Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  Her jealous friend Violet Trefusis was itching to verify the least flattering reports about Nancy’s new abode but Nancy was firm with her. To Alvilde (22nd April, 1968): ‘Following exchange with Aunty. She telephones: Can she come to tea?

  N. Violet, I shan’t be here.

  V. Can I come tomorrow?

  N. I say, it’s now two years since you wrote to say how vile I am and how everybody hates me. What is all this telephoning all of a sudden?

  V. I’m sorry if I gave offence.

  N. You didn’t give offence but you did give me an excuse. Goodbye.’

  ‘I didn’t add that everybody… says that Violet is déchainée against me… My anti-garden is a dream of beauty and my hedgehogs have had children. But I die for Germany. I get letters from old Grafs saying they will tell all about their ancestors and Fritz if I’ll go and see them, which I can’t wait to do. I’ll be shown a lock of the—fair and smooth—hair of Lieu tenant Katte. Alphy [Prince Clary] of course is hopping with excitement and loathing of my dear Frederick and says six weeks in Venice won’t be long enough for all he wants to tell me…’

  Violet Trefusis was nothing if not persistent and she was accustomed to having her way. In November, ‘Oh the old creature got people to tell me she was dying, then rang up in a dying voice to say could she come down. I can’t really keep things up, I mean hates, so I said yes and she arrived one and a half hours late so that the afternoon was wasted. She was rather thin but just as horrid. However that’s that and I shan’t have to see her again. Geoffrey [Gilmour] said she couldn’t bear it when people talked (why do they talk?) about rue d’Artois and she hadn’t seen it. She told L. who passed it on at once that she thought it all very moche. Then she tried to draw me into a row with the Brandos [Conte and Contessa Brandolini] and you can imagine how far that went!’

  Of the Communist and student riots in Paris which did not affect Versailles, Nancy wrote an account in the Spectator. ‘As I telephoned the copy to them (it took one and a half hours each time and nearly killed me) I know it will be full of boring misprints… all the same I think it gives an idea of what life was like down here. I would have loved to have seen the riots but couldn’t move from here as all transport was at a standstill and I haven’t got a motor. There seems to have been much more shouting than fighting and the police were simply wonderful, so patient and good. Luckily we have got a first-class préfet de police. I can tell you, it’s very alarming to live through an attempted Communist take-over. The workers were terrorized by faceless Communist agents THEY. The whole thing had been organised down to the smallest detail and when THEY decreed the strike, the workers, who knew that whereas, if they obeyed, the General would do nothing to them if he won, THEY, if they did not obey, would have some horrid revenge, so felt they had no choice. “Some men from St Cyr came and told me I must stop work.” The General’s timing was perfect; he had the courage to let the thing go from bad to worse until everybody could see for themselves the truth of the situation and then, at exactly the right moment he put a stop to it. If he had acted sooner, we should have been told there never was any plot, all invented by him. Now I think everything will be all right except that the economy has had a nasty jolt. They say it will take eighteen months to recover but I’ve noticed that French economy is resilient…’

  ‘I’m off for my summer travels, Greece, Venice, and Potsdam. It seems that the Germans were much better informed than our own police here and had sent two warnings to the Government which they simply did not believe.’ (26th June, 1968, to Sir Hugh Jackson).

  To Alvilde Lees-Milne she wrote in a more euphoric strain on 3rd July: for the time being General de Gaulle had eclipsed Frederick the Great in her imagination. ‘The revolution was thrilling except that I never got to a riot on account of the train strike. But one could listen to them on the wireless all night, and as there was much more shouting than fighting that was the best of it, and then in the morning people rang up and told. The telephone and electricity worked throughout so there was no discomfort… Versailles is very bien-pensant and my neighbours were all perfect, popping in from time to time and telling what they had gleaned. Oh how I love it when things happen. The General as per simply too brilliant, and when everybody had seen for themselves Mendés-France marching with the Commies and Mitterrand egging them all on, he packed up his archives and went off to Colombey whereupon they started illegally to seize the pouvoir whereupon he came back and said stop like a red traffic light and it stopped…’

  ‘Masses more has been done at Versailles this summer—the Dauphin’s rooms are furnished and so on—it’s a marvel now…’

  ‘My poppies are in full fig I can’t stop gazing at them, but next year I think I must have a potager. It’s really too silly to buy faded old veges when one has got a big garden.’

