Whenever she tried to broach the subject of divorce, Peter turned evasive; he agreed that the marriage was over, admitted he was in love with someone else – Peter was always in love with someone else – but somehow could not quite bring himself to end it. The uncertainty drove Nancy frantic. Dealings with Peter were never simple, and the negotiations continued for years. But at last he agreed, and in December 1957 Nancy was summoned to London to appear in court to give evidence that her marriage had broken down. ‘The divorce was terribly funny. The judge, & I don’t blame him, didn’t believe a word of Peter’s statement & says he must have Prod in the box to see if he’s lying or not. Every time my council [sic] opened his mouth the judge gave a sort of whinney & said Mr Stable, you’re making everything so difficult for me. However I don’t have to go back into court which is the main thing (although I couldn’t help rather enjoying it once I was there).’
While in England Nancy took the opportunity to pay what would clearly be her last visit to her father. Farve, living his quiet life up in Redesdale, had for some years been very much of an invalid, frail and deaf, with only occasional flashes of the odd, violent man he once had been. Nancy’s feelings towards him were dutifully filial rather than fond, almost as though in writing of him as Uncle Matthew he had ceased to exist for her as Farve. She remembered the rages and the iron rule, the funniness and charm, but the strong emotions they had once provoked had faded. She saw him for the last time that December. He died the following March. Nancy went up to Redesdale for the cremation and then to Swinbrook for the burial. Both services, she told Decca, were ‘such tear-jerkers Susan with the old hymns (Holy Holy Holy) & the awful words I was in fountains each time. Then the ashes were done up in the sort of parcel he used to bring back from London, rich thick brown paper & incredibly neat knots & Woman [Pam] & I & Aunt Iris took it down to Burford & it was buried at Swinbrook. Alas ones life.’
But while her feelings for her father had waned, towards her mother Nancy became increasingly bitter. At Muv’s door were laid every ailment and inadequacy of Nancy’s adult life: trouble with her teeth was caused by Muv starving her as a baby; her inability to have children was due to Muv’s criminal negligence in employing a syphilitic nanny: her difficulty in concentrating while working was because Muv had never allowed her to be properly educated. Reality – that Nancy had been well-fed, her nannies free of venereal disease and her powers of concentration if anything above the ordinary (she was capable of writing for seven or eight hours almost without a break) – had nothing to do with it. Muv’s coldness to her in childhood had done the damage, and the disappointments of her life, in so far as they were ever consciously recognised as disappointments, were all blamed on Muv. In 1962 Hamish Hamilton published The Water Beetle, a collection of essays based on Nancy’s newspaper articles, to which she added an autobiographical memoir of her childhood. In this she described her mother as ‘abnormally detached’: ‘What did my mother do all day? She says now, when cross-examined, that she lived for us. Perhaps she did, but nobody could say that she lived with us.’ It is not an unaffectionate portrait, although the abiding impression is one of aloofness and indifference. Understandably Muv was hurt. She wrote an injured letter to Nancy (‘It seemed when I read it that everything I had ever done for any of you, had turned out wrong and badly’), who professed to be amazed at her mother’s reaction. ‘Oh goodness I thought it would make you laugh … Of course the trouble is that I see my childhood (& in fact most of life) as a hilarious joke. But nobody could take this seriously … 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 light hearted.’ ‘FORGIVE’, Nancy wrote, and Muv forgave; but the incident did nothing to improve matters between them. Nancy continued to respect her mother, but she never loved her.
Towards the rest of the family, towards her sisters, Nancy’s attitude was more complex. Diana was the one she loved most. She was fond of the others but had little in common with them. Pam and Debo were essentially countrywomen: they ran their households, kept horses and dogs, and never opened a book if they could help it. Decca in California was too far away, had been gone too long, and had finished herself in Nancy’s eyes by embracing the American way of life and, after Esmond’s death, marrying an American husband. But Diana was different: she and Nancy shared much the same taste in books, in friends, and of course in jokes. In most things they thought alike. The exception was politics. Diana knew nothing of Nancy’s part in her arrest at the beginning of the war, but she did know that Nancy was completely out of sympathy with Fascism. Diana knew this and accepted it, convinced that, as long as the one dread subject was avoided, she and her sister were more or less as one.
