The dangers of kissing a frog

Alastair Forbes

LOVE FROM NANCY: THE LETTERS OF NANCY MITFORD edited by Charlotte Mosley Hodder & Stoughton, £20, pp. 538 here is nothing so inferior as a gentlewoman who has no French' had pronounced Nancy Mitford's formidable Stanley of Alderley great-grandmother, Blanche, Lady Airlie, astonished that the four-year-old child had not yet begun her lessons in that language. These (an hour's reading and grammar a day) were at once started with the enthusiastic encourage- ment of her parents, not least her father, to whom, then serving on the Western Front where he was to lose a lung, she was soon writing Mon cher pere. The latter answered her in a jolly piece of teasing verse that ended And I have no desire to quench

My child's desire for learning French.

For, despite his caricature as the arrogantly chauvinist Uncle Matthew in The Pursuit of Love, `Farve' had been brought up, as befit- ted the son of a learned, worldly and world-travelled father, to speak as fluent French as did his wife Sidney, and they had chosen Paris for their happy honeymoon.

The excitement of Nancy's own first visit to Paris comes through strongly in her let- ters from there to her mother. Charlotte Mosley has chosen to omit these in favour of others from Florence, but she neverthe- less truthfully records in her commentary that 'Nancy grew up speaking fluent French'. This came in handy when she and her sister Diana were four years later taken by their mother to spend three whole months based in Paris. To her brother Tom she was later to describe her sudden access of melancholy in, of all places, the Avenue Henri Martin. 'I waited for a bus there once and when the bus came I was in tears'. At Versailles (a presentiment perhaps?) 'I always cry buckets', but then she goes on to add that, all the same, in Paris

one can be more cheerful than anywhere else in the world & I have often danced all down the Champs Elysees and no one notices, they are so used to that sort of thing ... I'm now soaking myself in French history, art and lit- erature of the 17th-18th centuries which is passionnant.

She records that she already has three books about poor Marie-Antoinette under her belt but none that could justify her hateful and horribly overdone tease 30 years later against that unfortunate woman, whose last years of martyrdom had been as bravely borne as were to be Nancy's own. (Personally I have always thought that her earlier gaffe about the brioches that had been her sole breakfast since she could remember had a rather Mitfordish ring.) Nancy reported boastfully that she had `completely got off with a young French- man who is said to be le jeune homme le plus seductif (surely she should have written seduisant?) du pays.' And hardly had World War II, though still Phoney in Britain for many months, begun than we find her off- duty from her ARP post in Paddington, where she spent most of her time writing a novel,

chummed up with two heavenly French Colonels. They intersperse gallantry with dis- sertations on the cultural bonds of the Roman Empire which I very much like.

They had no doubt helped to blind her for a while to her husband's love affair with her sweet-voiced Stanley of Alderley cousin, Adelaide Lubbock — then in charge of another ARP post in distant Chelsea — which was to last on and off for a dozen years or so, not mentioned in Mrs Mosley's footnotes. No sooner was France defeated in 1940 than London became noticeably fuller of Frenchmen, and to her sister Decca in America she was writing of 'a glamorous Free Frog' with whom she had taken up, and to her closest of old friends, the widow Hammersley, of the Free Frogs, 'always the nicest and funniest'.

It is very agreeable the way the French chaps look at one, kiss one's hand etc without being rendered gaga with love first like the English ones, if you see what I mean.

To sister Diana, banged up in Holloway (after gratuitous and sadly unsisterly denunciation by Nancy to the authorities) by the hateful Labour Party hack Herbert `There's that nice Dr Jekyll turning into Hyde Park' Morrison, despite the liberal misgivings of her cousin Winston, the wartime coalition PM, she blithely wrote asking if she had read Memoires d'Outre Tombe, it's so won- derful'. But her glamorous frog, at one point described as the 'adored Captain Roy', said `Chateaubriand-assommant'.

Much worse than assommant was to be the hysterectomy that rendered her sterile for life after he had, as she expressed it, put her in the family way during their agree- able liaison, the pregnancy unlike her two previous miscarriages of potential heirs to the Rennell peerage proving ectopic. She had another go at Chateaubriand during her final illness but gave up after telling her `unique and indispensable friend,' Ray- mond Mortimer, that she now found him `so hateful that I can't even enjoy the writ- ing'. I myself had never understood her earlier fascination with him. For had he not somewhere once admitted that, such was his spleen, the nearest he could ever get to laughter was no more than a dog-like bar- ing of his teeth and lips? What good could that be to anyone proclaiming, as Nancy did, that 'I like fact better than fiction and I like almost anything that makes me laugh'?

