Nancy Mitford: The Biography Edited from Nancy Mitford's Letters

‘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

G

IBSON

S

QUARE

B

OOKS

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 talk, 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 taking 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.

Her paternal grandfather Lord Redesdale was still alive, and she usually stayed under his roof in Kensington High Street while her sisters were born. Of the first Lord Redesdale, G.C.V.O., K.C.B., one derives a romantically gracious image, or series of images, from the two stout volumes of his Memories which had achieved a ninth edition in 1916, when Nancy was twelve years old. The photograph of the author reproduced as a frontispiece to the first volume portrays a dapper old Edwardian musketeer with a swirling white moustache. His gleaming top hat is tilted at a rakish angle; spectacles hang from a button of his double-breasted overcoat and gloves are tucked under his left-hand sleeve. He confronts the future with dignified equanimity. His past had been crammed with episodes of historical interest, all enjoyed with such gusto that one cannot agree with his granddaughter Jessica’s dismissal of his Memories as ‘monstrously boring’. Indeed many of his youthful experiences in the diplomatic service were thrilling if not unique.

As second secretary of the Embassy at St. Petersburg during the winter of 1863–64 he was able to see the Russia of Czar Alexander II under favourable auspices. Even then the Ambassador Lord Napier warned him to send all his letters in the Foreign Office bag—‘none by the Post Office, where all our letters are opened.’ ‘Surely,’ he replied, ‘they would not dream of opening the correspondence of so humble a person as myself.’ ‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ broke in Lady Napier. ‘The other day my children’s governess received two letters by the same post from different parts of England. Each contained a photo graph. The two letters came in one envelope, the two photo graphs in the other!’ His account of Court ceremonies and balls; of Prince Gortchakoff and Princess Kotchoubey’s political salon; are as vivid as that of the fanatical piety of the people and of their saturnalia during the week before Lent in Admiralty Place, perpetuated in music by Stravinsky’s Petroushka. His life in Peking during 1865-66 was described in greater detail in his delightful book The Attack at Peking. His next post in Japan was the most exhilarating. ‘Suddenly coming in full view of Mount Fuji, snow-capped, rearing its matchless cone heaven ward in one gracefully curving slope from the sea level,’ he was caught by the fever of intoxication which, as he wrote, ‘will continue to burn in my veins to the end of my life.’ Not only did he meet Prince Tokugawa Keiki, the last of the Shoguns, ‘a great noble if ever there was one. The pity of it was that he was an anachronism’—he and the dynamic British Minister Sir Harry Parkes were the first foreigners to be presented to the sacrosanct Mikado and I am tempted to quote his entire account of the episode but will restrain this to a single paragraph:

‘As we entered the room the Son of Heaven rose and acknowledged our bows. He was at that time a tall youth with a bright eye and clear complexion; his demeanour was very dignified, well becoming the heir of a dynasty many centuries older than any other sovereignty on the face of the globe. He was dressed in a white coat with long padded trousers of crimson silk trailing like a lady’s court-train. His head-dress was the same as that of his courtiers, though as a rule it was surmounted by a long, stiff, flat plume of black gauze. I call it a plume for want of a better word, but there was nothing feathery about it. His eyebrows were shaved off and painted in high up on the forehead; his cheeks were rouged and his lips painted with red and gold. His teeth were blackened. It was no small feat to look dignified under such a travesty of nature; but the sangre Azul would not be denied. It was not long, I may add, before the young sovereign cast adrift all these worn-out fashions and trammels of past ages, together with much else that was out of date.’

With Sir Harry Parkes he narrowly escaped murder by reactionary samurai for his support of the reformers. His early book Tales of Old Japan (1871) has deservedly become a classic, and as a child I longed for more stories of the same kind, where blood was mingled with haunting poetry.

After fourteen varied and adventurous years in the diplomatic service he resigned in 1873. Meetings with Sir Richard Burton and Abd el Kader in Damascus, with Garibaldi in self-imposed exile at Caprera, with Brigham Young in Salt Lake City—the rest of his autobiography is sprinkled with dramatic encounters and anecdotes of historical personages. Disraeli appointed him Secretary to the Board of Works in 1874—ten days after he had purchased a black opal which a friend had prophesied would bring him luck precisely within that period. At the end of the same year he married Lady Clementine Ogilvy, a daughter of the seventh Earl of Airlie, and there is reason to believe that it was a happy marriage though he maintained that ‘the veil of sanctity should mask the wedded life of even the humblest individual’.

