Nancy Mitford (31 page)

On 21st May: ‘I’m off, full of hopes, to the doctor I’ve always wanted but who wouldn’t take me on until I’d been to do all the tests. Now the other doctors have given him the green light. Meanwhile X has put my blood in a box which is going to cure me—so let’s hope. I’ve had a perfectly horrible time of late…’

‘I’ve also seen Jamie [Hamilton] and A.D. Peters [Nancy’s agent] who both came between aeroplanes. I think they want to make sure that the goose who lays the golden eggs isn’t on her way out. They are printing 60,000 more Pompadours, even I am impressed. I also had the good Joy [Law] and her hubby to work on the proofs of
Frederick, so
I’ve been pretty busy… I go to Venice l0th July if Italy is still on the map, it sounds very groggy.’

‘Now send for a whacking brekker,’ she wrote Sir Hugh (24th May): ‘I am much better. I’ve got a new doctor who very gently, with a trembling motion, is putting my back into place—I’m so much better already that I believe he may cure me altogether. You ARE kind to be interested.’

‘I’ve been doing my proofs, my goodness the modern printer, I’ve never in a long life seen such a mess! I thought people were educated nowadays. However, the publisher assures me that all may yet be well.’

‘There’s a new book on the Poisons (Louis XIV) which strictly between you and me because it sounds rather swanky to say so, is the
Sun King
very slightly rewritten. I hardly could believe my eyes as I read it. It’s scissors and paste in style, a long quotation in almost every paragraph. I found this so irritating that I began to wonder if I’ve done the same thing too much in
Frederick
. I thought that the sound of his voice would help to bring him alive and I have continually quoted from his writings. Oh dear, now I have doubts. What do the great biographers do about that? (The greatest of all, Boswell, never stops of course). I began it in
Voltaire in Love
and am now wondering if it’s not a boring technique. I think the fact is this book is awfully bad apart from the style.’

‘The angelic Anna Maria won’t mind if I can’t always put in an appearance,’ she told Raymond Mortimer at the same time. ‘I’ve been asked to write about a forgotten masterpiece for an American mag (1000 dollars). The forgotten master pieces already bagged are:
Wuthering Heights; À la Recherche,
etc
, Paradise Lost
and two others equally obscure… I’ve just
read Elena Vlachov’s book she sent me. Very evocative of Athens where I shall never go again now that Mark is dead—including a sort of pervading silliness which I fear is a trait of the no doubt noble Greeks. We used to see quite a lot of her—she is the Anna Maria of Athens with a lovely beach where we used to swim. I can’t make out what has happened to her husband, it looks in the book as if he is quietly starving to death in her flat.’

‘David Pryce-Jones says… that the eight to fourteen-year-olds hate and despise the
hippies
, isn’t it too funny to think of them already overtaken by the still younger generation. Liliane [de Rothschild] has had her porte cochère blown in by a bomb and has a police guard. Debo, in Ireland, had to have a policeman whenever she left the house. What a world! Andrew [Duke of Devonshire] was rung up and asked how the Sinn Feiners got into Lismore? “By the door I should imagine.” They, the Devs, had left or one envisages Debo as Marie-Antoinette with the mob in her bedroom.’

Experience had attenuated and finally extinguished Nancy’s Socialist sympathies. Under the Labour government she feared that ‘the old land is running down like an old grandfather clock,’ and to Raymond Mortimer she declared (31st May, 1970): ‘I am an old fashioned Liberal and I strongly feel that if blacks want to play cricket (strikes me as odd but let that pass) they ought to be allowed to. But if people must demonstrate I suppose it is cheaper, and nicer, for the police to stop the ‘ole thing. Since living—well, not actually
living
,
co-existing
—with Hassan, now known as the Beamish Boy, my view of
le tiers monde is
greatly modified. He is a dear soul but the thought of giving him a vote makes me shriek. My
considered
opinion is that the world has been wretched ever since the abolition of slavery.
À bas
Wilberforce. Beamish is a slave (he knelt to his former owner to thank for being given to me) and look how happy we both are.
Look
I mean come and look.’

‘It was Gold Cup day at the rue d’Artois yesterday, many new rooms have been opened at the Château so the invités more dead than alive came here to be refreshed. I had a steady stream from 12.30 onwards. Unfortunately I had an awful pain—it has begun again, oh
what
can it be? I’m keeping the only pill which holds it off without, so far as I can see,
demolishing
me in other ways, for Venice because it is only magic for about a fortnight at a time.’

