Darling Soo
A cold hand clutched my heart at the word ‘photos’ in your letter because where had I put that bit of paper?1 A hunt far more frenzied than that for a pencil ensued, during the course of which I found two old out-of-date metro tickets, the enclosed torn by Noël Coward out of the Lausanne telephone book (look under ‘Reine’ and throw it away), ten dollars, a guarantee for my washing machine up to June 1956, some Italian small change, some Danish ditto & a ticket admitting me (Fancy Pogg)2 to a Red Army Parade at Mockbar.
I then became quite hysterical, sweated, threw off my dressing gown & assumed the attitude of Le Penseur. Calm yourself Susan, I have found it. I only hope the shop isn’t owned by communists – yes Susan – & the photographs won’t have been browned by a hot iron. I’ll go this morning & see.
Love N (Fancy Pogg)
Was the browning of the shirts in the form of a hammer & sickle by any chance?
I’m keeping Red Army Parade ticket to impress that laundry with if it ever comes into power.
F. P.
Darling Honks
I had a very terrible evening last night at the recep. at the Tate about the Romantic pictures. I had no idea it was a smart occasion – had on a cotton frock with a tie & to my horror I saw Cake advancing in crinoline & tiara & she pinned me while I talked quite wildly about goodness knows what, & Sir Rothenstein1 looked amazed at her knowing a sort of slum person when everyone else was in jewels & long dresses. It was terrible & I heard myself say, ‘And the worst of it is I’m stuck now’, & as I said it I realized how rude to complain to her about being stuck with her. Oh dear, I’m no good with royalties, & as I’m ¾ in love with her there is all that to contend with as well. Also my ticket had ‘Lady Eden’ written on it, & when Andrew saw he had ‘sir Anthony Eden’2 he funked it and didn’t come in.
Nice to be away from social traps though the weather is finished which is sad.
Much love, Debo
Get on
No, you can’t have a suit from Hardy Amies,1 you would have to make it yourself as well as design it & this might be beyond even your talent. Forget it.
Goodness how I would love to stay in Col’s place in Rome.2 A whole whack of Connaissance was devoted to it & made my mouth water. But what should I feel like in my nun’s shoes, fat ankles & square thumbs,3 a bit of a fish out of water, but I expect I could stick it. Enlarge on what would be a good time to go. Sept any good? Aug is booked by those benighted moors.4
Muv & Decca & Benjy came for the weekend. Muv’s shaky hands5 were so bad that I sent for Dr Evans (whom she loves & almost trusts) & he talked to her for ages & then came & told Hen & me that he had persuaded her to try one of the drugs which can help like anything. The thing about them is there are several & some of them have tiresome side effects on some people – one simply has to go on trying to see which one suits & how strong & so on. It had the most amazing effect, both hands were perfectly still & she was able to eat & drink at dinner without any trouble. Really it was extraordinary. But it made her terribly giddy & made her feet feel like ton weights. However she has promised to persevere.
Decca was much changed I thought, terribly nice & not touchy or anything. I love Benjy, he is so friendly & so funny.
The green silk is up in my sitting room at Chatsworth, looks quite jolly to me but I expect old French ladies like you will FIND FAULT.
Well, tweak yr ear, any chance of you coming to England? Or to Rome with
Yours truly, D Devonshire
Darling
You know the weather in Venice has been awful. Momo [Marriott] bathed only twice & they wore tweeds every day. A-Maria1 says never has there been such a summer. So you missed nothing. She says Daisy’s face is so awful & Elizabeth [Chavchavadze] is so fat again that she (A-M) lets me off having my face lifted, as she begins to see all this monkeying about makes no difference!
The two babies in my cour [courtyard] – aged four & six – call each other Monsieur.
Much love, N
They say Momo ought to have her legs lifted – how can she expose herself to the cruel gaze of les gens du monde!!
Darling Debo
We were so disappointed & SO TAHD last night that I didn’t phone – hadn’t the heart. I am glad about the big result1 for the sake of Ingrid2 & Wife. Our own result was fantastic, considering the canvass results. I never go by Kit’s meetings because he excites his audience but that doesn’t necessarily make them vote. But our canvass returns, & the fact that we drove all day round the constituency & were greeted everywhere by cheers & thumbs up & children covered in his photograph & heads out of windows smiling & waving doesn’t seem like under 3,000 votes.3 Most extraordinary. Another strange thing, in N. Kensington where there was tremendous election fever there was a lower poll than anywhere else – about 68%.
