And so, as Pryce-Jones observed of this intense and sudden spotlight: ‘Girls who were plain or dowdy, who for some reason failed to be noticed, had a thin time of it, and anyone of sensibility could be forgiven for disliking this particular showroom.’ Beneath the formalities, it was a grimly competitive arena; judgments were being made all over the place, not just in the Mall or the Daily Express. The Season had a deadly serious purpose. Girls were there to get themselves a husband. They also had to prove that they could operate in the world of society, amongst the people with whom they would almost certainly be spending their lives. It was terrifying, in that it mattered so much; and to a girl like Unity Mitford the only option was to become ‘a licensed eccentric’, to steal writing paper from Buckingham Palace, to go to dances with Enid in her handbag and Ratular curved around her Amazonian shoulder. But Nancy, essentially, played the game. It was an arena in which girls might sink or swim, and on the whole she swam.
‘I imagine she did,’ says loyal Debo, ‘because she was a great success. Very very pretty, very funny and all that. She made a lot of marvellous friends whom she kept.’ Certainly she was popular; her letters from the time prove that she did not suffer the fate of the rejected adolescent, that she was asked to parties and balls and race meetings and weekends away, all the usual stuff which, however boring it might sometimes be, is still preferable to not being invited. If some of these letters give off a slightly shrill note of unconvincing fervour (‘I am very drunk on one of Nina’s cocktails, I really must give up this pernicious habit or my young health will be ruined & I shall run round Swinbrook having d.t.s a dreadful fate for so young a virgin’), then that is not so unexpected. Nancy was a very clever girl who was, in a sense, still playing in the nursery; later, she realised as much. But her instinct, from the time that she came out into society, was to subscribe to it. As her character Fabrice was to say in The Pursuit of Love: ‘You should never despise social life – de la haute société – I mean, it can be a very satisfying one, entirely artificial of course, but absorbing. Apart from the life of the intellect and the contemplative religious life, which few people are qualified to enjoy, what else is there to distinguish man from the animals but his social life?’ This is elegantly put, and perhaps more rigorously thought out than is at first apparent. Debutante dances in Pont Street (strawberry ices, chinless Etonians, puppyish bosoms in white satin frocks) would have differed from the Duc de Sauveterre’s idea of la haute société, but the principle holds: society is a civilising concept, and as such Nancy believed in it profoundly.
She believed, too – and from the first – in friendship. ‘Nancy was very much liked by her contemporaries,’ says Diana. As a girl she was no doubt popular for superficial reasons – her love of chat, her relentless high spirits, her sparkling malice – and there is nothing so wrong in that; at the same time, however, she always took friendship seriously. She had very good girlfriends, such as the Countess of Seafield, a fabulously rich orphan with two huge houses in Scotland: ‘Well, Nina Seafield she used to stay months with!’ says Diana, which implies a gift for society, a natural ability neither to bore nor to be bored. There was also Mary Milnes-Gaskell, her friend from Hatherop; and Mary (‘Middy’) O’Neill, whose grandmother accused the girls of staging an orgy in her house. Middy O’Neill’s grandfather had been Ambassador in Paris at the time of Nancy’s stay there, and so: ‘the other night I dined at the Embassy & we went on & danced at the Florida which was divine fun...’8
Her social life was always good. Yet she did not come out in the manner of Evelyn Waugh’s Julia Flyte, to the sound of golden trumpets, and surely this is what in her heart she had wanted: the eagerness of her letters says as much. According to Brideshead Revisited, Julia was Nancy’s debutante contemporary in 1923: ‘Some said it was the most brilliant season since the war, that things were just getting into their stride again... and through those halcyon weeks Julia darted and shone, part of the sunshine between the trees, part of the candle-light in the mirror’s spectrum.’ Nancy’s own accounts of coming out bear little resemblance to this baroque hymn. ‘We really had great fun’, says clear-eyed Fanny in The Pursuit of Love, ‘although I don’t think it was dancing that we enjoyed so much as being grown up and in London.’ Being, however, a mysterious mixture of the realist and the romantic – of Fanny and Linda, if you like – Nancy also had her dreams of conquest: ‘Pray, who is that young woman?’... ‘That is my younger daughter Linda, your Royal Highness.’ These were her innermost hopes. But it was her sister Diana, six years later, for whom they would come true. When Diana emerged into society her impact was instant and dazzling; she almost immediately became engaged to Bryan Guinness, a very rich man who utterly worshipped her: like Julia Flyte, she was what all girls surely yearn to be, the ones against whom the others measure themselves. For Nancy it was a less exalted story. Not until she wrote about her world did she truly cast a spell over it.
