Shrieking of a different kind would follow, however, when in 1955 she wrote ‘A Queen of France’ about Marie Antoinette, of whom she said: ‘She certainly deserved a traitor’s death.’ The brevity of the attack, just a few dismissive lines, was in inverse proportion to the brouhaha it caused. ‘She got a bit more than she bargained for,’ says Alexander Mosley. ‘Some people actually refused to see her after it was published – there’s a very stuffy side to the French aristocracy.’ Nancy had caused genuine offence in ‘the Faubourg’, to which she reacted with a slightly shaky defiance. ‘I really don’t know what all the fuss is about as I am on their side for cutting off the head of an Austrian spy. Why do we dance on the 14th July then?’ she wrote to Evelyn Waugh (who sensed a tease to taunt the teaser: ‘Some of my informants say you may be readmitted to the fringes of Society. Others that you will have to change your name & go to Dakar’).
Nancy must have known that ‘A Queen of France’ would offend some of the French people whom she professed to love (just as she knew, back in 1935, that Wigs on the Green would offend her sister Diana); yet she had not let that stop her. She simply could not resist. In 1953 she had written to Evelyn Waugh, then in the eye of a social storm generated by Randolph Churchill (who had shown Duff Cooper a letter from Waugh that read ‘Cooper I have never tolerated except for his enchanting wife’), saying: ‘Whatever one may think of your letter, & I think you went too far really, it was quite indefensible to show it. In France that is the one rule, never make trouble.’ Yet that is exactly what Nancy did with her piece about Marie Antoinette. It was not trouble-making of a personalised kind, but it was not, perhaps, absolutely good manners. It was, however, good journalism: and it showed that Nancy, for all her apparent reliance upon la haute société, was prepared to put writing – and teasing – ahead of such considerations.
She loved to tease; she admitted as much. Is it true, however, to say that she derived an absolute enjoyment from creating havoc, that she took real pleasure in offending and hurting? This has been suggested, by Selina Hastings for one in her biography Nancy Mitford, which says that Nancy was ‘flattered’ by the upset she had caused with ‘A Queen of France’, and that it had been ‘Nancy’s intention’ to wound Mr Homer A. Thompson with her criticisms of Athens.
This question of intent is important. To go further, there are those who believe that Nancy’s ‘spiteful side’ was perhaps the most significant part of her. Diana Mosley is first among these, and with some cause. The spite is said to derive from frustration; it was the poison that oozed from the wound caused by insufficient love; and it led to Nancy writing her wicked articles, or making remarks such as this extremely silly one about John Wilkes Booth: ‘What was the name of that beautiful man who shot Abraham Lincoln?’ Or – of course – turning snake-like upon her family.
All of which comes back to the familiar idea that Nancy’s life was an emotional vacuum. She tried to deny this but, as time went on and the spaces in her heart became more gaping, her sadness could not help but reveal itself. Her dainty little teases were the means to expel unwanted unhappiness. It was what she had done when, trapped among the rivalries of life at Asthall and Swinbrook, she had forced Diana and Pam to be girl guides, or had told Jessica that with her newly curled hair she looked like ‘the ugliest of the Brontë sisters’. It had made her feel better; and if it had made her victims feel worse then that was just too bad. ‘“Being beastly”’, as her friend (sic) James Lees-Milne later wrote of her, ‘was her favourite sport.’ These were only jokes, after all. Nothing mattered so much as a joke.
This ‘explanation’ of Nancy’s character has been fairly generally accepted. The critic Rhoda Koenig, for example, who had previously accused Nancy of being Gaston Palewski’s ‘tragic, ridiculous hanger-on’ (see Chapter 6), would go on to assert, in a Sunday Times review of the collected letters, that Nancy had ‘more cause for bitterness than could be expended locally’. Her beloved jokes, which were mostly so much ‘twittering and sodden fluff and crapping on everything from a great height’, were an inevitable waste product: ‘While pretending that feelings didn’t matter, she showed that they did by taking her unhappiness out on others’. James Lees-Milne felt similarly and gives the impression that Nancy’s company was like sitting in a sunny but icy room. In his 1944 diary he recounts lunching in Nancy’s ‘non-garden’, where ‘She told me that her upbringing had taught her never to show what she felt. I thought how lamentably my upbringing had failed in this respect, and how too perfectly in her case, for there is a vein of callousness which almost amounts to cruelty.’ Emotional crippling leads to teasing: a neat equation with which to solve Nancy’s complex personality.