This letter is so that you shall get one when the boat comes in.
All love darling, Honks
Get on
I am in a slight bait with Wid – she writes ‘This is THE END, NO LETTER, nothing’, when I’ve written as often as my 9 yr old hard-worked fingers allow with many a saga of various inties [intellectuals], viz. Sir William Walton1 & E. Waugh. So I suppose nothing is forwarded as I naturally do not believe in foreign addresses, specially country ones.
E. Waugh sent me a nice present, his new book,2 all wrapped up in bits of other books & with gold-edged leaves & all the rest. So I idly opened it feeling v. pleased, & saw ‘To Darling Debo in the certainty that there is no word in this which will offend your Protestant persuasion’. I put it down having read that & got on with whatever I was doing but my Wife & daughter being readers, picked it up to have a further look & turned page after page with 0 on it till they realized it was blank pages throughout. V. kind of him wasn’t it, because it’s so much less trouble & so on.
I went to Uncle Harold3 for the weekend, I simply can’t begin to explain to you the change in him, it’s too extraordinary. He sends me now. So funny, so quick & freely admits when one speaks up about things one doesn’t know anything about. Smashing shoot, smashing food & Aunt Dorothy to boot. The only bad thing was bits of horse hair coming up through one’s sheets.
I hope to see Honks for a moment tonight & then tomorrow back home as the real work has begun at Chatsworth, moving furniture &, most difficult of all, hanging pictures. It’s no joke but v. v. fascinating.
Dread evening on Thurs, Princess Margaret & Gary Cooper4 to dinner & I can’t think what to have.
WILL YOU COME FOR XMAS? Please say yes.
Andrew’s Grandmother is sort of dying. She woke up from a doze the other day & said ‘Well it’s time we left, go & order the barouche’.
Much love, 9
Dear Miss
Yes I’d love to come for Xmas. Perhaps either a few days before or on THE DAY itself, to avoid the mob? We’ll see what suits. Momo wanted me to go to London, but I must get on with this book1 & such a visit upsets the train of thought completely. But I can’t go for years without seeing you & Muv & it seems to me far the best way of doing so is chez vous dans votre honorable château.
I’ve had Diana Week. So agreeable. Sir Ogre got ill in London & she has been here all alone & we’ve had practically every meal together. He returns today – poor old thing. Really I’m quite fond of him so it’s rather horrid to go on like this – but you know what I mean! She’s looking lovely so I think & hope is well.
I went to Lanvin – saw a dress, asked the price – 300. So I said out of the question. They said what about 230? I said no fear. They said 180 & I said snap. Doesn’t it go to show? Honks is quite X about it, saying with truth I might have scraped up the 300. I did terribly want it I must say & of course plan to live in it for ever!! But oh backless, & Honks says the heating at C’worth must go slow for fear of cracking the works of virtue. Oh dear, what about cracking my back?
I shall be after Eton copy from Stoker & teenage copy from Em & dotty copy from ye.
Fond love, N
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1 Of Nancy’s translation of La Princesse de Clêves.
2 ‘£50 at the very cheapest.’
2 Marie-Laure Bischoffsheim (1902–70). Poet, novelist, patron of the Surrealists and fashionable Parisian hostess. Married Viscount Charles de Noailles in 1923.
3 Henry Green, Nothing (1950). A comedy of upper-class life set in post-war London.
1 Deborah’s six-year-old son, Peregrine.
1 Jessica had cancelled her trip to Europe because the McCarran Act, an anti-communist law that was passing through Congress, might have made it difficult for her to leave the US and would almost certainly have prevented her from returning.
2 Nancy’s adaptation of André Roussin’s boulevard comedy The Little Hut, directed by Peter Brook, ran for four years in England.
1 The Mosleys had been staying in Paris. It was on this visit that they decided to buy the Temple de la Gloire, an abandoned nineteenth-century folly at Orsay, which remained Diana’s home for nearly fifty years.
2 Mogens Tvede (1897–1977). Danish architect and painter. Married Dolores (Dolly) Radziwill in 1932.
3 ‘Perhaps I should have mine operated on?’ Daisy: ‘Oh no, it’s not worth it.’