During his twelve years with the Board of Works he was responsible for many improvements in Hyde Park, Hampton Court, Kew Gardens, and other neglected beauty spots. He then decided to turn country squire, which led to being ‘mixed up with the horse world,’ notably as judge and director of the International Horse Show at Olympia, and succumbed dutifully but reluctantly to membership of the House of Commons for three years. English to the core, he was yet a cosmopolitan polyglot in culture and his Memories reveal the multifaceted type of milordo inglese now almost obsolete. ‘Looking back,’ he asserted, ‘I claim the privilege of the sun-dial, and among the hours record only the serene.’

In 1906 he accompanied Prince Arthur of Connaught on a mission to invest the Mikado with the Order of the Garter in Japan—how transformed since his previous visit in 1868 when the juvenile Mikado, regarded as a demigod, ‘had descended from the clouds to take his place among the children of men, and not only that, but he had actually allowed his sacred face to be seen by, and had held communion with, The Beasts from Without.’ Since capturing Port Arthur and annihilating the Russian fleet in 1904 Japan had become one of the great powers and there was a general imitation of everything European—to the detriment of many an indigenous art and craft. In lieu of their former elegance crude European dress was prescribed for officials. The rapid metamorphosis was prodigious even then, and Lord Redesdale had been lucky to witness the feudal status quo. ‘Tell us how it was in the olden time,’ the courtiers begged him, curious to hear of their bygone ceremonial from this venerable foreigner.

The second volume of his Memories ends with a rhapsody on Wagner: ‘poetry and music are united in an indissoluble wedlock; the senses are enthralled, and the world bows before the great wizard.’

Lord Redesdale’s grandchildren inherited many of his gifts, and in perusing his suave autobiography one is often reminded of this inheritance. Nancy’s eyes resembled his, and a drawing of his profile at the age of twenty-eight by Samuel Lawrence resembled her brother Tom. In fact her generation appear to have had more in common with their grandfather than with their father and mother. One seems to hear Nancy’s voice in his lighter anecdotes. She has related that when her fourth sister was born, on 8th August, 1914, just when war had been declared, ‘she was christened Unity, after an actress my mother admired called Unity More (an early Peter Pan), and Valkyrie after the war maidens. Unity herself always spelt it Walkfire. This was Grandfather Redesdale’s idea; he said these maidens were not German but Scandinavian. He was a great friend of Siegfried Wagner’s and must have known.’ Eventually the actress and the war maiden were combined in Unity with tragic results.

Since the betrayal of Denmark in 1864, when the ‘scrap of paper signed by Prussia in 1852, assuring the inviolability of Denmark, was torn up’, Grandfather Redesdale had foreseen a calamitous general war, the outbreak of which was ‘by far the most vivid’ of Nancy’s fitful recollections. ‘When it appeared to be imminent,’ she wrote, Blor told me to pray for peace. But I thought, if we had war, England might be invaded; then, like Robin Hood, one would take to the greenwood tree and some how or another manage to kill a German. It was more than I could do to pray for peace. I prayed, as hard as I could, for war. I knew quite well how wicked this was: when my favourite uncle was killed I had terrible feelings of guilt.’ Thus the ten-year-old innocent shared the private sentiments of many a grizzled soldier and politician.

Little Nancy’s prayers were answered but ‘the war turned out to be less exciting than I had hoped, though we did see the Zeppelin come down in flames at Potters Bar. I fell in love with Captain Platt in my father’s regiment, an important General of the next war, and crocheted endless pairs of khaki mittens for him—I am not sure that they were inflicted on him. In any case, all this crocheting was the nearest I ever got to killing an enemy, a fact which I am still regretting.’ She retained a lifelong interest in battles which I could not share, though I admired her per severance in trying to follow the campaigns of Frederick the Great when she was already an invalid.

Another memory which made an indelible impression on Nancy at the age of seven, was of Captain Scott’s tragic expedition to the South Pole. She devoured every book obtainable on the subject and would have won an examination on all its harrowing details summa cum laude. The hut under the active volcano of Mount Erebus where the Polar party were installed; Dr. Wilson’s appalling winter journey sixty miles along the coast to Cape Crozier in utter darkness and a freezing temperature to find the egg of an Emperor Penguin; the ascent of the dreaded Beardmore glacier towards the Pole; Seaman Evans’s death of frostbite and concussion; the suicide of Captain Oates who staggered into the blizzard with frostbitten feet ‘to try and save his comrades, beset by hardship’; and the final discovery of ‘Birdie’ Bowers, Dr. Wilson and Scott, all dead in their sleeping bags—every circumstance engraved itself on Nancy’s young imagination.

Captain Scott was to remain her hero of heroes, and the fact that he and his comrades ‘really wanted to prove to themselves how much they could endure’ haunted her till the end. The recollection of their sufferings often gave her courage to bear her own. Frequent references to Beardmore and Captain Oates cropped up in her letters, and she recounted their story in 1962, ‘fifty years to the day that Scott died.’ Paradoxically for a person with a frivolous façade, she admired sheer