empty as it used to be, people are getting wise to the niceness unfortunately.’

  From Fontaines she wrote to Alvilde Lees-Milne on 20th October: ‘So heavenly here, I’m still in a cotton dress can you beat it! Mrs Ham is here and all the usuals—the Jockey Clubites arrive this evening with news from the great world. All madly anti the General and simply furious because he threatens to go. They say it’s his duty to stay—how does this fit in with Gallic logic I don’t dare ask them. I sit rigolering intérieurement… Did you know that Marie Stuart was the same height as General de Gaulle? Nobody ever says this as one is never told that Charles I was a dwarf but I think it’s so interesting.’ 26th October: ‘For about two days the wireless tried to make one’s flesh creep and I spent my time preventing the old ladies from hearing the word Cuba. Quite easy as all they care about is the Concile. [Vatican Council]. Then Holy Dad blew the gaff by broadcasting an appeal for peace.’

  ‘Do you know what young people here call anybody over forty? E.L. Stands for Encore Là [Still There].’

  ‘I went to a circus last night and noted that, whatever any body may say, the lions and tigers simply love it! So that’s a weight off one’s mind.’

  At about this time a Cambridge don rang up Sir Malcom Bullock and said: ‘You know France, does General de Gaulle write his own speeches?’ ‘No,’ said Sir Malcolm, ‘Miss Nancy Mitford writes them for him.’

  The ‘little book of great thoughts’ was christened The Water Beetle and embellished with jocose illustrations by Osbert Lancaster. Beginning with the bravura portrait of her nanny Blor and ending with her conversation piece about Fontaines les Nonnes, it is the nearest Nancy floated towards an auto biography. Inter alia it contains a moving tribute to her hero Captain Scott of the Antarctic, the diary of her visit to Russia in 1954, her defence of Louis XV (with whom one suspects she identified the Colonel) and her candid admission: ‘I like fact better than fiction and I like almost anything that makes me laugh. But my favourite book falls into neither of these categories: it is La Princesse de Clèves’. Apart from her inclusion of Byron among the supreme entertainers there is no mention of any poet. Here we have the essence of Nancy within a small compass, ‘gliding on the water’s face/Assigning each to each its place’. It is a highly individual bouquet, and it still reads as if the flowers were freshly picked with diamonds of dew on their petals.

  In a post-script to her account of Fontaines, disguised as ‘Sainte Foy’, Nancy added that she showed it to a French friend who said, ‘My dear, if the English think we all live like this, they will never join the Common Market.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry at all, the English don’t believe a word I tell them; they regard me as their chief purveyor of fairy tales.’

  True, her commentaries on the Parisian scene had much of the charm and fantasy of fairy tales and as soon as you read them you longed to cross the Channel. She dwelt fondly on the apparent lack of change: ‘The bouquinistes by the river; the donkeys in the Tuileries gardens; the lace blouses, in the shop on the corner of the rue Duphot, which I coveted as a child and still covet now, but which have a curious remoteness like blouses in a dream; the falling cadence of the glazier’s cry as he walks the streets with a huge pane of glass on his back; Madame Bousquet’s salon on Thursdays; the pink electric light bulbs at Larue, rapidly diminishing, alas, as they can no longer be replaced; the flock of goats milked in the street… George of the Ritz bar; the outside platforms of the buses; the insides of the taxis which must, one feels, be the very same that took the troops up to the Battle of the Marne…’ But the cost of every thing has soared since her description of wines in the 1950 catalogue of Etablissement Nicolas where a Pouilly Fumé 1929 was advertised for 10s. a bottle and a Porto Imperial 1848 cost £2 10s, and one doubts if everybody in Paris still has some connection with the haute couture which always fascinated Nancy.

  The houses she visited ‘glittered like a miniature Wallace Collection’ and the women were generally ‘glittering with jewels’. There was ball after ball, wi
th champagne flowing from 14 buffets and women in huge romantic crinolines. Her letters after settling in Paris are full of them. To Mark Ogilvie-Grant: ‘Marie-Laure is having a Scotch ball—real bagpipes, Strip the Willow, all the cissies are off to Scotch House for their kilts. We want somebody to teach us the reels—why don’t you come in that capacity?’ And to her mother: ‘I’m just off to a fancy dress ball in black tights, little velvet jacket and beret and a dear little black beard. Nobody has talked of anything but this ball since Xmas so of course excitement is at fever pitch! The Colonel keeps ringing up to say he is against the beard, but I am firm! Dolly Radziwill is my wife in black and white and her wonderful jewels and we are King Sigismund and Queen Barbara. Bébé [Bérard] is Henry VIII surrounded by his eight wives, nobody likes to tell him there were only six.’ Again, in January 1951: ‘We are all entirely concentrated on Marie-Laure’s Fête de Village ball. Momo [Lady Marriott] arrived off the Queen Mary last night and I said I’ve got the most vitally important things to tell you (i.e. how she must come in our group) and she screamed with laughter, saying in New York they think it’s dangerous to go to Paris now, and wonderful to be greeted like this. Diana Coo wanted me to go with her as a tall ridiculous English woman with everything just wrong, so I’m going in the village school with Cora Caetani, as the school negress. Violet [Trefusis] is to be la veuve du village, followed by the ghost of the husband she had murdered (Antonin de Mun). I’m sure they’ll be wonderful. Then all the musicians are to do a music hall which will certainly be divinely funny as they are all clowns at heart. Isn’t Marie-Laure a good old girl to give this lovely party and such a sensible idea as no outlay for dresses required. We have all got pale blue overalls with white collars, awfully pretty, and sailor hats—£2 the lot.’

  After a while Nancy became surfeited with such entertainments and preferred reports to the reality of Carlos de Beistegui’s ball in Venice which gave rise to so many legends. It was even announced on the French radio that the entrée of M. Lopez would cost £50,000 and include two elephants. ‘The £50,000 may well be true,’ she wrote, ‘since M. Lopez and his suite of twenty are to represent the Chinese Embassy to Venice in the eighteenth century and will sparkle with specially woven material covered with real jewels. But the elephants are a legend.’ A young couple who, for fear of Communism, had sold their estates with the intention of emigrating, were said to have spent all the proceeds on their entrée at the ball, and ‘a lady who advertised for a dwarf to accompany her in the role of Spanish Infanta, arrived home to find her hall filled with rich dwarfs of her acquaintance who had not been invited… No society people left Paris before the middle of August, they were too busy trying on their dresses. When finally they got away a yacht race round Italy ensued, since there is only one good mooring in Venice for a big yacht. It is to be hoped that these ships will not suffer the fate of the Spanish Armada, as in that case the ball would be deprived of its most splendid entrées.’ The guests of the great ball trickled back to Paris ‘like survivors from a battle. Each has a tale of daring to recount, each gives the impression that it was a damned close-run thing and would never have done without his or her particular entrée.’