Nancy Mitford (32 page)

‘Lewes (G.H. Lewes’s
Life of Goethe
). Well I lived in it—perhaps the contrast between Goethe and Voltaire tickled me and then the jokes! When he fingered the metre of his verses on his wife’s body in bed! You know it must be rather good still to be in print. Voltaire used to say a book that is out of print is a rotten book. As for the greatness I suppose if one doesn’t know German one must take it on trust. I was listening to
Werther
on the French wireless the other day when I heard Gladwyn’s unmistakable laugh breaking in—I too gladly twiddled the knob and switched from the wild complaints of Werther to an urbane description of Ernie Bevin. That Duke of Weimar was Frederick’s favourite great-nephew—he said (when Weimar was 14) that he was the cleverest of his generation. Those possibly innocent homosexual
relationships
were so strange in those days (I mean Goethe and the Duke)… Here comes Sister Woman for a few days oh the joy—nobody knows what she is when one is ill, complete
perfection
…’

Eventually she was informed that there was no cure for her disease, diagnosed as fibromyositis, ‘awfully rare in our countries, much more prevalent and equally incurable in America… As for the intense pain, there is nothing but an injection of morphia which must be given by the doctor, who of course when one rings up—I tried it once—is out until six.’

‘I think the worst feature of this horrible disease is that one is no longer a pleasure to one’s friends but a worry and a bore,’ she told Alvilde (27th July, 1971). ‘I know I ought to retire like Captain Oates, but the mechanics are so difficult—poor Hassan, really I think fond of me, would hate to find me stiff in the morning. As I said in one of my books, it’s bad enough
finding
a white mouse dead in its cage. But I am a fearful burden, to Diana notably and my saintly femme de ménage. I won’t let anybody come to see me, except Colonel, I can’t count on not bursting into tears…’ Yet the second flowering of her roses was almost lovelier than the first: ‘I gaze and gaze and the smell comes into my bedroom. Oh dear, the world is so agreeable…’

‘If I hadn’t lost all sense of humour I should think it funny,’ she remarked when an inspired friend sent her a faith healer. Others sent Lourdes water and had masses said for her recovery. Fortunately her sense of humour never deserted her: ‘Tom Driberg’s Mass, owing to a deaf priest taking my name, was offered for Pansy Todd.’ ‘I don’t quite know how I’m expected to earn my living,’ she told Raymond Mortimer, ‘but for the moment I am kept, like many
another
lady, by the Sun King (350,000 copies. Can you tell me why?)’

‘The faith healer!’ she exclaimed to Alvilde. ‘You see I had envisaged a motherly soul who would sing a few hymns. Not at all. A sort of poor man’s Liz Taylor loomed, accompanied by French husband. I loathed them on sight. Then, instead of hymns, she fell upon my ill nerve and teased it just as Alphy’s London quack did, so that I’ve had three days of martyrdom, no drug the very slightest use. Like all quacks (I’m beginning to know the breed) she says I won’t feel results for a week or two. Today I’m vaguely back to normal, viz. not crying all the time, drugs
functioning
more or less. What a joke it will be if she cures me! I can’t help a sneaking hope—she said she would get my digestion working and I’m bound to admit she has… Oh what a dull letter but what can I tell? I see nobody. I’m fascinated by the idea of X running away with a man over seventy. I don’t think running is the right word after one is forty and absolutely not at seventy. Y proposes “to go and live either in Ireland or in Morocco”. She never reads the papers so is not aware of the barbarities which are perpetrated in those lands she thinks they are quiet, cheap and full of highly trained servants. To my mind the worst barbarity in Ireland is the climate.’

Wasting away to under six stone, unable to move, fed with little squares of cheese by Hassan, Nancy’s condition became so desperate in August that she ‘came off her high horse’, as she put it, and implored the London doctor she despised for some thing to stop the agony ‘or suicide would be the note’. ‘Well, he posted me a magic pill and after three days I could sit up and after six days I was in the garden planting wallflowers. For three weeks never a twinge but you see one gets used to these medicines and now twinges have rebegun, quite a lot of pain but
nothing
to what it was… Hassan, having offered to forgo his holiday, went off to Morocco and writes
votre fidèle serviteur
, at least the scribe does. So Zara, a Portuguese with small baby, came to cook—she’s the nearest thing to Marie only a much better cook. Diana says I rang her up to say Hassan has gone, what shall I do? and the other day she said, only a week now before Hassan comes back and I said don’t remind me, what shall I do without Zara? When one’s so ill it’s
comfortable
to have a woman but I really love the old swashbuckler… The Bismarcks have offered material if I want to write about the Pilot, do say a good joke… I think I shall write my
memoirs
beginning in 1945 when I first lived in France. That cuts out Uncle Matthew and so on, already overdone. But I must get well first.’

