Pepita
Page 26
‘But, darling, you want to get better and better known, don’t you? You want to make money, don’t you? Sans argent on ne peut rien faire. Et Hilaire Belloc lui-même told me once qu’un écrivain ne pouvait jamais réussir s’il ne perçait pas le leather belt of Suburbia.’
How I wished Mr Belloc had never made use of that disastrous phrase!
I said I really didn’t mind about getting better known; and as for making money, it was very nice if one could, but it came second,—a long way second.
‘Je ne te comprends pas du tout, ma chérie. A un moment tu me dis que tu ne peux pas afforder d’aller abroad, et puis next minute tu me dis that you don’t care about making money. Et puis, tu écris des livres qui ne sell pas.’
I protested mildly that The Edwardians had sold quite well, adding that I was sorry about that, because I hated writing novels; was a bad novelist; would never be a good one; and really only cared about writing poetry and other things.
‘Oui, je sais bien: c’est trés joli, la poésie, et je dois avouer que tu as écrit des choses qui me font pleurer [as Ella Wheeler Wilcox also brought tears to her eyes I could not take this as an especial compliment], mais enfin la poésie ça ne sell pas. Now you told me you were going to write a book about Jeanne d’Arc. Has it got any love-interest?’
I said I was afraid not: St Joan had died at the age of nineteen, and her few years of adolescence had been fully occupied by things other than love.
‘Mais enfin, ma chérie, ma niña, you know love is the most beautiful thing on earth? Et c’est ce qui appeal le plus to most people. Je te dis toujours que le soleil et l’amour sont les plus grands des peintres. Now couldn’t you introduce a love-story into your St Joan? It would make it sell much better.’
‘But Mama, my book on St Joan isn’t a novel; it is meant to be history. I can’t introduce imaginary episodes; I simply couldn’t.’
She looked wistful; regretful; trying to understand. Then she brightened.
‘Tiens, j’ai une idée. If you say Jeanne d’Arc never had a love-affair,—ce qu’elle a manqué, la pauvre fille!—of course I see you can’t invent one. You are as tiresome as McNed [her name for Sir Edwin Lutyens] with his endless talk of grammar in architecture. “You must have truth”, he says, and it seems to me you say pretty much the same thing. Au diable ces artistes with their silly consciences. But now look here, my silly obstinate child,—petite entêtée, va!—if you can’t give a love-affair to your Jeanne, couldn’t you introduce one for Charles Sept with one of his ladies? He had lots, I know. I went round all his châteaux on my honeymoon,—ah, how happy your Dada and I were then, et ce qu’il est devenu méchant pour moi depuis! enfin, n’en parlons pas,—we were talking about Charles Sept and his ladies and a love-affair for your book. Now there was,—who was it? Diane de Poitiers? Cléo de Mérode? j’oublie.’
‘Agnès Sorel?’ I suggested.
‘Of course,—Agnès Sorel. Diane de Poitiers, c’était un autre roi, Henri Deux I think; mais enfin ils avaient tous des maîtresses; tu vois comme on m’enseignait bien l’histoire de France au couvent. Cléo de Mérode, she was somebody quite different. She was what George Moore used to call la haute cocotterie,—oh, that old George Moore! what a bore he could be, and how amusing sometimes. Do you remember how he insisted once to come to Knole for Christmas, and how he wanted you to write a play with him, about Shakespeare I think, he shut himself into the library with you for a whole afternoon and I was quite anxious, and how he came down to dinner without his tie? And how he minded, when he found out! As though it mattered,—et lui qui était plutôt Bohemian. Enfin, je disais,—do remind me, child, it tires me so much to think of what I was going to say, and those dreadful servants they wear me out, so that I am bonne à rien.’
‘Agnès Sorel?’ I suggested again, ‘Cléo de Mérode?’
‘Ah oui, Cléo de Mérode!’ She forgot the dreadful servants and went off into peals of her old delicious laughter. ‘Oui, George Moore avait raison: c’était la haute cocotterie bel et bien. C’était bien l’époque des appartements entretenus aux Champs Elysées. And do you remember how Foch wrote to her, quel grand homme, que ce Foch! j’aurais bien voulu le connaître,—he just wrote, “Quand? Où? Combien?” and she replied, “Ce soir. Ici. Rien.” C’est chic, ça, hein? Ce grand maréchal et cette grande cocotte,—ça va bien ensemble, tout de même. Ça fait chic. I like that sort of thing. But, darling, what was I saying? You really must help me. It is such an effort for me to remember everything, and I do try to help your books in every way I can, mais il faut aussi y mettre un peu du tien.’fn5
VII
Reading over what I have written, I seem to have made light of it and a joke of it, but really I don’t mean to convey a wrong impression of what my mother was or of what she meant to me. It was a mixture of tragedy and—no, not comedy, but sheer fun. Even in the midst of her blindness and illness and general disability and hopelessness, she could still be better company than most people. Many people have told me what a clever woman my mother was, and what good taste she had; it was a sort of label tied onto her; but it was utterly wrong. She was anything but clever, and her taste was anything but good. What they never realised was that she was, above all things, herself. Wrong or right, tiresome, troublesome, turbulent, difficult, generous, mean, vindictive, revengeful, unjust, kind, lavish, enthusiastic, all in turn, she was always herself, and to be always oneself to that extent is a form of genius. ‘To thine own self be true’,—never have I known anybody who to their own self was truer, in every detail, creditable or uncreditable.
It is not for me to write a panegyric of my mother; I hope that my love of her has been implicit in all the foregoing pages of this book; I will leave the last word to Mr Rudyard Kipling as he expressed himself in a letter to a personal friend. This letter came into my hands a short time after her death:
‘P.S.—On mature reflection the most wonderful person I have ever met. And to think of that indomitable flame burning through all the dark years in those five acres of Knole buildings! And like all organisers of the highest type with no traces of pressure and apparently time in which to do personally kind things to the merest stranger. It’s outside all my experiences and of a type to which I know no duplicate.’
fn1 I have no idea who she means by ‘that coarse retired soldier’. Probably some gardener she sacked twenty-four hours after she engaged him.
fn2 She means ‘scornful’. (As though I could be!) She never got her English words quite right.
fn3 Turner, the painter; his house in Cheyne Walk.
fn4 ‘Little A.’ is evidently the person to whom this letter was dictated. It will be observed that she ceases to be in favour by the time the last paragraph of the letter is reached, and then becomes ‘my typist’ and ‘poor girl’.
fn5 I must disclaim all responsibility for these statements about Marshal Foch and Mme Cléo de Mérode. For all I know, they may be chronologically incompatible, and my mother may simply have been attributing a good story to two appropriate characters. All that I have done is to reproduce, almost verbatim, a conversation.—V. S.-W.
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Copyright © Nigel Nicolson 1937
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