Not that everyone perceived these profundities at the time; the truth of books is rarely immediately apparent. Evelyn Waugh wrote a rather sneaky letter to Diana Cooper saying ‘Nancy Mitford has written half a brilliant novel about her childhood; the adult half is no good but do read the beginning’ (he probably knew this to be a commonplace judgment, but Diana and Nancy were his two chief female correspondents, and he could not resist the occasional self-important bitch about one to the other). The TLS, too, said that the ‘real attraction’ of the book ‘lies in the amusing and maliciously observed picture of family life at Alconleigh’. The intellectual brigade was almost bound to denounce it: ‘they are all the more annoyed because they think it’s quite well written’, Nancy wrote to Waugh. Meanwhile it was being positively eaten up by the Tatler set: ‘kind people are giving luncheon parties to discuss the book & the Windsors have given it to everyone for Xmas. Rather low brow circles I fear but still!’
A different type of person, however, adored the book completely, and understood what lay beneath. The Spectator, for example, wrote in its review, ‘(rather gratuitously I thought) this is not great literature or great wit but is otherwise all right’2, but its conclusion was generous and accurate: ‘it has more truth, more sincerity and more laughter than a year’s output of novels in the bogus significant style.’ John Betjeman fell completely for the book, and wrote to Nancy that she had ‘produced something that really is a monument to our friends... Clever, clever Nancy. I am proud to know you.’ No doubt the novel confirmed Betjeman in his opinion that ‘Nancy was the warmest of them all.’ ‘Praise from you is praise indeed,’ she replied to him; ‘you say all the things I would have liked somebody (whose judgment I respected) most to say... How nice and clever we all are.’
Nancy’s letter to Betjeman continued that her father was ‘delighted’ with Pursuit, ‘but cried at the end & said he had read a sad book once before called Tess of the d’Urbervilles [not just White Fang, then?] & had hoped never to read another.’ To Lord Redesdale it must have been a bewildering little miracle, to see his own old self conjured to such life by his daughter; although Lady Redesdale seems to have taken little pleasure in what Nancy had achieved. ‘This family again’, she wrote to Jessica, in an oh-dear-God sort of way, after reading a couple of chapters. ‘It’s about all of you as children, the heroine appears to be Debo, and you appear in it of course, and Farve and I...’ Perhaps Sydney feared the publicity that the book would bring; she had had a bellyful with Unity, Diana and indeed Jessica. But nor was she overjoyed with her portrayal as Aunt Sadie, feeling as she did a small chill within it; although this vague, funny and benign figure left out much of what Nancy saw as her mother’s steel.
As for the sisters: the 1980 television documentary showed Pamela, Deborah and Jessica to be as intensely fond of The Pursuit of Love as if it, too, were a member of their family, which in a sense it was. Diana, notably, took a slightly more distanced view – ‘now I’m afraid that’s poetic licence’, she said firmly, when asked about Nancy’s depiction of the Mitford child-hunts. But for the others it was as if, by osmosis, the real and fictionalised versions of their shared past had become one semi-mythic truth. This is very Mitford, to collude in the magical joke of their own immortality; and certainly they seemed to be enjoying it.
Nonetheless, back in 1945, it must have been a surprise, to say the least, when Nancy was revealed to have taken what was intensely private and laid it all out for public consumption. Within the joy that The Pursuit of Love would surely have given – of recognition, if of nothing else – there may have been more ambivalent emotions. Again, this is the great moral question that is asked of autobiographical novels, whether they can ever be wholly acceptable to the people who form the raw stuff of them. The Pursuit of Love was not Wigs on the Green, there was nothing overt that could hurt or offend; but this was a history belonging to seven other (living) people that Nancy had made her own. The fact of her having done so may have aroused a vague disquiet, that Nancy should profit so from her extravagant use of them all.