  Only last year she had written to Mark Ogilvie-Grant: ‘I’ve always wanted to have poppies and cornflowers since seeing them at Fontaines and also in my favourite Impressionist picture “le chemin des coquelicots”. But these ideas are in the air. Vilmorin’s (the French Sutton’s) sell a packet of seeds called le champ fleuri—as I also discovered the other day, and a famous garden in Portugal has had poppies under lemon trees for many years. The Duc d’Harcourt also goes in for weeds in a big way… I’ve now got another very successful wheeze: huge sunflowers round my perron, also taken from a picture I saw years ago.’

  Ever since the ‘angel called Contessa Cicogna’ had taken Nancy in charge, Venice had been a second home. She no longer went to Fontaines, since Mme Costa had followed dear Mrs. Ham to the grave and the château was occupied by a louder and less pious generation. In Venice she could work as well as bake blithely on the Lido with a group of laughter-loving Italians though she greatly missed Victor Cunard. From there she wrote to Sir Hugh Jackson, 20th July, 1968: ‘I think the English are so spiteful about the French who, blessed with a huge feeling of superiority, never seem to notice the fact. Thank goodness for me, since I live in France. I enclose the General’s beautiful speech, on the Marne battlefield where he lunched with 400 poilus—I should have been in tears throughout!’

  ‘I sat next to an American at dinner last night who thinks Venice ought to be bulldozed, the pictures torn from the churches and put in a museum in New York; a few monuments, he kindly said, can be left to show what Venice used to be. I’m very glad not to be young and hope I won’t live to see these abominations. Meanwhile Venice seems very solid and very prosperous—it stood up to quite a severe earth tremor the other day (which incidentally rattled me about in my bed in Greece). I always tell the Venetians that Lord Byron used to urge his friends to come, saying in another ten years it will be in the sea.’

  ‘I’ve now got to answer about 100 letters from animal lovers. I was unwise enough to utter some rather mild strictures on the horrible cruelty that goes on. The article was reprinted in the Vancouver Sun and every animal lover in Canada seems to have sent me her views with revolting descriptions which of course I skip. There’s no more boring category in the world than the animal and especially the cat lover, unfortunately.’

  Peter Rodd, from whom she had been separated for the last ten years, had died recently, and while she expressed regret and even remorse to her sister Debo (though she had no cause whatever for the latter) she added candidly: ‘But I couldn’t live with him. I don’t believe a saint could have without going mad.’ As for her first fiancé Hamish Erskine, whom she saw occasion ally for old sake’s sake, she was intensely relieved that she had not married him. He had aged without any evidence of intellectual development, a faded butterfly flapping feeble wings on the periphery of café society—when they were not folded in heavy slumber. Of café society in general Nancy remarked, ‘What will they be like in twenty years’ time, I worry rather. Old cold coffee with skin on the milk and no sugar is so horrid.’

  Her greatest and enduring love remained in Paris, and if she was wounded by his eventual marriage, she accepted it philosophically, re
alizing that she valued his friendship above all else. Even with close friends she maintained a strict reserve about her deepest emotions. Her most intimate and amusing letters were written to her sister Debo, and during the previous February she wrote to her: ‘Mrs G., of the Observer telephones. Will I write an article on Love? No. Can Mrs. G. of the Observer come and interview me about Love? All right. Mrs G. came yesterday, apparently aged 14… incredibly sweet. Well it seems all the young people in England are in despair about Love and Mrs G. described this despair so vividly and with such a wealth of detail that I soon saw she too was in despair. She says they all talk non-stop about what went wrong? For hours and hours about W W W? I said, but how do they have time—I thought they all had jobs? It seems jobs don’t take one’s mind off W W W one scrap. She said when you’re old do you stop falling in love? I said certainly not and pointed to Emerald [Cunard], Princess Mathilde, Mme du Deffand, all rising 90 and suffering martyrdoms. At this she literally welled. Oh dear. She was so nice. I don’t believe French people go in for all this weltering emotion but I may be wrong. Mme du Deffand never fell in love at all until over 60 and blind—Princess Mathilde certainly had a steady most of her life but the fuss began when she was past 70. We talked for hours—what will the result be!… I greatly recommend Mrs. G. though I fear suicide may claim her before one’s friendship can ripen.’

