The New Compass: A Critical Review
Books for People
Who Don’t Read
Janet Bailey
Laura
Thompson. Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy
Mitford: A Portrait of a Contradictory Woman.
I
think Nancy Mitford might well have found Laura Thompson her almost ideal
biographer. The book sparkles with a passion for Nancy Mitford’s work and for
her character, and although curmudgeons may flinch in the face of such
consistent delight, there cannot be any better motive for embarking on the
search for understanding. As the literary world is awash with biographies and
most high profile writers, including this one,[1] have
already been tackled by high profile biographers, it is brave of Laura Thompson
to set out on this choppy sea, especially in pursuit of such an elusive,
stylish and controversial woman as Nancy Mitford, shimmering as she does, on an
horizon of aristocratic names and the tumultuous events of the twentieth
century.
Nancy Mitford was born in 1904 and
died in 1973, so her life spans the major part of the century. She was the
eldest child in a family of six sisters and one brother, from an upper class
English background, unflashy in ways that have all but disappeared today. David
Mitford, her father, inherited the title, Baron Redesdale, only through a
series of chances: his elder brother Clement, “the golden boy” (22) and
expected heir, was killed in 1915 in the First World War, leaving no son, and
just after his death, their father was gone too. Here the changes start to
happen more rapidly, to the course of the century as well as to the Redesdale
fortunes, and Laura Thompson gathers up many strands of these lives and times
with considerable flair.
Her
thesis is the contradictory nature of the woman, in her life and her work, and
the responses this has provoked since Nancy Mitford’s name was in the public
eye, first in the thirties, but most of all after 1949 when The Pursuit of Love was published,
closely followed by Love in a Cold
Climate. It could be argued that the venture is its own excuse for cobbling
together yet again all the extraordinary pieces of the Mitford jigsaw, “the
impenetrable fascination of this family”(31), with its strange alliances across
the uneasy perspectives of war and great changes in society—yet another foray
into high gossip, the more titillating for examining in such detail how Nancy
Mitford managed her undeniably bizarre family life in a wonderfully well
connected social world. This would, however, be far too easy a criticism of
what is a most loving and readable attempt to capture the eccentric nature and
subtlety of this woman’s achievement. Laura Thompson presents this
scintillating creature with such verve, such graceful determination to rescue
her from being boxed into a corner labelled frivolously lightweight and
irredeemably tarnished by her family’s awful associations with Nazism and its
henchmen, that we are readily enlisted to her cause, even if perhaps we find
the whole investigation slightly too long and occasionally repetitive. Given
the character we find so acutely defined in this portrait, who could not bear
any “droning on”(xiii), Nancy Mitford would probably have jibbed at some of
this, and better editing would have helped. There are also some moments when
the emphases on her particular kind of attitude towards what was happening in
The
real value of the enterprise is that she makes us appreciate the background out
of which “the resolute strength” of Nancy Mitford’s development grew; how her
façade was maintained by her hold on the importance of the virtues that
underpinned it. And this reinforces Laura Thompson’s main argument about the
best novels: if we think Nancy Mitford is too preoccupied with “airy nothing,”
then we have missed the peculiar quality of her life and art; “she believes in
charming her audience as least as much as enlightening them”(xii)—surely a
Jonsonian aspiration. When we recognise what she is doing, we will see that
“airy nothing” has been given its “local habitation and a name” in her
penetrating—often unsparing—explorations of the human heart, expressed with
such beguiling wit and style. Our world is greatly out of touch with any grasp
on ideas such as restraint, elegance, refinement and good manners—and perhaps
as an extension of these, with the rigorous idea of smiling in the face of
difficulty however severe, indeed in the face of tragedy itself. Laura Thompson
makes clear how easily today we find such behaviour cold and unfeeling. On one
level, it would be hard to think of anyone whose behaviour and attitudes seem
more antipathetic to modern notions than Nancy Mitford—a woman who thought
dressing beautifully all the time was
an important discipline but one to be enjoyed intensely, who could present a
bright face “among the jewel-coloured birds”(221) at dinner with her host in
his beautiful house just after hearing from him that her beloved brother Tom
had died of his wounds in Burma. It is by scrutinising the way she conducted
her life, and particularly the manner in which she handled love and crisis,
that Laura Thompson takes us quite close to the centre of the quest to
transmute life into art, and shows what this extraordinary woman has to teach
us about what we think we know already. There is much to provoke us, but this
is what we should demand of sprightly biography.
Crisis
comes to mind very easily when we consider Nancy Mitford’s place in the family
caravanserai, so what is it about its special nature, the conflict, the wild
behaviour, the caustic comment, the fun, and the allied contradictions, “a
heady mixture of the conventional and the unconventional” (72) found
beautifully restructured in The Pursuit
of Love (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949)
which makes some of us find them as unreal and frothy as a world of dream
fantasy? This is Laura Thompson’s central territory: she attempts to interpret
for us what it meant to live in a truly eccentric family, in a political
landscape ranging from the weird connections between all the Mitfords and the
sinister rise of Hitler, to Oswald Mosley and fascism and his marriage to Diana
Mitford, Esmond Romilly and communism and his marriage to Jessica Mitford,
Nancy Mitford’s own flawed marriage to Peter Rodd, her experiences in the war,
her miscarriages, all these gave a kind of edgy and sometimes savage
unpredictability to much of her life. There is obviously little space in a
brief review to give examples of how entertainingly Laura Thompson elucidates
what these experiences meant for this young woman’s development, as daughter,
sibling, friend, witty conversationalist and correspondent, tower of strength
(when she chose to be) in hard times, devastating social commentator, and
writer, but we are constantly and movingly reminded of the material she had to
work with, and in the relatively recent past. She died only thirty years ago,
Diana died only this year and Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire, is still
alive. It is Laura Thompson’s good fortune to have been able to converse with
these two of Nancy’s sisters who illuminate in a characteristically Mitfordian
argumentative fashion, the roller coaster of her life, and increase our
understanding of how a particular kind of insouciance can mask true grit, can
be a type of courtesy, as well as what courage it took to endure the pain of
her last years. When she was dying, Laura Thompson tells us, “Books were her
salvation; she clung to the words as if they were lighting the way to
sanity”(397). It is therefore fitting if her own writing can distil for us the
best essence of the woman, “such is her gift of seeing and imagining” (366).
