No: middle age was when a person was at their most interesting and desirable; the perfect time, in fact, to embark upon new adventures. Nancy, like Jean Brodie, reached her peak in her forties (‘Never have I seen her look prettier: a rose in full bloom’, wrote loyal Harold Acton). Her aristocrat’s assurance fell into glamorous, individualistic place. And this flowering allowed her to express what she had always, intuitively, believed: that youth was all very nice but adulthood was when life really began. There is a sense, in her first two novels, of unease with the young; although she was one with them, like Sophia Garfield ‘she was never a romper’, nor could she ever quite get along with the silliness that takes itself so seriously. The qualities that Nancy valued in people – charm, wit, elegance, cheerfulness, confidence, learning – were more likely to be found in an adult than in an adolescent. This was especially true in France. Indeed the two novels set in Paris – The Blessing and Don’t Tell Alfred – return repeatedly to this theme. In The Blessing, Nancy’s terrible (caricature) creation, ‘a large Teddy-bear of an American’ named Hector Dexter, delivers a long speech in praise of the young to his dinner-party neighbour, the fabulously ripe and sexy septuagenarian Madame Rocher des Innouïs. ‘“Now I am over forty [he says] but many and many’s the time, in French houses, when I have been the youngest person present, and I’ve never yet, at any parties, seen really young folks, college boys and girls and teen-agers. How do your French teen-agers amuse themselves, Madame Innouïs?”
‘“They are young, surely that is enough,” she said indignantly. “Surely they don’t need to amuse themselves as well.”’
This was Nancy’s view entirely: she liked young people on the whole, and was kindly – in her rigorous way – towards those who came to visit her in Paris. (‘Did I tell you about my Beauty of 18 who is staying here?’ she wrote to Waugh in 1949, describing Venetia, the daughter of her friends Pauline and Basil Murray. ‘You never saw such a heavenly girl... She has been a magnet for other little creatures who run in & out of the flat all day using my telephone & trying on my clothes – I have very much enjoyed the whole thing.’) But she had little indulgence for the young if they lacked adult attributes, good manners and good sense. Bring on the old people, she thought. ‘The Elwes boys14 not at all in the Jonathan [Guinness] – John Julius class’, she wrote to Diana in 1948, ‘deadly – or perhaps... young for their age. They certainly don’t see the point of ONE.’ Nancy thought that boys of this kind could only improve when they grew out of thinking that youth was an excuse for gracelessness; a very different attitude from that of today, when maturity is in balding thrall to the idiocies of the young. Fanny’s sons, in Don’t Tell Alfred, are portrayed as lost causes (‘showing off’) in their desire to make a quick buck, or swoon at pop concerts, or worship Eastern mysticism: ‘lettered-beachcombers’, they are called, the type of person that nowadays would be admired rather than dismissed, but Nancy knew better. She is highly prescient in her portrayal of youth culture in Don’t Tell Alfred. She sees American values taking over; she gives us perhaps the first ‘mockney’, an Etonian who earns £9 a week packing razors then becomes publicity agent to his pop-star idol; the raison d’être of her book is to show how superior are the old European ways, as practised by people like herself and her friends. ‘A Paris dinner party, both from a material point of view and as regards conversation, is certainly the most civilised gathering that our age can produce’, says Fanny. The reader sees no reason to disagree, nor to think that an evening spent among flowers in Sèvres vases, couture dresses and sparkling chat about everything from sex to Stendhal, is anything other than preferable to a night on the tiles with a bunch of twenty-year-old twits. ‘Paris isn’t much good for teenagers’, Fanny’s sons tell her: there could be no higher accolade.
It was France, really, that had made being forty a new beginning. Had she stayed in London, Nancy might have felt as fleshless and grey as the city itself. ‘Paris had cured me of my middle-aged blight exactly as I had hoped it would’, says Fanny; ‘if I was sometimes worried there I never felt depressed, bored and useless.’ As her creator had come to believe, Fanny feels that the longer life goes on, the better it becomes.