Certainly there was a chill in Nancy’s attitude towards her mother, although she believed this to be justified. Then there was her denunciation of Diana during the war, an act that may have been repeated, in different form.
On the 2001 Omnibus programme, John Julius Norwich told a very remarkable story. He revealed that some years after the war Nancy had related to him a conversation she had had, with her sister Diana, on the subject of Germany. According to Nancy, Diana still believed that, back in 1939, the Nazis should have been treated as our allies rather than our enemies. ‘But darling, seven million Jews!’ Nancy had cooed to her sister. ‘Oh but darling, it was much the kindest way!’ Diana had cooed back.
Now when this story was told on the BBC it created, as may be imagined, a furore among the elderly ex-socialites of Europe. ‘I’m very ashamed of myself,’ says Lord Norwich, ‘because I knew perfectly well that Diana was alive, and Debo was very cross with me, rightly. She wrote to me saying that I know Diana would never have said a thing like that, anybody who believed anything that Nancy said was living in a fool’s paradise. So this I have to accept. But it had never struck me to doubt what Nancy said for a second.’
Diana denies the story absolutely. ‘Did you hear what John Julius said about me? He wrote me a marvellous letter [a ‘groveller’, as he calls it, was also published in The Times]. But it was terribly libellous, people here say I ought to sue the BBC, not for money but just to get an apology.
‘You see it wasn’t true... But of course it’s quite possible that she said it, that’s the terrifying thing. Yes it’s quite possible. That’s where she was, really, rather dangerous. I do just feel that Nancy, and her sayings, and her letters and all that – it’s rather like an unexploded bomb. You see she really was rather naughty, she really was. It was quite possible that she would say anything, if she thought it would either amuse or shock. Also she wasn’t averse to giving me a bad name...’
There seems little doubt that Nancy did tell John Julius Norwich – together with his parents, Duff and Diana Cooper – something along the lines of what was said on Omnibus. Lord Norwich would never have invented such a thing, even if the joy of speaking to camera did (as Diana Mosley thinks) cause him to cut loose with his story-telling style. ‘If she made that up about Diana then that’s pretty malicious... I’d love to know what was really said between them.’
Indeed; but a conclusion of sorts has to be drawn, and the conclusion is that Nancy lied. Or, at least, grossly exaggerated. Diana was never afraid of admitting her views about the Nazi regime, but these did not include an endorsement of the ‘final solution’. Of course Nancy would never have said what she did had she thought that the story would end up on the BBC; for all the terrible grandeur of its subject matter, hers was a private and social lie, told for the sheer fun of hitting Diana where she was so grotesquely vulnerable. And told, perhaps, because in a way Nancy would not have seen it as a lie.
But – as with the wartime denunciation – it was a remarkable thing for Nancy to do, however much Diana’s political sympathies deserved opprobrium. Nancy did have spite in her, and it showed most venomously towards those by whom she felt threatened: her most beautiful sister, her mother. Yet according to Diana she was not above making digs at all of her sisters. ‘The corollary of her incredible exagg
eration, of seeing everything en rose – if it was one of her relations she was just the opposite. I used to laugh with my other sisters about it. But it was just her. It was part of her.
‘Another thing – I don’t think most of her brothers-in-law liked her. That’s rather odd, isn’t it, because she was great fun. Derek Jackson really hated her. Of course she was rather horrid when they were children to my sister Pam, and I expect that’s why Derek disliked her. They really disliked each other. Derek was such fun, and they could have been marvellous together, but they just weren’t. And Kit [as Diana called Oswald Mosley] – well. We had this house in Staffordshire, and he just didn’t want her there. He was terribly fond of my mother, devoted, and I think he always felt that Nancy was very, very disloyal to her, which of course she was –! He used to say she’s very disloyal. He was much more right than he knew, and much more right than I knew.