This was dated October 1971: in November she ‘slid back a little’ and it was ‘wriggle
wriggle
and cry cry’. She found a sympathetic new doctor: ‘he is serious, good, kind, and takes a wild interest in what I’ve got. I really loathe those young money grubbers dressed for White’s. New doctor said what did the English surgeon operate for? I said
£
200. He said you mustn’t talk about doctors like that. I said you don’t know English doctors.’

The saga of her sufferings meandered on with relatively calm intervals until she died but even the increasingly potent pain killers—and she clutched at every available straw—failed to dull her wits. Her sympathies and antipathies, often violent and unfair, were, like her indomitable sense of fun, tokens of her youthful spirit. Intellectually she was never detached. Her curiosity about life was too vibrant to succumb to accidie or melancholia. She was certainly preoccupied with the anticipation of her
Souvenirs
, ‘under which
sweet
title my memoirs will appear,’ as she told Princess Loewenstein, and I imagined that their composition might become a more solid and engrossing distraction.

In January 1970—her first fiancé Hamish Erskine came to stay with Nancy for two nights: ‘very bitter about having been penniless until over sixty. He said, “we would have been married now for thirty years.” Help!! He is very dull and might have been more difficult to get rid of than poor Prod was. I don’t like being married. I suppose too selfish. Anyway it would have been far worse for me, this illness, with some wretched old husband hanging about and either telling one one hasn’t got anything or forcing one into ever more hospitals.’ Written to her sister Debo, this shows that Nancy had ceased to contemplate marriage even, as many surmised, to her adored Colonel. She remained in love with him to the end; he had been the principal go-between in her long liaison with France; and his visits and telephone calls were still her chief sustenance.

Mindful of the annoyance caused by Jessica’s
Hons and Rebels
, she wrote to her sister Debo (29th October, 1971): ‘I repeat and can’t repeat too often that all sisters will receive copies of the book and will have the right of veto. If one writes an auto biography it’s not enough, as so many people seem to suppose, to tell how many housemaids one’s father employed—one must
unmask
oneself. Roughly speaking I shall say what an unsatisfactory relationship I had with Muv to explain my love for old ladies: Aunt Vi (Peter’s), Mrs Ham, Mme Costa, and others. I would like vaguely to try and find out if this relationship, shared with Decca and Honks [Diana] but not with you and Tom, was one’s fault or hers. The others loved her in old age. I deeply
respected
her and liked her company and jokes but never loved her. Owing to your right of veto I shan’t mind asking questions—shan’t leave things out for fear of annoying which might not annoy at all. That was Decca’s great mistake in my view. I might make each of you write a review of Decca’s book. Incidentally my book will begin in 1945 when I came here with flashbacks at the death of Bowd [Unity], Muv and Farve. I won’t bore the public again with our childhood to the extent of more than a few pages. Never thought of Muv as bossy, far too vague.’

Nancy’s reticence was too deeply ingrained to enable her to unmask herself. She could skate on the thinnest of ice but that is a different matter. We may be sure that she would have skated most gracefully in her memoirs. While she avoided probing surfaces and considered that
religion
, for instance, was a private concern, she respected Roman Catholicism. As Mme Costa’s guest at Fontaines she was surrounded by conservative Catholics whose company she enjoyed, but she smiled sceptically at some of the dogmas professed by Evelyn Waugh. In a letter to Raymond Mortimer (27th March, 1972) she stated candidly: ‘The longer I live the more
Christian I become—Christian civilisation with all its faults has been by far the best in historical times, do admit.’ And again: ‘Given the evil of human nature and the horrors of the Ancient World it seems to me there was a slow, very slow improvement—chivalry, Sir Philip Sydney, St Louis (don’t tease about the Crusades please), some humble little saints like Sainte-Beuve who was just like Marie…’

Presumably Mortimer was an agnostic, for she expostulated with him: ‘How can you say we know literally nothing of somebody among whose works we live? And certainly He has always been an interesting topic—you can’t deny that. Do you know Fulco’s [Duke of Verdura’s] story—St Peter to the assembled throng: “You are about to see God and there are one or two things I want to tell you—in the first place She’s black.”’

