4* ‘Every time, Madame, something of this kind happens to me, I console myself by thinking that far worse has happened to far better people. And I manage to survive.’
5* ‘Given that you are the only woman in Paris whom I have never tried to seduce.’
10
‘After this a very great dullness fell upon the Château of Versailles.’
The last line of Madame de Pompadour; one of the finest last lines ever written; and after 1957 dullness began to fall upon Nancy also. ‘I was sorry to see the end of 1956, which I greatly enjoyed’, she wrote to Evelyn Waugh. It was almost as if she had guessed that her enchanted life was about to become more sombre. She had been almost ten years in Rue Monsieur, the boudoir in which her own King could come and find her, although less regularly and devotedly than Louis XV did Pompadour; not an ideal situation but the best that Nancy could hope for, and true to her creed she made the best of it. Then in July 1957 she learned that Gaston Palewski had been appointed French Ambassador to Rome. She was in Venice when she heard the news, and instantly cabled to him: ‘O DESESPOIR. O RAGE. O FELICITATIONS. NANCY’.
It was not the end of their affair, but it was never the same again. The appointment enabled Palewski to detach himself, as twenty years earlier Nancy had done from her family. What had kept her going, despite the knowledge that Palewski was ‘l’un qui se laisse aimer’, had been the sweet balm of contact: the letters and telephone chats, the lunches and parties at which they were more than likely to see one another. From this, Nancy wove her picture of a love affair. She did not exactly deceive herself, in a way she knew the score all too horribly well, but she managed to make of flimsy stuff something exquisite. In her book she wrote of Louis XV’s vast Bourbon sexual appetite, which had frequently to be gratified by court ladies and tarts, saying, ‘It is clear that what the King did not want was another Madame de Pompadour; he had already got one, he loved her, was used to her, and she suited him perfectly.’ This was perhaps an expression of the hope that she held in her heart, that she was by no means all to Gaston Palewski but that she was something that the others were not.
Which was true, up to a point; as John Julius Norwich says, ‘she was the best of Gaston, really.’ But she had allowed him to be too sure of her. She had not, as Pompadour had, timed her scenes to perfection. So one finds letters such as this sad little series written in September 1954, not long after the publication of Madame de Pompadour in America. Although the reviews of the book were not good – ‘they say it seems to have been written by Daisy Ashford’ – Nancy received an invitation to work for MGM,1 for a period of up to six months, at a salary of $6,000 a week. ‘I wonder if I’d better do it’ – nudge nudge – ‘as I have no book in view.’
This was clearly intended to get a reaction out of Palewski; which it did, in a way. He wrote to Nancy, in a tone that he would surely not have used with his other women, to say that he was depressed and exhausted. Although he did not really want her, he did not want her to be independent, and she fell for it immediately. Her alertness to his every mood – few of which he seems to have spared her – was acute, naive, Nancy all over. ‘I’ve been thrown into a turmoil by your letter... if you are sad, as I can see you are, & if your prospects are no better I can’t go away for months & leave you alone. Or am I no good to you? Oh how I wish I could open you like a book & see what is there. Nobody has ever been such a riddle to me.’ This was La Pompadour again, who on her deathbed told the Duc de Choiseul that her lover had been ‘indéchiffrable’ [indecipherable] to her. Palewski could never have said this of Nancy, whose heart was laid out for him to walk on; but it was too late now for her to play games, and in a sense her dignity was of a superior kind. All she could do was try to make him happy enough to make her happy also. Which meant, as had always been inevitable, that ‘after 2 days of slight hysteria’ she decided not to go to America. ‘I realised that it’s not a question of whether you need me or not – the point is that I can’t live without you.’ Oh, Nancy.