The
magic of that voice lies in the narrator’s perfect assurance of tone and
perspective, and in The Pursuit of Love,
her handling of both comedy and tragedy within an apparently artless but highly
idiosyncratic romantic tale. Perhaps part of the patronising attitude to Nancy
Mitford’s work arises from a misreading of the swift and confident pace of her
writing, as well as from a modern kind of contempt for her subject matter,
sometimes foolishly assumed to make her not worth reading. Let us again recall
Ben Jonson: “it is only the disease of the unskilful to think rude things
greater than polish’d.” Nancy knew how to deal with many “rude things”: we
remember the entrenching tool “still covered in blood and hairs” hanging over
the chimney-piece, the wild ambiguities of the children’s thoughts and
conversation, in the hunting field and elsewhere, not to mention the myriad
aspects of managing the behaviour of a seriously odd bunch of people, in all
kinds of situation. We have to remember that one sister, Diana, remained in prison
through most of the Second World War for her dedication to Hitler, and another,
Unity, put a bullet in her head for him the day war was declared; these horrors
have no part in the nove,l but Nancy Mitford’s sense of the value of facing
difficulty with unflinching polish, in her writing as much as in her life,
besides giving her strength and courage, also allowed her to find her metier. Laura Thompson makes us focus on
the real questions that grow out of the apparently simple tale with its theme
of romantic love: is love “the most important thing in life? … Is it an eternal
value, or a series of exquisite illusions?”(244). Nancy Mitford’s effortless
juxtaposition of apparently small things with issues of great moment makes for
compelling reading. We have come to associate emphasis with extravagant
expression, as though it were itself a necessary good, and this is where
Nancy’s creations defy us: there is no babble, even the Hons’ cupboard
conversations are funny and brief, and the management of dialogue, which is so
difficult to do well, is one of the great delights of her best novels. At every
turn “droning on” is given short shrift.
If
as Jane Austen reminds us, we are “born to struggle and endure,” Laura Thompson
has given us an absorbing glimpse of what this meant for Nancy Mitford. The
most interesting and most contradictory part of the biography—which becomes the
grist to Nancy Mitford’s best writing—is the love of her life, Gaston Palewski.
Palewski was appointed General de Gaulle’s “right-hand man” (191) and chief
political advisor in London in 1940, and as well as being educated and
charming, and “on the side of righteousness” (190), he was funny and loved the
Mitford stories, so of course we hear him in Fabrice in The Pursuit of Love: “Allons, racontez, madame.” “Racontez what?”
“Well, but of course, the story. Who was it left you to cry on that suitcase?”
(28). We owe him a debt of gratitude whatever our view of the way they
conducted their relationship, and the description of Linda’s reaction to
Fabrice at the Gare du Nord is as perfect an evocation of the coup de foudre as we are likely to find
anywhere, and pertinently, has nothing whatever to do with conventional good
looks. In yet another turn of contradiction’s wheel, without Palewski’s dashing
unreliability and absences, Nancy Mitford might never have written her
important later books about Voltaire, Madame de Pompadour, Louis IV and
Frederick the Great, which although not all works with quite the “quick breath
of creativity” (341) as her earlier winners, show the same power to understand
human behaviour, how its quirks influence huge events in history. They
demonstrate her to be capable of a scholarly dedication the more effective for
its polished modesty and wit, and in the case of Madame de Pompadour she has given us a book “which glows and gleams
in the mind like a room in the Wallace Collection” (323). Gaston Palewski’s
“great fondness for her was real and solid, as his love had never been”(395);
here is the abiding contradiction with which Nancy Mitford chose to live and
which makes this biography a special kind of love story. It is riveting stuff,
written with captivating energy, and if we accept the joke that in The Pursuit
of Love Nancy Mitford wrote a book entertaining enough even for those who
do not read, allowing that she would have made some biting comments about
excessive biographical detail, perhaps she would be pleased to think Laura
Thompson had done something similar for her.
[1] See Harold
Acton, Nancy Mitford: A Memoir
(London: Hamilton, 1975); Selina Hastings, Nancy
Mitford (London: Hamilton, 1985); Mary S. Lovell, The Mitford Girls (
Bailey, Janet. “Books for People Who
Don’t Read.” Rev. of Life in a Cold
Climate: Nancy Mitford: A Portrait of a Contradictory Woman, by Laura
Thompson. The New Compass: A Critical Review 2 (December 2003)
<http://www.thenewcompass.ca/dec2003/bailey.html>