But it was not quite like that on Nancy’s side of the fence. Complicating what might otherwise have been a strong but straightforward political disagreement were much more obscure feelings. Nancy envied Diana the mutual love between her and her husband, she envied her her four sons and her demonstrably happy married life. In fact she was jealous of all her married sisters and disliked all her brothers-in-law. Her sisters were her family and she resented anyone encroaching on them. The line was that one way or another her sisters were to be pitied for the awfulness of their lives. Pam (dull country life) got off the lightest as Nancy did not dare tangle with Derek Jackson, a man of brilliant intellect who specialised in a line of cruel teasing with which she, herself a mistress of the art, could not begin to compete; Derek had never forgiven Nancy, either, for her unkindness to Pam, and there had been in the distant past a rivalry between them for the affections of Hamish. Decca’s first husband, Esmond Romilly, had been considered ‘loathsome’, and her second, Bob Treuhaft, when Nancy finally met him, was instantly perceived to be one of the greatest bores ever to come out of America. And poor Debo, who when Andrew succeeded to the dukedom, became mistress of Chatsworth in Derbyshire, one of the great palaces of Europe, was lumbered for life with a house that with the best will in the world Nancy could only describe as hideous, not one pretty piece of furniture in it.
But for none of these sisters did her feelings run as deep as they did for Diana: she loved Diana the most and resented Sir Ogre the more. When in 1951 the Mosleys left England to move to Orsay in the Chevreuse valley just outside Paris, Nancy was overjoyed. She had always said that the one ingredient lacking from her perfect Paris life was the presence of Diana; Diana and the Colonel were the two people she loved most in the world. Now she had Diana – but with her came the villainous figure of the Demon King, in Nancy’s mythology blood brother to the Devil himself. As the Mosleys settled happily into their new house, sharp-eyed Mrs Rodd saw something sinister in their every move. It was clear to her, if to nobody else, that the Mosleys spent their entire time plotting to incinerate their enemies and take over the world. When on holiday in Morocco it was ‘to meet Bormann’; in Spain, to plot with Franco; their friendship with the Windsors was based wholly on a shared nostalgia for the days of the Third Reich (‘They [Windsors and Mosleys] want us all to be governed by the kind clever rich Germans & be happy ever after. I wish I knew why they all live in France & not outre-Rhin’. ‘I believe their wickedness knows no bounds,’ Nancy wrote to Mrs Hammersley. ‘D[iana] says Sir O has never been so busy – it makes my flesh creep. No doubt we shall all be in camps very soon. I’ve ordered a camping suit from Lanvin.’1 Needless to say the Mosleys themselves never got wind of any of this, and although Sir Oswald found his sister-in-law affected at times and silly, he remained amiably disposed towards her. Nancy and Diana met frequently and talked every day on the telephone.
With three best-selling novels to her credit, Nancy was everywhere in demand; all she touched turned to gold, an effect which had not passed unnoticed by her publisher. At the end of 1951 Hamish Hamilton flew to Paris, and over an expensive lunch at Larue persuaded Nancy to let him reissue her four early novels. As soon as he had flown home again, she knew th
at she had been wrong to consent. Wigs on the Green was now in the worst possible taste, and the others were ‘badly written, facetious & awful. I can’t conceive why he wants it & the fact that he does has shaken my faith in his judgment.’ What she failed to take into account was that it was not Hamilton’s literary judgment that was in question but a shrewd commercial sense that Nancy’s name could sell almost anything. She wrote to him, ‘I know it’s wrong not right to break one’s word but I can’t – I’m very very sorry – allow it … You must forgive me, I’m too sorry if it disappoints you after coming to Paris & everything but honestly it has poisoned my day reading all that babyish rubbish & I would be too miserable if you reprinted it.’ She did, however, make one concession: he could have Pigeon Pie on condition that she be allowed to revise it first.
