‘I always thought you would stand by me whatever happened. You seem only to blame me – it’s wrong of you. If I’m supposed to have given an interview I think it should be denied, but I am paralysed by not knowing exactly & by your silence.’
This was bad enough, especially as Gaston did not reply directly to the letter; in July it got worse. Nancy was staying at the Countess Cicogna’s flat in Venice when she read in a newspaper of Palewski’s imminent marriage. It was only a gossip item, completely false in fact; and somehow one senses that Nancy herself was not convinced of its truth, but used it to say a few things that she thought he should hear. ‘But you always said you would tell me – I quite understand not telling because almost too difficult’, she wrote. ‘All the same I find it odd of you, after a month’s silence, to write comme si rien n’était [as if nothing had happened] & ask how I am. I am very sad & also do not know what to do with myself. I can’t live in Paris where I miss you more than anywhere... So I feel perplexed I must say...’ What she no doubt wanted was to tell him that he was a complete bastard, but as with the letter written to Hamish St Clair-Erskine when he had broken off their ‘engagement’, Nancy did not want to look bad in the Colonel’s eyes. Rather she wanted him to feel bad. But the key line in the letter does indeed ask the unanswerable of this opaque, kindly, selfish man: ‘The question is, too, what have I ever been in your life... I’ve never understood.’
A couple of weeks later Nancy wrote to him in a far more friendly, almost normal tone. Around this time Palewski was recalled to Paris, to serve in the government of his old protégé Georges Pompidou as Minister for Scientific Research. So things were back, in a sense, on a stable footing. Nancy knew more or less where she was; not least because she knew where he was. But she bravely made the effort to detach herself; she worked hard, she travelled to stay with Deborah at Chatsworth or Lismore Castle in Ireland, she went to Tripoli and Istanbul (which she loved: ‘until one has seen this place one hasn’t lived’), she spent her regular holidays at Fontaines and in Venice, and she did not, as before, write continually to beg Palewski to join her. Eventually she moved away from Paris and bought a house at Versailles. She had no choice but to accept that their love affair would never be the same again, and did so stoically, remembering that courage is not courage unless it wears a bright smile.
So the moment would never now come when Palewski entered her grey salon at Rue Monsieur and said, as Fabrice du Sauveterre says to Linda: ‘I came to tell you that I love you.’ Perhaps this explains why the romance of The Pursuit of Love, with its bursting happiness and dying rose fragrance, is reprised in Nancy’s last novel as something slightly different. In Don’t Tell Alfred, a conversation between Fanny and Charles-Edouard de Valhubert gives us the more worldly view of Linda and Fabrice’s ‘great great love’:
‘Poor Fabrice! He was the most charming person I have ever known, by very far.’
‘So was my cousin Linda.’
‘Le coquin! You say he hid her in Paris for months and nobody had any idea of it.’
‘She wasn’t divorced. Besides, she was terrified that her parents would find out.’
‘Yes... Also I think Fabrice had somebody else – another reason for secrecy. Always these complications!’
Fanny does not react to this, implying that she is completely unshocked by it; yet the reader, poor thing, is not. It feels like an act of near cruelty on Nancy’s part, to take that deathless love and, with a casual snap of her fingers, turn it into just another Parisian liaison. One senses that it gave her pleasure to do so, pleasure of a satisfying and destructive kind, like tearing to shreds a book of beautiful sonnets given by a faithless lover. Which was exactly what she was doing, in fact.
Don’t Tell Alfred, published in 1960, is an unloved novel; even its creator was not very enthused by it. ‘I’ve just written the last words of my book’, she told Evelyn Waugh. ‘It’s not good.’ She had thought herself incapable of writing another novel: ‘what can I write now?’ she asked Theodore Besterman after finishing with Voltaire. ‘No good saying a novel, I can’t any more.’ Perhaps she was thinking of the preface she had written in 1950 (and was rewriting ten years later) about the author of La Princesse de Clèves: ‘Madame de Lafayette went on writing novels, but her characters never again came to life. At last she seems to have realised this herself; she gave up fiction.’