4 The 10th Duke of Devonshire had died on 26 November, leaving huge death duties.
1 President Truman had proclaimed a state of emergency in the US because of the escalating war in Korea.
2 Geoffrey Gilmour (1907–82). Rich English collector who divided his time between an elegant Parisian flat in the rue du Bac and the Argentine.
3 Cyril Connolly inspired the character of Ed Spain in The Blessing.
4 By Martin Turnell (1950).
5 Pamela had received a generous divorce settlement from Derek.
1 The celebrated masked ball given by Charles Beistegui at Palazzo Labia, Venice, on 3 September 1951. Deborah went as Georgiana, wife of the 5th Duke of Devonshire, in a dress copied from the John Downman portrait at Chatsworth.
2 The Women’s Institute, founded in 1915 to expand the horizons of women living in rural areas of England, often produced amateur theatrical events. Deborah had been a member of the WI since she was fourteen.
3 Daisy Fellowes and her party went as ‘America’ from Giambattista Tiepolo’s frescoes of The Four Continents in the Würzburg Residenz. The comic actress Beatrice Lillie had rather masculine good looks.
4 Princess Elizabeth Chavchavadze went as Empress Catherine the Great. Her three ‘lovers’ all preferred men.
5 ‘Honks’, Diana’s childhood nickname, was later adopted by Evelyn Waugh and applied to Lady Diana Cooper. Lady Diana greeted guests at the ball dressed as Cleopatra, inspired by the Tiepolo frescoes at Palazzo Labia, and was accompanied by Baron Frédéric de Cabrol dressed as Mark Antony.
6 Lady Elizabeth von Hofmannsthal and her sister Lady Rose Paget went to the ball both dressed as the eighteenth-century ballet dancer Marie de Camargo.
7 Clarissa Spencer-Churchill (1920–). Niece of Winston Churchill. Married in 1952 Anthony Eden, Prime Minister 1955–7.
8 Anne Cavendish.
9 Elizabeth Cavendish.
10 Elizabeth Winn (1925–). Interior decorator and friend of Deborah and Diana.
11 The Marquess of Santo Domingo.
12 Nancy Perkins (1897–1994). Virginian-born arbiter of taste who bought the interior decorating firm Colefax & Fowler after the war. Married to Henry Field 1917–19, to Ronald Tree 1920–47, and to Claude Lancaster in 1948.
1 Under the Smith Act, which made it a criminal offence to belong to an organization suspected of wanting to overthrow the US government, the Treuhafts, as members of the Communist Party, risked being arrested.
2 It is unlikely that Lady Redesdale’s intentions were dishonest. At the time, Jessica had written to her mother, ‘When I got your telegram it was all mixed up, so I got the impression you were planning to smuggle some English goods into the country in order to get dollars.’ Decca, The Letters of Jessica Mitford, edited by Peter Y. Sussman (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), p. 129.
1 Clonfert Palace, the old bishop’s house in Co. Galway which the Mosleys had just bought, needed many repairs.
1 George (Gog) Farrer (1909–44). Eldest son of the Mitfords’ Aunt Joan. He was killed on active service in India.
2 When the Mitfords were living at Asthall, Pamela had come down to dinner one day wearing a hairnet and Tom came up with the rhyme, ‘The Woman, the Woman, the brave and the fairnet / When she came down she was wearing a hairnet.’
3 A book of recipes by the famous London restaurateur Marcel Boulestin (1878–1943).
4 Sir Jack Drummond, a British biochemist, had been murdered, together with his wife and ten-year-old daughter, while holidaying in France earlier in the year. A local farmer, Gaston Dominici, was convicted of the murders, but his guilt is still disputed to this day.
5 Victor Cunard (1898–1960). A homosexual friend of Nancy whose malice and extra-dry humour appealed to her. Correspondent for The Times before the war, he settled in Venice for most of his life.
1 W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965). The writer had been a friend of Nancy since before the war.
2 Marquis Louis de Lasteyrie (1881–1955). A descendant of General Lafayette who owned the General’s Château La Grange outside Paris.
3 ‘Was paying court to me.’
1 Nancy had turned down an offer from MGM of $6,000 a week to work in Hollywood on the script of Marie Anne, from the novel by Daphne du Maurier.
