Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  My recollections of luncheons in rue Monsieur are dappled with the sunshine Nancy evoked with her lilting voice and trills of laughter while Marie handed round a savoury stew or a succulent sweet. As soon as you crossed her threshold you were greeted with a scent of fresh flowers: you felt relaxed and stimulated at the same time. ‘Good-breeding,’ said Fielding, ‘is the art of pleasing in conversation’, and Nancy possessed this art, the nature of which can only be gleaned from her writing, especially from her correspondence. Table-talk, the essence of which is spontaneity, the impromptu interchange of topical news, impressions and ideas, is almost impossible to recapture, and Nancy’s remained ultra English in its fleeting allusions spiced with puns and nicknames. Her speech was animated with tender superlatives: she warmed one with gentle irony and she bounded from banality with the lightness of a gazelle. She had none of the airs of a self-conscious literary lady and she seldom referred to her writings. In spite of all the books she had to consult she was surrounded by neatness and order: there was a complete absence of clutter.

  While in Paris she was apt to become the victim of her hospitable impulse: she could concentrate better in Venice or at Fontaines. As she confided to Mark (19th March, 1964): ‘I’m trying to work and not really succeeding owing to a procession of compatriots—you know how unsettling that can be. They never want to see each other, that’s their last idea, and expect me to whistle up cohorts of fascinating frogs. Poor old Marie is wilting.’ No doubt her compatriots hoped to meet the originals of Nancy’s Gallic heroes. Among the compatriots were several fans, including journalists who needed taming or even ‘buttering’ for as Lesley Blanch remarked, she had a keen sense of publicity and an instinct ‘how to retreat, tease, drop a bomb, become indifferent, absent. She had decided on her line, how to present Nancy’s façade, behind which one caught glimpses of another Nancy.’ To Mark she confessed: ‘I write tenderly to all fans, having been strictly told by Willie Maugham that I must. It costs a fortune in stamps, I can tell ye.’

  Mentally refreshed and physically ‘boiled up a little’ after a trip to Tripoli and Istanbul—outside Contessa Cicogna’s Garden of Eden in Tripoli, she wrote, ‘one finds old Ireland to the life. The muezzin, who has a loud speaker, sounds like the Beatles IN one’s bedroom,’ while the Bosphorus conjured memories of Miss Nightingale, with ‘pretty old houses, a cross between Russia and Venice in design’—and returning via Athens, Nancy started to grapple with something more ambitious than a picture book on Versailles though, as she told Mark, ‘my book is to have 400 illustrations: it’s the new idea of publishing.’

  Having taken the plunge she wrote to Sir Hugh Jackson (28th September, 1964): ‘I’m boldly writing a book about Louis XIV—that is, not a biography exactly but describing the various things which amuse me in his reign. First Versailles and how it was built, then the Poisons, then St. Cyr (which will appear in History Today I hope), Lord Portland’s embassy. A chapter on doctors. And so on… But I’m having trouble, rather, with the publishers who think they won’t be able to sell it, after the success of Cronin—and want me to allow it to be one of those picture books. Don’t know what to think. If I say yes it can’t come out for two years which seems horribly long. St. Germain en Laye is called that because Louis XIV was born there… If you have any thoughts on the 17th century do impart them.’

  And to Christopher Sykes she wrote (16th December, 1964): ‘Oh how I would like to talk to you for hours about the Tyrant. Between ourselves he was awful. Always supposed to be so good at picking wonderful people, but when those picked by Mazarin finally died off they were succeeded by dud upon dud. At the very end, when he ought to have been fussing about what kind of Constitution he left poor dear little good Louis XV it was the Constitution Unigenitus that occupied his thoughts.’