The consensus is that Nancy should have done the same, that after The Blessing she should have stuck to historical biography (although her sales remained high as ever, 50,000 for Don’t Tell Alfred in the first two months). ‘Poor Nancy, I thought when I read it,’ says John Julius Norwich: ‘It’s gone.’ The book was not really about anything. It was just a series of incidents set in the British Embassy, peopled with old favourites – Fanny and Uncle Matthew and the Valhuberts – who were wheeled out like nonagenarian film stars on Oscar night. Nancy frequently said how hard it was to think of plots: ‘lacking in creative talent’, she said of herself, which was true in one way (she was not an inventor) and false in another (she was an intensely creative interpreter). ‘Isn’t it agony thinking of things for them to do’, she had written to Anthony Powell17 in 1951, ‘So unfair too the way Dickens & Co could use opening graveyards, long lost wanderers, & illegitimacy & so on, all closed to us!’
Don’t Tell Alfred is indeed unburdened by plot: it meanders along, lightly steered by the ever-satisfying Fanny, and touches amusingly upon the elegant fatuities of French politics (governments formed in the morning and dissolved by evening, which is pretty much what the Fourth Republic was like). Nancy is steeped by now in essence of France, as cosily bedded down as a potted geranium. From her position in the courtyard she views the world that she loves, and tells her relaxed, inconsequential tale. Et c’est tout.
But the novel is a little underrated. It contains some highly prescient thought: about the encroachment of America upon the world of European civilisation, about the threat to adult values from the worship of youth culture. And it is written in the Mitfordian voice, clear and benevolent, although devoid by now of romantic idealism. The young heroine, Northey, is an exquisite little tough nut: ‘an Arch-shit’, according to Christopher Sykes18, who refused to believe that she was not sleeping with every man in the book (Nancy’s original plan). Innocent though Northey is (‘I don’t hug’), she retains the sentimental, invulnerable aspect of a successful young courtesan, with money in the Bourse and a baby badger in her back garden. This is a book in which love is everywhere but has no real power. ‘Silly old love’, Fanny says to herself; ‘bother it.’
This is the book’s charm and interest, but commentators seized greedily upon its more ‘newsworthy’ features: for instance the fictionalized rivalry (dead some thirteen years by then) between the Coopers and the Harveys at the British Embassy. ‘“Is there any resemblance”’, Nancy was forcefully asked by the Evening Standard19, ‘“between the dragonfly brilliance and beauty of Lady Leone and Lady Diana Duff Cooper...?” Smiling silence.’ The interviewer then told Nancy that her depiction of youth culture was dreadful. ‘I felt obliged to inform her that... although they might have done so when Miss Mitford was a debutante, disc idols no longer “croon”... “Oh dear, how silly of me!” she remarked. “I wanted to examine the impact of today’s younger generation on people like me. I did try to get it right... on a station bookstall I saw a paper called Disc, and bought it and enjoyed it very much”.’
Nancy does get her young people wrong, so much so that it is unintentionally funny; not something she had managed before. The pop star, Yanky Fonzy, is a stunningly unconvincing creation (‘we must keep up the tempo. Where are the kids now?’), as if Noël Coward had created the role of a Hoxton Brit artist (‘what a terribly, terribly dirty bed’). One is reminded of what Nancy said about Jane Austen and Siberian peasants. She had used Diana Mosley’s sons, Max and Alexander, as her guide: Alexander is the model for Fanny’s travel-courier son Basil. But clearly she had not listened very carefully (
Alexander never said, for example, of his courier activities, ‘I’m the boy wot packs in the meat’: a truly Bestermaniac phrase). ‘The jargon was so wrong,’ he says now. ‘Wrong wrong wrong!’
