by Lisa Hilton
And Hamish did make her extremely miserable. The ‘engagement’ dragged on and on, opposed by both families. Nancy’s letters to Mark Ogilvie-Grant alternate between protestations of Hamish’s innate goodness, wince-inducing descriptions of his cleverness – ‘Hamish was funny yesterday … he had five glasses of brandy and crème de menthe (on top of sherry etc.) and then began to analyze himself. He said “the best of me is that I can talk Homer to Maurice [Bowra, celebrated Warden of Wadham College] just as well as Noël Coward to you, in fact I am clever enough to amuse everybody”’ – and lacerating despair. During one of the many severances of the engagement, she wrote that she had tried to commit suicide by gas. It came out as a joke: ‘It is a lovely sensation just like taking anaesthetic so I shan’t be sorry any more for schoolmistresses who are found dead in that way.’ Nancy explained that she had been put off by the thought of the distress her corpse might cause to her pregnant hostess – suicide as bad manners – yet to have gone through the motions at all, and evidently needing somehow to talk about this, indicates a genuine agony, even if the exposed wound had to be immediately concealed beneath a cicatrice of laughter.
Nancy told Mark that Lord Rosslyn said she might have his son if she could make £1,000 per year and certainly her primary motivation in publishing her first novel, Highland Fling, was to make money. The circumstances of its composition could hardly have illustrated more clearly the ignominious position in which she found herself as an unmarried elder daughter: the book was finished in Paris, at 12 Rue de Poitiers, the flat of the Guinness family, into which Diana had recently made a brilliant marriage. Her wedding to Bryan Guinness, the clever, good-looking heir to the immense Guinness fortune, had taken place on 29 January 1929. At just nineteen, Diana was possessed of a fantastically wealthy husband who adored her, a London house and a position at the pinnacle of the fashionable intellectual London society to which both she and Nancy had so yearned to belong during the endless waiting out of their adolescence in the country. In November that year, the Guinnesses, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy went to Paris. Diana was halfway through her first pregnancy and would rest in bed in the mornings while her husband and friends worked respectively on Singing Out of Tune, Labels and Highland Fling. If Nancy was irked that her younger sister was now considered a suitable chaperone, she did not allow it to spoil the pleasure to be taken in her beloved city. When their work was over the group enjoyed visits to the theatre or galleries, including a significant exhibition of Surrealist art, with dinner and dancing in the evenings.
Evelyn’s second novel, Vile Bodies, was published the following January, dedicated to Bryan and Diana. It was a huge success, though Nancy confessed herself disappointed in it. Much has been made by some critics of the influence of anxiety in Nancy’s relationship with Evelyn, perhaps similar to that which many attribute to Edith Wharton in her relationship with Henry James. At this stage of her career, Nancy was certainly in awe of Evelyn’s abilities, though later they developed something of a relationship of peers, if not equals, when it came to their writing. However, Highland Fling is interesting in that it sheds light on how Nancy’s own work may have influenced Evelyn’s. The book is an uneven comedy of manners, using the stock device of an ill-assorted house party assembled to shoot in the Scottish highlands, to pit Bright Young Things against the older generation with attitudes to art as one of their battlegrounds. At one point the pretentious Albert Gates insists on declaiming from T.S. Eliot’s 1925 ‘The Hollow Men’ – ‘Shape without form, shade without colourParalysed force, gesture without motion’ – in a scene that anticipates Anthony Blanche’s recitation of The Wasteland to the Christchurch hearties in Brideshead.
Eliot’s poem is complex and allusive, drawing on references as diverse as Dante, Joseph Conrad and Guy Fawkes, concerned with the difficulty of faith in a post-war world. Nancy’s use of it sends up the Bright Young Things’ pretensions as much as their elders’ conservativism. The feckless Walter Monteath’s own attempt at Modernist poetry, ‘With angels rising from the Guinness foam’, is a neat in-joke, yet the inclusion of the Eliot reference adumbrates Nancy’s thoughtful, rather poignant position on the querelle des generations. To General Murgatroyd, aesthete Albert addresses a diatribe which might have come from the Bright Young Things’ manual:
It was your war, and I hope you enjoyed it … But let me tell you, even when you have succeeded, even when you have brought another war upon us, it won’t be any good. None of my generation will go and fight. We don’t care for wars, you see. We have other things to think about … people of your class notoriously enjoy wars and fighting … Your very recreations consist in killing things. But in future you will do well to avoid stirring up the great civilized nations against each other.
