21 From a letter to Diana, 28 November 1942.
22 From James Lees-Milne’s diary, 17 June 1944.
23 As described by Diana to the editor of Nancy’s collected letters.
24 The Unquiet Grave, a book of reflections by Connolly upon his life and beliefs, was published in 1944 and reviewed unkindly by Waugh the following year.
25 James Lees-Milne recorded in his 1943 diary taking Lady Anne Hill, wife of Heywood, to lunch ‘in order to plead with her that they raise Nancy’s salary’. Anne ‘explained laughingly that whereas Nancy got paid £3 10s. od. she only got £2 10s. od.; that the shop barely paid its way...’
26 These were a wartime invention, selling food like stuffed heart at extremely low prices.
27 Journalist and biographer Harold Nicolson, married to Vita Sackville-West (more famous for her lesbian love affair with Violet Trefusis), was a friend of sorts, although he and Nancy were not mad about each other. In her editing of Nancy’s letters, Charlotte Mosley quotes this from Nicolson’s diary: ‘She is essentially not an intellectual and there is a sort of Roedean hoydenishness about her which I dislike’ (this quotation was used in a biography of Nicolson by James Lees-Milne, who although fonder of Nancy held a not dissimilar view of her). But civilities were maintained between Nicolson and Nancy. In 1957 he reviewed her book about Voltaire favourably, even though he disapproved of what he saw as its immorality. And in 1963 she asked to be released from a lucrative contract to write a book about the Congress of Vienna, having read Nicolson’s own book on the subject and found it to be unimprovable.
28 From his review of Nancy’s collected letters in the Spectator.
29 From a description of the clever seductress Albertine in The Blessing.
30 This is Selina Hastings’s word; elsewhere in her biography, however, she writes that Nancy felt for Palewski ‘a deep and overwhelming physical attraction’.
31 With the Observer in 1968.
32 Nicholas Mosley, son of Oswald and his first wife Cynthia, had recently published Natalie Natalia.
33 Lady Diana Cooper (1892–1986) was one of the greatest beauties of the twentieth century: among the women of London only she and Clementine Churchill were said to have had faces that could launch a thousand ships. Diana married the politician (later British Ambassador in Paris) Duff Cooper, and was the mother of John Julius Norwich. She was a close friend of Evelyn Waugh and their correspondence – collected in Mr Wu & Mrs Stitch, edited by Diana’s granddaughter Artemis Cooper – was extensive, although it lacked the relaxed exhilaration, the sheer cleverness of the letters between Waugh and Nancy. For her part Nancy was fond of Diana and initially dazzled by her, although she seems later to have found her slightly wearing: neither Diana’s tendency towards melancholia nor her dislike of France were to Nancy’s taste.
34 The phrase is Winston Churchill’s.
35 The Hon. Daphne Vivian, later Fielding, was married at the time to Viscount Weymouth.
36 Alastair Forbes has robustly refuted what he called ‘Osbert’s silly lie’ on a couple of occasions, including in his Spectator review of Nancy’s letters: ‘dear Osbert, with his clothes modelled on Max Beerbohm’s, his voice on Maurice Bowra’s and his complexion on Gaston’s, was quite capable of wanting to cut a figure at table by questioning the absent Gaston’s courage and blaming it on the absent Ali...’ Forbes then describes watching, in June 1944, the first V1 bomb to fly over London, in the company of a totally unfazed Palewski. ‘We calmly discussed the possible effect on the course of the war of the new weapon before parting, Gaston it seems to Nancy’s arms and I to mind-your-own-business...’
37 From Paris After the Liberation: 1944–1949, by Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper.
38 Violet Keppel (1894–1972), described in Charlotte Mosley’s droll editor’s notes thus: ‘Minor novelist. Married Denys Trefusis in 1919. Eloped several times with Vita Sackville-West.’ Violet moved to Paris a little before Nancy – where the two women moved in very similar circles – and thus viewed Nancy (younger, funnier, infinitely more talented) as something of a threatening interloper. Nonetheless the two exerted a certain fascination upon one another, as will be seen in Chapter 9.
39 Later married to James Lees-Milne, and a good friend of Nancy’s.
40 In an essay published in House & Garden.
41 ‘I had tea with Nancy in her garden’, James Lees-Milne recorded in his 1944 diary, ‘which is a wilderness of rank grass and chickens...’