And specific things must have irritated. When Lord Merlin (a character based upon Gerald Berners, who no doubt loved this fantastical portrait) says that Linda has run off with Christian Talbot not so much because of his noble ideals, but because he is ‘an attractive fellow’, this would almost certainly have annoyed Jessica and Diana: the shot is aimed at both of them. Jessica is a further target, when her elopement with Esmond Romilly is ludicrously parodied: Jassy Radlett, ‘pretty as a peach’, runs off to Hollywood to marry a ‘second-rate film actor’ named Carey Goon (this refinement may have been suggested by the minor scandal in which Winston Churchill’s daughter, Sarah, eloped with the actor Vic Oliver). In fact the whole notion of Communism is made to look futile in The Pursuit of Love (‘Left-wing people are always sad because they mind so dreadfully about their causes’, says Linda, ‘and the causes are always going so badly... One does feel so much on their side, but it’s no good, people like Sir Leicester [Kroesig] always come out on top, so what can one do?’). This sort of thing would have incensed Jessica; perhaps justifiably. There is a sense that Nancy found her loyalties relatively easy to attack, after the unyielding struggle with Diana over Fascism.
But the most interesting question is whether the sisters were jealous of Nancy after she achieved success on the back of their collective past. The Pursuit of Love seems to have incited them all, except phlegmatic Pamela, to write their own version of its events: Jessica’s Hons and Rebels, Diana’s A Life of Contrasts, Deborah’s Counting My Chickens. It is possible that these books, all of which stand alone as unusually good, would have been written anyway. Yet one suspects that they were born of Nancy’s example, that she set her sisters on this particular path. She was always an agitatrix. Benevolent though her novel was, it surely stirred things up within the Mitfords, and jostled the rivalries that lay never too far from the surface.
Nancy’s life changed for ever after The Pursuit of Love. ‘When it came out’, she would later say, ‘I sat under a shower of gold.’3 It would take her into the world of fame, protect her against want and obscurity, give her a voice to which people would always now listen. It would make her, as Diana says, ‘a star: it’s so lovely to have a great success, and she really did. Of course you might feel it’s rather awful not to have a success by the time you’re forty. But it was marvellous, and completely self-made. And she was a star, although she never considered herself one.’ In fact, Nancy was quite shy about her success. Among her friends she took pleasure in it, in print she allowed it to give her power, to say things that an unknown writer might not dare, but she did not flaunt it. One cannot imagine her using her name to get a table at Prunier’s. In 1956 she described a nightmare Air France flight made easy for her when a ‘fan... penetrated the disguise of Mme Rodd’, but a different type of person would never have worn the disguise in the first place. Nancy said of herself that she was ‘timid’, and in some ways this was true. She was nervous, for example, of appearing on television (‘I’ve always said no on account of the terror,’ she wrote to the producer of the 1957 BBC programme. ‘The trouble is that when I am frightened I become very affected’).
As her fame grew, from 1946 onwards, she took an ambivalent attitude to her own publicity. Personally she did not care for it; she was, wrote Harold Acton, ‘a very private person in spite of the publicity she had given to her family in The Pursuit of Love.’ At the same time she was not remotely snooty about being marketed; as long as she herself could remain withdrawn, she was more than happy to go along with it. Despite her fears she did the television interviews, because she knew the difference that they made to sales (‘I sold half as many again last week’, she wrote to Violet Hammersley, after a broadcast to plug Don’t Tell Alfred. ‘But can you tell me why anyone watches?’). She did newspaper interviews, although not of the probing kind, and she was on hand to give opinions to journalists (although she ‘cried off’ when the BBC telephoned in 1971, ask
ing for her thoughts on Edward Heath’s French accent: ‘I longed to say it’s his English accent which is so fearful’4). In 1971 she also – and this is extraordinary, so much so that one wonders if she quite knew what she was doing – gave her sanction to an idea, proposed by the then head of BBC Comedy, for a series of half-hour programmes based upon the Mitford family. An unintentionally comedic internal BBC memo says that the series was envisaged as ‘having the same sort of interest as The Forsyte Saga’, although the proposed writer was a veteran of the 1970s sitcom (‘This could be done before he does another series of My Wife Next Door’). The series went a long way in the planning. It stalled, chiefly because of the difficulty in getting the rights to The Pursuit of Love from the film company to which they were sold in 1946, but the idea only really died with Nancy herself in 1973. Although the BBC was still keen to continue, it would seem (from internal memos) that Deborah, Nancy’s literary executrix, and Anthony Jones, from her literary agency A.D. Peters, were not.
