Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘But the person who appears completely vile is me!!… No more efforts at autobiography. I’ve learnt my lesson.’

  Examining Nancy’s references to her mother objectively, one can understand Lady Redesdale’s failure to be amused. Nancy’s humour could be lopsided on occasion. True, she often laughed at herself. ‘Somebody wrote (did I tell you?) Voltaire doesn’t love Nancy, Nancy go home, on the Embassy garden gate. Said to have been Ed Stanley. How I shrieked!’ (to Alvilde Lees-Milne, 6th November, 1957). She was not in the least offended by her sister Jessica’s remarks in Hons and Rebels. On the contrary, she liked the book though her family could not speak of it. Her instincts might be mischievous but not malicious. The suppression of a painting by Derek Hill is a case in point.

  Derek had been so captivated by the refined bone-structure of Nancy’s bosom-friend Princess Dolly Radziwill that he longed to paint her portrait in spite of her reluctance to pose for him. Christian Bérard persuaded her to yield. Derek first produced a sketch in oil and then a larger portrait after two or three sittings. The latter, though unfinished, was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in London, but the sketch was left in an ante-room for a relative to look at. At the private view Violet Trefusis trotted up to Derek and said, ‘I’ve bought a picture of yours.’ Derek naturally asked her which. ‘The sketch of Dolly.’ ‘But you can’t do that without Dolly’s permission,’ Derek protested. He was protesting to a blank wall. Violet insisted on clinging to her purchase which the model had never seen. ‘Give it to Dolly for Christmas,’ he proposed, ‘and I’ll give you any other picture you may choose in return.’

  Violet duly sent the sketch to Princess Radziwill on Christ mas Day and the parcel was opened before her guests at luncheon. An awkward silence followed while the gift was inspected. Nancy spoke up: ‘It’s so unflattering that you’ll have to burn it.’ Whereupon it was consigned to the flames in the cheerful fireplace.

  Derek was horrified to hear of the fate of a creation he cherished—‘perhaps not flattering but forceful, like a Goya’. The blame was divided between Violet and Nancy: in fact Violet had been the agente provocatrice and I have little doubt that she had bought the sketch with malice prepense. Baroness Alix de Rothschild took up the cudgels on Derek’s behalf. ‘Legally you can’t destroy a painting by a living artist,’ she told Nancy. ‘He has a right to sue you.’ ‘I wouldn’t mind if I’d published a book and the manuscript were destroyed,’ Nancy answered. ‘Do tell Derek I can’t wait for the procès. What fun we’ll all have!’

  In the meantime Nancy sent Derek (Maître Hill as she dubbed him) a match with a Christmas card inscribed ‘love from Savonarola’.

  There was no lawsuit but there was a sad sequel. Derek kept his word and presented Violet with a landscape view from L’Ombrellino, her Florentine villa. When he visited her in 1965 he decided to revarnish it. ‘Leave it at Doney’s’ (the fashionable tea-shop), she said, ‘and I’ll send my butler to collect it.’ Six months later Derek received a note from Violet: ‘Why did you see fit to steal the picture you gave me?’ ‘You asked me to leave it at Doney’s. I have done so,’ he replied. But the butler never called or Violet clean forgot, and the painting was washed away in the flood of 1966.

  The unfinished portrait of Princess Radziwill was included in a retrospective exhibition of Derek Hill’s work and to compensate for her loss of the original sketch Violet bought it.

  Some time later Nancy, unabashed, remarked to Derek: ‘Cher Maitre, I’ve done it again!’ But in this case the picture’s destruction was not complete. She had cut off the arms and legs of Norah Auric’s portrait of ‘the Colonel’ to fit the head into an oval frame. She had signed it, moreover, with the artist’s name spelt wrong. Consequently she was not popular with modern painters except Bérard and the more traditional Mogens Tvede, who has left a charming portrait of her in water colour. Tchelitchev said of her: ‘Her face is so small I couldn’t get it on to a postage stamp!’

