Nancy Mitford Read online

  ‘The autobiography Nancy Mitford intended to write herself.’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Gossipy… filled with her deliciously funny voice…

  A hotline to Nancy Mitford.’

  Deborah Moggach

  ‘Weep with laughter.’

  India Knight, London Review of Books

  ‘Intoxicatingly entertaining.’

  Spectator Book of the Week

  ‘Wonderful.’

  Deborah Devonshire

  ‘Elegant.’

  Miranda Seymour TLS

  ‘The essential Nancy.’

  Diana Mosley, Daily Mail

  ‘Packed with good stories.’

  The Times

  ‘Stylish.’

  Antonia Fraser, The Evening Standard

  Nancy Mitford was the eldest and most famous of the Mitford sisters. A relentless tease, she wrote brilliantly satirical novels about her family and those around her. But what was her waspish sense of humour like for her friends? This intimate biography draws a witty, real-life portrait of Nancy, based on the letters she intended to use for her autobiography. The result is a sparkling and irresistible portrait filled with her unique voice and endless addiction to gossip and shrieking!

  Harold Acton was one of the bright young things (Evelyn Waugh based one of his most loved characters on him) who was one of Nancy Mitford’s closest friends. He was asked by the Mitford sisters to edit the material Nancy left for the autobiography she wanted to write.

  NANCY MITFORD

  by

  Harold Acton

  GIBSON SQUARE BOOKS

  To DIANA, DEBO and PAM

  With love and gratitude

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Nancy Mitford and Harold Acton were born in the same year, 1904, she in London and he in Florence. He remained a Florentine all his life, in spite of Eton and Christ Church. Nobody who was at school or at Oxford with him could ever forget his delightful personality, his Italian accent, his brilliant uninhibited conversation, exaggerated courtesy and sublime wit. Harold and Nancy made friends, and when I grew up in 1928, I felt about him as all our generation did: here was the cleverest, the most scholarly, the most amusing man ever born.

  He and his brother William lived in a rather terrible house in Lancaster Gate, chosen for its large rooms where William could display rococo furniture, which he bought, and sold to the discerning, while Harold wrote his first book, The Last Medici, and a very disappointing novel, Hum Drum. The novel unluckily appeared at the same time as Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. It was the beginning of a pattern which often recurred: seemingly less brilliant members of his generation were far more successful than he, when they put pen to paper.

  Both brothers loved parties, and all the intellectual feasts a great city can offer. Harold was a star, and when he left London in 1932 to go and live in Peking it was as if a light had been extinguished. William returned to Florence, Lancaster Gate was no more, and we felt bereft. Harold wrote to us all from time to time, and friends like Robert Byron and Desmond Parsons visited him in China, but until he came back in the war and joined the RAF his absence left a void.

  When my sister Nancy died in 1973, after a long illness, my sisters and I were more than pleased when he suggested writing this memoir; nobody could have done it better. He quotes extensively from many of Nancy’s letters to Mark Ogilvie-Grant, her confidant, about her unhappy affair with Hamish St Clair Erskine, which wasted several years of her life. Harold was the first person to mention the Colonel in print; he was alive and we all agreed about this.

  During her twenties Nancy wrote a couple of novels and contributed to various women’s magazines, in order to make a little money. Her talent was dormant; she had not even the first requisite of a writer: a room of her own, but perched here and there with friends and relations, or stayed at home in the country though she much preferred London. When the Hamish affair finally broke, she made a disastrous marriage. But at least she had a house of her own.

  The war changed her life. She fell in love, she got a job at Heywood Hill. The disastrous husband went abroad with the army, and she wrote a best-seller, The Pursuit of Love. Her prolonged adolescence was over, and from the age of forty she wrote books which have made millions of people laugh (and cry!) which brought her a fortune. As soon as possible, in 1945, she got a flat in Paris, where she lived for twenty happy years. Her French translator said of her: ‘Elle n’était pas bonne, mais elle était généreuse.’

  Then her luck changed again. She had given up novels and was writing historical biographies, as amusing as they were well-researched. She bought a house in Versailles where everything (except her books) went wrong and she was assailed by incurable cancer. Two rather unhappy loves and an unhappy marriage, followed by a painful death, made me say, as quoted by Harold, ‘Her life was too sad to contemplate’. It seemed so at that moment, but in fact she had twenty years in which everything went right, her great talent was rewarded by enough money to lead exactly the life she most enjoyed.

  She was often a guest at La Pietra, Harold’s Florentine Villa, where he was a perfect host. As he had no heir he offered to bequeath his estate to Eton, which refused. He then offered it to Christ Church, which was equally pusillanimous. Therefore, he left it to an American University, whose fortunate students go to La Pietra, with its olive groves and famous Italian gardens, to study Italian art.

  All Harold’s genius was in his personality. Not even his interesting histories of the Bourbons of Naples do him justice. Fortunately, he was often filmed for television. He was wonderfully himself, a star of the first magnitude. One can only hope these films will be carefully preserved for posterity.