So the arrival in her life of Gaston Palewski was therefore in every sense a Blessing. I myself had first met him in 1940 and quite agreed with Harold Nicolson's 1942 diary entry assessing him as

one of the most conversational men I know, being able to converse with equal facility on Wedgwood dinner services and who was Albertine.

There never was a more devout believer than Gaston in that maxim of Chamfort's which says that the most wasted of all days is the one that has to pass without laughter. Stuffy old Harold Macmillan wrote of `Gaston Palewski, whom I have known for a long time, but cannot bring myself to like'.

A decade ago, at Gaston's death, I wrote that it was his mondain side, not to mention the indiscriminately compul- sive and ubiquitous groping, pouncing and taxi-tigering habits he shared with Asquith, Lloyd George and countless others on both sides of the Channel and Atlantic that put off the hopelessly boutonnee and unworldly Lord Stockton.

Indeed the successful staving off of Gas- ton's attempted date-rapes was known in Paris to be quite a Kung-Fu-moi-la-paix feat. But to a beguiled and consenting party like Nancy his pleasure-giving skills in the sack made her conclude that although she had at the time adored her honeymoon with her Wagnerianly pretty but pretty rum husband, Peter Rodd had quite simply been ignorant of the facts of love- making life. No wonder that, after eight months of monopolising his nocturnal attentions in London, Nancy, desperate to resume such agreeable gymnastics, if possible first in Algiers and then in liberat- ed Paris, was rather careless of the require- ments of political propriety, let alone cor- rectness. (It might be OK for the King of Greece to have a beautiful married Englishwoman as his maitresse en titre et affichee but not for the right-hand man of General de Gaulle, incorrigibly suspicious of Brits under, let alone in, the bed. (Gas- ton always loved to joke that Nancy's faith- ful Marie at the Rue Monsieur was really a senior SIS operative).

There is no doubt that Nancy took too long to appreciate that while she would always remain the indispensable friend, she was bound sooner or later to reach her sell- by date as an indispensable mistress. Few women find the change easy to accept, and even we men sometimes take it hard for a while. Yet a year ago I myself sat at the deathbed of an adored and indispensable friend, my love affair with whom had sim- ply magically turned into a 20-year-long `affair of love'. Some of Nancy's aggrieved letters read dangerously whingeing and almost shrewish. Gaston patiently bore with them, joking that the rights of jealousy and passion were guaranteed by the Revo- lution. But the truth is that he loved her and her friendship. Besides, he had also enjoyed being in no small way a consider- able muse to her pen. He is regularly described by critics, particularly pinkish and proprietorially feminist ladies, as `small, dark and ugly,' often worse. But Mrs Mosley's illustrations do not bear this out, not even the 'he's no oil painting' oil paint- ing of him in his full ambassadorial rig in the Farnese in Rome, where once he most un-Scarpia-like after an official luncheon challenged Judy Montagu to a race down the Palazzo's passages. And, besides, didn't Voltaire say he could talk away his face with any woman in half an hour?

I was naturally pleased to read in one of Mrs Mosley's rather minimalist footnotes (e.g. no mention either of poor Violet Tre- fusis' own Legion d'Honneur or her sur- prisingly long and close friendship with Francois Mitterrand, 'a brilliant dema- gogue', Nancy scripsit, 'who makes my flesh creep'), that, in a 1947 letter to her sister Diana, Nancy had written: 'I really love Ali Forbes and so does the Col. I think he is the only clever young man I know with a heart.' But of the letter to which this foot- note is a gratifying addendum I had already demanded another factual explanatory note and correction at the time of its first appearance in a very inferior life of Nancy. The letter was written on 24 June, 1944 to Palewski in Algiers, whither he had returned after a brief stay in London over D-Day and after. It contained the sentence:

Osbert Lancaster said at luncheon on Fri: that Aly-F told him you were so frightened in that raid on Thurs: that you kept ringing him up.

One must of course give credit to Osbert for putting the final nail in the coffin of Nancy's absurd U and non-U tease (the word 'notepaper', by the way, crops up pas- sim in these letters) with his brilliant car- toon of Maudie Littlehampton remarking, as all sensible people had done from the start, `If its ME, it's U'. But dear Osbert, with his clothes modelled on Max Beer- bohm's, his voice on Maurice Bowra's and his complexion on Gaston's, was quite capable of wanting to cut a figure at table by questioning the absent Gaston's courage and blaming it on the absent Ali.

