Nancy’s friends were producing books, and this may have increased her almost panicky desire to get going with her own. Cyril Connolly sent Nancy The Unquiet Grave in November 1944 (‘I see it is going to be a great great pleasure to one’, she wrote, perhaps not wholly sincerely), and the following month she received a handsome copy of Brideshead Revisited: ‘a great English classic in my humble opinion’, she wrote to Evelyn Waugh (he loved this phrase). Seeking further to flatter, she went on to tell him about her own book, of which she had done 10,000 words before her leave had even been granted: ‘also in the 1st person. (Only now has it occurred to me everybody will say what a copy cat – never mind that won’t hurt you only me.) It’s about my family, a very different cup of tea, not grand & far madder. Did I begin it before reading “B.head” or after – I can’t remember.’
The implication here is that Nancy’s The Pursuit of Love was trailing in Waugh’s wake: a little girl book prancing after its stately big brother. This is typical Mitford – ‘oh you are so clever, so unlike idiotic One’ – although Nancy probably did feel the lack of gravitas within her own book when compared with her friend’s. She acknowledged, with honest grace, what she saw as Waugh’s straightforward superiority: ‘your well known knack of one tap on the nail & in it goes, whereas the rest of us hammer & pound for hours’. Yet there is the sense that, this time around at least, she preferred what she herself was doing.
Nancy seems to have seen an essential silliness in Brideshead Revisited. She knew the book was beyond her own capabilities; she was, as she called herself to Waugh, ‘an uneducated woman’; but as such she had a clear-sightedness that the average Oxonian male could only dream of (she later referred in a letter to a young graduate who had ‘a double 1st at Oxford, and also a spark of intelligence’: the two did not necessarily go together). She could never have written a book whose subject, according to its author, was God. She could never have composed the series of poems on the theme of fated aristocracy that comprise so much of Brideshead (‘He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind’). But then, she would not have wanted to. She could not compete with such splendours, yet beside all that overwrought baroque architecture The Pursuit of Love is as alive as a new-born puppy; and, as such, more moving as a hymn to loss. It is quite hard to care about the destruction of the Flyte family in Brideshead Revisited, so deeply besotted are they with their own doom. But when sadness, which has lain patiently in wait throughout the whole of Nancy’s book, moves finally centre stage, one’s heart breaks for those joyful Radletts, as when a glorious steeplechaser takes its last buoyant leap towards death.
Of course she raved about Brideshead – ‘so true to life being in love with a whole family’, she wrote to Waugh, which is indeed the book’s great fascination – but then, in her delicate way, she cut to the heart of its faults. ‘I think Charles [the ponderous narrator] might have had a little bit more glamour – I can’t explain why but he seemed to me a tiny bit dim & that is the only criticism I have to make because I am literally dazzled with admiration.’4 But a few weeks later she returned to this only criticism, and brought with it another:
I quite see how the person who tells is dim but then would Julia and her brother and her sister all be in love with him if he was? Well love is like that & one never can tell. What I can’t understand is about God. Now I believe in God & I talk to him a very great deal & often tell him jokes but the God I believe in simply hates fools more than anything & he also likes people to be happy & people who love each other to live together – so long as nobody else’s life is upset (& then he’s not sure). Now I see that I am absolutely un religious...
This dig would be made again, in The Pursuit of Love, in a way that shows the difference between the books. Linda is asking Fabrice about his Catholicism, and how it permits him to keep her as his mistress.
‘But then aren’t you living in mortal sin? So what about when you confess?’
‘On ne précise pas’, said Fabrice carelessly, ‘and, in any case, these little sins of the body are quite unimportant’...
‘In England’, she said, ‘people are always renouncing each other on account of being Roman Catholics. It’s sometimes very sad for them. A lot of English books are about this, you know.’
‘Les Anglais sont des insensés, je l’ai toujours dit...’