  As her books were her main source of revenue Nancy was sensitive to reviews, but she told Mrs. Hammersley: ‘Very good to have one or two blaming reviews among the praise, nothing better for sales.’ Though she preferred reasoned abuse to uncritical adulation she was nettled by Mr. A.J.P. Taylor’s review of her Madame de Pompadour in the Manchester Guardian. Mr. Taylor had written: ‘Pursuit of Love characters have appeared again, this time in fancy dress. They now claim to be leading figures in French literary history, revolving round Louis XV and his famous mistress, Madame de Pompadour. In reality they still belong to that wonderful never-never land of Miss Mitford’s invention which can be called Versailles as easily as it used to be called Alconleigh… Once more we have the secret words, the ritual of society, and the blunders of the uninitiated… Certainly no historian could write a novel half as good as Miss Mitford’s work of history. Of course he might not try.’ Commenting on this to her friend Lady Harrod, Nancy wrote: ‘In a way it’s a compliment when the historians bother to say keep off the grass—which is really what it amounts to, as they can’t pretend my facts are wrong.’

  She was gratified when Dr. Cobban included her Pomp in the bibliography of his ‘History of Modern France’, and delighted when Sir Lewis Namier congratulated her on her review of Dr. Gooch’s Life of Louis XV, which contains her trenchant remark: ‘Dr. Gooch also furiously takes him to task for loving women. Oddly enough, some men do.’

  Naturally she was susceptible to praise. With regard to Voltaire in Love: ‘I hardly like to tell you that my book is a triumph in America—not one adverse word and the anti-English Time has given it what they call a “rave”.’ Again to Mrs. Ham she wrote: ‘A Swiss woman publisher has just been to see me about doing 10,000 Love in a Cold Climate in a Swiss edition. She said, “I must tell you I have rarely seen anybody with an expression of such pure goodness as you have”. I said I would pay her fare to Isle of Wight if she would go and repeat these thoughts at Wilmington, Totland Bay.’ (Nancy told me that this best-selling novel was advertised in Cairo in a list of pornographic literature as ‘How to make love in the cold’.)

  The Swiss publisher was not exaggerating, for Nancy did have an expression of pure goodness as even her photographs show. Her pranks were due to an innocent love of fun, unaware that their effect might be devastating. While she did not court publicity she was shrewd enough not to discourage it. Somerset Maugham had advised her to answer fan letters, of which she received bushels. Among these was one from ‘a woman saying she had seen a young girl sitting crying on a suitcase at Victoria, whereupon the passers-by began quoting to each other (all strangers) from Pursuit of Love.’ Another told her: ‘as soon as I’d read Pursuit of Love I rushed to Paris where I very soon married a Frenchman and we’ve got a daughter called, of course, Linda.’ Such letters were often exhilarating.

  She valued the critical opinions of her friends, some of whom, like Raymond Mortimer and Cyril Connolly, also happened to be book reviewers, but she considered that few of them were qualified to deal with French subjects. ‘The English ignorance on French matters never ceases to astound.’ she wrote to Mrs. Ham. ‘Betty Chetwynd said the other day that when one has lived here a few years one sees that even the pundits like Harold Nicolson and Cyril [Connolly] don’t really know as much as they pretend to. Raymond [Mortimer] is another matter, he really does know.’ After Evelyn Waugh, Raymond Mortimer became her chief literary mentor, who patiently read her proofs and corrected errors.

  Since her research on Madame de Pompadour Nancy had a hankering after a house of her own at Versailles. In January 1959 she heard that the house she coveted had suddenly come on the market. ‘There are such pros and such cons,’ she told Mrs. Ham. ‘But I’m in favour of letting fate carry one along up to a point. The Rue Mr can never be mine and I long for something that is.’ In February, ‘the Versailles house hangs in the balance and I desire it more and more. Perhaps I shall get it but it will take most of my savings if I do.’ The house hung in the balance for another seven years. Rememberi
ng the days of her poverty, she confided to Lady Harrod: ‘The Colonel roars with laughter when I save up for my old age and says—when you were earning £6 a week in the bookshop I never heard about your old age—which is rather true, but there was nothing much I could do about it then, except hope! Violet [Trefusis] tells them all here that I’m an appalling miser—all very well for her with a huge capital sum in Canadian dollars! If one could count on the Bomb it would be different.’

  The delightful apartment in Rue Monsieur suited her exactly. ‘I do love pretty little things that lie about doing nothing in a room,’ she remarked, and she had filled her rooms discreetly with pretty objects. The only drawback was the vicinity of noisy children. As she complained to Mrs. Ham (19th March, 1959): ‘When I see Fillette dans le coma depuis 4 jours I do so wish it could be all the children in this courtyard who literally drive me mad. Talking on this subject with my late hostess Mme Lambert, she said, “Take Anne de G. (a lovely heavenly creature aged 25 with three babies), if she couldn’t have a large family she would feel there was nothing in life for her”. No doubt there are such women—how could they be ordered to limit their families? Of course in the end every thing will work out as it always does…’

  ‘I’m more than thankful to have no children, much as I minded at the time.’