42 His mother was a girlfriend of Gaston Palewski’s –!
Chapter 7
1 From a letter to Lady Redesdale, 24 September 1944.
2 Instead Heywood Hill engaged a man named Handasyde Buchanan (‘Handy’), who became a partner in the shop and married Nancy’s co-worker Mollie Friese-Greene.
3 From a letter to Evelyn Waugh, 17 January 1945.
4 From a letter to Evelyn Waugh, 22 December 1944.
5 From a letter to Violet Hammersley, 29 January 1949.
6 This story is told by a character in Frost in May, by Antonia White.
7 ‘Evelyn’s letter pure wickedness, not fun at all’, Nancy wrote to Mrs Hammersley after Waugh had attacked her behaviour with Palewski. ‘I wrote & said you are supposed to be fond of me, you should be glad that I am happy. He replied I am fond of you, very, & that is why I am not glad...’
8 This point is made in Selina Hastings’s biography of Evelyn Waugh.
9 From a letter to Lady Redesdale, 8 June 1945.
10 Waugh had written that Cedric talked exactly like the Radlett girls: ‘I can just accept Polly speaking exactly like Linda – but Cedric is a Parisian pansy. Oliver Messel doesn’t talk like Debo.’ Nancy made some adjustments, and phrases such as ‘solidarity between working girls’, which Cedric says to Fanny, are not exactly Debo-speak (the young Deborah’s authentic voice is apparently that of Northey in Don’t Tell Alfred: ‘you are lucky to be so kind’). Cedric does talk like a Radlett, but in a voice distinctly spiked with camp; as when he tells Lady Montdore that she must sleep in a face mask: ‘you mustn’t telephone until you’ve removed it with the remover, because you know how if you telephone smilelessly you sound cross, and if it happened to be One on the other end, One couldn’t bear that.’
11 Nancy called the Jacob et d’Angleterre ‘Heath’s hotel’, in reference to the murder committed in 1946 by Neville Heath in a then low-rent Notting Hill hotel. The trial of Heath, a handsome sexual psychopath, was a cause célèbre after the war: ‘Diana says shall we be 2 of the not-so-young women who fight their way into the courtroom’, Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh. ‘Think of the papers next day!’
12 Quoted in Philip Ziegler’s biography of Diana Cooper (Hamish Hamilton, 1981).
13 An article in Le Figaro in 2001, by Stéphane Denis, reviewed Jan Dalley’s biography of Diana Mosley, and mentioned having met Nancy at Fontainebleau ‘chez des amis de mes parents. Elle avait eu une liaison avec Gaston Palewski, qui était très coureur [one who runs after women]...’
14 Peter and Dominick Elwes were the nephews of Peter Rodd. In her letters Nancy wrote fascinatingly about Dominick, comparing him with her husband, as when in 1952 she wrote to Evelyn Waugh that he ‘came to see me – it all took me back to my early married life – the looks, the get-rich-quick line of talk. Only whereas old Prod is good at heart I feel this boy is really bad... I skilfully parried the question of an advance which loomed throughout the interview.’ A member of the Lord Lucan gambling set, Dominick committed suicide in 1975.
Chapter 8
1 In a programme called At Home, an interview with Nancy at Rue Monsieur. ‘I saw Debo last week’, Waugh wrote to Nancy in March 1957. ‘I feel it my duty to tell you that she is spreading a very damaging story about you: that you have allowed yourself to be photographed by the Television. Of course I don’t believe it, nor does anyone who knows and loves you...’
2 From a letter to Evelyn Waugh, 7 January 1946.
3 In a 1970 Daily Express intervi
ew.
4 From a letter to Raymond Mortimer, 24 April 1971.
5 From a letter to Diana Mosley, 12 April 1946.
6 This of course was old francs, of which there were one hundred to the new ‘franc lourd’ (introduced on 1 January 1959): a sizeable win to have missed, all the same.
7 From a letter to Harold Acton, November 1947.
8 Waugh described in his diary for 1945 a visit from Nancy to his home, Piers Court: ‘A mild winter; sunshine half the day... Nancy came for the weekend and remained seated by the fire for two days.’
9 A Danish architect and painter who married Nancy’s close friend, Princess Dolly Radziwill.
10 ‘Chimneypiece’: U, as opposed to ‘mantelpiece’: Non-U, was one of the notorious distinctions made in Nancy’s essay The English Aristocracy, and earlier by Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love. When Pigeon Pie was republished in 1951 she wrote to Evelyn Waugh: ‘I’ve given it a brush up (I say it’s full of mirrors mantelpieces handbags etc don’t tell my public or I’m done for)...’