In fact the youth culture in Don’t Tell Alfred is only really there to show the superiority of the pleasures of adulthood, which is as beautifully depicted as ever; but reviewers latched on to this dreadful failure of Nancy’s, and used it to characterise her as ‘in no good sense, middle-aged’. ‘She goes in for a lot of headshaking – half despondent, half irritable – over the younger generation’, said a review in the Guardian. Nancy was often accused of hating the new, and she did rail against such things as the despoliation of Venice, the belief that ‘London, at least from an architectural point of view, has become a branch of New York’, the ‘ugliness and mechanisation of modern times’ and, later, the Paris événements (‘Having said how much they [the rioting students] despised everything in life, especially money, they keenly gave the numbers of their postal accounts so that we could hurry out and send them some’20).
‘I really think that the world today is worse not better? and getting worse all the time?’ Nancy wrote in 1966. But these were genuine, one might say justifiable, opinions. They were not an inevitable adjunct to the ageing process; nor were they, as has often been said, evidence of her belief that Progress is Non-U. She had some sympathy with youth, battling its way through the tangled banalities of a world that it supposedly owned: ‘young men must suffer when they think that, however much they may protest as students, their future is bounded by office walls, their fame spurs them in vain while the laurels go to pop singers’, she wrote in 1968.21 This was wise, and remains so. Nancy felt alienated from the young, but she also pitied them: ‘When we were young every country still had its own architecture and customs and food. Can you ever forget the first sight of Italy?’ wrote Nancy in Don’t Tell Alfred, speaking her own thoughts through Charles-Edouard de Valhubert. ‘But... our children never saw that world... There is an immense gap between us and them, caused by unshared experience. Never in history have the past and the present been so different.’ Of course Nancy believed that the past was preferable. But it is belittling to say that her stance was purely reactionary. Her view of life required the past to be kept intact; in her own head at least.
A more percipient review of Don’t Tell Alfred appeared in the TLS in October 1960. It was probably the most interesting review Nancy ever received, amounting to an assessment of her authorial worth.
‘To most of her readers’, it said,
the world she describes is as remote as the Mato Grosso, and a great deal more attractive; and where the art of the novel is concerned a certain aristocratic off-handedness may well seem to them as appropriate as it is to the passions and velleities of Miss Mitford’s characters. And yet there is, among her admirers, a small and captious minority which insists, when it can get a hearing, that she does not quite do herself justice. They deplore, in short, that one so well equipped to become our foremost writer of serious comedy should fob us off... with something not far above ramshackle farce...
Consider her initial advantages: she has a sense of phrase which is, on occasion, marvellously acute... She is exceptionally observant... She has the magician’s art of making people want to read on... She has a fine sense of place; and when she is on her best form she can put a human being before us, with just a stroke or two...
Against this, she has two characteristics which, though honourable in life, are something of a handicap to a professional novelist. Fundamentally she is reticent, and does not care to intrude too closely upon her characters; and she is not at all malicious. The two together stand for a complete absence of that killer’s instinct which is indispensable to the serious novelist. Such a novelist would have forced all Miss Mitford’s characters out into the open, with no loss of comic effect. What is now left vague would have been made plain; and we should not feel, as we do now, that Miss Mitford vouchsafes to her public only a part of her true self. There is finer metal in her than is allowed to ring out in Don’t Tell Alfred.
To which one can only say: ‘Discuss’. Nancy herself was invited to do so, in her 1966 television interview. She deliberately slightly misunderstood what she was being asked, and terrorised her questioner in the process. On the question of reticence, she said: ‘It must be a fault of my own, I mean it’s nothing to do with my upbringing.’ But did she stand too far away from her characters, did she lack the killer instinct? ‘Because they’re caricatures? They’re not exactly caricatures are they? No, I don’t think so. I think it’s how people are. I don’t – no, I don’t quite believe that criticism. I see that it’s always made.’ As for her lack of malice: ‘My friends think I’m terribly malicious!... Do you think my novels are... somebody said they had a soft centre, do you find that? Cedric and Lady Montdore I think I’ve been quite hard, serious, quite cruel about, no?’
