Nancy adored Venice: if she could not be in Paris, then this was the city where she was happiest, where she could after all lead the nearest approximation to her Paris life. For fifteen years after that first stay on Torcello she returned to Venice every July, putting up at a hotel, once taking a flat, and then for year after year as the guest of Contessa Anna-Maria Cicogna. Anna-Maria was rich, chic, and as a friend ‘almost perfect I think – calm, punctual, affectionate, clever & sometimes very funny’. She provided Nancy with exactly the kind of surroundings and society she most appreciated: her house on the Dorsoduro was luxurious and grand, her servants well-trained, her food delicious. Every morning at eleven her motor-boat left for the Lido where her guests would lie baking in the sun, gossiping and dozing until a hot luncheon was served by two footmen in gloves, after which the party returned to the house for a siesta. In the evening, and every evening, there was a dinner-party either at the Gritti or Danieli or in one of the great palazzos, like the Mocenigo where Byron once lived: ‘I dined in his flat, quite unchanged, in a lovely stuccoed dining room, by candle light, with a lot of jolly, rather silly Italians, just as he so often did. How I thought of him, longing for Brookses!’ The company was always expensively dressed and the backdrop as beautiful as a set at La Scala. Through Victor Cunard and Anna-Maria, Nancy made her Venice friends – the Chavchavadzes, the Graham Sutherlands, Peggy Guggenheim, the Brandolinis, Prince and Princess Clary. These were people she saw every year, highly sophisticated, all of them lovers of art and of Venice, who saw the point of having a good time and were prepared to ‘shriek’ by the hour. At the end of the month Nancy gave a dinner-party of her own to repay the hospitality she had received. ‘Last night I gave my big annual dinner party,’ she wrote to Muv on July 27, 1962. ‘20 people on a platform on the Grand Canal outside the Grand Hotel. It went off very well indeed … I had the David Somersets she is Daphne, ex Bath’s, daughter & quite lovely & three Italian beauties so the level of looks & clothes was very high indeed & it was a pretty sight with pink table cloths & the dark blue sky & water & the marble palaces.’
Madame de Pompadour was published in 1954, Voltaire in Love three years later. After she had finished with ‘Pomp’ but had not yet started on Voltaire and Emilie, Nancy went through her customary period of worrying about money, ‘twiddling my thumbs & waiting for an idea’. At this moment there fell into her lap the subject for an article which, starting off as just another Mitford tease, ended in winning her worldwide notoriety and by giving a new phrase to the language. At luncheon with an American friend Nancy met a Professor Alan Ross, a philologist from Birmingham University who, in answer to a polite enquiry about his work, told her he was writing an article on sociological linguistics for a learned Finnish journal8 to be entitled ‘U and Non-U’, denoting Upper-class and Non-Upper-class usage. Nancy was fascinated, so much so that she prevailed on Professor Ross to send her his article in proof where she was thrilled to see The Pursuit of Love quoted in a footnote as a source of ‘indicators’ of English upper-class speech.9 Scenting in the subject a superlative tease Nancy told Ross he should publish the piece in London under the title of ‘Are you a Hon?’ ‘He blenched.’ The following year she tried again, suggesting to Heywood that it was ‘a natural for the Xmas market, illustrated by O. Lancaster & entitled Are you U?’ But the Professor was not amused (‘furious at the idea of his serious pamphlet being frivolously reprinted’), and it was not until it occurred to the editor of Encounter, Stephen Spender, to commission Nancy herself to write on the subject that the project got under way. Never had Nancy enjoyed herself so much: ‘I lovingly cook away at it all day & think it the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s a sort of anthology of teases – something for everybody.’
Entitled ‘The English Aristocracy’, Nancy’s article was based on Ross’s material (although not even he was wholly reliable – ‘poor duck speaks of table napkins’), reproducing his examination of class-indicators in speech (U ‘bike’ versus non-U ‘cycle’, U ‘looking-glass’ versus non-U ‘mirror’) and adding to it an imaginative account of the present way of life of the landed classes with many a glance aside at her own code of practice both in speech and behaviour. We learn, for instance, that the sending of letters by air is common: ‘Any sign of undue haste, in fact, is apt to be non-U, and I go so far as preferring, except for business letters, not to use air mail.’ So, too, is saying ‘Cheers’ before drinking, or ‘it was so nice seeing you’ when taking leave. ‘Silence is the only possible U-response,’ Nancy wrote. ‘In silence, too, one must endure the use of the Christian name by comparative strangers and the horror of being introduced by Christian and surname without any prefix. This unspeakable usage sometimes occurs in letters – Dear XX – which, in silence, are quickly torn up, by me.’
