To Evelyn Waugh she had given her usual line that she was doing the columns for money – of which half, she said, went in tax – but this was not quite true as she twice turned down offers to write them more often. (In 1954, Lord Kemsley asked her ‘to write only for him and once a week. He said “you’d find your column much easier to write”. I said “perhaps, but it would be impossible to read”.’1) Despite the fact that regular journalism can become a tyranny, ‘waking up in the night in a panic about what to say’, Nancy enjoyed this new arena: firstly because it gave her the chance to write whatever she liked about France, and then, when her remit was broadened, because it encouraged her to make those characteristic pronouncements that were one part truth to one part naughtiness (as when, in Madame de Pompadour, she wrote that a love affair can only succeed if the man has the upper hand; without the kernel of truth in that statement, the naughtiness would not work).
Her columns were an instant success. Waugh was waylaid by a woman who gushed over them: ‘I do admire her writing so,’ she said to him. ‘So do I,’ he replied, ‘I have just been rereading all her books.’ ‘Books! D’you mean to say she writes books too?’ Waugh was also an admirer, and wrote of her first piece, a series of general reflections upon Paris: ‘I thought your Sunday Times article excellent – positive, funny, enterprising – all that The Sunday Times isn’t. Also an entirely new & personal sort of journalism. If you can keep it up you will become what is called a “pioneer”.’ It was, he later told her, ‘your métier’.
Which was true up to a point: her post-war journalism was certainly extremely readable, and unlike most of what then appeared in newspapers. It was, in fact, very modern. Now it is the norm to read journalists chatting away about their lives and opinions; sixty years ago this was not the case, and the directness with which Nancy spoke to her readers was innovative. ‘My furniture has arrived,’ she told her Sunday Times audience in early 1952, ‘emerging from seven years of storage and its long journey in a surprisingly good state.’ If one were to read that in a newspaper column today – as one is more than likely to do (‘The husband is baying for my blood as I ask him to assemble Archie’s activity centre’) – one’s eyes would roll with boredom. But at the time it felt fresh. It also flattered readers – Nancy being so famous and all – in its implication of intimacy.
Talking to readers was what she did of course. Her two great novels had precisely this directness, transmuted into art; doing the same thing in journalism was, therefore, a diminished variation on her stylistic theme, stripping away the invention and the imagination of the books, leaving the quality of the voice but without its coloratura. This was all very fine, but it was far from being Nancy’s ‘métier’. She herself did not think so, at least not by 1954: ‘Journalism isn’t my talent’, she wrote to her agent A.D. Peters. She did not need its discipline to make her writing clear and readable. Indeed in her articles she became regularised, predictable, a bit too grown-up: although she describes Paris, one has no sense of it being ragingly good fun, more a dutiful and rather middle-aged procession of art exhibitions and plays. Nancy lost something of her idiosyncratic spark; her natural momentum was slowed. She always said that she worked extremely hard at her journalism (‘careful work’, she called it), probably because she knew that simplicity of style tends to be equated with ease of production. But the fact is that she wrote better when she thought less and intuited more: as in her glorious letters, which give her fantastical side free rein. The letter to her sister Diana about the Tour de France – ‘Bobet... succumbed to terrible furoncles (ONE can guess where)’ – is infinitely more Mitfordian than the version of similar events in the Sunday Times in July 1950, which ended: ‘But the English take no interest in the Tour. “A bicycle race”, they say, “how deadly”. So I expect I had better shut up.’ This really was not essence of Nancy; it had her clarity, her amused slant on events, but what was missing was the energy in her prose: that disdain for rules of punctuation and construction, that rush as a simile flies like a bird into her head, the intake of delighted breath before she makes a good joke, the childlike confidence with which she lays down unexpected words.