It was a small sensation when Nancy turned down the MGM deal: mouth agape, the Telegraph told its readers that ‘Nancy Mitford has rejected one of the largest offers ever made by a film company to an English writer... She explained to her friends that she “prefers to stay in Europe”.’ Some of these friends – Marie-Laure de Noailles for one – ‘can’t get over me refusing all that cash!!’ as Nancy wrote to Gaston. One might say that women are divided into those who would have been cool enough to go off to America and let the man stew, and those who would give up something worth having for a man who did not even really want them. ‘Women are divided into two categories’, as Nancy wrote in Pigeon Pie, ‘those who can deal with the men they are in love with, and those who cannot.’ Few women ever handled their man less cleverly than Nancy. For all her trickiness she was as sincere in love as a puppy gazing at its owner. The detachment and deceit of which she was capable deserted her completely; perhaps this, more than anything, shows that her nature was warm deep down.
There is something almost unbearable in this would-be sage outpouring, written to Palewski in 1954. ‘You know Colonel you have let yourself get too depressed & if you go on you will be ill. You’ve stayed too long in Paris & life has got out of perspective... I worry about you day & night it’s dreadful being able to do nothing, except worry – that’s the worst of this sort of relationship, one is really so helpless. But do listen to me for once & look after yourself.’
And he listened; especially to the advice about getting away from Paris. In 1954 his ‘prospects’ had not looked good, but he had worked hard throughout the long absence of de Gaulle, and, having been elected a deputy by the department of the Seine, joined the government of Edgar Faure in 1956. A year later the greatest prize so far came his way. He had asked for the post of Ambassador to Rome, and de Gaulle – making his sole request of the Government during his wilderness years – obtained it; then took umbrage when in 1958, at the moment of his return to power, the new Ambassador did not ask to be recalled (‘he never recovered his intimate position as adviser’, said Palewski’s obituary in The Times. De Gaulle had been confirmed in his view that Palewski was held back by the mondain character that had facilitated his ascent: like so many, he had the defects of his qualities). So instead of moving triumphantly into government, Monsieur l’Embrasadeur, as he became known in Rome, was merrily chasing women in the Palazzo Farnese: missing Paris, but not enough, freed from his erotic entanglements and from the guilt that he could not help but feel, being an essentially decent man, towards Nancy.
He was extremely fond of her, after all. It would be wrong to say – as some commentators do – that his one aim, au fond, was to evade her (‘If a man wants to leave a woman’, wrote Nancy in Voltaire in Love, ‘he can always find ways and means of doing so’: completely true). Palewski – a great haver and eater of cake – didn’t not want to see her, he loved her company, the charm that remained utterly English (‘la bougie anglaise’). He loved, too, her love for him. Yet it brought with it an unfortunate sense of responsibility, which he found near impossible to deal with. One can see his problem. And it was profoundly intensified by the fact that he had, before his escape to Rome, been conducting a serious love affair with a woman (also married) who lived very close to Nancy.
Sometimes he must have wished he had never gone to that meeting at the Allies Club back in 1942, and lit a flame in the romantic Mrs Rodd that would never burn out (of course it wouldn’t, because it was based so much on illusion, because she had written it into indestructible life, because she was passionately imaginative and he was nonchalantly kind). But what to do in the face of a letter like this one, written in January 1956: ‘Colonel I see I have offended you & I am very sorry. I beg your pardon. I only understood in the middle of the night as I lay on my b of d thinking furiously that you had abandoned me because being ill bores you [she had flu at the time]. Suddenly I saw with a great jump what it was’ – and she goes on to explain, at complicated length, th
at she believes him to be upset because she has, in some innocuous way, drawn attention to the fact that she gives him more presents than he gives her. ‘I must say everybody knows that all the pretty things in my flat were given me by you & it would seem rather unnatural if I never gave you a present. I apologise. But I think it is a little thing to set against 15 years of faithful & unchanging love.’ How on earth would a man, accustomed as he was to self-possessed society women, react to this kind of thing? By not reacting at all, one imagines; he would be too terrified of encouraging more of it. Hence Nancy’s characterising of his responses to her outpourings: ‘I think you are the most good & charming man in the world (“How true that is”). And my life is a desert without you (“I know I know”).’