‘Oh the jazzy Mass I saw on the télé The Catholics here say the true religion will come back to us from the East…’

Nearest to religion, almost confused with it, was Nancy’s attachment to her sisters. What she considered her mother’s vagueness was probably the veneer of a reticence stronger than her own, which prevented her from communicating the real warmth of her affection. And Nancy longed for this warmth. Mme Costa was French, Mrs. Hammersley half French; they and her Italian friends could express their love in so many ways without that embarrassing self-consciousness which is peculiarly English. The constant muzzling of emotion tends to freeze the heart. With her sisters she could share her most intimate feelings; they were united by their extraordinary childhood under Lord Redesdale’s patriarchal domination.

In September 1968 Nancy had told Mark Ogilvie-Grant: ‘Debo came for two days, and she and Diana and I have got a great craving for Farve so we’re going to get a medium and call up the old boy. Rosamond [Lehmann] who talks to her little girl got the Wid the other day. She said it’s better here than I’d imagined. This is so unlike her that we are rather shaken, but as Diana says they won’t be able to pull the wool over our heads over Farve,’ And later: ‘Don Antonio [our Chilean friend Gandarillas] says he is a first-class medium and will get Farve for us in no time. Woman writes to say she’ll come as she’s sure he would be easy “to contact”. I fear he might start using bad language at Tony who is not the kind of person he really likes. There might be references to nuts—better a stranger…’

Though Nancy might not have ‘unmasked’ herself in memoirs it is probable that she held many a rich surprise in store. We may be certain of a passionate tribute to France. As she told Raymond Mortimer (12th July 1972): ‘There’s at last a literary agent here who seems clever and has forced Pompadour down the throats of the Yugoslavs. He’s called Ulmann. Came to see me and began wailing (
c’est de sa race
) about Paris. I said “You ought to see London”. One must never compare anything French with other countries, only with perfection. Exactly what I feel.’

When I begged her to persevere and make notes Nancy replied (8th December, 197l): ‘It’s sometimes difficult for me to write owing to the muzziness induced by very strong pain killers—then of course when I can write it has to be to the bank and so on. What will happen to my Souvenirs?’

‘Mrs Law, who gets the pictures for my books, thought she’d make a spot of cash by
bringing 
out a book called
The Making of a Book
which would be her and my letters on the subject. So she had mine typed at great expense and found there was at least one major libel suit in each as well as one or two suicides. I’m glad to say it is doctors and publishers who come under fire, not one’s friends. Well, they are pathetic, so bad at their work. In my Souvenirs the people are nearly always dead. Diana went to a concert for Sauguet—somebody remarked there are very few gens de connaissance here. Diana said All dead and the word went round all dead all dead.’

Six months later she wrote to Raymond Mortimer: ‘If I could get better and write my
memoirs
I promise they would amuse and not embarrass you, but I feel I never will. I can’t help
slightly
wishing to be dead, my life has become such a bore.’

If she could get better… She had been told that she was suffering from an inflammation of a nerve root for which there was no remedy; that it generally lasted a few years when the nerve would wear itself out. It had lasted three years when she wrote to Raymond Mortimer: ‘That is a huge relief as everything so far has made me worse. He (the soi-disant best neurologist in Europe) gave me an injectable pain killer to be used if I feel I must… My great mistake was going to London, allowing all those treatments which lowered my general health and left me
£
3000 poorer—quite serious as I can’t work. However, I got that for my beautiful Chinese screens which have gone, not to some hateful museum but to a young man who adores them and has arranged a special room for them.’

‘I have joined you as a Legionary of Honour. I’m most excessively pleased. But nobody will ever know as the
Figaro
, didn’t say a word—only mentioned a historian of intense vulgarity called Decaux (television programmes about, for instance, les
amours de Fersen
).’