Waugh might have laughed at that, but it would have confirmed his belief that Nancy was beyond the theological pale (as would certain lines in Pigeon Pie, a book he did not rate: ‘For a short time, many years ago, he had been married to a woman so pious and so lavish with Sir Ivor’s money that she had posthumously been made a Papal Duchess’). Nancy never had much time for Catholicism. As with Brideshead Revisited, she saw in it both splendour and silliness. She also thought – acutely – that Waugh was ‘an amateur and not a professional Catholic’.5
Fabrice could absorb sin into his religion: he was like the Marquise who, after receiving the last sacraments, took up her knitting again saying, ‘ce n’est pas là une raison pour perdre son temps’.6 Waugh could not do these things; he remained a goggling convert all his life, bedazzled by the Brideshead set, and incidentally disapproving of the married Nancy’s love affair with Gaston Palewski, although apart from one serious scolding in 1949 he kept quiet about it.7
Waugh did not expect Nancy fully to understand Brideshead: ‘I know it will shock you in parts on account of its piety.’ Yet he was keen to know that she had enjoyed the book: ‘A letter from Nancy proclaiming Brideshead Revisited a classic’, he took the trouble to note in his 1945 diary.
‘Of course I value your opinion above all others about most things. But well no not about religion,’ Waugh wrote to her in 1950. Nancy’s opinions were simultaneously of great value to him and of no value at all: a healthy state of affairs. But what of the other way around? Did Nancy care what Waugh thought? ‘Well,’ says Diana Mosley, ‘no doubt she would have had him in mind, thinking to herself, you know, what would he say? Because he was a very strong character, really.’ Indeed, he has been called her literary mentor. His influence is highly visible in a book like Highland Fling, which bears a certain – distant – resemblance to Vile Bodies, although this may have been coincidence: young people tend to write in a similar style, which at that time was nervy and semi-hysterical, as if puffing at top speed through a cigarette holder (although even then Waugh had a far deeper moral dimension).
Nancy’s subsequent books, however, bore little resemblance, other than the sharing of a certain set of social assumptions. Still, from The Pursuit of Love onwards, he offered opinions on her work; it had, as he thought, become worthy of comment, and as mutual respect grew so friendship metamorphosed into something more solid and important. Instead of seeing each other at Heywood Hill, or at parties where Nancy would be brightly sober and Evelyn problematically drunk, they wrote to each other – a correspondence of unrelenting hilarity and ruthlessness – and this was how they got along best. Books were obviously one of the subjects that most engaged them. They were not Flaubert and Turgenev – if they exchanged views about the ethics or mechanics of writing then they did so only obliquely; but they always made and sought comments upon each other’s work.
Christopher Sykes, who wrote a biography of Waugh, said that he was ‘responsible for some of the more felicitous details’ in The Pursuit of Love (this has a faint air of ‘how could a middle-class Stratford actor write those plays?’). Waugh did suggest the simple but ambivalent title (Nancy had intended to call it ‘My Cousin Linda’ – ‘I’m very bad at titles... I’m always in favour of calling books what they are’). He also gave her the idea that Alconleigh, home to the Radletts, should be dominated by images of death8: ‘Not death of maidens, not death romantically associated with urns and weeping willows, cypresses and valedictory odes, but the death of warriors and of animals, stark and real.’ This is clever, but it is also a symbolic underlining of what is alrea
dy implicit in the text: in the intensely realistic descriptions of country life (‘it was not unusual to be awoken by the screams of a rabbit running in horrified circles round a stoat, by the strange and awful cry of the dog-fox, or to see from one’s bedroom window a live hen being carried away in the mouth of a vixen’); and indeed in the elegiac, à la recherche quality that suffuses the whole book.
Waugh also made a fairly detailed critique to Nancy of the passage set in the refugee camp at Perpignan, based upon her experience with Peter back in 1939.
The contrast of Linda with her manorial soup and port benefactions and her communist husband with his zeal to re-equip the militant workers for the class struggle in Mexico could be excellent. It would give point to her bewilderment that the Spanish gentry did nothing to help. You could make a dramatic climax in the sailing of the evacuation ship with the communists taking off the distressed families in order to pack it with international thugs...
