But these were crumbs of comfort scattered upon Nancy’s famished soul. The best she could hope for was that nothing would materially change; and at the end of her letter to Diana she seems reassured on this. She pulls herself together enough to make the requisite joke, in this case about the Tour de France (with which – being as ever more French than the French – she was utterly obsessed): ‘Bobet, the favourite & a hero to the public... succumbed to terrible furoncles (ONE can guess where)...’ And One is amazed by her stoicism, her bravery, her determination always to turn her face to the sun.
So was 1948 heavenly, or was it not? Can it possibly have been? For it was also the year in which Nancy’s sister Unity died of meningitis, aged thirty-four; a further agony for Lady Redesdale, although perhaps relief of a kind, despite the fact that Unity’s health had of late improved (so much so that her mother worried about the possibility of her daughter outliving her). But the bullet in her brain had always been liable to cause infection and inflammation. Almost as if she were aware of this, Unity had, towards the end of her life, amused herself in planning her own funeral. As Nancy’s would twenty-five years later, it took place in the little church at Swinbrook. The two sisters are buried side by side.
Before this, Unity had been transported from Inch Kenneth to the Scottish mainland. Owing to high winds, a doctor had been unable to reach her when she first became ill (one has to wonder at the decision to live on this island, when the churning series of disasters that befell the Mitfords emphasised its remoteness so cruelly), and by the time Unity got to Oban her temperature was flaming and her right temple bulging. ‘I am coming,’ she had suddenly said, from her bed at Inch Kenneth. Her mother had known what this meant. Within a few days her daughter was dead; she died on 28 May, the day that Nancy specifies for Linda Radlett’s death in The Pursuit of Love. When Linda dies, ‘a light went out, a great deal of joy that never could be replaced’. With poor Unity the light had begun to flicker when she put the bullet into her head – or earlier, when she first became the willing captive of Nazi Germany – but in a skewed way what Nancy wrote of Linda was true too of her sister: Unity, as a great galumphing girl, had been alight with joy, with vitality, with strong affections. So strong, perhaps, that they could not help but be misplaced. When Nancy said that Eugenia Malmains, Unity’s fictional representation, was the nicest character in Wigs on the Green, this had also been true; she was the most sincere, in an odd way the most vulnerable. And that had been Boud, a girl who once said to her mother: ‘No one ever had such a happy life as I did up to the war.’
The Redesdales attended the funeral together, but reconciliation would now never happen: Sydney returned to Inch Kenneth, and David to what had become his home, Redesdale Cottage in Northumberland, where he lived with his housekeeper (according to Jessica’s second husband, Bob Treuhaft23, David had ‘done that old-fashioned thing and run off with the parlourmaid’, but this was almost certainly wrong: until his dying day Lord Redesdale remained as unworldly as one of his own labradors). What did happen, as a consequence of Unity’s funeral, was a rapprochement between David and Oswald Mosley, greatly welcome to Diana. Time was healing, in a way: the physical separations – Nancy in France, Jessica now permanently in America, Pamela in Ireland, Diana also in France from 1951 (in a marvellous house, Le Temple de La Gloire, at Orsay near Paris) – may have helped to defuse the enmities. ‘Mitfords are very family-oriented,’ says Diana’s son Alexander Mosley. Losing touch with each other would never have been a possibility, even for Jessica, the Mitford who had checked in her family baggage at the Kremlin. But after the war it was perhaps better done at a distance; between the sisters, at least. For Lord and Lady Redesdale the loneliness must have been intense, the separations putting a near unbearable distance between themselves and the life they once had. Not long before she died Unity had asked her father whom he would most like to see walk through the door: ‘Decca,’ he instantly said.
Nancy felt the terrible sadness of Unity’s life and death. ‘I was so fond of her as you know’, she wrote to Eddy Sackville-West, ‘& it seems such a dreadful waste of the charming beautiful & odd creature that she used to be.’ Yet in January 1949 she wrote to Evelyn Waugh the phrase that annoyed him so much, as she had surely known it would: ‘I am having a lovely life – only sad that heavenly 1948 is over – except for Bobo’s death which I minded one of the happiest years I ever had.’