11 The description is Michael Ratcliffe’s, in a review of Harold Acton’s Memoir.
12 Chevalier had performed for the Germans during the war.
13 From a letter to Diana Mosley, 15 June 1946.
14 The nickname ‘Honks’ was one that Nancy had invented for Diana Mosley, and that segued into usage for the other Diana: Evelyn Waugh seems always to have loved employing the private Mitford language.
15 Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, who became an MP and married (like Diana Mosley) into the extremely rich Guinness family, loved European society as perhaps only someone born in America can. His diaries were published posthumously in 1967 to a great sensation, but Nancy wrote to Gaston Palewski, ‘you can’t think how vile & spiteful & silly it is... you are in the index as J-P Palewski & when one turns to the page there you aren’t...’
16 From a letter to Theodore Besterman, 19 September 1957.
17 The model for worldly, health-obsessed Davey Warbeck, stepfather to Fanny, who appears in The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and Don’t Tell Alfred. The Hon. Edward Sackville-West, who became 5th Baron Sackville in 1962, was a novelist and music critic, and greatly adored by Nancy: ‘I’m glad you love him, so do I’, she wrote to Evelyn Waugh. This affection is palpable in the portrait of Davey, an irresistible character who is utterly at home with the Radletts, which is to say the Mitfords.
Davey’s fascination with food and his insides may have come partly from Nancy’s uncle Geoff, brother to Lady Redesdale, who believed in whole foods plainly cooked, and produced without artificial fertilisers (‘murdered foods’, he called those). Davey Warbeck has, in his bedroom at home, ‘a picture of a grain of wheat (magnified, naturally) which shows the germ’, and he refuses to eat shepherd’s pie on the grounds that it contains ‘twice-cooked meat... it imposes a fearful strain on the juices’. But Davey’s other characteristics – his hypochondria, his sophistication, his intellectualism, his knowledge of all gossip (‘That was the heaven of Davey’), his understanding of France, his innate goodness spiked with realism about human nature – are very much Eddy Sackville-West; although it might be said that Davey is, too, very much his own man. ‘Pam Berry [was] full of keys to explain who everyone was, which I always find an infuriating sort of appreciation, don’t you?’ wrote Evelyn Waugh to Nancy about The Blessing. In her mature years, Nancy’s novels were more than mere romans à clef.
18 Quoted in Philip Ziegler’s Diana Cooper.
19 Born Marguerite Decazes, daughter of a French duke and an American heiress, thus well placed to be a central part of Paris society and to be unusually well dressed. Married the Hon. Reginald Fellowes. Before writing Madame de Pompadour, Nancy would tell Evelyn Waugh that she saw ‘Pomp’ as being like Daisy, but this was the sort of thing she would say at the start of books, perhaps as a kind of reassurance to herself that she understood her characters. In fact, once again, Madame de Pompadour is very much her own woman.
20 From a letter to Diana Mosley, 25 May 1948.
21 It has been suggested that Nancy’s Gaullism was her equivalent of Jessica’s Communism, and Unity and Diana’s Fascism. The House of Mitford makes the point that: ‘Under the influence of her love for [Palewski], Nancy became... as blindly pro-French as Unity had been pro-German, and in an equally partisan way. That is, she was unable to see that there was any other form of French patriotism than Gaullism...’ This is a good point, for – as with her sisters – Nancy’s political passion was bound up with the passion she felt for the man who espoused it. Had it not been for Palewski, the Englishwoman in her might have felt an absolute loathing for de Gaulle, so rude to darling Winston when he ought to have been so grateful.
However, the comparison falters quite quickly. With Nancy’s sisters, the political passion had a real and obdurate life outside the passion for their men. Not so with her. Although she was not a political idiot, as she has sometimes been portrayed, it is hard to see Nancy’s Gaullism as much more than a passion acquired to please Palewski; in 1952, when she was fed up with hearing about de Gaulle’s perfections, she wrote very firmly to her lover: ‘The Gen: is not God...’
22 From a letter to Diana Mosley, 26 July 1948.
23 Jessica married US attorney Robert Treuhaft in 1943.
24 In his introduction to the 2000 Penguin Classics edition of The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and The Blessing.
25 Peter Quennell was a distinguished editor and reviewer, who thought highly of Nancy’s writing: ‘Counter Hon Quennell behaved well about Love in his Daily Mail’, wrote Waugh to Nancy in 1946 (Waugh disliked Quennell, hence the Mitfordian epithet).