This, Nancy completely ignored. It was advice that was inappropriate to her, and she knew it. (She may – if she thought about it that way – have also disliked the implication that she herself had been foolishly playing Lady Bountiful when she had tried to help the Spanish refugees.) The Perpignan episode, where Linda dimly then clearly realises that her husband is the wrong man for her, and where she both dimly and clearly understands the plight of the refugees, is dislocated, but that is the point. It is not by any means the strongest part of the book, being something of a hiatus before Linda meets Fabrice, but this too is in a sense intentional. Making neat political points would have been an irrelevance; even if Nancy had been capable of it, which Waugh probably knew she was not.
In September 1945 he wrote to say:
I am sorry you have not been able to rewrite the unsatisfactory section of your book [Perpignan] in time for the first edition. Start rewriting it now for the Penguins. It is the difference (one of 1000 differences) between a real writer & a journalist that she cares to go on improving after the reviews are out & her friends have read it & there is nothing whatever to be gained by the extra work.
This is partly written out of a belief that Nancy should be kept up to the mark: ‘that was just his sadistic side!’ as Diana says. But it is also genuine, indeed kindly meant, written out of respect for what she had achieved, for what he saw as her worthiness to join the clan of ‘real’ writers.
She gave his advice even less consideration than he had given to her criticisms of Brideshead. High on the praise of Hamish Hamilton (‘the word brilliant has been used’9), she wrote to Waugh perfunctorily: ‘I can’t begin again on Linda so I am a journalist. Besides I meant Xian [Christian] to be like that even if Communism isn’t...’ In other words: awfully nice of you but I know best. She also takes a small revenge: ‘Hamilton advertises Linda as one long scream. I knew it. But Fabrice [that is, Palewski] says he thinks in many ways it’s more serious than your book but perhaps that’s just sucking up.’
So much for being a literary mentor. Waugh’s opinions were treated by Nancy rather as hers were by him, as something hugely important that would almost always be ignored. She had immense confidence in The Pursuit of Love and saw the dissection of the Perpignan episode for what it was: pointless. In 1948, however, she sent the manuscript of Love in a Cold Climate to Waugh, and received even more detailed criticism:
Six months hard I am afraid without remission for good conduct. The manuscript was a delight to read, full of fun & wit & fantasy... But it isn’t a book at all yet. No more 40 hour week. Blood, sweat & tears. That is to say if you want to produce a work of art. There is a work of art there, lurking in a hole, occasionally visible by the tip of its whiskers.
This time, Nancy was less unassailably sure about the book, and had sent it to Waugh despite the fact that Hamish Hamilton was begging for it. Her apparent motive had been for Waugh to tell her what corrections she should make. What she had really wanted no doubt was for him to tell her that none were necessary: the book was absolutely perfect. ‘I agree with nearly all you say’, she begins in reply to his criticisms. Then her tone becomes pathetic and defensive: ‘I have rewritten the whole thing once already you know. What I wonder is whether I can (am capable of) doing better. You speak of Henry James but he was a man of intellect...’ and so on. Finally, in contradiction of her first remark: ‘What you say about the minor characters I don’t agree with. Your complaint is that they are not photographs of existing people, but one must be allowed to invent people if one is a novelist...
‘Oh dear. You see I’m afraid that what you really criticise are my own inherent limitations...’
If Nancy thought that Waugh was an amateur rather than a professional Catholic, then he surely thought that she was an amateur rather than a professional writer; this was at the root of his criticisms, that she did not push herself the extra yard. ‘I will have a go at Cedric’s talk10 & do some revising on the lines that you suggest’, she wrote, but what he had actually said was that the whole book needed rewriting, and this she had no intention of doing. Once again, she had pronounced herself in thrall to his judgment, and almost completely ignored it. For a literary mentor, Waugh had scant influence over his pupil. ‘I long to read your novel & criticize tho what’s the good you never take my advice’, he wrote to Nancy in 1950 with regard to The Blessing, to which she replied, clearly in fond mood: ‘When you say I never take your advice it’s because you’ve only ever read them in proof when one can’t alter – if you could endure the hell of manuscript I promise to be obedient.’ Yet when she sent The Blessing the same thing happened all over again (‘The Captain doesn’t ring true to me’; ‘I don’t know why you have this idea of the Captain... Truly I think you are wrong’). For all their delight in each other’s jokes, and all their seeming similarity in wit and wickedness, they were very different animals as writers.
