Life in a Cold Climate

by Laura Thompson

  The Blessing was not well reviewed, although this made no difference to its sales. The time had come to give Nancy what she called ‘a beating’; even the TLS, usually an intelligent friend, clearly thought she was having an ‘off day’ and accused the book of lacking a story. In fact The Blessing began its life as a plot. It turns upon the desire of the Valhuberts’ small son, Sigismond, to keep his parents apart because his life is more amusing this way: each parent tries to outdo the other in giving him things, whilst their various suitors positively knock themselves out for him (Albertine throws a ball in his honour; The Captain, who plans to give him the starring role in his Communist version of Little Lord Fauntleroy, blows it when, before proposing to Grace, he sends him off with a shilling rather than a fiver: ‘I think he’s a bloody bastard, so there’, says Sigismond to his mother, who cannot then marry him.)

  The strongly schematic plot was untypical of Nancy, and not her invention (she readily confessed as much). It had been dreamed up for her by Alexander Korda9 (whom her father confused with the Earl of Cawdor). Nancy signed a contract with London Films to turn the idea into a ‘full length treatment which in book form may comprise a novel’. At the end of 1949, she wrote to Evelyn Waugh saying, ‘Prod is here & has upset me very much by saying... Korda has no intention of using my script’; the usual jealous bitchiness. In fact Korda did think Nancy’s treatment ‘too sophisticated’, as she later told Gaston Palewski. ‘Far from being a blow this is a great relief to me, now I can settle down & make it into a novel & not always be thinking of the camera.’

  The joke is that The Blessing was subsequently made into a film, for which Nancy was paid ‘seven million 500 000 francs so dear dear Colonel I can give you a nice present (“No”)’. The 1959 release Count Your Blessings starred Deborah Kerr and Rossano Brazzi and according to Nancy was ‘so bad I didn’t have the heart to see it’.10 ‘Cheerful, ruthless cynicism, not sentimentality, is Miss Mitford’s line’, ran a perceptive review in The Times: ‘On the screen, of course, this won’t quite do.’ Tweeness, instead, was the order of the day. ‘Among the victims of the film’, said the Observer, ‘is Maurice Chevalier, as the brat’s great-uncle’ (an invented character, the Duc de St-Cloud) ‘and at any moment one expects him to burst out in song...’ Nancy was appalled by the casting of Chevalier as a French aristocrat; she thought him far too vulgar (and there was the taint of the collaborator); unfortunately she said so, and had her remarks reported in the Evening Standard. She was obliged to grovel to Chevalier who replied, with rather ghastly nobility, saying, ‘Chaque fois, Madame, qu’il m’arrive quelque chose de ce genre, je me console toujours en pensant qu’il est arrivé bien pire à des gens beaucoup mieux que moi. Et je m’arrange pour survivre.’4*

  Count Your Blessings has evaporated into the land of one showing every twenty years on TCM, so one can only imagine the image of France that it offered (the Duc de St-Cloud, indeed). Of course The Blessing put forward a pretty strong image of its own; and it was for this that Nancy’s novel was most criticized. ‘Where she breaks down’, wrote the TLS, ‘...is in the strained nature of her “Frenchness”. The impossible marquis never actually sings “Auprès de ma Blonde”, but he does break into “Malbrouk s’en va t’en guerre” at the slightest provocation...

  ‘The fact is that Miss Mitford... has fallen into the trap which has caught so many English writers – the illusion that they, and they alone, are specially designed by nature to interpret l’esprit gaulois. A course of Stendhal, combined with a resolution to forget every word, for ever, of Brideshead Revisited, is perhaps the best corrective.’

  This was harsh, wholly inaccurate about the influence of Brideshead, and a sure sign that Nancy was not going to get away with swooning girlishly over France the way that she does in The Blessing, which does indeed present the country as a repository for all civilised values. France has Charles-Edouard, Albertine, Madame Rocher des Innouïs and her ‘great billows of sex’; England has Sigismond’s Nanny, who having refused a glorious Provençal lunch asks if the chef can cook her a ‘floury potato’.