Populism was not a dirty word to Nancy. Having created her remarkably defined image, she was willing to nurture it: she knew that people liked her well-bred provocativeness, that they loved the myth of the Mitfords, that they lapped up all the ‘snobbish’ detail of her writing, and she saw no reason not to give them what they wanted. There is a depressing chasm nowadays between novels that are ‘literary’ (602 copies sold) and those that are ‘readable’ (903,117,531 copies sold, excluding the TV tie-in paperback); but this did not exist for Nancy. She had the essential integrity that would prevent her from doing anything solely for sales: ‘she is not at all a hack; nobody can make her write unless she wants to’, as the TLS put it, and she herself later said: ‘I do not write consciously with the idea of making money.’ Nonetheless she was sensible enough to court success, rather than to see it as evidence of compromise.
As for the sudden unstoppable stream of wealth that flowed from The Pursuit of Love, flooding the parched poverty that she had known all her adult life – it was magical, and it made all the difference in the world to her. She was absolutely sincere when, in 1966, she shrieked ‘I’ve always needed money!’ at the television interviewer who clearly thought that anyone who spoke the way she did was up to her neck in share certificates. Not so: in London she really had lived on an upmarket bread line, across which her husband constantly threatened to push her. Of course she was protected by who she was: she received handouts from her in-laws and her father, and she owned a few posh accessories, like her Sheraton desk, the Chinese screens brought back from diplomatic travels by her grandfather Bertram, the fur coat that she sent to the country during the Blitz. Of course she was never truly poor, but she did have very little: ‘she was’, as Debo says, ‘pushed for money until she wrote The Pursuit of Love. She never had money to buy things. She was pushed, she really was.’ What she needed, she had to earn, and she did so industriously. The neo-feminists should be proud of her.
Except – they might say – from 1945 onwards the reason she wanted money was so that she could get close to the Colonel. Once the royalties started flooding in, she could be off to Paris, basking in his sexy, spotty presence. Which makes some of the letters she wrote in early 1946 rather baffling, since they are full of affection towards none other than our old friend Peter Rodd. ‘Peter is back’, Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh in January, from Blomfield Road, ‘which is bliss except that I hardly see him... What a clever man he is (Prod I mean) & so good. The late Colonel.’ This surprising letter ends on a wifely note: ‘I hear Prod stirring like a hibernating animal in the spring so must go & see to his breakfast.’ To which Waugh replies: ‘This Prod-worship is not healthy. Clever perhaps – good no.’
This letter of Nancy’s does not fit the perceived pattern of her life; but there it is, along with the reply to Waugh which returns to the same theme: ‘If ever there was a saintly character it is Prod & I bet you’ll see him nestling away in heaven from a distance long before you get there yourself.’ She was even planning to return with her husband to their shared past at Perpignan: ‘Prod is off to Spain he hopes for the revolution’, she wrote, although in fact he went to try and make a film (a typical shot in the dark; nowadays he would probably have an unsuccessful television documentary company, PRODuctions).
So was Nancy playing with the idea of returning to Peter, rather than ploughing on with Palewski? Or is this sudden affection for her husband better explained in a letter to Gaston Palewski, also January 1946: ‘In March Peter is going to Spain then please come & stay with me – he wouldn’t mind. I said to him, about my will, would it hurt your feelings if I left some money to the Colonel? Peter said hasn’t he got any money? NR: No. PR: Then I think it is a good idea, he ought to have some.’ In other words Peter had apparently become a complaisant husband, for which Nancy was lovingly grateful.
