But she was not, as has been said, a pitiable figure. So she liked a man better than he liked her: big deal. Yet this idea about Nancy has taken a grip so firm it is almost impossible to loosen: that her passion for Palewski overwhelmed her life, that he became as necessary to her as oxygen, while she, to him, was nothing more than an aristocratic bit on the side, a nuisance; and that therefore she was pathetic, unloved, dissatisfied, what you will. The BBC Omnibus programme took exactly this line, as did an essay in The Sunday Times which referred to Nancy spending ‘nearly 30 years as [Palewski]’s tragic, ridiculous hanger-on’ and writing, post-Pursuit of Love, ‘novels whose cleverness was overshadowed by an empty gaiety and brittle chill’.
But this, surely, is a very conventional take upon a highly unusual woman. It applies to her an orthodoxy that contains a dash of sixth-former feminism and a dollop of Women’s Institute traditionalism: it says that she should not have been hurling herself in so unsisterly a manner at this man, while at the same time it laments the fact that she did not manage to snare him. ‘She referred to herself, with bright sadness, as La Palewska’.37 Poor Nancy! – a failure, then, on all female fronts. And all the time refusing to admit her terrible sadness, keeping up the glittering mask, behind which lay her broken heart, her empty pelvis, her anguished mind.
For a start, the ‘La Palewska’ remark was initially made about her by another person: in 1946 her enemy-friend Violet Trefusis38 had said that Palewski had become so English he should be called Colonel Mitford, whilst Nancy was now so foreign that she should be called La Palewska. So to attribute tragic implications to this name is misleading, and typical of the way Nancy’s love for Palewski has been treated, which ignores so much of what she was actually like. In her own mind, her life was a joyful one, even if she never waltzed down the Champs-Élysées in white Dior with the man of her dreams. Why must she be assumed to be lying, or suppressing her true feelings? And why, in an age which professes to believe absolutely in the idea of female autonomy, should this bright-spirited woman, whose inner resources were so many, be condemned as a pitiable Mariana because she had neither a successful marriage nor a child? She had, as Diana says, ‘great compensations’. Not least of which was her own temperament: what Alistair Forbes called ‘her wonderful capacity for happiness’.
In June 1944 Palewski returned to London, and to her. It was only for a couple of weeks, during which time they dined together (although not as a couple) at Alvilde Chaplin’s39 along with James Lees-Milne, Emerald Cunard and Harold Acton: an intensely civilised evening, at which Lady Cunard made the unconsciously apposite remark, ‘What is the use of a handsome husband? They soon become less handsome, and in the end they are nothing but an incubus.’ How Nancy would have agreed; and how happy she must have been contemplating her lover as he chatted knowledgeably about French literature to Harold Acton, or about de Gaulle’s anti-Americanism to James Lees-Milne.
But then Palewski went home to France, with his General, for the imminent liberation; and this time it would be for good. All Nancy now had to look forward to was the occasional visit to Paris. According to the Cassandra commentators she should have been contemplating suicide, and yet she wrote to Mrs Hammersley in fine mood, saying, ‘Yes I do feel gloomy without the Col but I don’t believe it will be another year before I see him again & I must say it cheered me up – all the jokes you know & they are in such spirits... The Colonel knew all my letters by heart (flattering?).’ Hardly the voice of a Lydia Languish; of course some of it was probably front, but the front was successful.
And even while Palewski had been away in Algiers, all had not been unrelieved gloom. Diana and her husband were released from prison at the end of November 1943, which relieved Nancy from any deep-buried guilt (‘the first thing she did was ask, could she come to stay?’ says Diana). Work at Heywood Hill continued to give pleasure: ‘I am still entirely running the bookshop & like it’, Nancy wrote to Jessica in March 1944, ‘though I get rather tired and discouraged sometimes’. (Anne Hill had left the shop to have a baby; Nancy had acquired an assistant, Mollie Friese-Greene, with whom she got along very well, although she now believed herself to be seriously underpaid.)