  But England – ‘a country of enormous, fair, mad atheists’ – is treated with affection (not least by the adorable Madame Rocher, who at a dinner party held for her by Sir Conrad stuns the company with eulogies to ‘D.H. Heavens’ and ‘the Woolworth – oh the joy just to wander in the Woolworth’. She continues: ‘I had no time for luncheon as you can imagine, but who cares when you can have a bun and a cup of tea?’). America, however, is merely mocked. When Madame Rocher asks Hector Dexter, the most boring man in the world, ‘how, in a country where there are no brothels, do the young men ever learn?’ he is too dim even to be shocked. ‘We, in the States,’ he replies, ‘are entirely opposed to physical relations between the sexes outside the cadre of married life.’ Nancy’s anti-Americanism was an ever-burning flame. It was intensified by her determined hero-worship of de Gaulle, yet the instinct had been there since before the war, when she mocked Jessica for wanting to live in Washington (‘Really Susan you Americans...’). ‘I hate everything that has to do with American civilisation,’ she told the Herald Tribune in 1957, ‘your plastics, your skyscrapers, TV, refrigerators, psycho-analysis and Coca-Cola.’ This interview, with Art Buchwald, was not wholly serious. In fact Buchwald was one of (several) Americans whom Nancy adored. At the same time she probably meant every word she said. The American Rhoda Koenig wrote in The Sunday Times that: ‘Mitford’s anti-Americanism was merely the most obvious expression of her unpleasant personality,’ a valid opinion. Nevertheless one can also see the force of Nancy’s belief that America massively affected European civilisation: one can only thank heaven that she did not live to see the McDonald’s on the Champs-Élysées.

  Of course The Blessing does not describe a factual France. Nancy was in love with her image of the country, with the ‘light and heat of Provence’, with the trick of the Parisian light which can make ‘the buildings look as if they are made of opaque, blue glass’. The fervour expressed by Grace is Nancy’s own; as Nancy herself knew.

  Yet her France does have a reality. Balancing romance and reality was Nancy’s thing. It is wrong to say, as the Evening Standard did in its review, that she was merely providing a ‘gentle picture of French high society painted by a well-disposed foreigner’, and that this was ‘not what Miss Mitford’s readers have been brought up to expect’. Critics apparently saw Nancy’s two previous novels as satire, and so were disappointed by the girlish love that she bestows upon France. In fact, Nancy was not really a satirist. Clear-eyed benevolence is the keynote of her mature writing, and in that sense nothing changed in The Blessing: she remained a sophisticate, as well as a woman in love. She grasped the principles as well as the feel of Paris society: she renders its parties just as convincingly as the great dinner at Hampton which opens Love in a Cold Climate (‘Your descriptions of the Ferté dinner party are quite wonderful – not even exaggerated’, wrote Lady Alexandra Haig11, who moved in similar circles). She conveys the conspiratorial bustle of the French world into which poor simple Grace has fallen: this may not be the absolute truth of how it was, but what does that matter? And it may be a little simplistic to equate English mores (pace Sir Conrad Allingham) with innocent romanticism, American mores with a love life conducted in virtual reality, and French mores with worldly practicality. But doing so allowed Nancy to say the things she wanted to say. And the imaginative vitality that she brings to these distinctions is so palpable as to give them reality: the cool, sensual picture she creates of Charles-Edouard and Albertine chatting together (‘So! How do you find marriage?’; ‘Rather dull, but I rather like it, and I love my wife’... ‘He got up and locked the door’) holds something that is truly French. Artistically true, at least.

  Yet the consensus was, and is, that The Blessing is less good than its two predecessors. And this judgment does seem connected to the book’s ‘Frenchness’. The TLS thought it naïvely done; more penetratingly, Philip Hensher described Nancy’s ‘
long love affair with France’ in The Blessing as ‘intricate but not deep’. Consequently, although the book is ‘excellently done’, to him ‘it seems a less rooted novel’ than the two that went before. This is true, and subtle, but at the same time it raises a question: what would Nancy have done next had she not found this new French seam to mine? And – as Hensher implicitly concedes – it does not affect one jot the joy in Nancy’s ‘marvellous voice, which sounds exactly like someone talking without a moment’s notice beforehand’.