  For the present Nancy was chiefly absorbed by Frederick and everything that concerned him, including that rare disease about which she had procured a pamphlet entitled Porphyria, a Royal Malady, published by the Royal Medical Society. ‘I love Frederick,’ she told Sir Hugh Jackson, ‘he is everything I like, brave, funny, no nonsense, marvellous taste, common sense, interested in everything. He had a sad life because by the time he was fifty all the people he loved had died and also he knew quite well that his nephew was no good. Have you heard of a disease oddly named porphyria? Mary Queen of Scots had it and transmitted it to many of her descendants, among others Frederick. The symptoms are unbearable and unexplainable pains. His father had it even worse than he did…’ The pamphlet, she noted, failed to mention any cure. ‘The pain comes and goes… when it has gone the person’s real nature reappears until the next attack.’ Alas, Nancy herself was soon to experience pains as unbearable and inexplicable.

  Inevitably the problem of how to interpret Frederick’s passionate friendships perturbed her and she appealed for en lightenment to Peter Quennell, who had published some of her writings in History Today. ‘I don’t want to bore you,’ she wrote (30th December, 1968), ‘but there is nobody who takes the faintest interest in Frie’s sex life. It is such a puzzle to me. The story of the young officer after breakfast comes from Voltaire after the quarrel when nothing was bad enough for F so it may or may not be true. But when you remember that homosexuality in those days was considered such a sin that it was punishable by the stake (in France) it seems unlikely that someone so careful as F would have put himself in the power of any pretty young officer? I don’t mean that he could have been had up but public opinion—’

  ‘Katte, I suppose, is pretty certainly a love, but they were public school age so that means nothing (Katte’s great nephew I probably told you has written to beg me not to perpetrate this monstrous libel).’

  ‘Keyserling was his great and greatest friend for years—they used to be shut up together for hours on end—Keyserling not allowed to go near the window for fear of being seen. Yet at the height of what you’d think was an affair, it was Keyserling who wrote to Algarotti saying come as quickly as you can (when F’s father died). When Keyserling fell in love with a woman and married F wrote “he is not the first person who has had his head turned by love”—he gave fêtes and parties for the wedding and liked the lady very much. When Keyserling died two years later F was utterly heartbroken and cast down for months; did all he could to help the widow and orphan. I may be naïve but none of this seems to add up.’

  ‘Algarotti lasted a very short time as a love, if he ever was one, though F liked his company and conversation. He had nothing to do with him for five years after Algarotti had written a cheeky letter—quite at the beginning of their friend ship. This hardly looks like passion.’

  ‘No women at the Court. But pederasts love women as a rule. I think it was because he couldn’t stick the Queen and if there had been women it would have been too rude not to include her. At Rheinsberg, where there were women, he used to say that there could be no good conversation without them.’

  ‘I think perhaps I fail to understand the nature of homo sexuality—I am excessively normal myself and have never had the slightest leanings in that direction even as a child. My own feeling about F is that he was almost or quite sexless. I suppose Monty is—Napoleon was as sexless as a Corsican could be these people are interested in power.’

  ‘The thing is, shall I weigh the pros and cons as I see them or simply tell the story and let the reader deduce what he likes from it?…’

  ‘The interest of a love affair lies in the changing nature of the relationship and if there is no evidence available how can one describe it? Allez-oop with young officers is really very dull.’

  ‘Don’t bother to answer. Dr Halsband says he’ll know more about Algarotti presently and impart.’