But it is easy to see why Nancy’s columns were so popular. They were produced by someone whose every word was now eagerly devoured: a felicitous state of affairs for a writer. They also brought off some very clever tricks. The ‘letters from Paris’ were a more sophisticated version of A Year in Provence, bringing France to the English in just the way that they most like it: telling them about la mode and l’Académie, encouraging the knowledge that they already had, gracefully juggling expectation with novelty. Nancy knew that her readers were fascinated by the French, that they felt France to be the only country that could compete with England, that they were intrigued by a nation which could retain so much self-assurance in the face of its recent past. At the same time, they wanted the essence of France conveyed in a way that was essentially English, and no one could do that better than Nancy. She was a filter, an ambassadress, ‘in’ Paris but not quite ‘of’ it; she told her readers its little secrets but she did so as one of them. ‘The prices’, she writes of Parisian clothes, ‘are more horrifying than ever. I was with an English friend when she saw an embroidered jacket. “Darling I must have it. I don’t mind what it costs...” So we asked for the price. £360. Collapse of my friend.
‘I spoke of this to a Frenchwoman who knows about the business of haute couture...’ Oh, it was a clever trick that she pulled, and Evelyn Waugh acknowledged as much when he praised the use of French in the articles: ‘What the English like are phrases of which they can easily understand the literal meaning, if possible with words that look like English words, and have quaintness and drollness. That is what you give them...’ ‘What you say’, she replied, ‘is just what I’d figured out. My fan mail very funny... Must I answer them? I can’t.’ Later she said that she received letters from people who, regarding her as their intermediary between France and England, the patron saint of La Manche, asked her such questions as ‘will my electric iron work in a French hotel?’
And what a storm these columns of Nancy’s would go down still, today, among the second-home-in-the-Dordogne brigade: all those little snippets about the auctions at the Hôtel Drouot (‘a small unsigned Louis XV cabinet, with two legs and its marble top missing, was sold for £800... sale room wags said it would have fetched much less had it been complete’), the lack of indexes in French books (‘My St Simon in sixteen volumes and Mme de Sévigné in eight... have not got an index between them... Oh! the irritation!’), the new diktats of Christian Dior (‘Skirts are two inches shorter, a very nice little change, and I for one am in favour of it’). How good the readers felt about themselves, knowing that they were au courant, that none other than Nancy Mitford had filled them in on what the critics said about Cocteau’s last play (it was so bad that they said nothing, ‘writing about the difficulties of parking a motor on a first night’), or what Picasso said when asked who are the new painters (‘Moi’); how they all chatted about it at their Sunday lunch parties, or – according to Evelyn Waugh – at White’s club, ‘where men of influence & discrimination congregate and all were full of praise of your “Sunday Times” article – Birch, Birkenhead, Churchill, Hartington, Head etc.’ It all goes to show that when a writer is ‘known’ to be good, everything that they write is worthy of praise, even though – dare one say it – they sometimes wrote things that were far better before they ‘became’ good.
But it was a pleasant furrow for Nancy to plough, taking France to the English in this way; it was not too taxing, and she had the field pretty much to herself. So she did other things in the same vein. She translated what she would later call her favourite book, Madame Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves, a delicate, serious, intelligent romance set in the court of Henri IV, and steeped in an idiosyncratic, clear-sighted sensibility comparable with, though different from, Nancy’s. Her translation, which she felt overly obliged to make faithful to the
original, was published in 1950 (in America, under the title Love in a Cold Climate) by Euphorion Books, a house recently set up by the Mosleys.
‘Prod says it’s the most awful translationese he’s ever read’, she wrote to Waugh in January. Really, these people who do nothing themselves and pronounce upon those who do – but unfortunately Peter had a point, as was made clear when Nancy came to revise the translation by Penguin in 1962. Her corrected proofs show an agonising number of changes. An example of a cut sentence – ‘He knew himself that his brother was incapable of it, but feared it might be said that he had done it’ – does not inspire admiration, and Penguin were in fact very rude about it. ‘In 190 pages of text I have noted more than twenty verbal ineptitudes’, snapped an internal memo, and the editor Betty Radice later wrote of the book: ‘I hope very much that it need not be reprinted, so that we can have la Princesse properly translated in its proper place’. This seems extraordinary, considering that Nancy’s reprinted Penguins – Pigeon Pie, The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing – were selling in their thousands.