  Yet Nancy enjoyed the society of the young. When young Henry Harrod and two Eton friends went to Paris on their own she gave them ‘a marvellous luncheon with champagne’ although she had intended to see nobody. ‘They all came to luncheon yesterday,’ she told Lady Harrod, ‘so sweet and funny and hungry. As I’m not answering the telephone they came and of course I couldn’t resist their dear Woodley faces seen through a curtain. Absolutely loved them.’ And she was vastly diverted by her nephews who gave her fresh ideas for her next novel.

  Intensely loyal to her old friends, Nancy had to admit that she had outgrown many chums of her girlhood. Mark Ogilvie-Grant was the closest of these: him she had never outgrown. Each of them recovered their youth when they wrote to each other, long intimate letters full of private jokes and whimsical affection. But Nancy felt about many others as she felt about Mark’s cousin Nina Seafield, who announced that she was coming to live in Paris: ‘I love seeing her once a year but as a neighbour NO.’ And Hamish Erskine, with whom she had wavered on the verge of matrimony in her twenties, what a gulf had widened between them since the period of Highland Fling (dedicated to Hamish)! She wrote to Mark (6th December, 1959): ‘Poor sweet passed by on his way to Elizabeth Chavchavadze. She says he’s been asleep ever since he got there. He has written a piece for some book on snobbishness! and is furious because they only gave him £5. I suppose he thinks, like all amateurs, that writing is well paid. It is, if you scoop the jackpot, but otherwise sweeping crossings pays better. I got a letter from a poor fellow (unknown to me) who has published two novels and lives in Spain. He says he can only eat once a day “which sounds more amusing than it is”. Ay di me. He wants to come and live here, I’ve begged not. It would be once every two days, and less amusing than ever. Golly life here is expensive.’

  ‘To go back to poor sweet, one does wonder what he uses for cash. Then he is so silly. He was sitting here—I said now I advise you to go and catch the train. Oh no, it would mean waiting at the station. So he misses the train. Two expensive taxis, a telephone call to Bourgogne, and another night in an hotel, and another taxi in the morning. Made me cross. Quite a fiver I guess.’ For a season Daisy Fellowes (the Hon. Mrs. Reginald, formerly Princess de Broglie) had offered Hamish a sinecure as social secretary but his insouciance had exasperated her until she dismissed him with, ‘Good-bye, Hamish, we shall meet next summer.’

  Nancy often visited Mark in Greece as she had formerly at Kew Green, usually in June before proceeding to Venice. Her article ‘Wicked thoughts on Greece’, in which she attacked the American School of Classical Studies and the Stoa, ‘said to be “of Attalos”, but really of Mr. Homer A. Thompson,’ was the fruit of one of these visits. In compensation she admired the excavations at Olympia and at Delphi, where ‘the ruins lie in their own wonderful background and tell their own wonderful story’. Above all she admired Hosios Loukas, ‘the Byzantine church in its almond grove on a mountainside,’ hoping that ‘Mr. Homer A. Thompson will never get there’. This led to a heated exchange with Mr. Thompson in which Nancy had the last word. She returned to the charge in an essay on tourists, who were harmless on the whole with one exception: ‘Some Americans, who had probably seen the Victor Emmanuel monument on their way through Rome, generously decided to present the Athenians with its equivalent which they call the Stoa of Attalos. It is ghastly, but does not matter much, since Athens is past praying for.’ As the genial painter Peter Mitchell, a ‘good American’ friend of Nancy’s, remarked: ‘However correct the excavations and restorations were, they hardly added up to a Hubert Robert.’ Nancy wanted to see ruins with the eyes of Hubert Robert, forgetting that they had originally been painted in bright colours.

  While Mark was Nancy’s Athenian guide Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor showed her the islands beloved of Lord Byron, opening her eyes to their unspoiled scenery, and to an existence relatively primitive and serene. Professor Alan Ross’s pamphlet on ‘Upper Class English Usage’, read aloud while Nancy was visiting the Leigh Fermors at Hydra, seemed even more comical in such surroundings. Patrick, who has written so vividly about his Grecian adventures, should also record his conversations with Nancy. He and Joan were living in the house of Niko Ghika the painter during one of Nancy’s visits. He tells me that they were looking after a neighbour’s dog called Spot, ‘who barked incessantly at some visitors, and accepted others in silence. During a maddening call by some people we hardly knew the wretch never stopped barking for a second. “Out, damned Spot!” I can hear Nancy wailing to herself with eyes rolled up dolorously, and when they left she said: “I’m afraid old Spot is an unerring Non-U indicator.”’