2 In May 1954, Nancy spent two weeks in Moscow as the guest of Sir William Hayter, the British ambassador in Russia.
3 Nancy’s biography of Madame de Pompadour, the elegant mistress of Louis XV, was published that year.
1 Nancy had, in fact, altered her will in 1948, leaving nothing to Constancia. This was because of Jessica’s attempt to give her share of Inch Kenneth to the Communist Party.
2 When she was young, Jessica used to pick up her pet spaniel, hold it against her and squeeze its legs until its paws stood up stiffly.
3 This paragraph, which Jessica inserted into Nancy’s letter when she quoted it in her 1977 memoir, A Fine Old Conflict (Michael Joseph, 1977, p. 190), does not appear in the original. Jessica probably took it from Nancy’s letter to her previous to this one, which has not been found.
1 A beam in a chimney at Clonfert had caught fire and the house was burned to the ground.
2 The Mosleys’ French cook.
3 The Mosleys’ driver.
4 Pavel (Pavlik) Tchelitchew (1898–1957). Russian-born Surrealist painter and stage designer who came to Paris in 1928. Diana and her two Guinness sons were painted by him in 1934.
5 Augustus John (1878–1961). Diana sat to the British painter for her portrait in 1932.
6 Lismore Castle, Co. Waterford; the Devonshires’ house in Ireland overlooking the Blackwater.
1 Geoffrey Gilmour.
2 Count Jean de Baglion (1909–93). ‘The Count’ or ‘County’ was an interior decorator whose French accent in English enchanted Nancy and Diana. He was one of Diana’s closest friends in Paris.
3 Stephen Tennant (1906–87). The exotic youngest son of the 1st Baron Glenconner was one of the models for Cedric Hampton in Love in a Cold Climate.
4 A charity ball organized by Daisy de Cabrol at the Palais des Glaces which was turned into a skating rink for the occasion.
1 The Treuhafts were on holiday in Britain, Jessica’s first visit home since 1939. They were staying with Lady Redesdale, where Deborah and her children joined them, before going on to stay with Deborah at Edensor and Nancy in Paris.
2 Lady Katherine (Kitty) Petty-Fitzmaurice (1912–95). Quiet, discreet, intelligent and witty, she was loved by Nancy, Diana and Deborah. Her nickname ‘Wife’ was adopted by the sisters to describe any great friend of either sex. Married 3rd Viscount Mersey in 1933.
3 Between 1952 and 1958, a prohibition banned travel abroad by Americans suspected of left-wing leanings. The Treuhafts had u
nexpectedly been issued passports which were revoked shortly before their departure. They nevertheless managed to elude State Department officials and board a boat for England.
4 The Devonshires’ Mayfair house.
5 ‘The English Aristocracy’, which appeared in Encounter magazine (September 1955), popularized the term U and non-U, for upper-and non-upper-class usage, and brought Nancy a not altogether welcome notoriety.
1 Thomas Carlyle used, in fact, the exclamation ‘Ay de mi’, Spanish for ‘O woe is me’. The phrase has been corrected whenever it recurs in Nancy’s letters.
2 Nancy was working on the dialogue for Marie Antoinette (1956), a film by Jean Delannoy.
3 The character of Jassy, one of the Radlett children in Nancy’s novels, was based on Jessica.
1 Nancy’s nickname for five-foot two-inch Princess Margaret (1930–2002), who wore open-toed shoes, a fashion that Nancy considered vulgar. The Princess was much in the news at the time because of her affair with Group Captain Peter Townsend.
1 Grace Kolin (1923–). Married to Prince Stanislas Radziwill 1946–58, and to the 3rd Earl of Dudley in 1961.
2 Alastair Forbes (1918–2005). Writer, journalist and reviewer who, according to his obituary, ‘was frequently dismissed from lunch tables, and viewed the early train home on a Sunday morning after upsetting his hostess as an occupational hazard’. Daily Telegraph, 21 May 2005.
1 Haddon Hall, a fourteenth-century manor house near Chatsworth open to the public.
1 In an effort to discourage Jessica from visiting Paris, Nancy had gone to England to stay with Deborah.
2 Evelyn Waugh replied to Nancy’s article on the English aristocracy with a disparaging Open Letter in Encounter. Both pieces were reproduced in Noblesse Oblige (1956).
1 The concierge at rue Monsieur.
1 Jessica had sent Nancy a description of staying with Violet Hammersley on the Isle of Wight.
The Mitfords Page 31