Despite long hours (firewatching as well as bookshop-management), little food (‘I found a chicken chez Jackson... on presenting this much heralded fowl to Gladys she immediately discovered it to be crawling with maggots!... we all cried a great deal’), and no decent clothes (‘the most utter horrors [dresses] you ever saw for £23, cheap & dreadful looking, what is one to do?’), Nancy maintained her urbane social life among the usual suspects. A party at Cecil Beaton’s; a dinner at Boulestin; a lunch at Emerald Cunard’s; it doesn’t sound too bad for life during wartime. She also had the glorious retreat of Gerald Berners’ supremely beautiful house at Faringdon in Oxfordshire, where she would spend weekends and find ‘a double relief from discomfort and from boredom’, as she wrote in 1948.40 ‘I can remember, during the tedious or frightening but always sleepless nights of fire-watching in wartime London, that the place I longed to be most intensely was the red bedroom at Faringdon, with its cracking fire, its Bessabarian carpet of bunchy flowers and above all its four-post bed.’ As her marriage moved off into the middle distance, and her love affair hovered tactfully in the wings, so Nancy’s friends began to assume the structural importance that they would have for the rest of her life. Lord Berners was a good friend to everyone whom he cared about – he visited Diana in Holloway with aristocratic disdain for censure – and Nancy valued him as much for his kindness as for the aesthetic refreshment that she found in his home (although the sight of Lord Berners’ dyed pigeons fluttering ‘like a cloud of confetti’, or the touch of Sèvres and Dresden, would have been welcome compared with the chickens that wandered through her Blomfield Road garden41, and the clink of British Restaurant cutlery).
Nancy was not at all unhappy at Faringdon House. Despite the absence of Palewski, she found intense pleasure in these weekends. Then there was the day in April 1944, described by James Lees-Milne in his diary, when Nancy (and the beloved, stalwart bulldog Milly) drove with him to the National Trust property of Polesden Lacey: ‘we ate sandwiches on the south verandah. Nancy even sunbathed in the afternoon. When I had finished my work we wandered in the fields, picking cowslips (nearly over already). N. at her sweetest and happiest. A heavenly day.’ So where, one wonders, is this woman in torment? It was Palewski who had released in her the ‘wonderful capacity for happiness’; even in his absence this was there, waiting for whatever might fill it. It is simply, demonstrably, wrong to say that only his presence could do so.
She wanted to be with him, she wanted the hope of seeing him, she wanted – in June 1944 – to feel that she would visit him in Paris. But did she want, more than anything in the world, to be ‘La Palewska’? Would her capacity for happiness have been filled to bursting point had the Colonel proposed marriage and whisked her off to his apartment in the Rue Bonaparte, for a life of nightly bliss and daily blind-eye turning? ‘I suppose she’d have very much welcomed it,’ says Diana; ‘whether it would have been a success is another matter. I think he would still have hurt her, probably.’ Almost certainly; and anyway one wonders if, in the end, marriage to Palewski was what she truly craved. She would have liked to be asked, of course, but that is not the same thing.
Nancy longed for love but what she wanted was love of the all-consuming kind, which she undoubtedly felt for Gaston Palewski: ‘...she was filled with a strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness, and knew that this was love’, she would later write of Linda, and the strength of emotion is unmistakable. But Linda’s affair with Fabrice is cut short; it never has to deal with reality; and this was Nancy’s ideal of love. One comes back to the early days, to her infatuation with Hamish St Clair-Erskine, and to the unchanging blend of romanticism and separateness that was her nature. She was not a person who could integrate love into life. In some mysterious way, of which she was probably not conscious, she preferred the state of y
earning, of dramatising her situation to her friends, of non-attainment. She greatly valued the idea of marriage: she liked its sanity, its structure, the way in which it put a woman’s life into some sort of order. At the same time, and over and over again, she put herself into positions that made the idea unfeasible.