‘To be married, soon and splendidly, was the aim of all her friends’, writes Evelyn Waugh of Julia Flyte. ‘If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence.’ This, too, must have been what Nancy craved, but time went on and it did not happen. And then time went on too long. There were ten years between her debut in society and her marriage, during which time she lived, as her sisters have said, in a kind of limbo: coming out and then staying out, stuck in perpetual adolescence.
Quite rightly, Debo says that it was touch and go whether a girl met a marriageable man or not, even when they were all laid out for you on a Thomas Goode plate. ‘It’s just luck. In those days it really was I think luck, because you met a certain number of people – a lot of people, going out to these dances and things – but you could just discard ninety per cent of them. You know, they were either so boring or unattractive or something.’ In Love in a Cold Climate it is made clear that beyond a certain point, all too quickly reached, there was simply no one. Polly Hampton, like Nancy, shows no signs of marrying when well into her Season, and her desperate mother, Lady Montdore, is reduced to asking ‘a noisy, self-opinionated young Conservative MP’ to one of her parties in the hope that he will light a spark. The Pursuit of Love, meanwhile, is lethally succinct: ‘At the dances the great bar to enjoyment was what Linda called the chaps.’
Linda, of course, finds happiness in the end with a Frenchman, and the contrast between Fabrice’s irresistible confidence, and the ham-fisted Englishmen who go before him, could hardly be made clearer. ‘I was forced to the conclusion’, says Linda, ‘that neither Tony nor Christian [her two husbands] had an inkling of what we used to call the facts of life.’ She means more than just lovemaking technique: what she finds so wondrous in Fabrice is his liking for women, his interest in them, his fascination with them, all of which would have terrified the average Englishman in Nancy’s youthful sphere (Evelyn Waugh once tried to tell her as much: ‘I explained to her a lot about sexual shyness in men’, he wrote in his 1930 diary, although what he said did not immediately sink in). Also Nancy observed the shenanigans – highly typical in their way – of her brother Tom, who after a homosexual phase spent his time in theatrical pursuit of women like Tilly Losch: an Austrian actress five years his senior, one of those girls whom men went after, en masse, in a spirit of competition amongst themselves. Nancy must have seen the silliness of this kind of male behaviour; but it would take many years and a change of country before she could acknowledge as much.
This is not to say that she didn’t have suitors. She was tremendously attractive, although the charm that bloomed free and idiosyncratic in her middle age may have been a bit much for the men of her youth, who probably preferred something more pink-cheeked and bovine, or more straightforwardly sexy. Her appearance – in the fashion of the times with its evanescent slimness, its odd, slightly mournful, down-turning eyes, its air of a faintly androgynous Pierrot – was the kind more admired by women than by men. Nonetheless, men naturally took an interest (indeed her second c
ousin Randolph Churchill tried, as she put it, to rape her – ‘it was very funny’, she wrote9). A soldier named Archer Clive crops up in letters to Tom, although in March 1928 she wrote: ‘I do nothing now but have fearful quarrels with Archer & then make them up again. Luckily he goes abroad in May, it becomes a little wearing’ – and that, it would seem, was that. A couple of years on she was pursued by Nigel Birch (Niggy), who belonged to the group of Tom’s friends that she called ‘the Fat Fairs’, and by Roger Fleetwood Hesketh, both of whom were rich and respectably keen. But somehow, nothing happened. Nancy remained chaste and untouched, with the persistent aspect of a rakish sixth-former.