  In September 1951 Nancy wrote to Hamish Hamilton, saying: ‘I know why people (many at least) don’t like The Blessing. They think all the French characters are stock figures of literature. The trouble is that stock figures of literature (eg the dirty old German professor) exist like anything in real life too... I had a terribly nice letter from Mr Maugham [Somerset, that is, who called the book ‘extremely shrewd’]. He thinks it my best – & he has always lived in France.’ She need not have defended herself: ‘the public is forking out’, as she wrote to Gladwyn Jebb. Clearly her English fans did not mind that Charles-Edouard is an ‘impossible marquis’; perhaps they didn’t think he was, or they intuited that this wasn’t the point. Anyway that was the way they liked their marquises, nonchalant and sexy. Nancy gave them what they wanted, swathed them in the airy silks of her imagination, while all the time stitching away at a tougher, darker fabric. Once again, this was France filtered through Englishness: literally so, when Nanny returns from Paris and starts showing off to her friends. ‘Take the shops, dear, they groan with food, just like pre-war... animals like elephants. They could have suet every day if they only knew how to make a nice suet pudding. But there is one drawback, nobody there can cook...’

  The old trick had been pulled; and even the exigent Evelyn Waugh took pleasure in conceding its brilliance. ‘You should have seen the genuine schoolgirl delight on every face... when I brought them the news that you had written a masterpiece’, he wrote in April 1951. And in August, more generously yet: ‘Reviewers are lazy brutes. They want to say: “Here is another Mitford, sparkling & irresponsible in her own inimitable way.” They can’t bear to see a writer grow up. They have no influence at all. Everyone I know delights in The Blessing and I am constantly buoyed up with pride at the dedication.’

  As for what the French thought: one review called The Blessing ‘un roman d’une elegance rare’. There may also have been amusement at so much adoration: like Sir Conrad’s lover Mrs O’Donovan, Nancy ‘belonged to the category of English person... who can find almost literally nothing to criticise where the French are concerned’, and this included not just the cinq à sept, the ‘rich dark silver’ and the maisons de couture, but also General de Gaulle, a man who from 1944 onwards did all that he could to be hated by the English. For Nancy, everything that France had to offer was received with a smile. Had Marie Antoinette been French rather than Austrian, she would, as Harold Acton says, almost certainly have been treated with the kindliness bestowed upon Madame de Pompadour.

  In The House of Mitford it is suggested that this attitude may have ‘grated a little’ upon the French, ‘rather as André Maurois12 used sometimes to grate on the English; for a prophet can be short of honour not only in his own country, but in one which he has too uncritically adopted.’ This book is sometimes hard on Nancy, and offers no particular evidence of its claim. Of course not every French person was as enchanting as Nancy liked to say that they were, and one can imagine the bitchiness that might have been aimed at this bright, somehow vulnerable Anglaise, with her girlish enthusiasm and her errant lover. She would have known this, and accepted it as inevitable. At the same time, she never mentions anything of the kind. Aside from the Marie Antoinette controversy, the worst one ever hears is that her French friends considered Fabrice in The Pursuit of Love an incredible character – ‘je ne marche pas avec Sauveterre’ – mainly because ‘no Frenchman would have thrown [Linda’s] mink coat away to give her a better one.’ She never refers to a quarrel or an unpleasantness; not that she would want to, set as she was upon upholding the belief that, on leaving England, she had escaped ‘a sort of brutal island rudeness... which you never never meet with in France.’

  ‘You know England is getting past a joke’, she wrote to Evelyn Waugh in 1949. ‘I thought it more terrible than ever when I was there the other day – everybody so unkind. For instance I went to stay with my uncle & had to take a station bus from Oxford to Burford. When we got there I saw my uncle sitting there in his motor & said oh please stop. “Oh we don’t stop there any more” & took me on about 1/4 of a mile, with all my luggage. Now here that simply couldn’t happen you know, so much so that when these things overtake me at home I am so surprised that I almost start to cry.’ She continued: ‘Have the English always loved teasing people – I can’t help feeling it must be latent in the character or it wouldn’t have come out so strongly... Now the French have a mania for seeing people pleased & happy...’. This sounds, intriguingly, like Nancy describing the two sides of herself.