Palewski was a much better man than Peter Rodd, less frustrated in his life and with the almost disinterested niceness of the true sexual sophisticate. But the two had this much in common, they both treated Nancy worse for her good behaviour than they would have done had she been a tough nut, whose feminine malice they were obliged to respect. ‘You are not the sort of woman of whom men are afraid’, the heroine of Anita Brookner’s Hôtel du Lac is told, the point being that she would do better if she were: ‘modesty and merit are very poor cards to hold.’ Nancy knew this, and when in later life she was complimented for her character she wailed: ‘I don’t want to be kind, I want to be wicked!’ Perhaps above all else she was vulnerable; this tends to unsettle men, for it makes innate demands upon them that they dislike having to fulfil. Like Charles-Edouard with his wife Grace, Palewski had no desire to hurt Nancy. At the same time he had no desire to stop the behaviour that caused the hurt. It was a situation that he would have been understandably relieved to escape.
‘Margaret tells me that Gaston has got his post in Rome’, wrote Evelyn Waugh to Diana Cooper in August 1957. ‘True? Is Nancy desolate? Does one congratulate or condole?’ Diana did not bother to comment on this – ‘I’ve been a state of bent mealancholly [sic]’, she replied, which helps explain why Nancy avoided her company in later life – but Nancy herself was giving spry, terse news of the appointment to her friends. ‘Colonel very pleased with his new job’, she wrote to Waugh at the end of a fan letter (‘The shrieks!’) about The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. She was reading this book, an account of Waugh’s brief spell of hallucinatory lunacy, when the news about Palewski reached her: for a moment it may have seemed as if she herself were going mad. ‘The Colonel is off to the Palais Farnese’, Nancy wrote briskly to Violet Hammersley. ‘I thought I’d told you... He goes in October after which I shall be as free as air.’ Whether she realised then how bad the parting would be – that she would see Palewski a couple of times a year, between the end of 1957 and August 1962 – is impossible to say. Perhaps she thought that she would be able to visit Rome, although she must have known this was unlikely. At any rate, and whatever her feelings, the efforts she made to maintain the ‘shop front’ were not this time successful: the rumour mill was grinding over Le Colonel et l’Anglaise.
‘She goes on saying that everything is going swimmingly with the Colonel,’ wrote her friend Victor Cunard2 to Billa Harrod in August 1957, ‘but one goes on hearing rumours that the whole thing is breaking up which, from loyalty, one always denies. But my theory is it really is all over bar the shouting, that all her good spirits (or at least most of them) are a bluff and that her almost savage teasing of friends is a sort of safety valve operation. If I am right it is rather pathetic, because if she would only tell one she is unhappy one would do what one could to comfort her.’
Within this concerned kindness was a subterranean probing pleasure, a readiness to light the touchpaper that will set off a sizzling trail of gossip. Nancy adored Cunard, who introduced her to the idea of spending July in Venice (as she did from 1956 to 1970); but she knew his conversation to be, as Harold Acton put it, ‘fraught with infectious malice’. (Later she described, with terrible funniness, sitting beside him throughout the summer of 1960, as he lay dying in an Italian hospital: ‘I always thought people on their death-beds lay with angelic smiles saying I forgive you – not old Vic who has cooked up every grievance over a friendship of 25 years to fling at my head.’3) Cunard’s letter to Billa Harrod has been taken as incontrovertible evidence of Nancy’s misery, yet one must bear in mind that these were people to whom stories and scandal were meat and drink. Nancy was not the only exaggerator among them, although like her creation Albertine she had turned it into something of an art form.
This is not to say that Victor Cunard was entirely mistaken. Violet Hammersley also noticed Nancy’s strained, zinging manner, and even sweet-scented Acton says that ‘Nancy had smiled bravely’ through the war, but ‘ten years later in time of peace her nerves were more easily frayed’. The point is a slightly different one, about lives that are lived – as Nancy’s was – in the constant company of friends. However marvellous one’s friends may be, their love is rarely pure and disinterested (not that family members don’t let one down, but on the whole the relationship is different: both simpler and more complex). Friends are a source of amusement to one another, and this implies that their lives are up for conversational grabs. What happens to one friend is a story to be offered to another. When Nancy had a row with Victor Cunard, as she did in Venice in 1957, this became something to be picked over with Billa Harrod, who would then dissect it with somebody else – this is in the nature of friendship. It is not necessarily malicious; but nor is it a pointer to absolute truth, because it is always entangled in a web of gossip.