Of course it was all a tremendous joke; but a joke which Nancy herself more than half took seriously. She was not a snob in the sense of looking up to someone solely because he had money or rank; but Nancy was never a member of the public. She saw herself as special and apart; her friends were special and apart; she believed in privilege and tradition, in old-established families in big houses surrounded by acres of land – Uncle Matthew versus Sir Leicester Kroesig. Her tastes were expensive, and she liked to be in the company of people who could afford the sort of things she liked. As she once told Heywood her idea of Utopia ‘consists of cottagers, happy in their cottages while I am being happy in the Big House’. In short she believed that everyone should know his place, and in language was to be found one of the most crucial lines of demarcation. Those who speak of ‘notepaper’, of ‘mirrors’ and ‘mantelpieces’ at once give themselves away as belonging on the wrong side of that line. (The fact that Nancy herself, in younger, less self-conscious days, was guilty of such usage was a source now of embarrassment: in younger days the impeccable Miss Mitford had her ‘notepaper’ stamped at Harrods10; in Highland Fling in the Monteaths’ flat in Fitzroy Square ‘over the mantelpiece hung a Victorian mirror’; and her main object in revising Pigeon Pie for the second edition was, she confessed to Evelyn, that it was ‘full of mirrors mantelpieces handbags etc don’t tell my public or I’m done for’.)
When that issue of Encounter appeared it sold out almost immediately. Nancy had touched a raw nerve. ‘I went to WHS here yesterday – manager dashed at me saying all sold out the first day. Heywood who usually sells 20 had sold over 100 last week.’ A flood of letters came pouring in – some furious, some amused, some frankly worried; there were newspaper articles and cartoons, endless jokes and sketches, and a coruscating poem in the New Yorker by Ogden Nash with the title, ‘MS Found Under a Serviette in a Lovely Home.’ The following year, 1956, Hamish Hamilton reprinted it in book form under the inspired title, Noblesse Oblige, together with Ross’s original article, the poem by John Betjeman beginning ‘Phone for the fish-knives, Norman’, a piece by Peter Fleming (‘Strix’ of the Spectator) on ‘Posh Lingo’, and an open letter by Evelyn, ponderously waggish in tone, ‘To the Honble Mrs Peter Rodd On a Very Serious Subject’, in which he is careful to make the point that it was not until Nancy was twelve that her father succeeded to his peerage. ‘At that impressionable age an indelible impression was made; Hons were unique and lords were rich.’
By the end of the year nearly 14,000 copies of Noblesse Oblige had been sold in Britain; in America 10,000 had gone in the first week. At first Nancy was enormously amused by all the fuss. She had had hundreds of letters, she told Muv, ‘Mostly fans, though some abuse “I am circulating it in the monastery – the Prior much impressed by it” “My typist is so angry she refuses to type a letter to you” & so on … A friend in London sent me a telegram saying lunch Saturday & the girl on the telephone said “as this is to Miss N M should we not put LUNCHEON?” ’ She and Hamish Hamilton, both intensely interested in social nuance, corresponded happily for months on the various horrors perpetrated by those who knew no better. ‘Scottish’ was one of Nancy’s chief dislikes: ‘Both my grandmothers w
ere Scotch & would never have uttered that horrible Scottish’, and ‘Cook’ she wrote emphatically all the way from Rocquebrune, ‘… is VERY Non-U one of the very worst in my opinion.’ The jokes went on and on: her favourite, she told Colonel, was’ “I’m dancing with tears in my eyes ‘cos the girl in my arms isn’t U” ’. But eventually and long before the topic was exhausted, Nancy grew bored with it. She and Evelyn started to refer to Noblesse Oblige as ‘The Book of Shame’ in embarrassed reaction to those among their friends who found the whole performance distasteful. In a letter to Debo Diana bewailed the ‘horror & vulgarity of the whole notion’, an opinion reiterated in a letter in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Sir – There has been a good deal of discussion by your sillier contemporaries about words and phrases which are “Sub-U and Non-U”. I am sorry to see that this sad little controversy has seeped into your columns. It is very vulgar … I can only beseech you to refrain from further exposure of decaying tripe. Yours faithfully, Peter Rodd.’