  ‘Bidden to some feast at Spetsai, we caught the steamer with Niko. He was praising Le Corbusier, and Nancy said, “But I can’t bear him!” All the time the steamer’s gramophone was playing a deafening non-stop tune, rather like a roundabout at a fair, which, to tease Niko, gave rise to an improvised song which we both sang mercilessly:

  Corbusier! Corbusier!

  Tout est si propre et si gai!

  Les pannes d’ascenseur

  Nous laissent tous rêveurs,

  Mais, quand même, vive Corbusier! (e poi da capo)

  Lots of verses. For years, the phrase “tout est si propre et si gai!” surfaced whenever a particularly squalid or mournful scene came in sight. She couldn’t bear the lateness of meals—nearly as bad as Spain! It’s all right for you, reeling drunk all of you, but what about poor abstemious me? Well, inner resources I suppose. I’ll just think about Voltaire, or Madame de Boigne, till a crust appears…—’

  ‘After Mark (“Old Gent”), her favourite Anglo-Athenian was certainly Roger Hinks, then head of the British Council there, though he suffered bitterly from anti-us emotions during the Cyprus troubles. One day he said: “I’m off to Italy to see some proper painting, and by painting I don’t mean the daubed planks that masquerade under the name here! They haven’t an inkling of chiaroscuro or morbidezza.” (This occasioned a song by Paddy to the tune of Giovinezza, which began: “Morbidezza! Morbidezza! Chiaroscuro! che bellezza!”)’ Nancy’s nickname for Hinks was the Old Turkish Lady. Eddy Gathorne-Hardy was another congenial spirit.

  Paddy describes a later visit when, ‘we were living in a rather wretched house at Limni on the west coast of Euboea, with an amazing view over the sea to the snows of Parnassus. There was no room for a guest that you could call a room, so Mark brought her to stay with our neighbour, Aymer Maxwell, a delightful Galloway laird, very civilized, rather eccentric, very amusing, an angel in fact, always in a bit of a stew about what he gravely called “my staff” rightly, I must admit. It was an immediate click—“I adore Sir Aymer, and I love Bleak House!” (th
e house had belonged to the English overseer of a magnesite mine, now abandoned; it had a certain charm with a touch of the dak bungalow about it, only bigger and more rambling, lit by petrol lamps and candles). There are several other English residents, revelling as usual in minor feuds and gossip, not to mention labyrinthine complications, slander and conspiracy among the local Limniots, and subtle playing of one foreigner against the others, then vice versa in every possible permutation. Nancy was fascinated: “I quite see. A Euboean Cranford…”’

  ‘We had most of our meals in an out-door taverna among the trees, which is full of shaggy resin-gatherers from the mountains in summer, pals of Aymer’s and of ours, and often tight. There is a great deal of unsteady dancing in the evening, lurching and retsina-spilling and not very tuneful song. At one moment when a stumble had brought down a whole Indian file of dancers in a sottish and Breughelesque heap, Nancy murmured “Arcady”, heaving a sigh of mock rapture, followed by a round-eyed pitying look, then a bell-like peal.’

  ‘Aymer took us for idyllic sails in a charming yacht he has called Dirk Hatterick (after the Galloway pirate in Guy Mannering)… to the Boeotian shore, up the coast towards Mount Pelion and the Gulf of Volo, to a small island with a tumbling monastery that he thought of buying, dropping anchor in deserted and brilliant blue-green bays, bosky to the water’s edge with cistus, rosemary, lentisk and thyme under reflected emerald green pines and the tall spurs of Mount Canodilli; always with Parnassus afloat and glimmering in the west. She loved it. They were very happy days. But once, on a short outing when we were due back for luncheon on shore for some reason, instead of on cushions on the deck, it grew later and later… Nancy closed her eyes with a sad sigh and made the French sawing gesture across her tummy with the edge of her hand. “Nancy, you think of nothing but meals.” “Try to be nice.” Then: “Early and light, early and light, are the luncheons the Limniots love.”’