It is both heartening and depressing that a writer as rampantly successful as Nancy could be treated with the same kind of disdain as some pitiful first novelist selling tens of copies. For example, as a very particular kind of stylist, she had problems with editors. Her nephew Alexander says that ‘she was always fighting them’: their itching desire to replace her racy commas with sedate semi-colons, to take out sullying phrases such as ‘he did not go droning on about things’ (in Madame de Pompadour), to kill her prose stone-dead. Of her biography of Frederick the Great, Nancy wrote to her friend Sir Hugh Jackson2: ‘The publishers took it upon them to change many colloquialisms as I know they do in America and Russia... “They had a good gossip” became “they reminisced” and so on... No wonder American books read so dull and flat.’ In fact Nancy always retained a kind of humility about her writing, a legacy of her sense that she was ‘an uneducated woman’. Her letter to Sir Hugh continues: ‘Raymond Mortimer, a master of English, had been over the typescript and removed many horrors as I’m the first to admit – I naturally accepted all his changes but then the high school girls at Rainbird’s3 took over. Oh no. Luckily I bring them in money and they don’t really want to kill the goose.’ So it was that Penguin published Nancy’s translation of La Princesse de Clèves, despite the po-faced contempt in which it was held. Nancy herself had known that the 1950 version required work, and clearly believed that she was capable of improving it: ‘I think & hope I write better English than when I translated La Psse: some 10 years ago’, she wrote to Penguin in 1959. ‘I think the actual translation is quite correct.’
But therein lay the problem: correct translating was not Nancy’s thing. As with her conscientious letters from Paris, it dimmed her vitality. Far more suitable was her next venture, in which she took an amusing, slightly louche play, André Roussin’s La Petite Hutte, and adapted it for the British stage. Translating again, in a sense, but this time with a much freer hand. Roussin spoke not a word of English, ‘so I’ve got away with all my own jokes & dialogue & just kept his situations which are heaven’, she wrote merrily to Evelyn Waugh at the start of 1950. Once again, Nancy could perform her filtering job of pouring the essence of France into an English vessel: Dom Perignon into a teapot from Goode’s.
She was a terrific admirer of Roussin: ‘a great love’ with a smilingly cynical eye on the world. As in Love in a Cold Climate, whose plot concerns a man who has an adulterous affair with an older woman, marries her daughter, then falls for her male cousin, The Little Hut also handled strong, sexual realism with a light and knowing acceptance. Four people are shipwrecked on a desert island – a married couple, the wife’s lover and the ship’s cook – and the men take it in turns to spend a night with the woman. Nothing could have been better suited to Nancy’s sure but delicate touch: no one was better than she at grasping a situation of this sophisticated kind, and treating it with a different kind of sophistication, one that softened any overly cruel lines with that gift of hers, that ability to portray everything that happens as natural, that absence of judgment which, paradoxically, does not preclude a sense of morality. Nancy herself loved French worldliness. She roared at Roussin’s works (such as Le Mari, La Femme et La Mort, about the attempts of a pretty young wife to murder her rich old husband), and the terrible behaviour of people like the Duc de Richelieu – anti-hero of Madame de Pompadour – did not bother her in the slightest (‘his 4 wives & all his mistresses & all his men friends simply loved him, he must have been rather nice!’). Nonetheless her instinct was to keep in place the sexless safety net of English humour. Between stints in bed, her wife in The Little Hut laments the absence of Tatler on the desert island. It was the same trick again. Audiences were allowed their pleasurable shocks, but they were also wonderfully at their ease: safe in the hands of Miss Mitford, from whom the unexpected was always deliciously expected. Most people loved The Little Hut’s naughtiness (‘the name of Dr Kinsey is introduced & they laugh for 5 minutes’4), although there were, no doubt to Nancy’s gratification, those who found the whole thing deliriously obscene. ‘I have received a rain of anonymous letters’, she told Diana Cooper, ‘“go back to the Paris brothels where you belong, always an ENGLISHMAN” etc etc. “Who are you anyway?” one began. So hard to answer really!’