Almost from the time that Nancy arrived at the Hôtel Jacob et d’Angleterre, her voice settled into a slightly different tone – different even from The Pursuit of Love. It acquired a note of smiling affirmation, an amused acceptance of all that life had to offer; even when it offered sadness. It grew up. What she wrote after The Pursuit of Love never quite recaptured its strange, semi-conscious poetry, for this was the book that saw Nancy poised between her past and her future, between memories of an England that had the distance of another life, and dreams of a France that would be another life. It was a book full of imaginative loves: for the father that poor Lord Redesdale had once been, for the world that had been created by herself and her sisters, for the man that she wanted Gaston Palewski to be. Afterwards, her writing settled to reality. It no longer contained wrenching, poignant longings for a vanished childhood, in which Unity and Tom were as unstoppably alive as the bloodhounds that hunted them across ‘the beautiful bleak Cotswold uplands’; nor for an unattainable future, in which love was as strong and real as the sunlight on the trees in the Bois de Boulogne.
Reality would become enough for Nancy, would contain its own enchantments and delights. This sufficiency underpins her next novel, Love in a Cold Climate, which has no poetry pulsing beneath its prosaic surface, but which brings so much of the fascination, the sheer gift that life itself has to offer. Nancy’s letters, too, have this quality: they tell little stories like the one about the ‘char’, and her pleasure in them is so great, her phrasing and observation so natural, that the reader becomes the same contented person as she was herself. This is one of her defining talents, this ability to communicate to us what the TLS would call ‘the kind of aerial high spirits which persuade us, for a delectable instant, that we too can be wonderfully amusing if the fancy takes us’.
And it came, once again, from France. For what she found in Paris was a means whereby her philosophy of life could become a day-to-day actuality: there are not many philosophers who learn to live by what they preach, but Nancy was one of them. Of course she still had her powerful imagination, her sadnesses and dreams. These were often as strong as ever. Yet her will to happiness had triumphed: a remarkable feat, calling upon reserves of stoicism and grit and faith, but it happened. As Alistair Forbes put it, ‘she had wisely discovered [happiness] to be made up, like a coral reef, of small joys upon small joys’, a discovery that sustained her for the rest of her life, throughout all the sorrow that it could throw at her.
In 1945, what Nancy dreaded more than anything was the moment of returning to London. ‘Darling’, she wrote to Violet Hammersley in October, ‘my life has resolved itself into a mule-like struggle not to leave this spot (Paris I mean).’ The spot had become home. She had not thought of this brief interlude as a visit, but as real life. She kept putting off her departure, lingering until the very last of the autumnal heat had slipped away, before writing to Diana at the end of October: ‘Positively – you won’t believe it I know – I am coming back on Tues.’ Her letter continued: ‘Do you realize it is exactly 20 years since we were in the Av: V.Hugo?... Apart from love or anything I must come & live here, & if one makes up one’s mind things generally happen don’t you think.’
In fact Nancy did not dare to think that she might not live in Paris. The idea that the dullness of Blomfield Road, and daily work at Heywood Hill, would comprise her existence was too dreadful to contemplate. And she may have realised something else, connected to the writing that she now took seriously.
It was Evelyn Waugh who identified a magnificent irony in the fact that she had helped – as he saw it – to speed the decline of the elite, while plotting to live in a society that recreated an ideal of pre-revolutionary Paris. And he was right: it was a peculiar paradox. Nancy had voted for the symbolic ending of an England that s
he loved, the one she described in her introductions to the Stanley letters, and her homage to land-owning in The Pursuit of Love. She had done so for obscure reasons: because she had acquired the ‘pinko’ habit in reaction to her family, because she had a rogue streak of radicalism in her nature, and, perhaps, because she saw change as inevitable. She knew, in fact, that ‘her kind’ were on the way out. Her two post-war ‘English’ novels are both set in the period leading up to the war; this allowed her to depict a society that was disappearing by the time the books were published. The magnificent Park Lane home of the Montdores, described in all its splendour in Love in a Cold Climate, has become, in Don’t Tell Alfred, ‘a huge hotel... the colour of old teeth’, while London itself is portrayed as a city pointlessly depredated in the name of progress: ‘Every time I visit it’, says the narrator Fanny, ‘I am saddened by seeing changes for the worse: the growing inelegance; the loss of character; the disappearance of landmarks and their replacement by flat and faceless glass houses.’ Don’t Tell Alfred addresses the encroachment of this new world, which Nancy could warn against but not inhabit (‘oh bother – what are jeans?’ she once asked).