Nancy’s garden remained her greatest solace. To Alvilde Lees-Milne, who shared her love of nature, she wrote in early June: ‘Fearful drama going on about the blackbirds’ nest which has been half blown down while two vile cats sit gazing at it. Hassan being so good about it, he must think one is a bit mad. But he has tied it up as if it were the treasure of the Incas. Do send the name of the anti-cat stuff or better still to save time tell Harrods to send it here on my account. There are still only eggs so it will be a fortnight before the birdies fly… I wish you could see the garden now there is the annual explosion of roses, really wonderful because of the mixture of colours, one forgets how divine it is. No credit to me, I found these wonderful roses.’

‘I think I am better. The morning is horrid but the pain doesn’t last so long and for
several
days has not come back after my bath. Touch wood. The doctor does a little more each time but won’t see me more than once a week.’ Ten days later, ‘Hassan put his curly head
among the roses and announced three half-fledged babies (blackbirds) but I dread the day when they fly.’

NANCY’S NEXT AND last visit to Venice, like the next and last years of her life, was a losing battle with bouts of agony. Venice itself, where Wagner and Diaghilev and the hero of Thomas Mann’s famous story had died, always meant abundance of life and health to Nancy, and in her heart she may still have expected a miraculous cure there. Her life wish exceeded any death wish she felt in time of torment. Her hostess Anna Maria Cicogna provided her with the society she most enjoyed, and Prince Clary, whom she called ‘Alph the Sacred River’, a perambulating Almanac de Gotha, was an endless source of the recondite information she hankered after. Other Venetian friends led the same sort of existence as their ancestors in the eighteenth
century
, except that sea and sun-bathing on the Lido had replaced card-playing on the Brenta. The gossip was lively, frivolous, and sprinkled with salty jokes. And there was the vaudeville of the English, who behaved so oddly near the Adriatic, whether ‘draped round Cipriani’s pool’ or ‘undressing to stark in the cabin with curtains wide open—a wondrous sight’—in the case of a buxom duchess.

‘Life ticks on most agreeably here,’ she wrote. But for once her supreme effort to carry on
normally
was defeated. The zigzags of her ‘upping and downing’ were as acute as they were sudden. To Alvilde Lees-Milne she wrote on 23rd July: ‘I’ve spent half my time on an electric blanket,
fearfully
lame and hardly able to hobble. However, yesterday Anna Maria anted up a doctor who rather frightened me with some rough stuff (manipulation) but who has considerably relieved me for the moment. Time will show. If it could be a cure my life would be transformed—I was beginning to have serious thoughts of suicide because how can one enjoy anything in such a state? Cecil [Beaton] says there is a
£
400 pill which kills at once. Who sells this lovely stuff?’

On 10th September: ‘Posting letters here is rather like throwing them into the canal but
anyway
here goes… The doctor here saves me from the very worst by putting my back in when it pops out but he can’t cure my leg and I have as usual varying degrees of pain. I now think of trying the man who indubitably cured Alphy [Clary] and at 83 has turned him into a two-year-old. He is English but one hasn’t heard of him actually killing anybody, unlike most
English doctors. The horror of going to London and seeing Knightsbridge barracks, which I had hoped for ever to avoid, might be compensated for if I could be cured of this grinding pain. I’d really go to Hell—anywhere except New York in fact.’

‘When not in extremis I’ve adored it here as usual. Anna Maria has shown a new side to her nature, she is extraordinary when one is ill and knows at once when I’m in anguish. The other day she got up at a huge dinner and sent for the motor boat and packed me into it—I thought nobody could have noticed. But that hasn’t happened often and I’ve stood up to the life pretty well… Still hot and lovely and we go to the beach…’

‘It seems the Saving of Venice is at last getting under weigh… There’s a government here now which can and does take certain vital decisions. The clever French have bagged the Salute and are doing it up with great placards everywhere Comité Français. The English are relegated to the Madonna dell’Orto and are anyway running out of money…’

‘Fanny Botkin’s flat may be for sale, perhaps the nicest flat in Europe. But I couldn’t live
anywhere
except France and never have much desire for two houses.’