No one did this more than Nancy. She completely understood that it was part of friendship: unless friends could be funny and fascinating about one another, like characters in Choderlos de Laclos, then they might as well be in America, or in the land of abstract conversations inhabited by Fanny’s fabulously boring son David (‘Zen forbids thought’) in Don’t Tell Alfred. Nancy adored gossip, was ‘wildly indiscreet’, according to Alexander Mosley: ‘you couldn’t tell her a secret’. Had it been someone other than herself who rowed with Victor Cunard, she would have picked it all over afterwards – what? why? who? – with all the greedy delight of someone winkling the meat from a lobster. ‘I had it all like a lovely serial story day by day’, she wrote to Waugh, of a lurid saga concerning Cyril Connolly and his then mistress, Barbara Skelton4: ‘oh did I enjoy it.’ Graham Greene and his mistress Catherine Walston (‘I was surprised, having pictured her scruffy Bloomsbury, to see a Ritz vision in dark mink’; ‘What a sexy man he must be, Mr Greene’); Diana Cooper (‘Honks is starving at Tring. I expect you knew’); and always, always, Connolly (‘Boots... lost 21 lbs. Well that is a lot for a shortish man. I think it will be the end of him’) are all stuffed into the rumour mill by Nancy and Evelyn Waugh, the handle turned and the screams of laughter – part wicked, part joyful, wholly alive – duly produced. ‘She was intensely loyal to her friends,’ says Alexander Mosley; ‘and intensely disloyal.’
So Nancy accepted that this would be her fate also, that le tout Paris would lobster-pick over her affair with the new Ambassador to Rome. Yet she remained an innately private person – like Linda Radlett, she both ‘told’ and withheld – and this is not such a paradox as it seems. When Victor Cunard said that if only Nancy would talk about her sadness her friends would be able to help her (a very modern idea), he misunderstood something fundamental. Nancy saw her social life as a guard against this kind of honesty: if she were to admit her problems to her friends, in anything other than a manner so overt as to constitute another kind of deflection (‘oh I simply die for the Colonel’), then this would destroy much of the point of having a social life. To her, public and private behaviour were two separate things. ‘Even with close friends she maintained a strict reserve about her deepest emotions’, as Harold Acton put it. Later, when she became ill, she would prevent people from visiting her because, as Diana Mosley says, ‘she used to feel she had to pull herself together, and she couldn’t, always.’
Which would be u
nderstandable, were it not for the fact that Nancy’s friends were more than just jolly acquaintances. They were an enormous part of her life. From the 1950s onwards, they were almost the whole of her life.
She had her sisters, of course. It is strange to picture the woman who created the near-mythic entity of ‘The Mitfords’ surrounded instead by friends; but that was, in fact, a consequence of Nancy’s youthful absorption in family. Now she wanted to put them at a remove. At the same time, and at this remove, her sisters remained as important as ever. ‘Her family didn’t recede,’ says Alexander Mosley. She believed absolutely in the Mitford tie. She saw a good deal of Diana, who had moved to France in 1951 and who was probably the person to whom – despite everything – Nancy felt closest, most equal, most mysteriously similar. She exchanged quantities of letters with Jessica in America (‘Darling Sooze’) and with Deborah (‘Dearest Miss’), with whom she frequently stayed; occasionally she saw Pamela. What she also loved was to be visited by the younger generation of Mitfords, like the Mosley boys or Jonathan Guinness, who brought with them all the pleasure of family but without the suffocation. ‘Every Sunday for two summers I’d go round to her,’ says Alexander Mosley (as a very young man he worked as a travel courier, and would pass through the Gare du Nord on his way back from Spain). ‘Have a bath, a terrific lunch and a long chat. I mean, this is an example of her great kindness. Because she was rather spinsterish in her way, and her life was very nicely organised, and I come blundering in... she was a wonderful aunt.’
Life in a Cold Climate Page 39