Actually it suited him to have Nancy trailing after another man, as he must have realised after the jealous fury of 1944 had subsided. In 1950 he made the remark to Nancy about having ‘for the last 12 years... considered himself as married to Adelaide [Lubbock]’, so what difference did it make to him if Nancy adored the Colonel? This may all seem rather strange today: the contemporary view of marriage has become more conventional as love lives have grown more noisily recherché. But the fact is that Peter got along fine with Palewski, Nancy frequently spent time with Mrs Lubbock and nobody really batted an eyelid. One wonders, of course, what went on beneath the surface. For example Nancy may have exaggerated Peter’s complaisance in the letter to her lover, in order to prove how absolutely free she was. And Peter’s real reason for behaving in such ‘saintly’ fashion may have been that he was after some money. Now that Nancy was awash with the stuff, he could anticipate being provided for. She did not let him down but then she, in her turn, saw this as the best way of keeping him quiet. ‘I long to live here [Paris]’, she wrote to Evelyn Waugh in June 1946, ‘but what would Prod live on? Isn’t one’s life complicated. But I can’t stay here for ever & keep Blomfield at full blast & Prod installed with unrestricted use of telephone. Even Linda can’t pay for that. I wish I could see my way ahead – of course there is the path of duty – but so thorny.’
Did she give the nod to ‘duty’ to look good in Waugh’s eyes, or did she really feel guilt about her desire to leave her husband? And what did she mean by the phrase ‘the late Colonel’? Peter had been made a temporary colonel during the war, so this was her obvious meaning: but there was more to it than that. Nancy was clearly linking her ‘two Colonels’ in her head. Perhaps she was suggesting that Peter was someone she had once loved as she now did Palewski. But she was surely fooling herself if she was trying to see Peter in this way, for at the same time she was writing this to her lover:
Your darling voice & your darling handwriting within an hour of each other is almost too much happiness. And I suppose the next best thing to having one’s sentiments returned is to have them appréciés... What will happen to me on Sunday mornings when I have to stop writing to you? Oh darling Colonel... Darling Colonel come to London. I am very rich. I can lend you masses of money a thousand pounds if you like... I can’t settle to anything or sleep.
Poor Nancy, who despite success was suffering dreadfully from her sudden transportation. ‘I long for the darling Frogs’, she wrote to Waugh in February, but her tone implies that they are almost illusory, that the dim world of Blomfield Road – ‘too difficult & depressing’ – was the reality of her life. At the start of 1946 she seems, for a brief grey moment, to have seen her future as struggling on until death with Peter Rodd, leaving Gaston Palewski to skip down the Rue Bonaparte with his pretty ladies. ‘You are in a mist for me now’, she wrote to him, ‘& don’t seem real. Come out of it Colonel...’
Yet it was Nancy who came out of the mist: she resisted – and thank heaven for it – the gloomy temptation to remain in England. Paris, after all, had been real to her, as real as the sunlight hitting the fountains in the Tuileries gardens. How could she deny it? What was all thi
s miraculous money for, if not to facilitate the pursuit of happiness?
It was, in a way, more of a landmark decision to return to Paris in 1946 than it had been to go there the year before. The 1945 visit had been passed off, to other people at least, as a semi-holiday with a bit of work thrown in, but Nancy had now left Heywood Hill, she had no alibi about setting up bookshops and so forth, and if she went to Paris in 1946 then it meant something serious. It meant she was going purely and simply because she wanted to. She was acknowledging that this was where the future lay; it would be a turning point to affect the rest of her life.
For she could have stayed in England, where things would almost certainly have improved. She would have had money, continued to write, been surrounded by friends and family, had the odd love affair: nevertheless she knew that to stay would be a cowardly act. In France, the situation with the Colonel had changed a little, to Nancy’s advantage. General de Gaulle had been voted out of office, Palewski had more time on his hands and Nancy had the luxury of being able to comfort him for his loss of power, while possibly relishing the fact that she was now the one with status and money (‘Dear Col I shall ring you up in a week or 2, lucky I’m so rich isn’t it?’). Peter was safely wasting his time in Spain. What was there to lose? In April 1946, Nancy went back to Paris. She never lived for any length of time in England again.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 30