  Diana Mosley

  Paris

  Introduction

  WRITING ABOUT BIOGRAPHIES to her mother (8 April, 1954), Nancy Mitford observed: ‘Of course a family always expects nothing but praise, but lives of people must show all sides. Then imagine writing a biography and having to submit it to the family sewing in a lot of little anecdotes, etc, and altering the whole shape of the book! The result would never be any good… People who don’t write, however intelligent they may be, simply do not understand the mechanics of a book—it never ceases to amaze me. Almost all depends on construction in the last resort… years of work and then frustration. A biographer must take a view, and that view is almost sure to offend a family. The whole problem is excessively thorny I do see, probably the answer is that no really good biography under such circumstances (living children in possession of the material) has ever or can ever be written.’

  In this biographical memoir of a dear friend from whom even absence made the heart grow fonder—for my life in China, followed by the war and a return to my home in Florence, kept us apart for long periods—I was guided by a wish to celebrate the fragrance of her personality and its flowering in France. An Oriental proverb occurs to me now: to enjoy the benefits of Providence is wisdom; to make others enjoy them is virtue. Nancy possessed this virtue to a supreme degree.

  I have attempted to show all sides of Nancy from her copious correspondence, and have not been afraid to sew in a lot of little anecdotes. Whether the result is any good I leave the reader to determine. I have only been limited by consideration for people who might be offended by remarks which, innocuous in t
alk, assume a more serious aspect in print. In a few cases this has amounted to frustration but at least my conscience is clear.

  In an age dominated by telephones Nancy Mitford was a voluminous letter writer and during her last years when she had not the strength or the desire to face friends for fear of harrowing them—the pain might get beyond her control—she wrote more and more letters as a temporary relief. Fortunately most of their recipients kept them, less on account of her fame than because they were intensely idiosyncratic. The average letter we receive nowadays betrays little of its writer’s personality. Not so with Nancy’s: even her spelling and punctuation, her capitalizations and underlinings were redolent of her speaking voice. If one loved her one could not part from those leaves, though they might not contain more than a date or a promise of meeting. At Chatsworth, where her papers are preserved, I marvelled at the cornucopia of her correspondence. Nothing had been thrown away. There is ample material for future biographers.

  To her mother and sisters Nancy wrote frequently, and these letters were only a fraction of the total. To her friends Mrs. Hammersley, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, Alvilde and James Lees-Milne, Heywood Hill, Evelyn Waugh and Raymond Mortimer, she poured out her impressions and comments, her plans and ideas, with varying degrees of frequency. With the erudite Sir Hugh Jackson whom she never met personally, she corresponded as a faithful ‘pen-pal’ since 1956. To these and many others who have kindly allowed me to scrutinize their letters from Nancy I have paid tribute in a note of acknowledgement, but above all I am deeply indebted to Nancy’s sisters: to Debo (the Duchess of Devonshire), Diana (the Hon. Lady Mosley), and Pam (the Hon. Mrs. Derek Jackson), without whose help in fishing them from big boxes crammed to the brim and sorting them out, I could not have produced this volume. Thanks to these generous ladies I have let Nancy tell her story in her own words wherever possible so that the reader may follow the progress of her career.

  Except when she went to Russia, she never seems to have kept a diary. Usually she wrote in a reclining position, and her pen flowed over the paper on her lap as if she were talking with complete spontaneity. Of course many of her missives were concerned with practical matters, but even these had humorous touches and it is not always easy to extract the nuggets of ore. Apart from her published writings, her letters are the most poignant relics of her individuality. Innately modest but not self-effacing, she made no attempt to conceal her feminine nature, her love of life’s little luxuries, of good but simple food, of genuine characters both simple and complex.

  Inevitably some correspondents elicited a greater liveliness than others: foremost of these were Mrs. Hammersley and Mark Ogilvie-Grant. Victor Cunard, a resident of Venice and a malicious gossip with whom she corresponded for many years, might well have been added. She consulted him about her literary projects inter alia. When he fell ill she recounted all the incidents most likely to amuse him, week after week, and we may be sure that they would have amused us too. It was therefore a blow to Nancy—and to us—when his brother informed her that he had spent a whole afternoon tearing up her letters. They would have helped to replace a considerable portion of her unwritten diary.

  Nancy’s correspondence with Hamish Erskine, to whom she had been engaged before her marriage to Peter Rodd, might have yielded another harvest, but that was also destroyed. Her innumerable letters to Evelyn Waugh have been perused by his biographer Christopher Sykes and will probably be published. With so many others at my disposal I felt disinclined to trespass on Christopher’s territory.

  Some writers adapt themselves to their correspondents, even to the extent of changing their epistolary style. Nancy remained true to her colloquial self without frills or furbelows. In her letters to her family, however, we may detect variations of mood and attitude, a slightly more deferential tone to her mother, a more playful to her sisters, which were in her sprightliest vein. She was also prodigal of picture postcards both comic and sentimental. ‘I hope you’ll love this postcard as much as I do! You must look at every detail.’

