Nancy Mitford (14 page)

Though Nancy had won fame as a novelist she seldom read contemporary novels. ‘How I wish I could get on with Miss Compton-Burnett but it’s my blind spot,’ she confessed. ‘So I plod on with Saint-Simon, such a nice readable edition, and the Racine, which on account of the notes is as good as
Punch
.’ With her serious addiction to history, above all eighteenth-century
history, she was easily diverted from fiction to biography. No adequate biography of Madame de Pompadour had appeared in English—another incentive to embark on such a venture. ‘I’m really starting from scratch,’ she said. ‘I know more about Louis XIV than Louis XV.’

‘I’m doing Pomp, very much enjoying it myself though nobody else may,’ she told Christopher Sykes (16th January, 1953). ‘I’ve finished an account of what I think the battle of Fontenoy was like, trying to pretend that I hope the English are going to win. (As both the generals were huns and most of the French troops Irish there can’t be any very strong
national
feelings over it.) I’m rather nervous, never having done such a thing before, and with the fearful example of my poor friend Polnay’s book on Charles Edward, so good yet so badly received, before me.’

From ‘Mr. Street’ she wrote to Mrs. Hammersley: ‘On 7th April (1953) I retire to a
heavenly
pension at Versailles to get on with Pomp. Impossible here—friends are pouring over, brought out by the fine weather and buzzing like bees on my telephone. I think Versailles is just the locale, don’t you? (in fact a very important part of the book depends on the
geography
of the château, which I shall get to understand I hope).’ And from Versailles: ‘I really am working—two or three hours in the library here and until midnight in my bed, and most of the day’s seven or eight hours. Evelyn [Waugh] who came to see me, says it’s too much, one shouldn’t do more than four, but it suits me. Everybody has their own system. The library is bliss, they have of course everything and all hop round ONE, very different from British Museum or Nationale…’

‘I’ve got a letter from Binkie Beaumont saying I must go to New York, everything paid, with the
Hut
. Goodness! He speaks as if it would make all the difference if I went—how queer as I said Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde don’t go and yet their plays run. I don’t think I can ginger myself up to it, really, all alone like that. What do you advise. It’s not till October…’

‘One could do worse than to come and live here, only not in winter, I doubt if it would be warm enough for ONE, Also at the moment it is too full… The other guests are nearly all American soldiers who are perfectly unbearable but are out all of every day except Sunday. Then there is an ill old mad French man with his nurse who says sententiously to the
company
in general “il faut les aimer!” and clinks bottles in a very sinister way. Yesterday the Americans never got up at all—trays of chicken, champagne, vitamin foods and
Danish
butter
(why?) went to them at intervals and they came down to dinner in their pyjamas. I work of course every working hour as there is nothing else to do.’

Nancy’s eyesight troubled her and she had spasmodic misgivings during the course of composition. ‘Getting on famously,’ she wrote to Heywood Hill (15th April, 1953) ‘except that I am tortured by my eyes which is a bore because if I can’t write all day, or read, there’s nothing I can do except sit with them shut and that is so dull when one is dying to be AT IT.’ And to me from Versailles (27th May): ‘I should never have taken it on. I haven’t the
education
—I feel very low about it. However too late now, as in childbirth to STOP.’ On 22nd June from Paris: ‘I’m still shut up and working very hard and going to no parties… I don’t want to
stir up the telephones. The book is good—best I’ve done I think, but the public won’t like it, reviewers are always beastly about the biography of a novelist.’

The book finished, again she wrote to Heywood (18th July): ‘I gave Pomp to Hamishham (who came specially) in the afternoon and met him for dinner and DIED on the way there. “I’m sure you’ll find another publisher” was what I envisaged, and only saying it after dinner when I felt stronger. However, one look at his face and I could see all was well. The relief was great…’

After ‘a terrible month of August, sitting for hours every day in the Lyric Theatre during a “heatwave” (i.e. rather warm, muggy and cloudy)’ because
The Little Hut
was being rehearsed for America, Nancy fled to Hyères where she stayed with the affable Chilean Tony Gandarillas. Tony could not exist without opium, thanks to which he was very spry and
continued
to beguile his friends with cosmopolitan gossip in ripe old age, but I am sure he never persuaded Nancy to share a pipe with him, though she was on tenterhooks about her first biography. ‘The book, read by a few souls when I was in London, had a mixed reception,’ she informed me in September. ‘Cecil Beaton, who read it because he was doing the dust cover, thinks it very bad indeed. However Raymond [Mortimer], on
the whole
, gave it his blessing. So did Dr. Cobban, the greatest living expert on French history, who very kindly consented to have a look and take out some of the grosser errors.’