The writing of Voltaire in Love had been a torment to Nancy because of the debilitating headaches caused by her apparently failing eyesight. Reading or writing for more than a couple of hours a day had become too painful to bear, and the prospect of starting on another book was out of the question. She began to be seriously worried that she might be going blind and consulted several specialists in Paris, none of whom came up with an effective remedy. Then in November 1958 while on a visit to London she made an appointment to see the distinguished ophthalmic surgeon, Patrick Trevor-Roper, who ‘speaks of a rheumatic condition of the eyes for which he gives drops but not very hopefully & he has given me specs which won’t be ready for a week. So we shall see.’ But the spectacles worked: ‘It is heavenly to be able to read for a long time on end & now I see how handicapped I was when doing Voltaire. Now I’ll read a lot of books & then perhaps write a novel.’ But she was in no hurry to start; as she told Muv, ‘If people knew the boredom & slavery of having to write books they wouldn’t put on a silly pretence of envying one!’ In January she spent a few days with Madame Costa and the ancient habitués at Fontaines. Then Debo came over to buy clothes: ‘She & Diana (my goodness they have become eccentric) rushed about Paris in huge long coats & their heads tied up in white satin like two beauties distracted by tooth-ache. Woolworth bags bulging open & a hundred parcels dangling from their arms. The staring that went on, you can imagine!’ After that there was a trip to Brussels to see the Battlefield of Waterloo, staying at the British Embassy with her friends the Labouchères. After this, in July, Nancy went to Venice from where she made a secret sortie to see the Colonel in Rome. Returning to Paris in August, a month she loved for the heat and the emptiness of the streets, she at last started work on her next book, a novel.
Don’t Tell Alfred is set in and around the British Embassy in Paris, with the Embassy itself, ‘that large, beautiful, honey-coloured house’, almost as much a character as the people who inhabit it. Fanny is again the narrator, uprooted from Oxford when her husband Alfred Wincham, the ‘Alfred’ of the title, is appointed Ambassador in Paris to replace the famously charming, worldly and rich Sir Louis Leone. Dowdy Fanny is understandably terrified, the more so when she arrives at the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré to find that Lady Leone has installed herself in an apartment on the Embassy’s entresol from which she is entertaining tout Paris and spreading disobliging stories about the Winchams. But Fanny, not quite as mousy as she looks, gets rid of her by a clever ruse, and the rest of the novel is devoted to her experiences as Ambassadress. First there is the chaos caused by her niece and social secretary, Northey, a latter-day Zuleika Dobson who, true to her Radlett heritage, is beautiful, amoral and cries at anything sad to do with animals. Then there is the eruption into the dignified diplomatic world of Fanny’s two sons, one a brilliant drop-out now running cut-price package-tours to the Costa Brava, the other a bearded weirdie who turns up with wife and baby en route to China and the Zen masters. Through it all, wickedly glinting, runs the theme of the traditional hostilities between England and France, acted out again with relish and in conditions of the greatest comfort and sophistication.
There are several familiar figures from the past: Uncle Matthew is glimpsed at a cocktail party ‘standing with his back to the wall, a large glass of water in his hand, glaring furiously into space. The rest of the company was huddled together, rather like a herd of deer with an old lion in the offing.’ The Valhuberts, Grace and Charles-Edouard, are here with Sigi, the naughty little boy of The Blessing, now being naughty at Eton. And here, too, is Fanny’s hypochondriacal Uncle Davey, just out of hospital where he had been choosing ‘a few human spare parts, frozen, don’t you know, from America’. Lady Leone, the spoilt and beautiful ex-Ambassadress who cannot bear to leave ‘her’ Embassy, is of course Diana Cooper. Nancy was worried that she might object to the slight element of caricature, but Diana, never averse from a little personal publicity, was reported to be delighted with her rôle as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’, although ‘cross’ that she disappears from the book for good as early as Chapter V.