‘And then when we got the Temple [their house at Orsay] she very very often came, and he would have much preferred she hadn’t, but I always wanted her. They got on outwardly alright, because of me I suppose, but they must have both been making an effort. I suppose manners –! But as I say he wasn’t the only one, because Derek didn’t like her. And Esmond [Romilly] of course didn’t like anyone, that’s different.
‘My mother used to say she planted a dart in people...’ James Lees-Milne used a similar phrase, writing of a ‘sharp little barb, barely concealed’: for some people Nancy held a faintly repellent quality, as of a cold-blooded reptile dressed in Dior and schooled in the art of epigrammatic gossip. Of course one might say that men such as Jackson and Mosley would never have liked Nancy, knowing as they did that she despised their political affiliations and their rather aggressive masculinity. She saw through them, in fact, and there is nothing that men like less. Indeed it may be that a lot of her ‘spite’ came from the skewed clarity of perception that could not resist expression. Certainly that was the case with her journalism. It was also true of some of her social bon mots, for example her comment upon the writer Rosamond Lehmann’s attempts to use spiritualism to contact her dead daughter. ‘I said bad luck on the girl. Imagine a heavenly butler saying “the Hon. Mrs Philipps [Lehmann] is on the line again, ma’am” when one is gambolling in a green pasture.’5 This was a desperately cruel crack, one of the worst instances of Nancy’s spite. But she had seen through the lunacy of what Lehmann was doing; and so she could not stop herself.
The ‘joke’ may have been obscurely linked to Nancy’s own childlessness; thus the spite comes back to the personal, to the lack of love in her life. It may even have been the ‘splinter of ice’ that Graham Greene famously believed to be buried in every writer’s heart. But this is not quite right. The coldness in Nancy came and went, like a sudden wind which disappears when the sun emerges.
For all that there were those to whom she was ‘chilly and unlikeable’ (as her god-daughter Harriet Waugh later put it), there were others who divined the warmth in her. Not least among these is her sister Deborah, who despite her loyalty to Diana says simply: ‘I adored her.’ Her nephew Alexander understood and loved her – a ‘wonderful person to have known’ – and Diana, too, is entirely fair in her willingness to praise Nancy’s good qualities. ‘All my sons were very fond of her. She never showed the spiteful side. She was also very fond of Debo’s children. And another nice thing about Nancy, she was generous to the last. If she saw that somebody was poor she’d immediately give them money. There was one couple – very hard-up, I believe she paid for the boy to go to school.’ When it came to disinterested kindness, Nancy was exemplary: ‘a very nice person indeed’, says John Julius Norwich. And in a review of Harold Acton’s memoir, Nancy’s friend Anthony Powell wrote of how she spent several summers in Venice: ‘I can vouch for the fact that her name, mentioned casually in the bar or restaurant of the Torcello hotel, would arouse an immediate reaction of remembrance and affection among the staff.’
Of course it was easy for Nancy to be kind at a distance. Even with Deborah there was sixteen years between them, a space that allowed the rivalries to disperse (imagine if Diana had been Duchess of Devonshire –!). Close up, caught unawares on a sore point, or seized with the sudden desperate desire to hurt, Nancy’s warm smile could take on a bright and icy glint. Yet it is impossible to read The Pursuit of Love, or her letters to Gaston Palewski – ‘I know one’s not allowed to say it but I love you’ – and not to think that her heart longed, quite desperately, to burn with joyful fires. Impossible not to think that she was cold because she wanted not to be.
And was this merely a shrill frigidity, or was it, as Deborah says, ‘absolute courage’? One can take the view that Nancy’s life was ‘like the story of a real-life Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days, buried up to her neck in ruins and a brave, tight, twitchy smile permanently pinned to her face.’6 Or one can see her, as John Julius Norwich does, as ‘one of the bravest women I’ve ever known. Oh she was brave. I’m sure the misery was there, but she never complained. I never heard a complaint. She could make a good story out of how awful something or somebody was, of course she could – but that wasn’t complaining. Those were jokes.’