Nancy had a tendency to identify herself with the characters she delineated, and it gave her peculiar satisfaction to write about a period she appreciated thoroughly. Madame de Pompadour seemed to have been chosen by destiny to become Louis XVs mistress and she was already a queen of fashion when she captivated him. For the next twenty years, until she died at the age of forty-two, she swayed politics at home and abroad, played the role of a female Maecenas, and remained indispensable to the restless and blasé monarch. Undoubtedly Nancy was biased in favour of Madame de Pompadour and Louis XV but this added vivacity to her narrative. She also had a talent for simplification: her language, sometimes verging on schoolroom slang, was far from that of the scholastic historian. The result was a gain in readability, though here and there we may smile at certain colloquialisms.

Madame de Pompadour led Nancy on to Voltaire and Frederick the Great with a
backward
inspection of the Sun King in between. She had found a subject after her own heart into which she could infuse her delight in the Ile de France, and her book is a prose paean to
pleasure
—the
douceur de vivre
before the French Revolution. One of the chapters is entitled
Pleasure
. Aware that this was still frowned upon, Nancy wrote: ‘People in those days approved of pleasure. When the Duc de Nivernais left on his very serious and tricky mission to London after the Seven Years War, he was described as going “like Anacreon, crowned with roses and singing of pleasure.” This was by way of being high praise.’ Furthermore, she explained that ‘the act of love was not yet regarded with an almost mystical awe, it had but a limited
importance
. Like eating, drinking, fighting, hunting and praying it was part of a man’s life, but not the very most important part of all. If Madame de Pompadour were not physically in love with the King, being constitutionally in capable of passion, it would not be too much to say
that she worshipped him; he was her God. She had other interests and affections, but she made them all revolve round him; rarely can a beautiful woman have loved so
single-mindedly
.’

Before the book’s publication in 1954 Nancy admitted to Heywood Hill: ‘I must say these months of waiting are very bad for an author’s nerves!… The worst of living alone (a state which I personally prefer) is that there is nobody to say “oh well, not so bad this and this is rather nice—when one begins to see things en noir. I quite see it wouldn’t do at all for a
pessimis
tic
character. As you know life generally appears to me in a rosy light…’

Later she was to become impervious to the arrows of reviewers, but having put so much of herself into
Madame de Pompadour
she was unduly sensitive. On 13th March she wrote to Heywood: ‘I’ve got a letter from Dr. Cobban saying he’ll bet my reviewers have never read an original 18th century document, or any secondary stuff since Carlyle. Wouldn’t they be
furious
at this news! But far the most beastly doesn’t come under this category, it is A.J.P. Taylor in the
Manchester Guardian
. In a way I think his review holds more water than Harold Nicolson’s and Cyril’s—he doesn’t object to the history or indeed deign to mention it at all—but the fact that somebody like me should poach on the sacred preserves. He obviously couldn’t bear the book. I don’t know much about him, do you? Gooch is easily my favourite so far, though I did love Cyril’s [Connolly’s] for being so funny… A few more reviews. Don’t say I said this but the fact is none of them know their subject and that is why they seem so confused and contradictory…’

Again Nancy had achieved a prodigious success. I remember numerous passengers on the Channel steamer to Calais hugging their copies of
Madame de Pompadour
, as if in preparation for the fleshpots of Gay Paree. Nancy was the recipient of even more fan-letters. ‘Oh the horror of fan-letters,’ she exclaimed to her friend Alvilde Lees-Milne. ‘It’s so odd why they should think one should
want
to know their boring reactions to one’s work. Like a breath of fresh air was one I got yesterday. “My grand mother was born Mitford, she married a farm labourer called Potts. In spite of the opprobrium attaching to the name I persist in calling myself Mitford-Potts… I live alone in a bungalow and shall soon no doubt be murdered by one of the many people who think all Mitfords better dead. Yours sincerely, Mavis
Mitford-Potts
. P.S. Please don’t think I admire your idiotic books”.’