As her fame as a novelist grew, so did her reputation as a journalist. Lord Kemsley, quick to see that someone with such a talent to annoy was a gift to his circulation figures, wrote offering Nancy the freedom of the columns of the Sunday Times to write on any subject she chose. This was an irresistible opportunity, an official License to Tease, which she seized with both hands. She teased the Italians after a visit to Rome by comparing the Eternal City to ‘a village, with its one post office, one railway station and life centred round the vicarage’; she teased the Irish by laughing at their language; she enraged almost the whole British nation by a derogatory paragraph on that most sacred of institutions, the herbaceous border. (‘Every gardener in the country will resent this statement as a calumny of the vilest order,’ wrote one furious reader.) The worst row of all was provoked by a piece she wrote about Marie Antoinette, timed to coincide with the opening of an important exhibition at Versailles celebrating the bicentenary of the Queen’s birth. To the French one of the most romantic and glamorous figures in their history, Marie Antoinette to Nancy was silly and irritating (and, of course, not French). ‘She was frivolous without being funny, extravagant without being elegant, her stupidity was monumental … In the end, putting class before country, she sent military secrets to the enemy, through her lover Fersen. She certainly deserved a traitor’s death.’ Not surprisingly this gave enormous offence, and Nancy was flattered to be told by Gaston that, thanks to her, Anglo-French relations had not been so bad since Fashoda2. She was quite unrepentant – ‘I don’t really know what all the fuss is about as I am on their side for cutting off the head of an Austrian spy. Why do we dance on 14th July then?’ – and went happily off to cook up the next tease, an article inspired by a visit to Greece in June 1955.
For some years Mark Ogilvie-Grant had been living and working in Athens, and it had long been planned between them that Nancy should visit him there. Unfortunately after all the arrangements had been made, Mark at the last moment was called to England; but he alerted his friends and told Nancy what to see and where to go. She arrived full of expectation of romantic ruins and the classical beauty of the unspoiled capital of Ancient Greece. Modern Athens came as a shock. ‘I thought of it as very small, rather like Naples or Toulon. I’d no idea it was a sort of New York … I thought I was flying away from noise & smell & cocktail parties to small pink islands & Byzantine churches, but these seem so difficult to attain. Nobody will – or can – tell me what to do. Roger Hinks3 merely closes his eyes & says My dear there’s nothing to see.’ In the end she enjoyed herself – toured the Peloponnese, went to Delphi and Hosios Loukas, met the King (‘Chatting with foreign royalties is always rather easy as for some reason they all seem to have been brought up with the Rodds’), and even had thoughts of returning the following year and taking a house – ‘I shall go to Berliz [sic] & learn enough to say stop throwing stones at that kitten.’ But the article she wrote for the Sunday Times began with a description of Athens as ‘probably the ugliest capital in Europe’, and continued with an attack on the barbarity of the American reconstruction, ‘in a ghastly graveyard marble’, of the Athenian Stoa. The Director of the project, Mr Homer A. Thompson, was deeply hurt, as was Nancy’s intention. He protested to Nancy, who replied with all the vigour and rudeness of a defiant child. ‘I must tell you that never shall I forget the shock I received when I first saw that unspeakable Stoa – which I truly supposed must be a cinema or public swimming bath. The fact is that you & your compatriots are using your enormous power to spoil this world we live in, & are doing so very fast. I am only thankful that I am now old & shall soon be dead – until then, however, I shall protest against all forms of trans Atlantic hideousness in Europe, useless though I know it to be to do so. Yours sincerely Nancy Mitford.’