  ‘He was very brave, and that one likes, and a true aesthete not a false note that I can see there. I like la gloire and all that side of him. But in human relationships always dreadful. He loved to laugh however, and he loved Lord Portland and so do I (their great scream was anything to do with the Duke of Savoy).’ [Hans Willem Bentinck, first Earl of Portland, William III’s ambassador to Louis XIV, was an ancestor of Christopher, who had looked up sources for Nancy.] ‘There’s such a book to be written [about William III and Bentinck.] As I’ve pointed out in mine, the English thought they were getting honest Dutchmen and were not pleased when W. of Orange and W. Bentinck turned out to be the finest flowers of French civilization. Macaulay excellent by the way as per (though I note he falls down over the great House of Sykes)…’

  Eventually she became convinced that the interest of her book would be enhanced by well chosen illustrations: ‘I’m sure people now need pictures with their reading matter and indeed they are the greatest aid to memory. I read an illustrated Histoire des Français and for the first time I really sorted out Philippe Auguste, Charles VII, etc. etc.—comes from seeing their faces, their homes, their coats of arms, etc. My book is going to be too beautiful thanks to clever Mrs. Law [who selected the pictures]. Also Rainbird is perfect about money and his favourite pastime seems to be writing enormous cheques for one.’

  Nancy had often mentioned Saint-Simon in her conversation and letters over the last decade, and her enthusiastic article on ‘The Great Little Duke’, first published in the New Statesman (1955), was reprinted in The Water Beetle. ‘Oh he is a lovely Duke!’ she exclaimed to Mrs. Hammersley, who was then engaged in translating Mme de Sévigné’s letters. ‘I don’t think Sév could have known him really, he’d have been too young. What a pity—his remarks about the Grignan family would have been worth having—I know he did speak of her but only just. Did Sév really say Racine passera comme le café? Somebody said the other day that it is one of those apocryphal sayings—did you find it in the big edition of the letters? I’m nearly sure I saw it in that book you kept urging me to read when I was trying to profit by your company—but perhaps it is part of the new material signed Violet Hammersley.’

  ‘My article is really an elaborate tease on Harold Nicolson—rather dangerous ground! But I couldn’t resist…’

  A week later (22nd November, 1955): ‘I’ve been living in the past. Saint-Simon has led to Macaulay, all of whose French passages are taken shamelessly from him. The article went off yesterday—it makes me shriek but will infuriate such as A. J. P. Taylor I fear…’

  A week later (29th November): ‘My (intensely brilliant) Saint-Simon will be in N.S. on Friday. If the proofs don’t get to them in time you will chuckle over: “it was during a treat at La Trappe.” I so adore the idea of a treat there, don’t you? that I quite long for it to stay in. It is all designed as a tease on Harold N.—fearfully unwise, that elephant never forgets, I feel sure!’

  Saint-Simon had not only led to Macaulay, he had led to an investigation of the whole period which interested Nancy more and more, and to Versailles, “the outward and visible sign” of the Sun King’s power. In 1957 Nancy told Sir Hugh Jackson: ‘I plan to end my days at Versailles. It is a ville-musée and one won’t be for ever made wretched by new hideous buildings replacing old friends. The tourists are like ants, they follow a trail and two yards off the trail you never see one.’ Again in 1960: ‘I long to live at Versailles and am looking for a house there—not very easy to find. The other day I went for a walk there and I’m delighted to be able to tell you that our wonderful M. Malraux has had the car park at Trianon moved out of sight. Thank heavens—it ruined all. How I hate motor cars more and more and love M. Malraux who is the saviour of old Paris.’ When she wrote of Louis XIV: ‘For years before he lived there Versailles was never out of his mind,’ she was identifying herself with him. Her longing to live there increased while she was writing about it.

  Of the palace Nancy stated: ‘He [Louis XIV] built the greatest palace on earth but it always remained the home of a young man, grand without being pompous, full of light and air and cheerfulness—a country house.’ Against this architectural background she recounted the
chief episodes of his reign with zest and humour, never mincing her words about its scandals and abuses, about the Affair of the Poisons and the absurdities of Saint-Cyr. She tried to see the King’s mistresses through the eyes of their contemporaries but with all her good will she could not make them alluring. With the exception of the pathetic Louise de La Vallière, at least they were not dull, and the ascent to power of Scarron’s widow remains mysterious in spite of the well known facts. In the long run one dislikes Mme de Maintenon less than her flamboyant rival. Nancy described the Mortemart family as a French version of her own: ‘Among themselves they used a private language. They were malicious, but good natured; they never really harmed anybody; they liked laughing and had the precious gift of making other people sparkle.’ Her innate prejudice against the medical profession boiled over in her chapter on ‘The Faculty’, and she could discern little progress between then and now: ‘In those days, terrifying in black robes and bonnets, they bled the patient; now, terrifying in white robes and masks, they pump blood into him. The result is the same; the strong live; the weak, after much suffering and expense, both of spirit and money, die.’ Though she could hardly sympathize with Le Nôtre’s aversion to flowers, and she had to concede that Le Brun, a decorator of genius, was a second-class painter, Nancy was entranced by the harmony of their achievement in collaboration with Le Vau.

