Mark McGinness salutes Nancy Mitford's classic novel
On 10 December 1945, Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love emerged from the house of Hamish Hamilton. This hilarious, high-spirited and sweepingly romantic tale came at just the right time to a country exhausted and numb after six years of war. That spirit and the ingredients of love, childhood and the eccentricities of the English aristocracy make it still so eminently readable today.
The Daily Mail and The New York Times were rhapsodic while The Spectator’s V.C . Clinton-Baddeley observed, “It is not great literature. It is not great wit. But it has more truth, more sincerity, and more laughter than a year's output of novels in the bogus significant style.”
The novel opens with the arrival of cousin Fanny, the narrator, at Alconleigh, the country seat of her Uncle Matthew, Lord Alconleigh, his wife, Sadie, and their children. Fanny begins in elegiac mode, contemplating an old Radlett family photograph. “Click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from the happiness and promise of youth.”
It is almost impossible for many to separate the family from their fictional equivalents. The intensely autobiographical nature of Nancy's fiction might suggest a lack of creative imagination but the real-life models she was so brilliantly able to draw on – with some, but not much, embellishment – made it all the more fascinating for appearing to be true.
And they were notorious. Nancy was the eldest of six extraordinary sisters: Pam a Gloucestershire farmer, Diana a beauty and British Fascist, Unity a besotted Nazi, Jessica an American Communist and Deborah an English Duchess. Four of them became authors.
But in the early chapters of the novel, the sisters, like the Radletts, were still startlingly original, opinionated, uneducated. Their father, the second Lord Redesdale, was Uncle Matthew to the life - a philistine given to building houses and blinding rages. Family folklore claimed he had only ever read one book, White Fang, and found it so good he felt no need to read another. It is now suspected he was dyslexic. In any case his children read voraciously from a huge library at home. While Alconleigh is portrayed as the Radlett seat from time immemorial and the elements of all country houses are there, but in the Mitfords’ case, they had three Alconleighs. Nancy once wrote, “We lived under the shadows … of two hammers: that of the builder and that of the auctioneer.”
Uncle Matthew dominates the book. Affectionate, frightening, funny, endearing. “… he still remained for us as a sort of criterion of English manhood; there seemed something not quite right about any man who greatly differed from him.”
Lord Redesdale (or ‘Farve’ as the girls called him) did not believe in school for gels (their one brother Tom was sent to Eton) so they remained cut orf at home; but he and their mother (‘Muv’) paid the price. While Nanny was a constant, a succession of fifteen governesses were frightened off with endless intricate teases, “shrieks” (of laughter), “floods” (of tears) and thirty-five nicknames ricocheting around the house. Out of this ‘ferocious intimacy’ the sisters hatched their own language and perfected a lifelong languid drawl and extravagant phrasing which became known as the 'Mitford Voice', which jumps off the pages of this novel.
The sisters came to be intensely fond of the novel. As one of Nancy’s biographers, Laura Thompson, says, “as if it, too, were a member of the family, which in a sense it was.” As Diana saw it, “in its way just about perfect. I can’t find a criticism. Evelyn couldn’t have done it.”
Never would a book be so easy for her to write. It took her about three months - January to March 1945. She had been contemplating what she called ‘her autobiography’ since 1942. But the spark was her meeting with Gaston Palewski.
The Parisienne son of a Jewish industrialist from Belarus, he was Charles de Gaulle's chef de cabinet & homme de confiance. He and Nancy met at the Allies Club in London in 1942 and Nancy fell irrevocably in love – with him, and with France. She would call him ‘Colonel’. He may have been short and stocky with a face like “an unpeeled King Edward” but he was a consummate saloniste and practised lover. A committed Anglophile (he had spent a post-graduate year at Oxford) and when Nancy met him he was already welcome in the drawing rooms of Ladies Colefax and Cunard. As he had in Paris: Proust had been a pal and those who inspired Marcel were also friends of Gaston. Within weeks of meeting they were lovers. In the novel she writes of that “sound more intimately connected with the urban love affair than any except the telephone bell, that of a stopping taxi cab. Sun, silence and happiness.”
She was given to hero-worship; and well, he was the great love of her life but the saddest thing was that when Nancy told her Colonel how she loved him, he would merely say, “I know.” Of course, as with Linda, the position was complicated (or as the French put it, ‘pas so simple’). In Nancy had married a fellow Hon, Peter Rodd, the third son of diplomat, Lord Rennell of Rodd and his wife, Lilias, a model for the mesmerizingly monstrous character who inspired Lady Montdore in the sequel, Love in a Cold Climate. Prod, as the sisters came to call him, was handsome and clever but a know-all, feckless, unfaithful, and unemployable. Both Linda Radlett's husbands, Tony Kroesig and Christian Talbot - a Tory with Nazi sympathies and an aristocratic Marxist - are milder composites of Prod. By 1940 all passion had been spent and Nancy and Peter tended to live separate lives, although they did not divorce until 1958.
Nancy's ability to shriek in the face of pain and loss never faltered, despite an agonising four-year battle with (then undiagnosed) Hodgkin's disease and the Colonel's marriage, in 1969, to a divorced protestant duchesse (having told Nancy for years that he could not marry a divorced protestant). She managed to finish Frederick the Great in 1970 and to write letters that sparkled and stung right up to the end.
In the Spring of 1972 she was given the Légion d’Honneur, which the Colonel pinned on her. She cried with happiness afterwards. And, as if they were competing, she was told she would be honoured with the CBE. At first, she pretended to never having heard of it but then warmed to the idea, “It enables me to sit above a knight’s widow so you must find me one to take everywhere with me (I do, anyway, without wishing to boast, as a peer’s daughter…’)
On 30 June 1973, the Colonel was driving on the outskirts of Versailles (where Nancy lived) and had a strong presentiment that he should go to her. He went straight upstairs, his spaniel running ahead as she always did. Nancy was apparently unconscious but she smiled as he took her hand. She died a few hours later; an ending as poignantly romantic as any she could have written and one that underlined the links between her life and her art.
A last word on the novel whose publication we celebrate; in fact the last lines of The Pursuit of Love reflect that unswerving knowingness of the author. When Fanny, says of the dead Linda, “But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice…He was the great love of her life, you know.” Her mother, the Bolter, observed, “Oh, dulling, one always thinks that. Every, every time.”