  She maintained contact with English friends, some of whom seem to have done little to change her opinion of their ‘island rudeness’. Cyril Connolly, told by Evelyn Waugh of Nancy’s new ‘masterpiece’, is reported to have said: ‘Yes. Yes. She keeps at it. I suppose she is constantly terrified and rightly so by poverty in old age.’ Later Connolly told her that he did not begrudge her success, just as he would not begrudge a little restaurant that sold good lamb cutlets. Of course Nancy had mocked Connolly in The Blessing, turning him into the intellectual but lazy Captain, with his left-wing girlfriends and his love of the high life. It took eighteen months and an effort from Nancy13 to heal the breach, although one senses, beyond that, a niggle that someone he would have considered a lightweight should be so much better at writing than she ought to be. The jealousy of men, when it comes to clever women –! or at least to those who are clever in Nancy’s way, which is defiant of category: she was neither a bluestocking nor a de Vilmorin-style mythologiser of her own wit; she was simply as talented and intelligent as most of her male friends but in a wholly feminine way. Peter Rodd – who should have thanked God for the money that she made – was driven nearly frantic by his wife’s delicious gift. This was partly because of their relationship but it was also the envy of the failed Balliol man for the female intellectual savage. Even Gaston Palewski succumbed to jealousy, extraordinary for a man who so obviously had the upper hand. But how else to explain the catty little remarks he would throw at her when she read from her latest writings? The Blessing, he said, was ‘too slow & had such dreadful longueurs at the start, & that Nanny must come out as she was so dull etc etc & I even wondered if H Hamilton would want it’; it is terrible to think how eager she would have been for his praise, and how graceless he was in refusing it. He doubtless resented the fact that she had far more money than he; she was also, at this time, more successful.14 To his great credit, Evelyn Waugh was completely different in this respect. He treated Nancy’s writing purely according to what he saw as its deserts, and was not jealous of her cleverness at all. But then he had no need to be.

  Jealous beyond belief, meanwhile, was Violet Trefusis: a writer of sorts but better known as the lover of Vita Sackville-West (and, later, François Mitterrand). Having set up before the war as the English Cultural Ambassadress in Paris, she found Nancy, ‘sa grande rivale dans les années 50’15, a dreadful thorn in her side. But the thorns cut both ways. If Violet (‘Auntie’) was unhappy about this younger pretender, she still had something Nancy did not: the Légion d’Honneur, given for no good reason in 1950, which she was said to display ‘comme un géranium’. This must have been an irritant to Nancy, especially as, according to Harold Acton, Violet’s writing was ‘no more than an exhibitionist exercise. Unlike Nancy she had a fat independent income.’

  Acton cannot hide his dislike for Violet; he calls her ‘one of those friends who made one prefer a foe’. Nancy could see another woman as friend and foe at the same time. She and Au
ntie knew each other well, their Francophilia having created a bond in London – ‘Les Françaises Imaginaires’, Rebecca West called them – and in Paris they belonged to the same social set. Nancy could not avoid Violet, and in the right mood could relish her, although she was far from delighted when an ‘autobiography’ entitled Don’t Look Round was published in 1953: ‘Can you tell me’, Nancy asked Acton, with the barely repressed agony of one contemplating an undeserved success, ‘why it had what I believe are called “rave notices”???’

  Nancy’s own suggestion for the book’s title was Here Lies Mrs Trefusis. For if Nancy was an exaggerator and an elaborator, Violet was a downright fabricator, claiming for example to be thirtieth in line to the throne (her mother, Alice Keppel, had been the mistress of Edward VII: Violet would hint at her own royal blood). Years later Nancy wrote to Alvilde Lees-Milne with a story that Violet had just told her, of how ‘she once had a burning affair with [Count] Ostrorog and got in the family way. I said goodness Violet, where is it? She muttered something about a bumpy taxi...’ This was irresistible to someone of Nancy’s temperament, and explains the perverse pleasure she took in Violet’s company. Also they had things in common. As Rebecca West wrote, they were ‘both unusually intelligent’ and, despite their love of France, they remained intensely English: ‘Mrs Trefusis, in the plainest suit by Dior or Cardin, recalled some English opera singer who had specialised in the role of, say, Turandot.’

  But Violet lacked what Nancy had in spades – self-discipline – and she could not hide her desire to claw at the pedestal upon which Nancy stood in Paris. She claimed to have had an affair with Gaston Palewski, a story that he sharply kicked into touch: ‘étant donné que vous êtes la seule femme à Paris à qui je n’ai jamais fait la cour.’5* Later, when Nancy moved to Versailles, Violet was driven mad by the fact that she was not invited to visit: she ‘is déchaînée [raging] against me’, Nancy wrote to Alvilde Lees-Milne. She then reported this conversation: ‘N. I say, it’s now two years since you wrote to say how vile I am and how everybody hates me. Why all this telephoning all of a sudden?