Why did she have to fall every time for impossible men? She was, as many people say, ‘a bad picker’. And this was, as Debo says, ‘bad luck’. But was it not, also, something to do with Nancy herself? She preferred Hamish to Hugh Smiley, Peter to (for example) Nigel Birch, Gaston Palewski to André Roy: to choose wrongly twice may be considered a misfortune, but three times looks like carelessness. What about the Free Frenchman Marc, Prince de Beauvau-Craon, who pursued her during Palewski’s absence in Algiers, and who wrote to her: ‘Nancy darling... do you think of me a little bit, if so how much?’ (The answer, despite some nice dinners at the Savoy, was no: Marc was years too young for her42, but his real crime was probably to be so hideously smitten.)
This was an attractive woman, who could have found a man with whom to share a happy life. She could also have made a far better fist of being happy with Palewski – who obviously liked her enough to return to her from Algiers – had she not let her emotions rush her off into the rapids of impotent jealousy (which, as her beloved Proust would have reminded her, is the fuel that feeds Nancy’s kind of love). This is the kind of truth that she knew all too well and put into her novels. Yet something in her resisted it in reality. Which makes one feel that this was how she wanted it: to live in a state of being poised, eternally, at the edges of celestial fulfilment.
For when she wrote about Linda and Fabrice, and the affair that exists in an enclosed world (a visit from two English friends almost shatters the crystal bubble of Linda’s contentment), she was describing her own image of perfection. ‘Sun, silence, and happiness.’ Of course Linda and Fabrice are mutually in love: therein lay the great, the chasm-like difference between them and their real-life counterparts. But the point remains, that what gave Nancy most pleasure of all was an ideal of love, such as she makes Linda and Fabrice embody. She was, after all, an artist; she had the power to create; it is of immense importance, this transcendent dimension that she had in her life. She created Fabrice out of love for Palewski, but also because by the time the war ended she had become a real writer, with a writer’s independent spirit. And when Palewski let her down, she still had the power to make Fabrice say to Linda: ‘I came to tell you that I love you.’ It was poignant, this rewriting of her affair; it was born of a sometimes desperate longing; but it brought its own purer, truer, untouchable satisfaction.
1* ‘Châteaubriand sends one to sleep’
2* ‘As a lover of fine china...’
3* ‘I used the word “avalanche” for reasons of style, not to complain about the number of letters you send.’
7
And who knows? Maybe the grande passion of Nancy’s life was for France, rather than for the man who embodied it. Maybe that was why she loved him so much: because in Gaston Palewski she saw another world, and through him she glimpsed the possibility of escape to a place that would allow her to flourish as never before. Nancy was as English as tea and walnut cake at Gunter’s, but it was only in France that this Englishness would truly bloom. More than almost anyone, she was an example of the freedom that moving to a foreign country can bring: the freedom to be her best possible self.
As a girl she had fallen for Paris – she had stood at the top of the Avenue Henri-Martin and felt tears gather at its sheer sweeping perfection – and now, through her dealings with the Free French officers (not just Palewski), she had come to feel that this was the place in which she would be happiest. ‘Oh to live in Paris, I’d give anything’, she wrote to her mother in September 1944. Just as when she married Peter, back in 1933, she was in real need of a new life. Her old one held almost nothing for her.
In Paris, Nancy believed, she would find all that she craved: the right things taken seriously, the right things laughed at, an enlivening tension between politesse and pleasure, above all an appreciation of One. And then there was what she would leave behind: the schoolboyish men, the dowdy women (‘English girls in navy blue with white touches’), the bombed streets like mouths with missing teeth, the wretched husband and the family feuds. It was a dream, of course, as was so much for Nancy. Post-war Paris was poor, hungry, humiliated, still blazing with feral memories of muffled screams in the Gestapo headquarters on the Avenue Foch, of collaborators shot without trial, of women wandering even the smartest streets with shaven heads, of a prostitute who had served Germans kicked to death in the 18ème. Nancy must have known all this; yet her image of the place was too strong for the reality, she believed those dusk- and champagne-coloured streets to hold the secret of all joy: and so strong was her belief that it did, indeed, prove true.