The play – rather surprisingly directed by RSC wunderkind Peter Brook – toured Britain in 1950 before opening at the Lyric Theatre in August. It was kindly reviewed by The Times: ‘there are moments when the champagne does not work, but not many of them’ and its glittering success anticipated. Nancy was told by a friend that Hamish Hamilton was ‘afraid you’ll make so much over this play that you’ll never write another novel’. She wrote to her mother that ‘everybody to do with it in London is borrowing money on its success which is thought to be certain’. She herself was less sure, although in fact the play ran for 1,261 performances and was attended by the same people over and over again (among them Nancy’s distant cousin Bertrand Russell. ‘I have always wondered who it is that goes regularly & now we know. Old philosophers’). It was not until September 1953 that she wrote to Evelyn Waugh: ‘oh The Hut is shut, & that lovely steady hot water bottle of £300 a month has been taken out of my bed. I feel very chilly.’ In fact Nancy’s books were raining money on her head; one is hardly inclined to go along with the familiar refrain of ‘do be sorry for me’.
She toured with the play before its first night (‘sounds so indecent at my age’), an experience she found amusing and dreadful in equal parts. She adored Peter Brook – ‘one of the cleverest people I have ever met’ – and he adored her in return. But she was appalled by the carryings-on of her cast: ‘I never knew such people,’ she told Waugh. ‘Any good line is “my good line” or “my laugh” & the rest are “that’s a very flat line of yours darling” (to me).’ Indeed she retained a horror of actors – ‘unbridled by one ray of intelligence’ – although she took to Robert Morley (the husband in The Little Hut), a robust bon vivant and ‘the only actor I’ve ever met who was a human being’. The morning after the play’s opening in Edinburgh, Nancy telephoned to Morley to invite him for a celebratory dinner at their hotel the next evening: come at 8 o’clock, she said. Morley was obliged to explain to her that he would not be free until eleven. ‘Do you do the play twice every night?’ she asked, her head two centuries away at the Versailles theatricals run by Madame de Pompadour.
Meanwhile the touring provided material for a Sunday Times column, ‘Britain Revisited’, in which she described the sensation of being ‘a foreign tourist’ in her own country. ‘My impression is that the hotels are good, that the art galleries are full of treasures... and that the food, though not good, is not as bad as people suppose. The railways are truly terrible, however, and so is the climate.’
This reads quite anodyne, certainly by today’s journalistic standards; but Nancy’s non-Parisian columns did get a strong reaction, and therein la
y another trick. When she wrote about Rome or Athens, when she went to Ireland and described people living in ‘horrid little wooden or wattle huts... What was good enough for President Kennedy’s ancestors is good enough for the Irish’, she was, of course, trying to provoke, knowing that her readers would lap it up and get a massive kick out of hating her. And so they did: ‘Rome is Only a Village’ was ritually burned by an Italian countess in the presence of her friends; ‘The Other Island’ was greeted with a letter starting ‘Hell would be a more suitable place for you than Ireland’; ‘Wicked Thoughts in Greece’ elicited a distraught letter from the American director of the reconstruction of the Athenian Stoa, which Nancy had described as ‘said to be “of Attalos” but really of Mr Homer A. Thompson’.
So all of this was taken desperately seriously, which to Nancy made it all the funnier. She herself rarely took offence. ‘The fact is, with me, my love of shrieking is greater than my amour propre’, she wrote to Evelyn Waugh in 1955. She called Cyril Connolly’s review of Madame de Pompadour ‘a masterpiece’, even though it contained criticisms: ‘I literally screamed with laughter, in the street where I bought the paper.’
Not that she could always assume so sanguine a pose; who can? She was upset by A.J.P. Taylor’s assertion (often held up as a tremendous aperçu, really just a low blow) that she had, in Pompadour, merely transferred the Radlett family to the court of Versailles. But she took it, all the same. After Taylor’s review appeared, she wrote to the Manchester Guardian to correct a quotation from her book; her letter was gracious in the extreme, however, and expounded the philosophy to which she tried to adhere. ‘Please don’t answer, or bother Mr Taylor again’, she wrote, ending with this postscript: ‘I suppose what I really minded was getting such a beating from the M. Guardian which is the only English paper I ever see. However such beatings are always deserved and should be taken without complaint.’ No doubt she expected the same stoicism from Mr Homer A. Thompson and co.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 34