Perhaps Harold Acton comes closer to the truth when, in his ladylike but acute way, he writes that ‘the Free French had fired her imagination with a growing love of France. I suspect that she was already looking forward to pastures new when she embarked on her semi-autobiographical novel, The Pursuit of Love.’ In other words it was the thought of freedom, of an imminent new life (connected of course to Palewski), that had pushed Nancy forwards, and enabled her to write about her family and childhood with such ease and perspective. The fact that she had grown away from that English life of hers allowed her to see it with perfect clarity, each memory as taut and separate as the vibrating strings of a guitar: the dark blue trees on a Cotswold morning; the image of Uncle Matthew standing behind Linda to tie her hunting stock in a looking-glass, ‘both the very picture of concentration’; the debutante dance with the floating panels of taffeta on the ballgowns and the twenty oil-stoves for warmth – out it all came in a rich and elegiac flow, rhythmic and symphonic and true. It could not have been written until then; Nancy was not ready to do it; but the whole of her life had brought her to the place of writing this book, it was not to be explained as a mere liberation by love.
What Palewski had done was liberate her into feeling that she could tell the straightforward story of her life. Great play is made, in the affair between Linda and Fabrice, of the joy that he takes in hearing stories of her family. ‘“Et Jassy – et Matt – alors, racontez.”
‘And she recounted, for hours.’
Now this is not invented, it is a representation straight from Nancy’s relationship with Palewski. She, like Linda, could enchant her lover with tales of her past, with the way in which she talked about Farve and Muv, Decca and Debo, this whole other world which seemed to him a magical fable, complete and separate, set in the heart of England. ‘Nancy was a wonderful raconteuse’, says John Julius Norwich, ‘and I’m sure her telling the Colonel about her family was a hoot.’ As Palewski said to her: ‘La famille Mitford fait ma joie’; and by saying it he may have given Nancy her clue, her confidence, her simplifying sense that a book could be a story. At first, she had cast about for both a voice and a plot; by the time of Pigeon Pie she had found the voice, but still felt the need for a plot; but the key to The Pursuit of Love is that in it she required no devices at all. Like the Radletts, she simply ‘told’. She used all that she knew, and wrote it in the way that she knew.
Her childhood, her parents, the extraordinary life force generated by her family; the search for love, the failure to find it, its sudden discovery; here – of course! – was her book. Fascinatingly, she had been pondering what she called ‘my autobiography’ since 1942, when on solitary evenings at Blomfield Road she had found some solace – or perhaps the promise of something more – in writing about her early life. This was the germ of The Pursuit of Love; but Nancy was not yet there with it, almost certainly because she had not yet grasped that literal and artistic truth could dance felicitously together. By the end of 1944 she knew what to do. It has been suggested that the final push came from reading Brideshead Revisited: that from Waugh’s novel she had the idea of writing about her family as a complete entity; or perhaps the idea of the first-person narrator, which certainly worked wonderfully. This is possible, although as much as anything Brideshead probably showed her how not to write her own book. Keep it simple, keep it One, she may have realised. No: it is of course speculation, but it is nice – as well as convincing – to think that the last, satisfying click came from her lover’s sparkling delight in her tales. And what a revelation it would have been, to realise that the seeds of a work of art lay within ‘racontez, racontez’, that she held it all in her hands and need only set the bird free.
Now she knew that she could write from the inside out, rather than the outside in; and she was, at last, completely relaxed. No wonder her fingers had itched for a pen. No wonder her voice now bloomed, in all its casualness, its clarity, in the immediacy with which characters were placed before the reader’s eyes, in the robust concreteness of language. It was pure mature Nancy to describe a Renoir beauty as a ‘fat tomato-coloured bathing woman’, or trees as ‘black skeletons against a sky of moleskin’: phrases so sure and rooted, so surprising and so right, that they stay anchored in the mind.