He is put in his place by the folklore bore Mr Buggins (whose wife languishes sinisterly offstage in a lunatic asylum), who observes that four years in the trenches have deprived his generation of their spirit and self-respect.
Everybody knows – you are at no pains to conceal it – that the young people of today despise and dislike the men and women of my age. I suppose that never since the world began have two generations been so much at variance. You think us superficial, narrow-minded, tasteless and sterile, and you are right. But who knows what we might have become if things had been different?
Much of the novel is little more than a series of set pieces based on the more notorious antics of the younger set. A mock funeral refers to the sham wedding staged in January 1929 by Robert Byron, Elizabeth Ponsonby and Oliver Messel, while Albert’s art exhibition recalls the Bruno Hat hoax got up by Diana, Bryan and their friends, in which Tom Mitford posed in a wheelchair and false moustache as a naïf artist with works hurriedly mocked up by Brian Howard in the style of Picasso and Braque. Some of Nancy’s lighter themes are gestured at – the perennial dowdiness of Englishwomen, a prototype of the immortal Bolter in Mrs Fairfax, the discomfort of country-house life – yet there is also a nascent engagement here with those issues that develop subtly but persistently into her maturity as a novelist: the consequences of war, the meaning of civilization and the role of art and the intellect. In her first novel, true, they are slight, barely showing their whiskers amid the barrage of inconsistently successful jokes, but they are there nonetheless. There is also, early on, a rather harsh description of the heroine, Jane Dacre, which reads like Nancy brutally setting out her sense of her own inadequacies at the age of twenty-eight.
Thought by some to be exceptionally stupid and by others brilliantly clever, she was in reality neither. She had certain talents which she was far too lazy to develop, and a sort of feminine astuteness which prevented her from saying silly things. Like many women she had taste without much intellect, her brain was like a mirror, reflecting the thoughts and ideas of her more intelligent friends and the books she read … She had, however, a certain sense of humour and except for a certain bitterness with which, for no apparent reason, she regarded her father and mother, the temperament of an angel.
The book was published in the same period as Nancy’s suicide attempt. It was well reviewed and sold respectably, but Nancy’s letters to Mark Ogilvie-Grant at the time reflect little of the delight of the first-time author. There is a sense of futility, of ‘gesture without motion’, of a voice which knows it must take itself seriously if it is to progress, but which, trapped in circumstance, is unable quite to do so. There is nothing of the truly vicious despair of Vile Bodies, and Nancy’s comedy is by no means as yet as dazzling as Waugh’s, but perhaps it is fair to say that both books are the product of disaffected love, Waugh’s for his wife Evelyn Gardner, whose marriage to him collapsed in the face of her adultery halfway through its composition, and Nancy’s for Hamish, which dragged fruitlessly on until 1933.
Nancy’s second novel, Christmas Pudding, is a much more confident book, its teases more self-mocking (‘It’s no good writing about the upper classes if you want to be taken seriously – Station masters!’) and subtle, as when a
greasy-flannelled young man at a Chelsea party waxes lyrical about the bucolic delights of the Russian timber camps (aka gulags). Some of the writing, particularly the mini-drama within the Victorian diary of Gloria, Lady Bobbin, is superlatively done. If Albert Gates owes much to Hamish, Bobby Bobbin, the teenage baronet in Christmas Pudding, is a portrait from life. Again, the action centres on a country house party in which the forces of art and true love are pitched against the old and the philistine. Love, though, is much more thoroughly considered here, and considerably less idealized. Tellingly, the newly married Jane and Albert Gates are spied at a party and described as ‘wretched’.