In September 1955 the magazine Encounter published an article by Nancy entitled ‘The English Aristocracy’. This contained, within its considerable length, the handful of paragraphs for which she was perhaps best known in her lifetime, and which put forward the theory of U and Non-U language, U being short for – dread word – upper-class. The piece was reprinted a year later by Hamish Hamilton in a book called Noblesse Oblige, together with a fond, caustic reply by Evelyn Waugh: ‘To the Honble Mrs Peter Rodd On a Very Serious Subject’. ‘Dearest Nancy’, it begins, ‘Were you surprised that your article on the English aristocracy caused such a to-do? I wasn’t. I have long revered you as an agitator – agitatrix, agitateuse? – of genius. You have only to publish a few cool reflections on eighteenth-century furniture to set gangs on the prowl through the Faubourg St Germain splashing the walls with “Nancy, go home”. In England class distinctions have always roused higher feelings than national honour... Was it kind, dear Nancy, to pull their legs?’ (Perceptively, Philip Toynbee7 wrote of this contribution to Noblesse Oblige that Waugh’s ‘primary aim is to show that he knows more about the aristocracy than Miss Mitford does.’)
The oddest thing of all about U and Non-U is that the labels – which did, indeed, cause uproar – were never Nancy’s in the first place, but the concept of a philologist named Professor Alan Ross who, at a lunch (Non-U) with Nancy, told her that he was writing an article on sociological linguistics for a Finnish journal. In this he would use an extract from The Pursuit of Love, quoting Uncle Matthew as he accuses Fanny of talking about notepaper and mantelpieces (Non-U), instead of writing paper and chimneypieces (U). The idea of this learned, serious and obscure person dealing in such inflammatory material amused Nancy no end, although she claimed that it was Stephen Spender, commissioning her for Encounter, who insisted that she brought it all into her article. Indeed, what she called the ‘U stuff’ does seem slightly dragged in. Her mother told her that the article would have been just as good without it, and she was right. Nancy lists a series of words according to whether they are U or Non-U, giving examples such as ‘bike’ versus ‘cycle’ or ‘pudding’ versus ‘sweet’, but although she endorses these categorisations (‘Silence’, she writes, ‘is the only possible U-response to... the ejaculation of “cheers” before drinking’) they actually come straight from Professor Ross. Nancy then moves on to her own thoughts, giving readers a rollicking treatise on the nature of the English Lord, whom she describes as resilient, philistine and ‘impervious to a sense of shame’; and this part of the article is much more interesting.
But of course it was U and Non-U that everyone latched on to, it was Nancy who was regarded as its onlie begetter, and the edition of Encounter in which her article appeared was an instant and frantic success. ‘I went to W.H.S[mith] here yesterday’, she told her mother in Septe
mber 1955, ‘manager dashed at me saying all sold out the first day. Heywood who usually sells 20 has sold over 100 last week...’ The whole subject grew like a monstrous triffid, entangling English nerves in terrifying questions: are you a snob? and worse, are you common? ‘Absolutely fascinating, the reactions to it,’ says Alexander Mosley. It was as if some brave soul today were to lay bare the question of equality between the sexes, now similarly festooned with lies and taboos. ‘I think in a way,’ Mosley continues, ‘bringing questions of class home to so many people, and turning it into a sort of game, hastened its demise: it stung at the time, but I think it was antiseptic in a way.’
Which is interesting, and partly true; yet class does still inflame tremendous passions and an article like Nancy’s would still cause an anguished furore. It would be different in tone, as it is now the Us rather than the Non-Us who are on the back foot, scattering consonants like confetti in their longing to be loved; but it would not, in essence, be so dissimilar from the national debate of 1955. There would still be intellectual articles like Toynbee’s, censuring Nancy for avoiding ‘her obvious duty as an analyst to tell us why this [Non-U] usage is unspeakable’. There would be jokes, like Nancy’s favourite: ‘I’m dancing with tears in my eyes ’cos the girl in my arms isn’t U.’ There would be letters of the kind that she received, such as this: ‘My typist is so angry she refuses to type a letter to you’; or this: ‘I am descended from Alfred the Great’s sister & would like to congratulate you on your splendid stand for people of our sort.’ There might even be advertisements like the one in The Times for a ‘U-type Ski Party’.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 35