Gaston Palewski was not exactly, as he has been called, Nancy’s ‘muse’; no one can turn another person into a better writer than they are capable of being. But ‘telling’ to him proved a surefire way of making other people want to listen. Nancy did not write The Pursuit of Love for him, nor did she write it because of him. There is little doubt, however, that she wrote it with the thought, ever present in her mind, of holding his attention. If it could amuse the Colonel, then it would do for all the others.
So in March 1945 the book was almost finished; peace loomed and Paris called; but before happiness could begin, there was still one more tragedy left to come. The war, which had done such desperate damage to the Mitford family from the very day of its outbreak – had left Unity with a bullet in her head, put Diana in jail, made Jessica a widow at twenty-five, destroyed the health of Lord Redesdale, the serenity of his wife and the marriage of both – waited, cruelly, until hostilities were almost over before throwing its last grenade. Tom died in Burma on 30 March 1945, aged thirty-six. He sustained several machine-gun wounds at the hands of the Japanese and, like Unity, had a bullet lodged inside him; Tom’s was in his spine. He knew this, and knew also that although he had been paralysed, he was not expected to die. In fact pneumonia killed him. Nancy heard the news while staying in the enchanted fairyland of Lord Berners’ house, where she had gone to finish The Pursuit of Love. Gerald Berners took the call and went upstairs to tell Nancy that her brother was dead; smiling more brightly than ever, she came down with the other guests to sit among the jewel-coloured birds at dinner.
She broke a little, however, in the letter she wrote to Jessica a couple of weeks later. ‘I thought you would like a line to say Muv & Farve are being simply wonderful & much much better than we had feared at first. But it is almost unbearable oh Tud if you knew how sweet & nice & gay he has been of late & on his last leave.’
Nancy had adored Tom. No doubt she now remembered him as ‘the fattest boy’ upon whom she had tested teases, or as the clever young man whose friends had brought the outside world to her during the Rapunzel years at Swinbrook. And she and Tom had grown into a new closeness during the war, when he had stayed at Blomfield Road and, perhaps, provided silent solidarity with Nancy in the fury she then felt against her family, and the suffering she was enduring with her husband. Her brother mattered to her, merely through his cool and judicious presence. She had for him the respect, the sense of equality, that she had for Diana; but without the jealousy. Always she wanted to think well of him – something she resisted easily with the rest of her family – and for him to think well of her. Of course Tom was a lover of Germany, a friend of Oswald Mosley and an intellectual supporter of Fascism, although he resisted anti-Semitism; his sympathies were violently inimical to Nancy yet she took little notice, apparently convincing herself that that these were not his real feelings, that he simply affected them when he was chez Mosley. ‘Tud was a fearful old twister’, she wrote to Jessica in 1968, ‘& probably was a fascist when he was with Diana. When with me he used to mock to any extent & he hated Sir Os no doubt about that.’ Yet it is documented fact that Tom had been a paid-up member of the British Union of Fascists, and had thrown a Fascist salute at one of Mosley’s pro-peace meetings in 1939, so at least part of what Nancy wrote is untrue (as she surely knew?). And according to Diana – whose view would naturally be on the opposite side – Tom and Mosley adored each other. ‘My brother completely agreed with my husband about politics and the war and so on.’ Tom had requested that he be sent to Burma because, according to his old Eton friend James Lees-Milne (whose first love Tom was): ‘He does not wish to go to Germany killing German civilians whom he likes. He prefers to kill Japanese whom he does not like.’ Ye
t Nancy forgave the beliefs that she could not share, just as she had denounced them in Diana and reproached them in her mother: principle proving itself, once more, to be an uneasy master of the emotions.