In other words: in Nancy’s own view, she wrote the way she did because that was the way that she wrote. This is the question that engaged Evelyn Waugh when she produced her first little masterpiece, The Pursuit of Love, and fifteen years later engaged the TLS reviewer of Don’t Tell Alfred. Would she have been a better novelist if she had ‘tried harder’, gone in further, cut the charm, looked beyond the worlds that she knew and, more importantly, loved? Were her historical biographies better books than her novels, because although she could still use her tricks she was forced into greater rigour? Or was she, as a novelist, the complete item? Would trying harder have taken the edge off her voice, like a singer who practises so many scales that the performance itself becomes perfect, polished and slightly dull? Might she – had she plunged deeper – have lost that strange, tremulous, artless artistry, which sprang as much from her relationship with her life as with her work? One wonders. One thinks so.
Which is not to say that her last two books, The Sun King and Frederick the Great, were not ‘superior’ works to Don’t Tell Alfred: they were superbly done, and when Nancy herself said of The Sun King (to Deborah) that ‘No more readable book has ever been written in my view!!!!!’ she had a point. She chatted about it quite fascinatingly in a companion programme to the 1966 interview, entitled Nancy Mitford’s Versailles. And, as she talked, one saw the workings of her talent: saw how what reads as the brilliant idiosyncrasy of her mind springs from its absolute clarity.
For example, as she said of Louis XIV: ‘he organised things so that everyone was always on the verge of being a little bit late for something – there was never time to plot!’ And instantly the court of Versailles comes to life; the reality of her vision switches the imagination on to full power; one sees the great dresses rustling along endless corridors, the proud noblemen reduced to the state of schoolchildren trying to beat the bell for the start of lessons; and one is absorbed in the immediacy of what Nancy saw. Absorbed in her instinctive honesty, direct to the point of funniness. ‘I haven’t come to much conclusion about what Louis XIV was like,’ she told her interviewer, who seemed a little thrown by such frankness. ‘So what do you do?’ ‘Well I’ve said, here one doesn’t know.’
This was her gift: the same gift, really, in every one of her eight post-war books; and, in different form, in her magnificent letters. One can take the opening of The Pursuit of Love, written in early 1945:
There is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of an open fire full of logs. Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph, hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered in blood and hairs.
One can take some of the last lines of Frederick the Great, written twenty-five years later:
On 15 August he started to work, as usual, at 5 am. The next day he did not wake until 11 am and then tried in vain to give orders to a
weeping general. All that day he was dying in his chair. He asked his reader for a chapter of Voltaire’s Précis du Siècle de Louis XV, but he could not listen to it. Towards the evening he went to sleep again. He awoke at midnight and told the servants to throw a quilt over his dog who was shivering with cold.
And one can take sentences, almost at random, from any of the books in between: ‘Lady Montdore, who resented death, clearly thought it most inconsiderate of her sister-in-law to break up their little circle so suddenly’; ‘“Ravi de vous voir, ma chère Grace”, he said, kissing her hand in his rapid way’; ‘Few women would have been so magnanimous, but Madame de Pompadour knew her own worth, she suffered neither from an inferiority nor a superiority complex, she saw herself as she was and on the whole she approved of what she saw’; ‘David and Dawn had gone to share a bowl of rice with a friend – they could never say they were dining out, like anybody else’; ‘Voltaire’s real interest was in the human race, past, present and to come’; ‘Louis XIV fell in love with Versailles and Louise de la Vallière at the same time; Versailles was the love of his life’.
And one finds, with a mysterious and satisfying pleasure, that these sentences form a pattern, almost a poem: for all that they trace the changes and movements in Nancy’s writing they are entirely and joyfully of a piece: to read them is like looking at the six faces of the Mitford girls and seeing their certain and indissoluble bond. Such is the strength of Nancy’s voice. Such was her gift of seeing and imagining with equal intensity. Such was the communion between what she wrote and what she lived.
6* She seemed unworried by the King’s attraction to the Duchess of Valentinois, and untroubled by any jealousy about it; but she dissimulated so well that it was difficult to judge how she really felt...
Life in a Cold Climate Page 43