  ‘I think old Louis (XIV) has fixed me up for life—no need to bother with Frederick [the Great],’ Nancy told M. Jacques Brousse, who was translating her books into French. And indeed the fifty-four years reign of the Sun King provide endless subjects for biography, fiction and drama. Nancy wisely concentrated on Versailles as the symbol and focus of the civilization she preferred. Considering her addictions to the florid Macaulay and the rambling Carlyle the straightforward simplicity of her approach betrays her originality. Amid so much purple she does not even attempt the purple passage. She allows the extraordinary facts to speak for themselves. Her style is devoid of decoration yet in her account of his long reign, beginning in gaiety and glory and ending in a dismal parade of premature deaths, she does succeed in building a prose monument to Louis XIV.

  Cyril Connolly had observed of Voltaire in Love that Nancy had ‘evolved a technique for regurgitating packages of old letters in palatable form which any historian might envy,’ and in composing The Sun King she perfected this technique. Hers is surely the most entertaining introduction to the subject in English. From a French point of view she was batting on a well-worn pitch: this was the great century of Racine and Molière as well as of Louis XIV and in spite of Lytton Strachey’s defence of Racine against English detractors he is still insufficiently appreciated in England, and many of Nancy’s sources were unavailable to English readers.

  Nancy was a Marathon reader, yet when we remember her trips to Tripoli, Turkey and Chatsworth, and the procession of callers at ‘Mr Street’, we wonder when she found time to write as well as read.

  From Fontaines she wrote: ‘There’s a great deal of talk here about adopted children because a young man, adopted at three weeks by rich and delightful, perfect in fact, people has suddenly murdered a taxi-driver. Ordered him to come by telephone, made him drive to a lonely place and killed him, all obviously premeditated. The psychiatrists say, and I think it may be very true, that it’s most important that the child should know who his real parents are, otherwise he thinks they are the Emperors of China and lives in a kind of resentful day-dream. I know this would have been so in my case had I been adopted—as it was I always felt I had come down the wrong chimney and ought to have been Anastasia or Princess Mary.’

  In February 1965 she was ‘on the last lap’ of The Sun King and her faithful Marie had decided to stay on another year, ‘glory be’. ‘Book over for the moment, being typed. I go home tomorrow to correct it,’ she wrote to Mark from Fontaines. ‘So came down here to breathe a little cold fresh air and delicious it is, with hot sun in the day. I have Mrs. Ham’s room now but she never turns up for a chat—it’s a shame, she would so much have enjoyed the funeral notes [Sir Winston Churchill’s]. I dined with Randolph two days after it—he is on his way to Morocco to write his book—and he was full of lovely tales, mainly about the Duke of Norfolk who must be a genius. It seems Woodrow Wyatt said to Randolph one can only be thankful the Duke isn’t secretary of the Conservative Party. Indeed his enormous gifts do seem rather wasted.’

  ‘Elizabeth Longford’s Queen Victoria—screaming with laughter over it for days—it’s too good. The beginning especially perfect: one feels as the sixty years drag on that Elizabeth gets a tiny bit fed up with all the piffle and certainly one does—the end is far less fascinating. Isn’t it extraordinary that, surrounded all her life by sophisticated men of the world, she never budged from her pristine naïveté! The Dixons’ [British Ambassador’s] last glorious act was keeping the embassy flag at full mast when the General’s, next door, was at half for Winston. Several thousand people telephoned (so my friends on the exchange told me) and were informed that the flag is only lowered for Royalty. After this they left, unsung, and no doubt Anglo-Frog relations will look up. See you in March?’