  Peter Quennell’s reply must have been pertinent if not instructive: I regret I could not find it among Nancy’s papers at Chatsworth. The word ‘pansy’, so often employed by Nancy with a tolerant twinkle, was certainly inept in connection with the Great Frederick, though I have heard it applied to Michelangelo, by a woman who should have known better. Nancy had the naïvety of the pure of heart. I doubt if she realized how many of her friends had what the French call ‘special tastes’. As she admitted to Mark Ogilvie-Grant (whom she begged not to become a monk with long black hair when he went to Mount Athos): ‘Nobody has ever been so ferociously normal as me, and the idea of Gomorrah gives me the jim-jams. In fact I prefer not to think about it.’ A thoroughly lady-like attitude.

  Valentine Lawford, whose book Bound for Diplomacy had delighted Nancy, now stepped forward, as a student of German history, to help her with sources for Frederick the Great since, as she confessed, nearly all her sources were in French and she knew no German. ‘I think if I could bring off this book and if it had the same enormous public as the Sun King, it might do a little good from a European point of view,’ she told him. ‘English people regard Frederick the Great as a sort of Hitler I believe.’ With Mr. Lawford Nancy could frankly discuss the complexities of Frederick’s personal relationships. He sent her learned notes on various German works, historical and psycho analytical, dealing with Frederick’s peculiarities, and offered to translate important letters for her. He even procured photographs of Katte family-portraits from one of Katte’s descendants and provided her with such curious information as that ‘the bow tying Katte’s hair, preserved in his coffin at Wust, had been stolen from his tomb in the 1920s, and that an English tourist had removed Katte’s severed spinal cord as a souvenir at about the same time, as a result of which the family had walled up the vault in 1926 to prevent further depredations.’

  ‘I worship the bow and the spinal cord bagged by an English tourist,’ she replied gleefully. ‘They do make life difficult. By pulling all the strings in the world to get into the Scotch chapel here where all James II’s bogus Dukes are buried I have never succeeded because it was desecrated in some way by an English tourist. (A bit hard, with Ogilvy and Dillon Jacobite ancestors both of whom owned regiments at Versailles.)’

  All the same she was ‘suffering from slight doubt over this book. How to interest an enormous public without any love at all to sugar the pill?’ She thirsted for a long gossip about him with Valentine Lawford, for ‘nobody in Paris knows the first beginnings about Frederick.’ Having taken time off to read Michael Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey, she remarked it was ‘rather wonderful and terrible how all could now be said.’ The question remained: ‘Shall I ever be able to put across the fascination
—if not I shall have totally failed.’

  Nancy wrote that she was ‘encouraged, to my surprise, by my German publisher. I suppose there are no light-weight biographers in Germany now.’ As her old Austrian friend Prince Clary detested Frederick, Valentine Lawford’s assistance was a boon. If only he did not live in America! Nancy could not understand ‘how a real European like yourself can go and live among savages. Oh do explain. It’s so terribly unnatural.’

  So many questions cropped up that needed answering. Was she right in thinking Frederick didn’t care for Bach’s music? Should she enter into his fiscal, agrarian and military reforms? Perhaps she could indicate his absorption in those things without boring myself and therefore the reader…’ What was his attitude towards the Jews? Nancy continued to consult Mr. Lawford and send him ‘progress reports’ until her book was finished.

  An article on the new vernacular in the Listener was a momentary distraction from Frederick. To her sister Debo she explained: ‘Roughly my song is this: the BBC ought to be for England what the Académie is for France, a guardian of the lingo. Now I must go at it with slightly kid gloves on account of silly old U and non U. I say on the whole the announcers are good and when you turn on you know at once you are in England, not the voice of America. I then go for the guest speakers (are they called that?) I say I don’t think pronunciation matters much, it changes every fifty years or so, but I do mention changes I have noticed (without saying they make me sick) and so far I’ve got INcrease, WestMINster, Cabinut, Uffica, countree, HostESS goes in, thanks, any more?’

  ‘Then I absolutely go for the talkers—how they begin elaborate sentences which they can’t finish and flounder about ums and ers, but I say the chief horror is over-emphasis. Instead of saying “people aren’t very nice about him” he has to be “undergoing character assassination”. This is always used to emphasize: “I think so” becomes “This I believe to be true”. “Nowadays” is “this day and age”. People don’t say, they claim. They don’t meet or think, they meet up and think up. G.M. Young used to say, let the English language take care of itself—meaning don’t fuss—and that’s what they won’t do.’