It could be said that Tom’s love of Germany helped bring about his premature death, just as it would Unity’s. (‘I do envy Tom’, said Unity when she was told the news, ‘having such fascinating arguments with Dr Johnson now.’) But his fate was not as desperate as Unity’s; his life had been short, but it had been properly lived. His death might have been expected to bring about a reconciliation within the Mitford family, as a tragedy that they all felt similarly deeply. Yet in terms of healing the schisms it had mixed results. Diana had not spoken to her father for years – not since her beyond-the-pale conduct with Mosley – when she turned up at Rutland Gate Mews in April 1945, where the family (including Nanny Blor, even including Peter Rodd) had gathered after Tom’s death. The Mosleys were still under house arrest but Diana had left her home near Newbury, and set off for London with her husband and two policemen (no one else could afford two footmen now but you, Lord Berners had remarked). According to Nancy, whose account was recorded in James Lees-Milne’s diary, there was a sharp intake of breath when her sister entered the room; but ‘she sailed in unabashed, and at once, like the old Diana, held the stage and became the centre of them all. To their amazement Lord Redesdale greeted her affectionately.’ When she left, David insisted on escorting her to the car. ‘Finally she had to explain, “Farve, the man Mosley is waiting in the motor for me.”’ At which, ‘Lord Redesdale laughed and let her go.’ Certain rapprochements could never, it was understood, be made.
And the most serious of these unbridgeable chasms was between Tom’s parents: this churning renewal of grief would ensure that they stayed apart for the rest of their lives. What had happened to these two was too massive for assimilation. Of course they were not the kind of people to know how to do this, to want to share their feelings, but it would probably have made no difference anyway. David, especially, found no comfort from his wife, nor indeed much from his daughters. It was a great change from the days when he had thought of Sydney as his rock, his saviour, and had found such fiery pleasure in the family that had made him its hero, its top-of-the-bill act.
Indeed despite Nancy’s reassurance, given to a distraught Jessica in America, that their parents were ‘being simply wonderful’, this final blow half-killed the Redesdales. Sydney wrote an appallingly touching letter to Jessica which told of how the news had reached her, first through a telegram saying that Tom had been wounded: ‘As the days passed we grew hopeful, and the shock was so bad when it came that I nearly went mad.’ She made the interminable journey from Inch Kenneth to her husband in London: ‘he is sadly down, and you can imagine what it is to us both, and in fact I know all of you, to lose Tom. He was certainly the best of sons and brothers and I think we all relied so much on him.’ His presence had never dominated that family, but he had been its touchstone of sanity: the person who cut through feuds and jealousies, the almost invisible yet essential element with which everybody – from Esmond Romilly through to Oswald Mosley – could mix.
For David, the loss of Tom completed the job started by Unity, and made him an old man: ‘he was not well preserved’, wrote Nancy in her last novel, Don’t Tell Alfred, in which Uncle Matthew appears as a diminished figure, although less poignantly than his real-life counterpart.
He had gone through life with one lung, the other having been shot away in the Boer War... After that he had hunted, shot and played lawn tennis as though he had been perfectly fit. I can often remember, as a child, seeing him fight to get his breath – it must have been a strain on the heart. He had known sorrow, too, which always ages people...
In August 1945 David visited Nancy at Heywood Hill, where he was seen by James Lees-Milne.
Nancy said, ‘You know Farve’, and there, leaning on a stick was a bent figure with a shrunken, twisted face, wearing round, thick spectacles, looking like a piano-tuner. Last time I saw him he was upstanding and one of the best-looking men of his generation...
Nancy was kind to her parents at this time: her letters to her mother have a gentleness, a sweet searching for anything that would provide comfort. ‘You will be glad to hear that Mark is back’, she wrote in April 1945, about the return of Mark Ogilvie-Grant from his POW camp. ‘He says in prison they dreamed of nothing but food & his dream was – do you remember that layer-cake with jam you used to have? Well that! Isn’t it too funny...’ Even Nancy’s reluctant heart was going out to Sydney, living on Inch Kenneth with Unity while her husband remained in London. Nancy stayed for a time with David, and tried to console her mother about his unwillingness to be with her. ‘I’m sending you a present from Farve, on Monday’, she wrote in May 1945. ‘You must unpack it carefully.’ Then: ‘Farve is really all right, rather weak of course, but up all night making tea wh is a good sign!’ However, Nancy was feeling the strain when she returned to Heywood Hill in June.