Gaston was soon able to deal with Osbert's silly lie, for it so happened that the very first pilotless, jet-powered V1 bomb to reach the West End on the night of 13 June had farted its way flamingly over Grosvenor Crescent like the man from Madras in the limerick at the very moment Gaston and I emerged together on to the pavement outside the Argentine embassy, where we had been dining with its delight- ful occupants. We calmly discussed the pos- sible effect on the course of the war of the new weapon before parting, Gaston it seems to Nancy's arms and I to mind-your- own-business.

All this was explained to the journalist in whose rotten life of Nancy the letter had appeared, but of course she failed to keep her promise to add an explanatory note in her paperback edition and sadly Mrs Mosley has followed her route. I correct the detail before lamenting that neither Sir Harold Acton's affectionate and moving memoir of 18 years ago nor the masterly account of the whole Mitford family by Jonathan Guinness are in print. An even greater cause for lamentation is that the same fate has overtaken Nancy's wonderful historical books, with their narrative style, as her principal literary mentor Raymond Mortimer put it, `so remote from what has ever been used for biography, as if an enchantingly clever woman was pouring out the story to me on the telephone'. Even A. J. P. Taylor fell for her Pompadour, and she is herself probably and inimitably right in calling her Frederick the Great 'the best book I've ever written and next to King Solomon's Mines ever read.' She had well understood that it is la petite histoire qui fait la grande'. In the year of Jurassic Park it has been discovered that even dinosaurs suffered the bone cancer that, in its most painful Hodgkin's Stage IV form, it took 24 expen- sive doctors four years to diagnose in Nancy. The French are still shockingly behindhand in matters of pain control, as a recent conference emphasised. In 1971 Nancy was writing to Alvilde Lees-Milne: 'I won't let anyone but the Colonel come to see me'. But, all the same, against her ambassadress cousin Mary Soames' advice, I telephoned and went to visit her in the dear little Versailles house whose wild champ fleuri and old roses were intended to be of the school of Miriam Rothschild and Highgrove's meadow, reminiscent of pre- pesticide Cotswolds.

Later she wrote to me describing the pin- ning of the longed for Legion d'Honneur to her emaciated, pain-wracked frame:

Gaston made a speech to me and my two sis- ters and gave me the gong and we all cried. I'm desperately bad again, have hardly seen a soul since you so kindly came. So sad, as my garden with the bowers of roses is literally a dream. I long to show it. V. much love, Nancy.

Her last lunch party was for Cyril Con- nolly who, supposing them to be already boiled, had brought expensive plovers' eggs from Hediard or Fauchon which poured over everybody's faces, especially poor Cyril's. Of this incident she wrote to me to say that 'The raw eggs will be good for a laugh till my dying day . . . Keep in touch — Love from Nancy.' Her dying day was still a year away. I showed Mrs Mosley by fax — the letter Gaston wrote to me after it had taken place, telling me of the great gap it was going to leave in our lives, glad as we might be of the end of her mar- tyrdom. He told of the intuition that had made him hurry to her house, enabling him to see her again before she closed her eyes. `She recognised me,' he wrote, 'which was a consolation to me.'

George Painter surely nods Homerically in deeming these letters (500 out of 8,000 available) the summit of Nancy's literary output. Cyril Connolly wrote of the tech- nique she had evolved 'for regurgitating packets of old letters in palatable form which any historian might envy'. Her bril- liant early work with the two books on the Stanleys of Alderley and her Russell ances- tors had stood her in good stead. Printed en bloc, as The Spectator's literary editor found with Evelyn Waugh's and Ann Flem- ing's letters, tpo many of them read at a sit- ting can cause intellectual indigestion, not to say heartburn.

Still, this beautiful book, with its beauti- ful jacket pictures of its beautiful subject and its beautiful editrix, is full of priceless gossip and therefore like Creevey, Greville, Gronow and Byron — the best English letter-writer of all time — full of the stuff of history.

Unlike many people, Mrs Mosley and Nancy's sisters especially, I found myself most of all admiring Nancy's wonderful capacity for happiness, which she had wise- ly discovered to be made up, like a coral reef, of small joys upon small joys. Even on the day she was contemplating suicide but dreading the danger of merely doing her brains in instead of blowing them out, as poor Unity had done on German soil, significantly in the Munich's Englische Garten (nowadays around the corner from the Rue Monsieur and in every Paris book- shop you can buy Suicide — Mode D'Emploi over the counter), she could write: 'Odd as it may seem, I get a lot of happiness'.

As someone once in her circle, the apho- rist Logan Pearsall Smith aptly wrote, `Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither, these make the finest company.' Charlotte Mosley's book gave me once more a taste of dear Nancy's.