The Sunday Times paid well – up to £500 for one of the longer pieces; the new edition of Pigeon Pie was selling briskly; Korda had given £7,000 for the film-rights of The Blessing, and The Little Hut was still bringing in between £50 and £100 a month. (Nancy had been told by her cousin Bertrand Russell that he went regularly to The Little Hut: ‘I have always wondered who it is that goes regularly & now we know. Old philosophers.’) Nevertheless, conditioned by the financial crises of her childhood, Nancy never stopped worrying about money, always convinced that poverty was just round the corner. In September 1954 she received an offer to go to Hollywood for six months at $6,000 a week, surely a magnificent solution to her financial anxieties. Commonsense told her she must accept; but how could she leave Paris for six whole months? how could she live for six months without the Colonel? what might he not get up to while she was away? Colonel himself advised her to go, and for twenty-four hours she was in an agony of indecision. ‘I can’t go away for months & leave you alone,’ she wrote to him from Hyères. ‘Or am I no good to you? Oh how I wish I could open you like a book & see what is there. Nobody has ever been such a riddle to me. At the same time do I want to go? Do I want more money? Le côté intéressé de tout ça says yes, but when I reflect a moment what do I find? One life, not very long, no heirs – then why do what one doesn’t want to, simply for the money. Would I consider it, apart from the money? Of course not. Then I think dollars for France – perhaps its my duty. They say 6000 dollars a week for up to 6 months - 48 million francs, if it were 6 months. 48 million francs, & come back to find the Colonel married to Mme A –. Do you see why I am in a turmoil?’
But the indecision was short-lived. ‘I realized that its not a question of whether you need me or not – the point is I can’t live without you. I should be too miserable & it can’t be right to make oneself miserable for dollars.’
Nancy never wanted to be away from Paris while the Colonel was there. She was obliged to leave ‘Mr Street’ as she called rue Monsieur for a month every summer to give Marie a holiday, and it was a source of permanent regret that during this month she and the Colonel never could go away together: he would not allow it and that was that. Occasionally if she were staying with people he knew, he would consent to come for a couple of days before disappearing to Paris – or to other parts of the country to stay with unnamed ‘relations’ in places Nancy knew nothing of. The uncertainty of his arrangements usually ruined any chance she had of enjoying her holiday – will he, won’t he, will he, won’t he, will he come and stay? Then if he did come there was the worry that he might be bored – he disliked the country (except in the form of ‘some large luxurious & worldly house with pretty duchesses playing canasta all around you’), was only really happy in Paris – which would mean that he would be even more reluctant to agree to come the next time. Her letters to him, from the South of France, from Ireland staying with the Devonshires at Lismore or Eddy Sackville-West at Cooleville, sound a single, mournful refrain: ‘I always think I can do quite well without you but after a few days it is terrible;’ ‘I’m so passionately sad & lonely without you … I long for you more than sea & sun & mountains, much as I love all these;’ ‘in despair at having left you;’ ‘lonely & sad & restless without you;’ ‘a little love & affection would be very welcome though quite unexpected … I’m torn between hoping you miss me & hoping you don’t even notice I’m not there. A bit of bot
h I daresay, since an odder man than you has seldom breathed. Alas, poor Mme Rodd.’ Even when, in 1954, she went as far afield as Moscow to stay with her friends the Hayters4 at the British Embassy, a visit she hugely enjoyed and for which she had prepared with almost childlike excitement, her greatest pleasure was in looking forward to her return to Paris and to seeing the Colonel again – ‘When I woke up & realized I was back in my own bed an enormous smile spread over my face.’
But the Colonel continued to be elusive. He was now a very busy man: as well as his work as a founder member of the RPF, he was Député for the Seine, Vice-president of the Assemblée Nationale, and from February 1955 Ministre délégué à la Présidence du Conseil in Faure’s government. His day was filled with official business, his evenings with dinner-parties and with the pursuit of his innumerable love affairs. Indeed it was this worldly, frivolous side of his nature that prevented his rise to real power. The General, a man austere almost to the point of ascetism, had complete faith in Palewski’s loyalty, never doubted his intelligence nor his political acumen, but he could not look with an approving eye on the much commented on ‘entrechats et parfums’, on ‘les succès mondains et féminins’ typified by the procession of ladies of quality and well-known actresses that all day long made its way up and down the staircase in the rue Saint-Dominique. As de Gaulle once confided to Palewski’s old protégé Georges Pompidou, ‘Rien ne lui nuit plus dans mon esprit que cette manie de vouloir par vanité se mêler de tout et être partout.’ This apart, the General knew that in Palewski he had a friend and ally of unswerving loyalty. The only time in his career that de Gaulle was ever known to ask for a favour, it was for Palewski that he asked: that his old companion in arms should be given the Ambassadorship to Italy.
Nancy Mitford Page 24