Of greater cause for concern to Hamish Hamilton when he read the novel was Nancy’s instantly recognisable and undeniably libellous portrait of the Evening Standard’s Paris correspondent, Sam White, appearing in the book as Amyas Mockbar in mocking reference to his Russian birth11 and left-wing affiliations. Although wary, Nancy had always rather liked White and been amused by him; the Fiend in Human Form she used to call him, ‘a brigand if ever there was one, whom I can’t help rather loving’. But then they had fallen out: Nancy was overheard talking about the film version of The Blessing in which Maurice Chevalier was cast as Charles-Edouard – absurd miscasting for Chevalier to play an aristocrat, said Nancy, as no one could be more vulgar. White helpfully quoted this in his column, Chevalier read it, was furious and threatened to walk off the set. Nancy, rashly denying that she had said anything of the kind, demanded a retraction which the Standard refused as she had spoken before witnesses. Nancy was left having to write a couple of grovelling letters to Chevalier12 and with a determination to get her own back on Sam White.
After the manuscript had been read by Hamilton and his partner Roger Machell, there was an anxious conference in Great Russell Street. Sir John Foster, the eminent QC, was called in to advise and a list of requested alterations was hastily sent off to Nancy in Venice by way of the diplomatic bag:
p. 197 Delete ‘saturnine and sardonic’.
p. 230 Delete ‘fiendishly clever, deeply annoying to all concerned and only half true’.
p. 264 Delete ‘ill-natured, inaccurate’.
But in spite of these amendments Amyas Mockbar remained clearly and unflatteringly Sam White. When the book came out, White, hurt and angry, was stopped from bringing an action only by his proprietor: Lord Beaverbrook argued that as his employee’s image was that of hard-bitten journalist, a tough guy with a thick skin, any personal sensitivity about this image would diminish his credibility.
Don’t Tell Alfred was published in October 1960 to a tepid reception from the critics and a marked lack of enthusiasm among Nancy’s own friends: Mrs Hammersley was reported to be ‘bravely struggling’, Anna-Maria Cicogna found Fanny ‘dreary’, and Christopher Sykes violently condemned the beautiful Northey as ‘an Arch-Shit’.13 But in spite of the reviews the book quickly climbed into the best-seller list, with 50,000 copies sold in the first two months. Although, like many writers, she affected to be indifferent to critical opinion, Nancy was surprised and hurt by Alfred’s poor reception. ‘Book v. badly received,’ she wrote to Evelyn. ‘Handy14 has stabbed me in the back by conjuring up a vision of a Belgian-type mob baying outside the shop for its 15/- I can see the time has come to chuck it & I spend my days & little remaining eyesight counting out my money.’
This was an exaggeration, but Nancy never wrote another novel. It was an unpropitious start to a new decade, one which was to bring a great deal of unhappiness. Although still only in her fifties she was begin
ning to feel out of tune with the times as her nostalgia for the past grew stronger. She wrote to Debo, ‘Oh Miss the world! Marie says no bêtes any more, nothing but machines – & it is really horrible if one stops to think. Surely one ought to have been able to have washing machines & peers & horses. Well you have sort of managed. (I do admit about washing machines.)’ Even the fashions had little to be said for them: ‘Bony knees, spindly legs, enormous feet & heads like marmalade cauliflowers all dyed the same brilliant tangerine. Diana & I realise that this is the parting of the ways & we are now old ladies, old fuddy-duddies, comic old things ancient beyond belief.’ When she turned sixty in 1964 her line, she told her youngest sister, was to be ‘rather wonderful for 60. She’s up by 11.30 every morning, rather wonderful & she sometimes spends quite half an hour in the shops & she’s so interested in everything, she even watches the television sometimes & do you know she’s going to England for Christmas rather wonderful for 60.’ Nancy had a pen-friend, Sir Hugh Jackson, an old gentleman of wide general knowledge and courteous manners who had first written to her about one of her histories. He and Nancy corresponded regularly and with relish about the horrors of the modern age – hideous buildings, vulgar behaviour, the deleterious effect on civilised life of the Common Market – and the perfection of the Past. Misuse of language was a favourite topic between them: ‘Don’t you hate “he ordered him shot.” I continually see that. Also the current use of this This I believe instead of I think so, etc.… We were strictly brought up not to say very pleased—very interested … Oh yes & don’t you hate we don’t have any instead of we haven’t got any. I hear it everywhere. As for pronunciation n’en parlons pas. Even Prince Philip sometimes offends.’
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