  As in the case of most writers Nancy Mitford’s life was not externally eventful. Having evoked her years of childhood in The Pursuit of Love, she intended to write Memoirs of her life in Paris, which had become her second home after the war. Her migration to France was a clean break with her past, a past that had been none too happy—though, owing to her cheerful dis position, she had made the best of it. Highly diverted by the difference of French and English social conventions, full of admiration for General de Gaulle, enchanted by the details and incidental episodes of the Parisian scene, she became ardently Francophile, yet she remained English to the core. Most of the friends she continued to see were English. With one or two exceptions and the antiquated circle at Fontaines-les-Nonnes (to which she was introduced by Mrs. Hammersley) her French friends belonged to the international society which was equally at home in London, Rome and Paris. She loved the Cotswolds, where she had been brought up, and it is interesting to speculate on what books she might have written had she remained in England.

  Her most memorable literary achievements were matured in France and when she grew tired of fiction French history provided her with characters to whom she could apply her psycho logical insight with profit and enjoyment. The same narrative skill was diverted to Mme. de Pompadour, Voltaire, and Louis XIV, hence plodding academic historians have sneered at her brilliant achievements in their field. Nancy was a votary of Macaulay, and Macaulay had written: ‘The best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature, and we are not certain that the best histories are not those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed. Something is lost in accuracy, but much is gained in effect. The fainter lines are neglected; but the great characteristic features are imprinted on the mind for ever.’

  In literature as in life laughter was the golden key to Nancy’s heart. Nearly all her friendships began with a joke, and in her letters we seem to hear the jests as they sprang from her pretty lips. She will never appeal to readers without a sense of humour, but I fear that hers is so peculiarly English that it is almost untranslatable. Her humour seldom rollicked ‘on high planes of fantasy or in depths of silliness’, rather it rippled on betwixt and between them. I hope its ripples are reflected in the mosaic of this memoir. La Bruyère’s famous maxim might also have been Nancy’s: ‘You must laugh before you are happy for fear of dying without having laughed.’

  1

  IN A LETTER DATED 29th September, 1971, Nancy Mitford wrote to me: ‘I’m going to write my memoirs beginning in ’45 so as not to bore the world all over again with our childhood. Tell Vi (Trefusis) that, it will make her vaguely uneasy! But I must get well first—this vile pain has begun again in spite of my new dope. Not as bad as without the dope but nag nag nag, makes it impossible to concentrate.’ Alas, the pain became implacable and one of the most potentially scintillating memoirs of our age was never written. Since 1946, when she decided to settle in Paris, Nancy enjoyed a physical and spiritual rejuvenation until she was stricken with an incurable illness. Her child hood had been evoked in the sprightly pages of her novel The Pursuit of Love as well as in her sister Jessica’s Hons and Rebels, which reached an enormous public: The Pursuit of Love sold over one million copies.

  As in a story by Hans Andersen, Nancy Mitford was the eldest of six comely sisters and a handsome brother, the progeny of impeccably English parents attached to family life in the country rather than in the town. Their home was their castle, closely guarded by a Cerberus whose bark was worse than his bite. Only their brother Tom was sent to school like other boys, and he brought back an exciting aroma of the outside world. The girls were consigned to the care of nurses and governesses, of whom Nanny Blor (whose real name was Dicks) had the predominant personality. The memorable Nanny in Nancy Mitford’s novel The Blessing was based on the character of Blor and Nancy has also drawn an appreciative sketch of her in The Water Beetle: ‘She had a wonderful capacity for t
aking things as they came and a very English talent for compromise. In two respects she was unlike the usual Nanny. We were never irritated by tales of paragons she had been with before us; and she always got on quite well with our governesses, upholding their authority as she did that of our parents. When we grew up she never interfered in our lives. If she disapproved of something one said or did, she would shrug her shoulders and make a little sound between a sniff and clearing her throat. She hardly ever spoke out—perhaps never—and on the whole our vagaries were accepted with no more stringent comment than “Hm”—sniff—very silly, darling”.’

  Though she had the porcelain complexion and slender figure of a country-bred girl Nancy Mitford was born in London at 1, Graham Street, now Graham Terrace, on 28th November, 1904. She has admitted that she could remember almost nothing about her early childhood—‘shrouded in a thick mist which seldom lifts except on the occasion of some public event’. For instance she retained a hazy impression of her parents at break fast, both crying over newspapers with black edges: King Edward VII had just died. More clearly she could remember the dining-room wallpaper, ‘white with a green wreath round the cornice.’ Such seemingly trivial details are often etched on our memories like the flavour of Proust’s madeleine, conjuring long submerged emotions. Psycho-analysts might read significant symbols into them: the green wreath might betoken a presentiment of future fame.

  The sinking of the Titanic left a deeper impression, for it was accompanied by daydreams ‘of a rather dreadful kind’. With dis arming candour she related that she used to scan Blor’s Daily News for an account of a shipwreck in which her parents (who sailed every other year to Canada in order to prospect for gold) might be ‘among the regretted victims’. In spite of what psycho analysts might infer, she loved her parents—with comprehensible reservations in the case of her father—but at the age of seven she nurtured an enterprising ambition to ‘boss the others’. The brood, however, continued to increase, which she considered ‘extremely unnecessary’ at the time.