Her last novel is, au fond, ‘French’, as is its predecessor The Blessing. Both belong to a supremely aristocratic world, that of the British Embassy in the Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré (the ‘large, beautiful, honey-coloured’ Hôtel de Charost), and of the Valhubert family in St Germain (built ‘between courtyard and garden’ expressly to receive Marie Antoinette). And the fact is that Nancy could not have got away with this sort of thing had she continued to write ‘English’ books. Even The Pursuit of Love got her into trouble with left-wing intellectuals: ‘the Bloomsbury Home Guard are gunning for me’, she wrote to Evelyn Waugh, while Cyril Connolly and co. ‘think my book utterly indecent on acc/ of not being about cabmen’s shelters & Hons Cupboard makes them vomit.’ In her 1966 television interview she was asked why she always wrote about the upper-classes. Quite rightly, she replied that ‘writers write about the people they know, really, I think. I suppose it’s rather natural... Jane Austen wouldn’t have written about Siberian peasants. She couldn’t do it.’ And so Nancy, having mined the seam of interwar English aristocracy, made an extremely clever switch to France: to Madame de Pompadour, Louis XIV and the Marquis de Valhubert, all of whom live in the same, untouchable land of wealth and privilege.
In a semi-teasing letter of 1946, Waugh wrote to Nancy that ‘Your literary future is insoluble I think. You see even the most bookish and authoritative minds... decay in exile... You are so topical and on the spot & so radically English that you must feed on a fresh English diet. As an English observer thinking foreigners absurd you might be able to write about them. As a cosmopolitan you are lost.’ As it turned out, this prediction was both correct and utterly wrong. Nancy did remain radically English, yet she found a fresh French diet. She filtered France through her Englishness, in fact, and in a way that readers simply adored. ‘Do you admit that when I came to live here you said I would never write a book that was any good?’ she sang out to him in 1951. ‘And that, on the contrary, I have improved?’
Privilege, as she knew, was her authorial milieu. It was what her readers expected from her. But what she wrote was also what she lived: by turning to France she found, through her imagination, the values that she sensed would be lost to her in England. ‘I feel a hostility from people in England I hardly know, because they think I sound frightfully superior’, she later said. With the typical survival instinct of the aristocrat, she intuited that the way for One to thrive was in another country. As Evelyn Waugh grew ever more embittered and frightened by the changes in England after the war (‘There has been a revolution here. Your sans culottes have triumphed’), so Nancy remained untouched by them. Instead she used them for her own mischievous ends: as with the essay on class, containing the infamous distinction between U and Non-U, which she might not have dared to write had she been living in England. She was liberated indeed.
So what would have happened to her, had Paris not provided this glorious escape route? ‘Yes, one does wonder,’ says her sister Deborah. ‘I don’t know. She’d have probably found somebody else besides Peter, I just don’t know, who can tell. One thing I’m quite sure of. If she’d had, at that time, what I suppose is still described as a normal life, a husband and children, she would not have written as she did.’
It is therefore fitting that Nancy’s writing – product of solitude, independence, sadness, what you will – supplied the means to her own kind of fulfilment. Not the ‘normal’ kind, the wife and mother kind; that was closed to her. Yet by having nothing to hold her, she could become successful, rich, able to live as she pleased: in Paris, close to her lover, surrounded by courtesy and appreciation. Her second set of dreams could come true. And it would all be made possible by the fact that she had ‘written as she did’: by the publication of The Pursuit of Love, in December 1945.
8
Within three weeks, The Pursuit of Love made Nancy more money than the rest of her books put together: £798. Within six months it made £7,000. Within a year it sold 200,000 copies. The novel was an instant sensation: it absolutely hit the spot, and the remarkable thing was that this happened pretty much by word of mouth. Although publicised to an extent, the book’s popularity spread from person to person, like pollen. An equivalent success today would be on chat shows, in supermarkets, a continual source of newspaper articles (‘Are Frenchmen Really Better Lovers?’ ‘Should Child-Hunting be Banned?’ ‘Are You a Bolter?’). It would be overhyped like the silliest piece of female fiction (‘The Hon. Bridget Jones’s Diary’). Linda would be portrayed as what she always threatens to become but never does: a generic man-hunter, a symbol of every woman’s longing for love, fulfilment and the Duke of Rightshire.