That she even considered Mme Botkin’s flat shows that Nancy could still look forward
confidently
to a cure. I saw her at this time as the guest of Contessa Cicogna and the change in her appearance gave me a shock I attempted to camouflage with a gush of gossip. Her emaciation, and the sharp, almost audible twinges of pain as she dragged one poor leg after the other were distressing to witness. Her charming features were tense with anxiety when she fell silent and when she moved one pretended to look in another direction. But having received an advance copy of her
Frederick the Great
I could tell her honestly of my admiration for what was, after all, a triumph in the circumstances, a tour de force when much of her force had ebbed. Her choice of a hero seemed to me perverse though Nancy doted on military commanders. It was as if she were coming round full circle to her father’s views. Because the corpse-crammed career of her hero was repugnant to my nature she too might brand me a ‘sewer’. Sans Souci and Voltaire and the flute-playing could not obscure for me the reality of Spartan drills, manoeuvres, harsh
discipline
, carnage and destruction. I failed to warm towards such a martial monarch but I suppose Nancy’s femininity was attracted to his resolute maleness. At times she nearly succeeded in
making
him sympathetic. Her book betrays no symptom of mental or physical fatigue.

My young German friend Alexander Zielcke also cheered her with his enthusiasm, and I was amazed when she decided to join us in Anna Maria’s motor boat after luncheon for an
excursion
to the Madonna dell’Orto, which had recently been restored with the aid of English funds. Together we gazed at Giovanni Bellini’s blithe Virgin and Cima’s elegant Renaissance Saints, and the huge Tintorettos glowed dramatically in the afternoon light, but Nancy had to sit down on the steps of the altar in evident anguish and the desperate swarm of Tintoretto’s
Last Judgement
alarmed me less than her forlorn figure, though she assured me in a whisper that she would soon be quite all right. Her face had become that of a martyr. Our return to Cà Cicogna through the flickering canals was overcast with sombre premonitions. The lithe Nancy I had known was reduced to a limping shadow yet her keenly observant spirit was still ready to laugh. Though we corresponded frequently I was never to see her again.

On 17th September she informed Sir Hugh: ‘I am in considerable pain nearly all the time. I go home next week having been here since 10 July… I love this town more and more but haven’t been able to see anything as the only relief comes from lying in the hot sun on the beach. Luckily my room has got a most heavenly view over the Zattere and I can see the huge ships, some even bigger than the churches, going up to the port. It’s very amusing.

‘Don’t you think all these men in aeroplanes who let themselves be captured are too feeble for words? I can’t see any of my relations putting up with it for a minute and I despise them from the bottom of my heart. I hope you’ll enjoy
Frederick
. P.S. A Pakistani went into a wine merchant’s. “Can you recommend a good port?” “Yes, Southampton and now b—off.”’

‘I suppose though I greatly fear it will be the usual story: one thinks one is cured for a bit then all begins again,’ Nancy confessed to Alvilde Lees-Milne. However, she made an
appointment
with a London specialist recommended by Prince Clary. ‘Perhaps he will cure me at once. Alphy swears he will,’ she told Princess Loewenstein, who had invited her to stay during the ordeal. ‘If he doesn’t cure me I think I will
mettre fin à mes jours
but how?,’ she asked Raymond Mortimer. ‘It’s so difficult, because I can’t see the point of its being a punishment. I think I’ve been punished enough. Après rack very soon ended in a nice little hanging after all… English doctors have killed three quarters of my friends and the joke is the remaining quarter go on
recommending
them, so odd is human nature. We have seen the same thing with Louis XIV and Fagon. You may say I long for death, well yes, but I long even more to be cured. Dr. S. hasn’t killed anybody known to me and has cured three, so I don’t mind trying him… My good
doctor
here says “
il faut frapper à toutes les portes
.” I shall get to know Europe. I haven’t been to England for three years and had hoped never to go again…’

‘If I hadn’t been so unwell I would have enjoyed my visit to you more than any for years—even with the racking pain thrown in I absolutely loved it,’ she wrote to Prince Rupert Loewenstein on 8th November. ‘Now I am
far
worse—can hardly crawl and the pain is
horrible
. But oddly enough I still have confidence in S. and a speedy cure… I’ve seen nobody. I’m too bad to and have no desire to bestir myself. Sister Pam is here thank goodness.’

‘Useless to pretend that I am any better,’ she wrote again on the 13th. ‘I only hope Dig [Mrs. Henry Yorke, whom she had invited to stay] won’t have too dull a time but of course the awful truth is she
will
. I had the romantic idea that I should be leaping about and able to go
sightseeing
with her but all I can do is limp round the garden looking for my tortoise who, like Captain Oates, has gone out into the cold and disappeared… Lesley Blanch came just now. She is
writing
a book on Pavilions of the Heart and wants to turn the Monster of Glamis into a Demon Lover. I said, but Lesley he was a poor old thing with an elephant’s head who lived on worms. She is the archetype of the Lady Writer and I love teasing her.’