Their mutual respect was intense, however, and became more so. Waugh would later modify his opinion of Nancy as a writer: around the time of The Blessing’s publication he seems to have accepted the fact that Nancy’s faults and virtues were indissolubly linked, and that criticising the one might impact upon the other. As for Nancy, even though she apparently ignored much of Waugh’s advice this does not mean that he did not affect her writing. Diana Mosley is surely right to think that Nancy would have had him in her mind, wanted his approval, measured herself against his standards. She was in continual contact with the most highly regarded writer of her generation; this kept her on her toes. Her authorial horizons were sharpened by exposure to Waugh’s magnificently decisive style, broadened by the seriousness with which he took his work. Yet Nancy had her own calling, and this was something that, at the time of The Pursuit of Love, Waugh only semi-understood. Indeed there was always an element of tolerance in his admiration for Nancy: in his 1962 review of her collected essays, The Water Beetle, he put her into the category of an author who ‘can write but cannot think’. Up to a point, he was taken in by the apparently dilettante quality of her style (if Cyril Connolly thought that the problem with Brideshead was that Waugh went ‘too much to White’s’, then Waugh probably thought the problem with The Pursuit of Love was that Nancy went too much to bed with the Colonel). Certainly with this book he felt that she had allowed her facility to make her lazy. He could not quite accept that The Pursuit of Love was, as Diana says, ‘in its way just about perfect. I can’t find a criticism. Evelyn couldn’t have done it.’ Which was as completely true as saying that Nancy could not have done Brideshead Revisited.
After reading the book Waugh wrote in his diary: ‘Nancy has written a novel full of exquisite detail of Mitford family life, but planless and flat and hasty in patches.’ Also true, to an extent: parts of the book are not so much writing as simply talking on to the page, parts are not so much structured as simply saying what happened next. But this, again, was irrelevant. The occasional drift from artful candour into real artlessness, from intentional vernacular into downright cliché, was all part of Nancy’s charm, which
by then was so impregnable that trying to pick holes in it was a total waste of time. It smiled dazzlingly at its critics and sailed merrily on. Of course Brideshead Revisited contains Waugh’s famous attack upon charm, ‘the great English blight’, which ‘spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art.’ This superb aperçu is relevant to Waugh’s view of Nancy’s writing (and perhaps of the whole Mitford family, so light and airy, so dark and remorseless). Clearly he felt that the Mitford charm was enabling her, and tempting her, to sidestep her responsibilities as an artist. Yet charm does not have to be a merely shallow thing; Nancy’s was also profound, not least because she understood it. She seemed to be engaged with the surfaces: she wanted them to be as brightly polished as possible. But there was far, far more to her than that. The Pursuit of Love is above all else a sincere book, suffused to its considerable depths with feeling: bright with hope, shadowed with sadness, sometimes cold and stony with realism. It is also – as are the three novels that would follow – steeped in a homespun, benevolent understanding of human nature, which shows as clear and clean beneath the sparkle as dolphins moving steadily under a sunlit sea.
And which came, or so it is said, from Nancy’s overpowering love for Gaston Palewski. This is what opened her virginal heart, put the cleverest-girl-in-the-school writer of Pigeon Pie in touch with her deepest emotions, and transformed her into the creator of a moving little masterpiece.
Yet love is notoriously a distraction from work, and Palewski’s absence at the time of writing would have been as much of a help to Nancy as his presence beforehand. She could think about him, turn him into whatever she wanted in her head, and without the worry of having to deal with him. Even a book as easily written as The Pursuit of Love – it took about three months, from January to March 1945 – required her steely and selfish attention. Although it has the air of an outpouring, and although it was dedicated to Gaston Palewski, it is more than simply a two-hundred-page love poem: to say that it was ‘inspired by love’, or that Nancy’s ability to write it was somehow induced by being ‘put in touch with her feelings’ is simplistic. Like any other real novel with a life of its own, The Pursuit of Love was the mysterious possession of its creator: nothing, perhaps, is more solipsistic than the act of producing a book as good as this one, whatever the effect may have been upon the writer of love, hate, sadness, or any other strong emotion.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 26