But would The Pursuit of Love succeed so wildly, were it to be published today? What would certainly be relished is its extraordinary gift of immediacy, the direct and intimate voice, the hotline to the anxious banalities of the female psyche (‘I have often noticed that when women look at themselves in every reflection... it is hardly ever, as is generally supposed, through vanity, but much more often from a fear that all is not as it should be’). Then there is its faith in the redemptive power of love, its romantic realism, qualities that still underpin ‘women’s’ books despite the rise of neo-feminism. In other ways, however, Nancy’s novel is completely different to any contemporary counterparts. Its cultural landscape is literary rather than journalistic, Evelyn Waugh rather than Cosmopolitan. Despite the modern technique of ‘racontez, racontez’, the book is a conceived and constructed thing, rather than two hundred pages of jolly spiel: ‘LINDA: V bd day today. Tony (bliss, swoon) rang but Farve (boo, hiss) picked up, ultra-disaster. Binged on jugged hare, 3 hlpgs stewed prunes (450 cals?). Gloucs. the absolute End.’
The Pursuit of Love is still adored for its autobiographical content and its ‘unwriterly’ style: in that sense, it is modern. What would probably go against the book, were it to be published today, is that it is set so shamelessly, so non-judgmentally, among the aristocracy. Nancy could bring the most socially remote member of the upper-classes to instant life, but there is a convention nowadays that posh people cannot be quite real. In fact Nancy was increasingly accused of uppishness during her own lifetime (‘I don’t like snobs,’ said a member of an Audience Research Report after her starchy appearance on BBC television in 19571). The world, as she knew, had grown inimical to her kind. Her compelling charm began to be seen as something false, fake, a music hall turn almost (‘The U Girl from Kew’). But she was lucky; she made it under the wire, a fugitive aristo embraced by the populist fold. A few years later and she might have been consigned to the oblivion of an unvisited stately home with its roof caving in. Nowadays she might not even get published at all; although antipathy to the upper classes continues to go hand in hand with a reluctant fascination.
Back in 1946 however, Nancy’s sweet, posh Radletts were devoured by read
ers with a near-frenzy. After the war, people were desperate for books, given near-luxury status by paper shortages; and none was more in demand than The Pursuit of Love. As with Brideshead Revisited – which also had tremendous success – readers wanted to forget the boredom and privations of war, and to lose themselves in tales of suffering upon goose-feather mattresses. Britain was in a state of depression at this time – ‘It shouldn’t have been,’ says Debo, ‘because the war had been won and so on, but it just was’ – and its tired old soul yearned to wallow in semi-illicit pleasures like escapism and nostalgia. Moreover Nancy made people laugh. She energised them with the pure aliveness of her tale. What must readers have felt, encountering for the first time that firecracker Uncle Matthew? What breathless joy he must have brought, and what reassurance with his indestructible patriotism, his unassailable sense of his place in life.
Of course, as with Brideshead, there was more to Nancy’s success than this. What The Pursuit of Love proves is that for a book to catch fire it must operate on two levels: give both instant and enduring pleasure. It must be fit for love at first sight and for fifty years of marriage. Obviously the novel had jokes and romance, it was a perfectly mixed cocktail of otherness and accessibility, and its fable-like aspect entranced a world that had changed for ever. All this explains why it is readable. But it is, for many people, infinitely readable, and this is because of its less evident qualities: its subterranean poetry, in fact. There is the slow, elegiac sadness that keeps watchful pace with the book’s springing vitality. There is its rigorous treatment of the apparently simple theme of love: is it the most important thing in life? Does its pursuit preclude day-to-day happiness? Is it an eternal value, or a series of exquisite illusions? And then there is the instinctive perfection with which the passage of time is marked: again and again comes the changing of the seasons, but as the book moves inexorably towards its end these seem to happen ever more quickly until, in the final pages, there is a last, poignant shift into spring, which arrives ‘with a brilliance of colouring, a richness of life’ and brings with it tragedy. These are the qualities that give Nancy’s book its subconscious life; and they are drunk, as great draughts of sustenance, along with the champagne bubbles.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 29