During Dig Yorke’s visit Nancy felt that ‘on the whole there is progress. Dig is being too lovely. We sit all day chatting and I’m being put in the picture about my contemporaries: N. Then what about So and so? D. Haven’t you
heard
? And what I haven’t heard is never that they have won the Irish Sweep.’

After Dig left, Nancy had a fearful relapse, ‘mostly in tears of pain mixed with rage and
despair… Oh the world! how much better off we shall all be in the next one. And yet one’s
pretty
house, the sunshine, the bird’s moving in for the winter, Hassan and his niceness and all one’s friends can’t but attach one to it. If only somebody would invent a pain killer which killed pain, everything would be so delightful.’ But her doctor would only allow brandy for the time being. ‘I never expected to be an old lady with a tell-tale bottle in the bathroom. The worst of it is that while I’m drunk I’m all right but I’ve got a very strong head, it takes a huge amount and the effect doesn’t last very long and then I feel of course liverish as well…’

‘No words to describe what I’m enduring now,’ she told Raymond Mortimer. ‘I don’t ask anybody here unless they suggest coming as I’m so dull. The Brandos and various regulars appear, but it worries them and tires me though I expect it’s a good thing sometimes… My
consolation
—these awful days—has been Goethe’s Italian journey (Penguin). Written in 1786, it describes Italy as you and I have known it. Oh dear that earnest, noble young German, how
different
from Voltaire and the Great King and how much one prefers really those two old
sinners
! His great hope in Italy is that he may find the Primal Plant, whatever that may be! But his descriptions of landscapes and buildings and Vesuvius erupting are masterly. Then, what’s so funny, he keeps describing his own works and makes them sound utterly unreadable.’

Brief periods of hope alternated with black despair. It was a distraction and a relief to write letters and she wrote a great many to her friends in a script always clear even when tremulous. Those to Raymond Mortimer and myself prove that books were the most effective adjutants to pain killers: ‘I read about a book a day.’ And she envisaged writing her memoirs:

‘My souvenirs will have the piquant originality of starting poor. They nearly always start rich, don’t they!’

She tried to count her blessings: ‘I can’t go downstairs but the garden is divine to look at from my room and my servants so infinitely good and kind (Hassan and the daily), and I’ve found a dear little Portuguese for Sundays. All that is a great great comfort.’

‘Don’t speak of birds’ nests. From where I sit I’ve actually seen three gobbled by crows and one father blackbird eaten by the neighbours’ vile hateful cat. I’m getting a water pistol for Hassan, would gladly give him a real gun.’

‘… I’m going to plant masses more roses as I see they are perfectly happy in my long grass. Do tell the names of those you mentioned which begin later. Mine will be over next week. I can hardly bear it… Roses again. Do you know one called Queen Victoria? It’s a very pretty little thing, like the one Pompadour was always painted with, lovely smell. But prettiest of all is out of Marie’s garden—it’s beginning to take in mine. Like a Redouté, pale and delicate. It seems a lady driving by stopped and begged old Marie for a cutting, saying impossible to get it any more. I rather love this lady for noticing. Perhaps Marie’s ancestor the Grognard
1
—she has got his medal—planted it. I read somewhere that in Louis XIV’s reign there were only ten varieties of roses but by the time of Josephine hundreds. Marie’s is only at one remove from the wild rose—double, heavenly smell which fills the room.’

Nancy kept rotten apples for the blackbirds: ‘They like them better than anything.’ ‘Do you know of a good but extremely simple bird book?’ she asked Alvilde. ‘I get a bird’s eye view of
birds from my window, what mysterious little things they are. Thank goodness baby time is over so I am less agitated—they don’t seem to try again and I’m really worried about the black bird population so sadly diminished.’

She was to experience the whole gamut of treatments medical, spiritual and spurious: a major operation with cobalt rays and cortisone: acupuncture, osteopathy, a faith healer, and all sorts of drugs. After the failure of the operation in February 1971 the pain was more intense. ‘I have to take a strong drug which makes me idiotic,’ she wrote to Princess Loewenstein from Versailles; ‘If I’ve got to have my neck cut I’ll have it done here, they are much more used to doing it (their old guillotine) and I’ve lost all faith in English doctors dressed as for White’s. The bills! And I keep reading that English doctors are under paid. All I can say is Coo!’

And to James Lees-Milne (29th May, 1971): ‘Doctors! Don’t make me laugh. I got two
letters
by one post from London medicos. (1) If you are feeling better it is because of the cobalt rays—the result will last several more weeks. (2) The agony you are in at present is due to the cobalt rays and unfortunately the result will last several more weeks. As the Americans say,
peeriod
.’