What do you think I did? I decided not to come here Sat: morning as I was really tired, & forgot to lock the door on Friday, so the shop was full of wandering people trying to buy books from each other... By the mercy of Providence Heywood was passing through London & happened to look in. HE WASN’T BEST PLEASED. And I don’t blame him. The fact is I’m too tired but it’s no excuse for such dottiness.
Another fact was that she had had it with being Heywood’s chief shop assistant – in 1942 she would always have bothered to open on a Saturday morning – and her time there had become like a sentence being served out. Nancy saw herself cutting loose from the ties of England, family and its clinging sorrows. Over the horizon she saw something new and wonderful. The life she was leading seemed less real than the one she was dreaming of: Paris, sunlight, success; and sadness left behind along with bombed-out streets, whalemeat steaks and wooden suspender belts.
Her buoyancy was returning; it could not help itself. The loss of Tom was terrible, the separate griefs of her parents tugged at her heart, she had her wretched husband to deal with (now trying to find a constituency as a Labour candidate in the 1945 election. ‘I fear it will be no good though, married to a Mitford’ – it wasn’t). And she knew that Gaston Palewski was hardly desperate for her arrival in Paris, despite his occasional crooning of ‘venez, venez’. But she could not control her longing for her own future; and the most wonderful thing of all was that reality, like a miraculous racehorse, was beginning to catch up with her illusions.
On 8 June she wrote to her mother that Hamish Hamilton, her publishers, liked The Pursuit of Love so much that they were giving her ‘a £250 advance which I call enormous’. What a magnificent moment for Nancy. Her last two novels had died, but this one, she knew, was different, and here was her vindication. The Pursuit of Love was due to appear in December, and for six months, Nancy lived with a warm fire of hope inside her.
There were other hopes too, threatening almost unbearable joy. When her book was written she had returned to the question of setting up her de facto branch of Heywood Hill in Paris. Her father, who through the solipsistic haze of his misery may have been proud of Nancy’s wartime stoicism, and of course now had no son to inherit from him, suddenly extended to his daughter a gift of £3,000. With this – as she wrote to her mother – she could buy a partnership in the shop. Heywood liked the idea of the French connection, and encouraged Nancy to proceed. It took a lot of organising at this difficult time – travelling abroad required an exit permit, there were rigorous currency restrictions in place – but Nancy pushed the red tape through her fingers with energy and excitement, eyes fixed upon France.
She felt now that life held the possibility of true happiness, and that the only sin – pace Evelyn Waugh – would be not to seize it. ‘Is one’s failure in life always absolutely one’s own fault – I believe it is’, she wrote to the Colonel in 1944, a stern creed to which she at least partly subscribed; but she also believed in its obverse, that one could b
ring about one’s success in life. As Voltaire wrote, one could decide to be happy. Nancy was forty, she had just written the best book she knew how to write, she had had it with war and sorrow and exhaustion, she was weary of grasping at the ephemeral shadows of pleasure. She wanted to be happy day in and day out, to turn her philosophy of joy and jokes into reality, as she sensed now that she could. And this meant not just the Colonel; but France.
Nancy travelled to Paris at the beginning of September and arrived in the middle of an auspicious heatwave. Later she would always say that when she came to England by boat the skies grew grey but that on the way back, halfway across the Channel, a brilliant sun would emerge.
She wrote to her mother on 3 September, from a little hotel in the 6ème called the Jacob et d’Angleterre (‘Do you think the name of this pub the funniest thing you ever heard?’), ecstatically close to Palewski’s apartment in the Rue Bonaparte. Although smart today, in 1945 it was, according to Nancy,
the kind of hotel that O Wilde died in – aucun confort, no bathroom, or loo except dans le couloir, dry bread & water for breakfast etc. You see utter parsimony has set in, I’m rigid with terror lest I shall run out of money & be forced home...
So I eat in workmen’s restaurants mostly little bits of cat I think, & feel alternately very hungry & very sick. Like this I can live on £1 a day for everything – rather wonderful. I suppose when the weather gets cold I shall die, like a geranium.11
Life in a Cold Climate Page 27