But was it because the streets also held Gaston Palewski? This is the conventional wisdom: ‘Because of the Colonel she went to live in France’, wrote James Lees-Milne after Nancy’s death, in a manner that brooked no dissent. She wanted to go haring off to Paris not because she yearned for the view from the Pont-Neuf, but because she wanted to be near the Colonel. Which she did. But would she have hankered to be near him quite so much had he lived in Antwerp or Belfast? Palewski and Paris were intertwined, inseparable. As London grew ever drearier, so he brought a vision of this wonderful other world – this Paris, not of the Occupation, but of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour – into her drawing-room at Blomfield Road. She had heard the sound of Voltaire in his voice, traced the outlines of Fragonards on the dank walls behind his head. And it was this – at least as much as Palewski himself – that she had fallen for. Her lover was, indeed, the forty kings of France rolled into one; had he been Ethelred the Unready and George V, Nancy’s passion for him would not – however powerful his various charms – have sustained itself. No, she was in love with a country as well as with a man; each love intensified the other, impelled by her imagination. And her affair with France would be the most successful of her life.
She thought of visiting Paris from the moment Palewski left for France in June 1944 – would have leaped on the first boat train had she dared – but then the idea began to grow that she might do more than visit. This idea was born of an urge to see her lover, yet it was also something more. ‘I am angling like mad for a job in Paris’, she wrote to her mother in September, ‘but all rather nebulous, tho’ I think it may come off... I got a lot of books from there last week by a wangle, the only bookseller who has. They are like water in a drought & I sold £20 worth the first day!’
The plan – commercially sensible, but pursued with an ulterior motive – was to establish a Parisian connection for Heywood Hill (‘selling Cobbett’s Rural Rides to the French’, as Evelyn Waugh put it). Meanwhile the final months of the war had still to be got through, irksome and drab, during which the shop became a bit of a bore to Nancy. ‘I do not like hard regular work,’ she wrote to Diana in March 1945. ‘However many people it seems do which is lucky.’ Not Heywood or Anne Hill, however; at least not according to Nancy. ‘Neither Hill has been near [the shop] since the bombs began & they say they won’t come back to London until an armistice has been signed.’1 This annoyed her, as did the affront to her status when, at the end of 1944, Heywood Hill hired ‘an old Jew called Jutro to be my boss [in fact this mysterious character never joined the firm2]. I am biding my time,’ Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh. ‘If I can keep him like Caliban in the cellar & get him to do my work when I feel like a brisk walk round the Park, well & good. But if he is going to join in the cocktail party atmosphere I so carefully foster, I shall leave & write a book.’
And here, in fact, lay the reason for her frustration with her job. She did not want to be selling other people’s work. She wanted to be doing the work herself. Her mind was elsewhere as the war came to an end; she was fed up with what now seemed like the banalities of daily work; but it was not so much that she ache
d to get to Palewski as that she was desperate to get started on a book. ‘Oh how I long to’, she continued in her letter to Waugh, ‘but £ s d rears its ugly head – I write so slowly & my books always come out at moments of crisis & flop.’ This time, however, she may have known that she was, as Diana puts it, ‘on to something’. Although the urge to get to Paris was slow-burning in Nancy, what was positively flaming was the desire to write (‘my fingers itch for a pen’3).
According to most commentators, Nancy’s love for the Colonel was all-consuming by this time: she was, at the end of the war, a desperate woman separated hopelessly from her man, smiling twitchily at the customers of Heywood Hill as she plotted her escape to Paris. Yet this image does not quite square with the evidence. Until she got the book out of her system she was at least as concerned with The Pursuit of Love as with pursuing love; and more concerned that Heywood Hill should give her three months’ writing leave (which he did), than that they should discuss his offer of a partnership. This was made in October 1944, and it would obviously have advanced her Paris plan no end. Yet she reacted with odd spikiness: ‘could we wait until the end of the war & then think?... I don’t think I do much want to play at bookshops all the rest of my life, though I may have to. Also I believe we might find it difficult to work together, both having been bosses.’ Hardly the words of someone willing to try any route to get to her lover. Only when The Pursuit of Love was written – in June 1945 – did she return, with full attention, to the idea of buying and selling books in Paris.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 25