The heroine, Amabelle Fortescue, is a development of the ‘really snappy’ demi-mondaine for whom Nancy had shown a certain fascination in her letters, the first original and impressive character her author creates: a ten-grand-a-night hooker with a diplomat’s brain. Her worldliness is beautifully, though rather wishfully, drawn and her aperçus are the beginning of Nancy’s philosophy of love: ‘The trouble is that people seem to expect happiness in life. I can’t imagine why, but they do. They are unhappy before they marry and they imagine to themselves that the reason for their unhappiness will be removed when they are married. When it isn’t, they blame the other person, which is clearly absurd.’
Love, Amabelle declares, is a talent like any other, but unlike, say, a talent for tennis or playing the violin, no one is prepared to admit to not being possessed of it. Through Philadelphia Bobbin’s infatuation with her brother’s tutor and her eventual acceptance of a much more reasonable match in an eligible marquess, we see that love is to be approached with thought and consideration, distinguished from juvenile fantasy, and impossible to maintain without a solid compatibility of interest and outlook (we might compare Elizabeth Bennet’s pash on Mr Wickham and her slow understanding of the real love she feels for Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice). That Nancy can recognize this in art, if not act upon it in life, is clear from the character of Bobby Bobbin. It is not gushingly positive; indeed, at times her analysis is painfully cold:
Bobby has a peculiar character, I must say. I suppose he is the one complete egoist of his generation. It is very lucky for him because it means that he will never, in his whole life, know the meaning of the word boredom. He will always be quite happy as long as he is with other people because it is wildly interesting to him to watch the effect he is producing and their reactions to his personality … Leave him alone and he would collapse, of course.
Bobby’s aesthetic pretensions are exposed as a sham – he keeps Proust on display while preferring the Tatler, he is profoundly conventional in his ideas about society and professes a secret love for hunting. Nancy evidently considers him an engaging fraud, despite being far more painfully engaged than the reader. She is also very aware of Bobby’s predilections – his first appearance in the novel is ‘writing a note to an older boy’ – even if she still doesn’t quite see how precisely they applied to Hamish and herself. A month before publication she was writing to him about a fancy-dress party Diana was giving at her country house at Biddesden: ‘Your dress is lovely, really divine, I hope you’ll think so too. I tried it on this morning …’
The ball at Biddesden was memorable for more than Hamish’s outfit. Since early 1932, Diana Guinness had been conducting an affair with Sir Oswald Mosley, the dashing, maverick politician whose British Union of Fascists was officially inaugurated in October that year. At the party, he appeared all in black to Diana’s white and silver and, to the anguish of his wife Cynthia (née Curzon), the demon king and the fairy princess disappeared immediately after dinner, remaining upstairs until it was time for the hostess to say goodbye to her guests. Mosley was a notorious philanderer, but Diana was not content for their relationship to remain merely a discreetly sanctioned liaison of the kind which was openly tolerated among her set so long as scandal was contained. A month later, she told her husband Bryan she intended to leave him. Mosley had made it clear that he had no intention of getting a divorce from his wife, but Diana was so utterly convinced that they were meant to be together that she was prepared to throw away her marriage and her fortune, jeopardize her children and submit to social opprobrium to become no more than his official mistress.
Diana remained implacable in the face of appalled opposition from her parents, her in-laws and much of London society. She took a house at the north end of Eaton Square, ‘the Eatonry’, where Nancy, still in the no-man’s-land of the failed deb, was glad to be given a room, and devoted herself to the man she called the Leader whenever his political duties allowed.
In May 1932, a month before the Guinness divorce was to be heard Cynthia Mosley died of a sudden attack of peritonitis. Diana was greatly in need of her sisters’ support, and the day before the hearing, 14 June, Pamela and Unity joined Nancy at the Eatonry. Mosley arrived before supper, presenting Unity with a Fascist badge, and during the evening Hamish telephoned and asked for Diana. Nancy took the call, to be told, untruthfully, that Hamish was engaged to another woman. Unity, Diana and Mosley (Pamela, who could not bear Mosley’s company, had left earlier), tactfully removed themselves and Hamish appeared to face the inevitable scene.