Chapter 9
1 From a letter to Heywood Hill, 13 March 1954.
2 Sir Hugh was an amateur historian who began writing to Nancy after the publication of Madame de Pompadour; although the two never met, they continued to exchange letters until Nancy’s death.
3 George Rainbird’s publishing firm conceived the ‘coffee-table book’ and published Nancy’s The Sun King and Frederick the Great.
4 From a letter to Evelyn Waugh, 15 September 1953.
5 Quoted in Selina Hastings’s biography of Rosamond Lehmann.
6 From Hilary Spurling’s review of Selina Hastings’s biography.
7 Novelist and critic: in a review of Harold Acton’s Memoir, he made the acute remark that the stuff of Nancy’s humour was not – as it is usually assumed to be – ‘polished wit’, but was more like ‘high buffoonery’.
8 From a letter to Evelyn Waugh, 12 September 1951.
9 Korda was a film producer and director of great renown: among much else he put Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh together on screen in Lady Hamilton and produced The Third Man.
10 As she told the Sunday Telegraph.
11 Daughter of Earl Haig; Nancy sent her letter praising The Blessing nto her publisher Hamish Hamilton ‘just to show you that really it is all true’.
12 Writer (notably of Ariel, a life of Shelley), some-time supporter of the Vichy government and, according to Nancy, ‘a particularly horrible human being’.
13 ‘When I was in London I made up my quarrel with Cyril’, Nancy wrote to Evelyn Waugh in December 1953. ‘...I was desperate for an opening. Bobbie Helpmann, next to me, said “Do you know who I miss most in the world? Constant [Lambert]”. I could see Cyril was listening, & I said to him “Do you know who I miss most in the world? You”. And he melted...’
14 After a time in the wilderness Palewski was elected a Deputy in 1951 by the department of the Seine, and in 1953 became vice-president of the Assemblée nationale.
15 From Une Passion Inachevée: Violet Trefusis by Antoine d’Arjuzon.
16 From a letter to Evelyn Waugh, 30 September 1950.
17 Six years after the book was published, one of the priests who visited Fontaines-les-Nonnes asked for Nancy’s Voltaire in Love. ‘I said to Mme Costa what should I put as a dedicace? She said perhaps nothing – I’m afr
aid if you do it will be very compromising for him after his death; you are (in English) such a beautiful young (sic) lady...’ (To Evelyn Waugh, 26 October 1963.)
18 By Michael Arlen, a thrillingly over-written novel about a fallen woman that caused a sensation in the 1920s.
19 This was Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles: as Charlotte Mosley put it in Nancy’s collected letters, ‘friend of the Surrealists’. In Nancy’s version of the party that Waugh describes, she wrote this to Pamela Berry: ‘I took [Evelyn] to see Marie-Laure & he said afterwards “While I was looking at that lady’s pictures I found a Picasso so I’ve hidden it. They won’t find it again for months I hope”. He really is a leetle bit mad isn’t he...’
20 Lady Antonia Fraser, writing in the Evening Standard after Nancy’s death: ‘In any examination of the remorseless process by which historical and biographical sales have soared since 1950, she must be regarded as an important if not central figure.’ In her turn, Nancy was an admirer of Lady Antonia’s books.
21 Nancy drawled this strange phrase at the start of the ABC television programme about Versailles and The Sun King.
22 Nancy Mitford and Raymond Chandler were in fact Hamish Hamilton’s stars at this time: an unlikely coupling.
Chapter 10
1 Nancy had been asked to work on the final script for a film called Mary Anne, based on a novel by Daphne du Maurier.
2 Cunard (1898–1960) was a lifelong friend of Nancy’s, another of the homosexuals who were, as Diana says, ‘god’s gift’; although in Victor Cunard’s case with a distinct touch of the diabolical about him. He lived in Venice much of his life and, after his death, Nancy found it painful to return. ‘I miss him so much I almost wonder if I wasn’t in love with him. It’s the jokes of course...’ At the time of his death Cunard had been ‘in the middle’ of writing Nancy’s own obituary (somewhat prematurely, as she was aged only fifty-five). He had also exchanged many letters with her whose dazzle and fun can only be guessed at, as they were burned by his brother Edward: ‘you have burned a fortune’, he was told, when he strode into a Venetian lunch party and announced to Nancy what he had done.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 53