‘How is one to find the perfect man, either they seem to be half witted or half baked or absolute sinks of vice or else actively dirty like John Strachey. All very difficult!’ Nancy wrote to Tom in 1928. John Strachey (later a Labour MP) was rather Bohemian and not to Nancy’s taste; very possibly she thought the pose affected, even though she went in for plenty of posing at this time. Asked by a mutual acquaintance what she thought of Strachey, ‘I said rather rashly that I preferred young men to be less clever but more cultured.’ This reflects very interestingly on Nancy herself. For it is fairly certain that most of the men she met would have preferred, in their turn, that she had been rather less clever. Those penetrating jokes, those disconcerting teases: female cleverness is far more off-putting to men than they care to admit.
Yet the impression is that Nancy was not clever with men: not clever enough to handle them. Something in the quality of her cleverness – which made her too distant in one way, too excitable in another – was not to male taste. The reason why Nancy did not marry until she was twenty-nine may not just have been because the men were all so hopeless (none of them was worse than the one that she did marry), but because of something in her. She lacked the intuitive woman’s touch. She did not have within her the instinct to gravitate towards a prospective husband; the gift for men.
This is not the sort of thing that one is supposed to say anymore, but it was clearly something that fascinated Nancy: her novels, and indeed her historical biographies, are full of women who do have this gift and are vastly admired for it, not least by their creator. Take, for instance, Albertine Marel-Desboulles in The Blessing, who is neither young nor beautiful but who uses her superior cleverness as a sensual tool. Diana, too, was clever (‘the cleverest of us all, probably’, says Debo, intriguingly); but she was also, decidedly, a clever woman. Nancy’s cleverness had a remorseless quality to it: if she thought of something quick and funny to say, like her remark about John Strachey, then she would come right out and say it, regardless of considerations such as male ego. Later in life, when she was conducting a love affair with her own Fabrice – de Gaulle’s right-hand man, Gaston Palewski – she would be unable to resist teasing him even when it was clear that, after a hard day spent dealing with the General, all he wanted was a bit of silence sympathique (‘Poor brute,’ said Sir Oswald Mosley to Diana, after hearing Nancy describe how she would laugh at her frazzled lover; secure in the knowledge that his own wife, calm and stately as a moon goddess, would never put a foot wrong in that way. Who would wish for Sir Oz’s10 approbation, one might say, but that is not the point).
It is probably significant that Nancy had such good friendships with other women; tremendously ready, on the whole, to pick up on whether another girl is a sexual threat. Nancy was not a threat: ‘no B.A. at all’, as Lady Montdore says of Polly. This is not to say that Nancy (or indeed Polly) had no interest in sex. That is something quite different. However, her nephew Alexander Mosley says: ‘She was very feminine, yes. But was she sexy? No, she wasn’t sexy.’ A friend who knew her in Paris, John Julius Norwich11, agrees. ‘She was totally unflirtatious. I mean she was beautiful and exquisitely dressed, she had a wonderful figure. But I don’t think there was any come-on aspect to her nature at all.’ Nancy, one feels, was rather like Grace de Valhubert in The Blessing, who is adored by an Englishman obsessed with his inability to make a pass at her: such is her elegance, he cannot bring himself to grapple with her pristine clothes and ‘grasp the waist of Grace’. The original of this Englishman was the writer and critic Cyril Connolly.12 At a party in 1950, the year that The Blessing was written, he said, ‘the trouble with you Nancy is one can’t imagine you sitting on one’s lap – have you ever sat on anybody’s lap?’
‘No I said, with some vehemence, nor have I ever allowed anybody to kiss me (almost true).’13 This little incident may have given Nancy the idea for Grace’s apparent froideur. But it is appearance only: Grace’s husband makes passes at her all the time, but then he is French and divines her sexual nature beneath the ‘buckram dresses’. And Frenchmen, for Nancy, came later.
Yet she did have one, very serious, English admirer: Sir Hugh Smiley of the Grenadier Guards, who proposed marriage to her several times in 1932, when she was twenty-seven. It seems an unlikely coupling. He was presumably dazzled by her and she, for her part, considered him as a husband for ‘about five minutes’. ‘Sir Hugh laid his ginger bread mansion at my feet last Monday.’14 She accepted his proposal and then backed straight out again. ‘Muv went on at me about it & said you’ll die an old maid’ she wrote at the time; but much later, in a letter of 1971, she made an (interestingly honest) admission to Jessica: ‘I think I was telling lies if I said Muv wanted to marry me off... One of the reasons for my respect is that she never did urge marriage without inclination & I hardly think she knew who was rich and who was not.’ Nancy was talking here about Nigel Birch and Roger Fleetwood Hesketh, either of whom – she implies – she might have married. But the closest she came, before actually doing the deed, was with Hugh Smiley.