  In May she visited friends and relations in Ireland and wrote from Cooleville House in Tipperary to Sir Hugh Jackson: ‘I’ve come here from Lismore and am feeling very much better. It’s the petrol fumes I think which do one so much harm in spite of the fact that I sleep on an old garden, giving on to the vast garden of Denys Cochin, so am luckier than most. We have got an owl and a great variety of birds left over, I always think when I hear the chouette, from the days of Clovis and long before that… Raymond Mortimer is the other guest here (Sackville is our host) so we have lovely chats about all the things you and I like… The French television had such a funny hoax on April 1. They explained that it is French week in London and they showed the statue of Nelson being removed from Trafalgar Square and replaced by one of Napoleon, while les amis de Nelson, a lot of old gentlemen in top hats had a pitched battle with the Peelers. Everybody believed it (seeing is believing). Alas I haven’t got the instrument so didn’t see it but it sounded hilarious. They always have lovely poissons d’avril…’

  ‘Dublin society is really most agreeable,’ she continued. ‘I was with my nephew Desmond Guinness who has got a pretty house called Leixlip Castle. We went to the opera, in the Italian Ambassador’s box; we went to the sale of Castletown; we lunched and dined out. It is all, I imagine, rather like life in Florence a hundred years ago. But oh alas the climate! Not one gleam of sunshine the whole time I was there. But for that I might almost be tempted to live there though I doubt, now, if I’d be happy anywhere but in France. Certainly one would feel nice and rich in Ireland, it’s incredibly cheap. Castletown fetched the price of a nice Paris flat—with about 500 acres of land thrown in and several old masters which some enthusiastic ancestress of Lord Carew had stuck to the walls!’

  And from Leixlip Castle Nancy wrote to her sister Debo: ‘The Alice in Wonderlandery is total which for only two days is funny. Viz.—yesterday afternoon an American family arrived. Pa, Ma and daughter. Teeth. Mariga [Guinness] said, “You’re the friends of Mr Macklehenny”.—“No, no, we’re not his friends”. Me (hopefully) “His enemies perhaps?”—“Oh no, we’re sure he’s dourling.” Mariga (looking out of the window) “Here comes your enemy Mr Macklehenny.” Americans (fearfully agitated) “But we’re not his enemies, we’re sure he’s a lovely person.” Mariga. “May I introduce Mr M.—Mr and Mrs Marikovsky?” Americans reproachfully “O’Leary.” So it went on. Nobody ever knew why they had come. Vast car.’

  The Pursuit of Love was being converted into a musical comedy by Mr. Julian Slade and it sounded promising when he played it to her on Mme Costa’s piano. Eventually it was performed in Bristol (in May 1967) but the critics damned it with faint praise. They agreed that it was ‘mildly pleasant’ and that the cast ‘did an excellent job’, but the show lasted for three-and-a-quarter hours, contained 23 numbers, and was evidently in need o
f cutting. ‘Almost every character comes from the same well-heeled section of the upper-crust and after a time one longs to hear a fresh accent,’ one complained. He concluded that ‘a mountain of effort had gone into producing a molehill of a musical.’ Another wrote that Mr. Slade had ‘only skimmed just enough of the cream to hold the tunes together; and yet it is still funny and still moving, though not half as moving as the book is.’ Unfortunately the money could not be raised to take it to London, where it might have had a warmer reception.

  Delays over production are always trying to an author and Nancy had to wait until October 1966 for the publication of The Sun King. ‘No it won’t be one of those huge books,’ she told her sister Debo, ‘quite all right for reading—but will have hundreds of pictures which I love because you can prove your point with them—viz. the Dauphin’s wonderful rooms, all destroyed, you can show what they were like, also everybody’s face, so important.’

  The tantalizing part of such delays is that other books on the same subject are liable to be published in the meantime. In November 1965 Nancy wrote to Sir Hugh Jackson from Fontaines on paper with a little mole stamped in gold as a crest: ‘Do you like this paper—it’s for staying away. The mole is my emblem. Mme Costa de Beauregard, my hostess, used to have lovely writing paper with a little train and a telegraph post and an envelope in the corner but now one is given plain white sheets, very dull.’ (Apropos of which she told one of her sisters: ‘Auntie, writing about my mole, says when she was young the peasants called them cunts, “a word one never hears nowadays.” She’s not in the Tynan set, obviously.’) ‘I’ve taken the liberty to tell my publisher to send, if he can, if he has a spare, the page proofs of my book to you as I long to know what you think of it. They are loose but quite handy to read—excellent print—uncorrected of course.’