The capture of enj oyment
Peter Quennell
A TALENT TO ANNOY: Essays, Articles and Reviews 1929 — 1968 By Nancy Mitford, edited by Charlotte Mosley
Hamish Hamilton, £12.50
In March 1929, Nancy Mitford, then aged 25, the eldest child of a picturesquely eccentric peer, had some good news about her literary achievements for her close friend and party-going companion Mark Ogilvie-Grant. Although both of them were gregarious and lived a fairly expen- sive social life, neither of them was very rich. But, she told him, 'I'm making such a lot of money with articles — £22 since Christmas' that 'I'm saving it up to be married; but Evelyn Waugh says don't save it, dress better and catch a better man. Evelyn is always so full of sound common sense!'
In April 1930, her news was even more encouraging: 'The Lady people have now definitely taken me on at £5.50 a week to write a sort of running commentary of current events. They are sending me to everything free . . . So to celebrate this I went out today and bought myself a divine coral tiara — the family think I've gone mad.' Her editors, on the other hand, must have been very well pleased with the results of their commission. That same year she produced two remarkably amus- ing pieces — 'At a Point-to-Point', where she describes the hardships of the kind of rustic pastime from which she had so often suffered in her childhood, and a vivid account of attending a Wagnerian opera at Covent Garden — a cultural treat she found it a little difficult to enjoy, or, indeed, to understand, as she felt she should have done.
Despite the great success of her novels and biographies, Nancy remained a versa- tile and hard-working journalist until, in 1968, her health eventually broke down. Just how hard she worked between 1929 and 1968, and, as she grew older, how wide her range of interests became, this wisely edited selection shows. 'The fact is', she wrote to her sister Diana Mosley, on the subject of a weekly column she was then turning out for the Sunday Times, 'these articles which look like nothing at all take me ages of fussing and rewriting'; and, in a letter to Evelyn Waugh, who was still her literary conscience, 'they take me for ever, eight hours a day for a month'; to which Waugh, always a generous critic (mice he had discarded his mask of semi-comic antagonism, replied it is your m6tier'.
Few essays or reviews, written at an editor's request, seem worth reprinting several decades later; but Nancy Mitford's, serious and frivolous alike, have for the most part a surprising air of freshness, and, although they may annoy one here and there — she confessed that she sometimes set out to 'tease' her readers — at their most juvenile they are rarely dull. She had a quick mind, a lively sense of humour and a rapid, untutored response to any topic that she handled. Clearly, she was fond of life, and thus, unlike some modern writers, preserved a warm, spontaneous affection for her fellow human beings. Not that she did not occasionally cause offence. An infuriated Irish patriot proclaimed that hell would suit her better than Ireland; while romantic admirers of Queen Marie Antoinette (whose influence on French life she deplored) also condemned her to perdition.
As a journalist, her finest opportunity came when Ian Fleming arranged that she should write for the Sunday Times a regular column from Paris — an assign- ment that lasted nearly five years, and displayed her talents at their best. The moods, prejudices, social habits and poli- tical and literary goings-on of 'the cross, clever French' endlessly interested and amused her, whether she was chronicling the annual excitements of the Tour de France, or discussing an impassioned row that had broken out between Jean Cocteau and Francois Mauriac, during which Mauriac had reminded his former friend — now 63, though he 'sees himself as an eter- nal 28', — that 'very soon the tightrope on which you have danced so long' would undoubtedly be cut short by death.
At the same time, Nancy's column abounded in diverting personal anecdotes. One evening she relates, a guest, as he left her house, had been accosted by a hand- some, well-dressed man, who enquired if this were the residence of the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, and, when informed that the archbishop lived in the next street, exclaimed 'It is urgent; I am posses- sed of a devil!' On hearing this story, her faithful maid Marie was astonished and indignant. 'Fancy bothering Monseigneur for a little thing like that', she said. 'Why any priest could have arranged it for him!'
The self-portrait that emerges from A Talent to Annoy — not, I think, a very good title — is a highly sympathetic one. Nancy was a sensitive, shrewd, courageous woman, and had learned, as Jane Austen had done, to enjoy a way of life that might otherwise have been frustrating and, now and then perhaps, embittering. Her only marriage — to Peter Rodd, nicknamed 'Prod' — had quickly proved a dismal failure; for he was the type of 'brilliant' young man, reputed, before he grew up, to possess a touch of genius — his friends said he could do anything he chose — who, in the end, does nearly nothing.
Nor did her only great love-affair — her lengthy attachment to 'the Colonel', whom in her most successful novel she glorifies as the romantic duc de Sauveterre — ever completely realise her hopes. But, if, during her later life, at her pretty house in Versailles, she was very often lonely, she was both too proud and too sensible to cultivate a taste for angst or introspective gloom. She looked back on the past with amusement and affection and regarded the hazardous present with almost philosophic equanimity. Much of that spirit is happily reflected in the pages of this book.
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