‘Every single German publisher has been after Pomp,’ Nancy informed Mrs. Ham, ‘and I’ve got a huge advance finally from one in Hamburg. I told Marie-Louise Bousquet who said, “
au fond c’est le seul peuple qui nous aime
”.’

Her social life was often harried, as was mine in Florence, by the irrepressible Violet Trefusis, and we had this singular bugbear in common. We called her Auntie Vi and exchanged anecdotes about her for many years, interrupted, in my case, by a definite
estrangement
owing to Violet’s extreme rudeness. Though she possessed a facile wit which
depended
mainly on punning Violet was a law unto herself, perhaps the most selfish woman I have known, so selfish and inconsiderate that she became a joke, except to a tiny clique of blind adorers who believed she was a daughter of King Edward VII (a role she loved to assume)
and treated her like capricious royalty. Mr. Nigel Nicolson’s
Portrait of a Marriage
was yet to be written, but if we believed what we were told then, Violet had been courted by all the world’s leading statesmen, musicians and poets. It is fitting that Philippe Jullian, author of
The Snob Spotter’s Guide
, should write the biography of this super-snob for whom literature was a mere hobby. She was one of those friends who made one prefer a foe. As Nancy, while engaged on her
Pompadour
, complained, ‘Violet is literally torturing me, she rings up all the time. I have to leave the telephone on because of various matters to do with the lease—nobody else
telephones
and I’ve begged her not to, she doesn’t pay the least attention. I’m really beginning to quite
hate
her.’ We had a rhyme:

‘I’ve got a luncheon party today. Violet arrived for it yesterday,’ Nancy told Heywood Hill. ‘I was eating a little bit of fish. I said you MUST go away but she tottered to the table, scooped up all the fish and all the potatoes, left half and threw cigarette ash over it. I could have KILLED her. Lady Montdore exactly. Nothing left for Marie and hardly anything for me.’

But there was no escape from the predatory Violet in the small circle Nancy frequented, and it was the same for me in Florence.

‘Old Auntie is being wonderful and keeps us all on the hop,’ she told Robin McDouall. ‘She is said to have bought a house without doors or windows and with only a skylight through which she comes and goes on a broomstick. This
potin de Paris
was recounted to me at luncheon today and I haven’t yet verified it. Also she rang up one of the partners at Jullian’s whom she has long known but seldom sees and warmly urged that he should spend May and June in Florence with her. He was reeling with amazement when she added she had sent him the manuscript of her novel which, she added, has been a coast to coast best seller in America.
Alors il a compris
. He asked me what her
standing
(this is a new French word) is in the English world of letters. I was really at a loss. I said she is very well known but I think more for her mémoires than her novels—?’

To Alvilde Lees-Milne Nancy wrote (6th February, 1964): ‘Last night Philippe Jullian gave his first dinner party. It would have been intensely agreeable but for Violet and the cold. Honestly Violet is the ruin of a small evening—as for the cold, it took 3 hot water bottles to stop me shivering afterwards. He had Peyrefitte, a luscious, rather funny, rather horrible man, J-L Curtis the writer, and the nice fat Princesse de Croy. Violet made up her face 10 times at dinner. I counted.

‘Tonight is Beaton Night at the Embassy, a dinner of 38 we are told. So I can wear my ball-dress, oh good.’

Cecil Beaton’s state visits were always red letter days. On a future occasion Nancy wrote: ‘I went to no fewer than five dinner parties for him—in fact my clothes completely gave out!
At the Embassy I sat next to Cocteau who said that Rosamond [Lehmann] is translating something of his, “she must be a very old lady now.” I said well, yes, about my age. It turned out he has never seen her and thought she was about 80—don’t you find it odd? Of course she started very young, with
Poussière
[
Dusty Answer
]!’

‘Don’t you find it odd?’ had become one of Nancy’s regular refrains. ‘I’ve seen something of Willie [Somerset Maugham] while he’s been here—I’ve never known him so agreeable. But by a sort of wonderful magic he finds the same sort of people here with exactly the same drawing-rooms as those he frequents on the Riviera. Thumping jazz gramophone and bad modern pictures if you know what I mean. I find it too odd for words especially as he seems to like and enjoy serious conversation.’