‘I’m not surprised girls do that sort of thing. Besides the old boy is really awfully nice & kind in his own way. But think of having blond & stupid children. But then one could be so jolly well dressed and take lovers... But it is better to retain one’s self-respect in decent poverty isn’t it?’15
So Nancy did not want marriage at any price: something in her – the embryonic writer? – refused to accept what most women want, or feel obliged to want. ‘Proper husband, proper children,’ as Debo puts it. ‘I think Nancy would have loved those things, but she never had the chance.’ And yet Sir Hugh did, surely, give her that chance? Of course he was not the perfect man for her, but she was close to being regarded, by the judgement of the time, as an old maid (the grievously hurt Hugh told her she would end up ‘on the shelf’). And she was stuck in a life that increasingly frustrated her; it is fair to say that many women would have accepted the offer and made the best of it. Nancy was not like that. A mixture of immaturity and integrity prevented her from taking that particular plunge. When she later wrote in The Pursuit of Love about Linda’s marriage to Tony Kroesig – who bears no small resemblance to Sir Hugh in his wealth, his blond denseness, his yearning to go into Parliament – it was as if she were describing what her life might have become. But Linda believes that she is in love with Tony: Nancy never did believe that about Hugh, and she was too much of a romantic to enter into a marriage without at least the illusion of love.
The fact that, a bare year after turning down this proposal, she accepted a man even less likely to bring her happiness, seems extraordinary. There was a reason for it, however; as will become clear.
But for the moment, forget boyfriends, suitors, marriage: what Nancy most preciously took from the years of her youth were enduring friendships with men who would never be lovers, yet understood her as lovers never would. ‘A delicious creature, quite pyrotechnical my dear, and sometimes even profound, and would you believe it, she’s hidden among the cabbages of the Cotswolds’ was Brian Howard’s judgment upon Nancy, given in the late 1920s to Harold Acton (‘He was so scornful of feminine intellect among contemporaries that I felt it was more than a special compliment’, wrote Acton in his memoir of Nancy). Nancy always got along extremely well with homosexuals, and her easiest, most satisfying relationships were proba
bly with those male friends who were not in the running as lovers.
Brian Howard – the model for Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited – was later described as ‘one of the most amusing people in the world’ and ‘a genuine exponent of high camp’16. Camp has become debased currency, but it was once a peculiarly English, oddly subtle, gently irresistible idiom. Nancy recalled Howard saying, to a boyfriend who was spraying himself with ‘£100 a drop’ scent in the Guerlain shop in Paris, ‘Now, my dear, you’re not putting out a fire you know!’
Other great friends were the more forceful Robert Byron (later a travel writer), another homosexual and one with whom Nancy was half in love. Byron was a genuine and energetic eccentric: ‘He affected loud tweeds, a deerstalker hat, yellow gloves, horn-rimmed pince-nez, a cockney accent’, wrote his friend Waugh. ‘Wherever he went he created a disturbance, falling down in the street in simulated epilepsy, yelling to passers-by from the back of a motor car that he was being kidnapped...’ John Sutro, who bankrolled the Oxford University magazine Cherwell and later became a film producer, was said by Nancy to be ‘a marvellous correspondent because you really can say what you think to him’.17 Oliver Messel, the set designer (later to work on a play translated by Nancy18), was described by her in a letter to Tom, recounting a party held in 1928 called the Pageant of Hyde Park: ‘Oliver Messel was too wonderful as Byron, I nearly fainted away when he came limping on to the stage, this proves that I must have been Caroline Lamb in a former incarnation.’ Best companion of all was Mark Ogilvie-Grant, a man of wit and sweetness, a caricaturist who illustrated covers for Nancy’s early books and of whom Diana says: ‘He was really like a brother to Nancy.’
Life in a Cold Climate Page 10