The letter Nancy wrote afterwards is generous and humble, straining for a somewhat abject dignity: ‘Please think of me with affection always and never blame me for what I may become without you. Don’t think of me as a selfish and hysterical woman, even if I appeared so tonight.’
The end of the affair was as much of a farce as the ‘engagement’ had been as Hamish had no intention of marrying Kit Dunn, the woman for whom he claimed he had jilted Nancy. Yet Nancy had to believe that the relationship which had cost her five years of her life had been real, so her letter must be read on her terms, not as pathetic grovelling, but as an attempt to invest the whole charade with some semblance of genuine feeling. Perhaps Diana’s daring example suggested that it was not enough for a woman to sit passively by and wait for her prince to come; perhaps the humiliation of Hamish’s behaviour was intolerable unless it could be proved that another man desired her. Either way, a week later, Nancy was engaged to another man.
4
FAUX PAS
Gaston’s sybaritic student habits were about to receive a rude jolt. He had been excused military service in France for two years to permit him to complete his studies, but in November 1923 he was obliged to take up his post as a member of the 67th Infantry Regiment and attend the military college of St Cyr close to Paris. After his sophisticated independent existence at Oxford, Gaston was appalled by what he saw as the boorishness of barracks life, and swiftly managed to contract ‘nervous depression’, in light of which he was permitted to return to his parents’ home. He had hardly changed out of his uniform before he was off for a spot of flânerie on the boulevards, at which point a military doctor, summoned urgently to treat a dangerously depressed soldier who had ‘seen the walls of his bedroom advancing to crush him’, 1 arrived at Rue de Grenelle to find his patient not at home. Back to barracks. Gaston endured his obligatory six months, though he left St Cyr with the lowly rank of sergeant, and was then instructed to report for duty by 1 June 1924 to the 1st Regiment of Zouaves, about to embark for Casablanca. The Zouaves were a distinctly un-Faubourg corps, light infantry drawn mainly from conscripts in France’s North African colonies. In the nineteenth century they had enjoyed a reputation as an elite volunteer force, but though their record was exemplary and their uniform one of the most cheerful in the military, they were definitely not smart.
Gaston’s career in the air force later proved him to be an exceptionally competent and courageous military man, but at this point he was disinclined towards the more active duties of regimental life. His colonel, Pompée, noticed this and kindly suggested Sergeant Palewski undertake the task of writing a history of the unit. Sergeant Palewski was equally disinclined towards regimental memoirs and consigned the job to a private who claimed to have a literature degree. When the finished opus was delivered to the colo
nel, he was horrified. Treachery and rivers of blood from slit Zouave throats were the main themes. The private turned out not to have a degree, but managed to substitute sacrifice and glory for murder and bloodshed to an extent which satisfied the colonel; still, it was the end for Sergeant Palewski of the Zouaves.
Gaston was spared total disgrace by the intervention of his first cousin Marcel Diamant-Berger, the elder son of his mother’s brother Mayer-Saul, a successful military doctor. Marcel was ten years older, but the two men were close and would become closer. Unlike his feckless cousin, Marcel had already achieved military distinction, serving at the age of eighteen in the First World War as a sub-lieutenant in the cavalry. Wounded near Ingolstadt, he was imprisoned by the Germans at Hirschberg, from where he had attempted a daring escape, accompanied by a certain Captain Charles de Gaulle, like Gaston a graduate of St Cyr. He declared that the experience had created a fraternal link between himself and De Gaulle which would endure all their lives. Marcel then moved to the 1st African Cavalry Regiment, where he became part of the personal escort of the resident general of the French colony of Morocco, Hubert Lyautey. After leaving the army in 1919 to take up a business career, Marcel remained in contact with Lyautey, who had been impressed by him. When Lyautey, now promoted to the highest French military rank of maréchal, let it be known that he was looking for a young man to work as an attaché in his office, Marcel proposed Gaston for the post. So Sergeant Palewski left for Rabat on the Moroccan coast, since 1912 the administrative capital of the colony.