Despite it all – the wet hankies, ‘the horror of love’, the reminders of the sad grey past – that is what she thought; and although one can dismiss it as an act, a delusion, to do so would be contrary to the spirit of Nancy. As she wrote in her next letter to Waugh, ‘you must know as well as I do that happiness doesn’t depend on exterior or political events.’ This is almost completely true. Nancy wanted to be happy, and if she shrieked about a cyclist’s boils after laying her wretched heart on the executioner’s block that was not a sign of repression, but of courage. More than that; it was her instinct, her nature. For what was the point of sorrow, when every day was ‘one step nearer to THE END’? And when, in the opinion of Alexander Mosley, she had, ‘I think as much as anybody I have known, a successful, fulfilled life’?
Which came, in the end, from writing; and perhaps the most heavenly thing about 1948 was the creation of Love in a Cold Climate. It did not come easily, partly because she was distracted by life; partly because she was now without question a ‘professional’ writer. What she did after The Pursuit of Love mattered, it would be awaited and scrutinised; this was a long way from cranking out a fey little divertissement in between writing names on people’s foreheads at an ARP post. This novel required invention, it required construction, a tricky synthesis of the intimate voice of ‘racontez, racontez’ and a plot about people whom she did not already know inside out. The Radletts were there again, as a delicious sideshow, so too were Fabrice and Davey, and the extremely satisfying figure of Fanny was still acting as narrator; but now Nancy tackled new worlds, familiar to her but not a part of her own life: London high society, Oxford don society, Paris homosexual society.
She pulled it off magnificently. Some commentators think Love in a Cold Climate even better than The Pursuit of Love (it is, says Philip Hensher24, ‘her masterpiece’). Certainly it is more of a ‘novel’; not a flowing stream that directs itself, one does not know quite how, into the sublime reaches of art. It is a structure, albeit one built in the Mitfordian manner, that of a brilliant child playing with toy bricks. And it is rooted in the real world, not that of illusion and poetry. It has no romance about it; it is stunningly cynical, although it has the quality of benevolence that marks Nancy’s mature writing. Its understanding of human nature is knowing and non-judgmental. It is a comedy of manners, written to the highest possible level. And it contains a character worthy of the best of the genre, at least as good as anything in Congreve or Austen or Wilde: Lady Montdore, ‘the old she-wolf’, who stands facing Uncle Matthew in perfect enmity, his absolute female equal.
The key to Lady Montdore, as with Lord Alconleigh, is that neither is purely a pantomime character: they stride through their novels like fairytale monsters, terrorising those about them, loathing each other; but it is Nancy’s great gift to make them utterly real, to bring them before us as people as well as semi-mythic creations. ‘Miss Mitford’s people possess an authenticity not always achieved by novelists whose characters are largely drawn from families of the peerage’, said the TLS; this was entirely true, and although a simple point it was well worth saying.
For all the glee with which Nancy kindles Lady Montdore into extremely large life, there is a subtlety about the characterisation. Like her male counterpart, she has – and this is the surprise element – areas of vulnerability. Just as Uncle Matthew’s rampant xenophobia hides a small, silent fear of the unknown, so Sonia Montdore’s desire to control hides a fear of the unpredictable. She would never have dreamed in a million years that her daughter Polly, with whom she is obsessed, and whose looks are s
uch that they should have led to a brilliant marriage, would go through her debutante years without a single proper suitor (‘So beautiful and no B.A. at all’). The terror of Polly’s failure – which is, of course, her mother’s – is real, and the consequent panic makes her furious: ‘Can’t you try to be a little jollier, nicer with them, no man cares to make love to a dummy, you know.’ Hilarious stuff, but within it lies bewilderment, giving substance to the jokes: ‘“Ever since she was born, you know, I’ve worried and fussed over that child, and thought of the awful things that might happen to her... but the one thing that never even crossed my mind was that she might end up an old maid.”
‘There was a rising note of aggrieved hysteria in her voice...’
Lady Montdore is not as sure as herself as she appears to be. In a sense, she is a monolith of certainty, as when she describes having ‘all this’ (her husband’s quite stupendous wealth): ‘Remember that love cannot last, it never does, but if you marry all this it’s for your life. One day, don’t forget, you’ll be middle-aged and think what that must be like for a woman who can’t have, say, a pair of diamond earrings.’ Her physical demeanour is staggeringly assured: ‘Lady Montdore sat well back on the sofa, both her feet on the ground. She seemed planted there, immoveable and solid, not actually fat, but solid through and through.’ Her pronouncements admit of no dissent: ‘No point in cluttering up the ballrooms with girls who look like that, it’s simply not fair on anybody’; ‘Whoever invented love should be shot.’ But when Polly is removed from her life, as she is in the middle of the book, her mother reveals herself to be a slightly lost figure. She drops in constantly on the newly married Fanny – ‘never bothered to ring but just stumped upstairs’ – and is always rude (‘yes, just a cup please. How weak you have it – no, no, this will do quite well’), but it is obvious that she is in desperate need of company. ‘She was horribly lonely, you could see that.’ And when Cedric Hampton, the glittering homosexual who is heir to ‘all this’, descends upon her from Paris and swoops her into a new life of leg lifts and skin brushing, she is almost touchingly grateful. Cedric’s own motivations are dubious, as Nancy makes clear in wonderfully implicit fashion; but Lady Montdore, at the age of sixty, submits to the uncontrollable and falls in delirious love, watching for Cedric constantly with ‘one spaniel-eye’: it is the final touch that brings her character to indestructible life.
This stunning, endlessly funny creation probably had her origins in Nancy’s mother-in-law, Lady Rennell (although she also owes something to the writer Violet Trefusis, who once scooped up Nancy’s serving of fish at lunch in the same way that Lady Montdore does to Fanny). In 1946 Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh: ‘The other shot in my locker is my book called The Ambassadress, which can be written when my ma in law has kicked the bucket’ (in fact she did not bother to wait; Lady Rennell died in 1951). But the novel evolved considerably from that point. In September 1947 Nancy wrote to Waugh again, having conceived the central, impeccably signposted plot twist: that Lady Montdore’s daughter, Polly, should be besotted with her mother’s own lover, Boy Dougdale. (Waugh thought him an unconvincing character; perhaps he is someone that only a woman could truly understand? Such is his creepiness that one can hardly bear to read of him ‘rubbing our knees with his’; his femininity – making tapestries, painting, chatting – and cosy snobbishness are perfectly rendered; and the ghastly essence of his sexual appeal is conveyed by saying that he ‘was physically repulsive... to those women who did not find him irresistible.’)
Nancy struggled on with the book – it really was a struggle in the beginning – writing in the first person of Fanny, then trying third person, then returning to Fanny (first person, Waugh counselled, ‘suits you perfectly’). ‘Oh my novel has STUCK’, she wails in December 1947; then, two weeks later, ‘My book has begun to go, isn’t it wonderful when they do that. Of course it’s simply a question of working whatever one may tell oneself.’
That, always, was Nancy’s philosophy. Much as she loved her social life at this time (despite fatigue from her ‘low stamina’), she would willingly ignore invitations and write 2,000 words a day: by hand, into long red books, quite a different thing from tip-tapping on a PC (she claimed to love the feeling of pen on paper). In the end, however, what with the to and fro of Peter, and the constant noise of the telephone (‘Counted the telephone calls this morning, 10 before 11. What am I to do...’), Nancy decided to up sticks and accept Diana Cooper’s invitation to finish Love in a Cold Climate at Chantilly. ‘I write my book all day in the stables & at meal times there are large & cheerful parties so you see it is ideal.’ In fact things still went stickily – John Julius Norwich (Diana’s son) remembers Nancy’s plaintive despair, ‘no good darling, just won’t come’ – but she ‘pegged away’ and by September 1948 was finally finished. ‘I see I’m going to miss the book now it’s done – I’ve never taken so long before – one year & 22 days. Oh I do hope it’s good’, she wrote to Evelyn Waugh. But surely she knew, really?
Waugh read the manuscript and gave his lecture upon the need for ‘Blood, sweat & tears’, which provoked a small flurry of panic and revising. Then she consigned Waugh’s opinion to the sub-fusc cupboard where it belonged. ‘Well I suppose you will hate me now for the rest of our lives’, he had written at the end of his criticism, but of course she did not: she was far too good-natured, she valued her friendships too highly to cast them aside in pique and, as she put it, ‘my skin is thick’. She also saw, crucially, that their talents were of a very different kind. When she wrote to Waugh ‘I do feel quite sure that I am incapable of writing the book you want me to’, that was the simple truth. As she would say a year later, ‘you are cher maître to me but even so one must write as one can’. It was something that he, too, came to recognise.
Nancy’s second classic novel was published in July 1949. The reviews were extremely good, and perceived the substance beneath the dazzling surface: ‘So far out of the ordinary you may never hear the last of it’, sang the Daily Express; ‘It has feelings as well as fun; moments of sensibility as well as explosions of farce’, said the Evening Standard; and Peter Quennell25 in the Daily Mail wrote, ‘To her sense of fun the novelist adds a mature wit, not untouched now and then by a dawning sense of tragedy.’ Hamish Hamilton must have been rubbing his hands at the thought of all those sales; he was not disappointed. ‘My book is a great best seller so are you impressed?’ Nancy wrote to Mark Ogilvie-Grant. ‘Even in America where the reviews are positively insulting, it is on the best seller list... Anyhow I shall never write about normal love again as I see there is a far larger and more enthusiastic public for the other sort.’ In fact her portrayal of homosexuality – Cedric’s and, later, Boy’s – was a bit too much for some. ‘Boy Dougdale’s bad habits are made to change somewhat arbitrarily to worse ones’, wrote the TLS, concluding manfully: ‘such things are not impossible’. But there is no doubt that Nancy’s acceptance, her refusal to make any comment upon what were then illegal proclivities, were attitudes ahead of their time (indeed Harold Acton suggests that Nancy’s ‘witty tolerance’ helped to remove homosexuality’s ‘social stigma’; also not impossible.) America couldn’t take it at all, however: ‘you can have pederasts in books so long as they are fearfully gloomy & end by committing suicide’, wrote Nancy. ‘A cheerful one who goes from strength to strength like Cedric horrifies them...’
In England, too – where the novel was so successful that Nancy reported Queen Elizabeth acting it out in a charade (‘she kissed the King & shivered & everybody guessed at once!!’) – there was a faint, if delicious, sense of shock: that the book should end with so many people having got what they wanted, without having necessarily deserved it; that the climax should resolve itself according to a sunny, foreign philosophy, which proclaimed above all the morality of happiness. It was not the modern creed of ‘the self’ – Nancy didn’t believe in that at all – but it was alien to the world of ration books and austerity. ‘The climax is extremely bad�
��, wrote Evelyn Waugh. Perhaps his sense of sin caused him to shudder at that cloudless déroulement. Even now, one is pulled up by the way the book refuses to judge, the way its characters are allowed to thrive: in its calm, cosy fashion it is something of an eye-opener, almost subversive in its remoteness from the usual value systems. Nancy’s characters are not good or evil, they are not selfish or selfless, they are simply there, dancing their hopeful way towards happiness, finding it and losing it and, if they are lucky, finding it again.
‘“So here we all are, my darling, having our lovely cake and eating it too,”’ says Cedric at the end of the book: ‘“One’s great aim in life.”’ How the readers of 1949 devoured it; the assorted triumphs of Cedric and Lady Montdore, of Polly and Boy, were tastier morsels any day than tales of duty rewarded or fecklessness punished, and in Nancy’s hands they seemed just as real. Thereafter her readers would expect the piquancy of provocation as well as the comfort of nostalgia, they waited ecstatically to see what ladylike surprise she would give them next, and she did not let them down. Throughout the 1950s she carried on hitting the spot, becoming ever more successful in the process. Having the best cake from Fauchon and, on a good day – which she believed almost every day to be – eating it too.
9
The early years of the 1950s were wonderfully busy ones for Nancy. She was harvesting her success with gleeful assiduity. At the end of 1949 she took up journalism again, and with all her new assurance, having been asked by Ian Fleming – ‘handsome Mr Fleming’ – to write a column for The Sunday Times, which she did regularly for four years. These columns began as letters from Paris, ‘causeries’ as the newspaper called them, but they took on other subjects when the editor-in-chief, Lord Kemsley, saw the effect that Nancy could have upon sales with her jokes and teases. Accordingly she took out her elegant quiver and shot various bows: Rome, she wrote, was ‘a village’ whose life was ‘centred round the vicarage’, Athens was ‘probably the ugliest capital in Europe’ and Marie Antoinette ‘one of the most irritating characters in history’. All of which gave her readers plenty to be going on with.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 33