A class act that will run and run

Sophia Topley

As the BBC prepares to screen a new adaptation of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford's niece assesses the oeuvre from the perspective of half a centwy.

creen adaptations of fiction always provoke contention. 'Oh, but I always imagined Brenda Last as blonde' and 'Why did they make Adela Quested pretty? The whole point was that she was plain!' Naturally it is impossible to please everybody. What is not in contention is the resulting increase in the sales of the books concerned, whether it be rescuing E. F. Benson's stories from obscurity, or increasing the readership of enduring writers such as George Eliot and Evelyn Waugh.

Nancy Mitford, whose novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, are to be shown on television (beginning on Sunday, 4 February on BBC1), falls into neither of the above categories; she is not a writer of highbrow classical literature, nor indeed in the same league as her contemporaries such as Elizabeth Bowen or Evelyn Waugh. But neither have her light-hearted, middlebrow comedies fallen into obscurity; four of her novels — those two, The Blessing and Don't Tell Alfred — written between 1945 and 1960, have never been out of print, and have, for the last ten years, sold a respectable 3,000 copies a year. Given that most popular fiction has a limited life span (who now reads Domford Yates or Caryl Brahms?) it might be considered unusual that these novels have survived as they have.

The world inhabited by Nancy Mitford's characters, although within living memory, seems as remote as that of Jane Austen. The attitudes and modus vivendi, such as Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie's fury at Linda's divorce and the education at home of the daughters, are unimaginable today. Even phrases such as 'coming out' now have a very different meaning. Of course, this could be said about any novel of the period, but certainly in her later fiction there is more to them than dated observations of upper-class life.

Nancy Mitford's first book, Highland Fling, came out in 1931, followed in 1932 by Christmas Pudding. These two met with some success, but although amusing period pieces, they are too slight to stand the test of time, and their successors, Wigs on the

Green and Pigeon Pie, fail in my opinion to cut the mustard even as light, enjoyable novellas.

It was not until 1945 that she suddenly won wide recognition as a writer. Two factors probably account for the dramatic improvement in her fiction: firstly, during the war she had worked at Heywood Hill's bookshop which gave her the opportunity to observe what readers wanted; second, in 1942 she met and fell in love with Gaston Palewski, for the rest of her life her love and raison d'être. He was an enthusiastic audience for her tales of Mitford family life, and so, encouraged by his interest and buoyed up by the intoxication of her love affair, she set about turning the material she had to hand into a novel. The result was The Pursuit of Love, an instant success and bestseller. This was followed in 1949 by the equally acclaimed Love in a Cold Climate.

Palewski featured in all her novels, most famously as Fabrice in The Pursuit of Love.

Her fictional accounts are idealised versions of her love affair, which in reality was never ideal since her adoration of him was only half-heartedly returned. But he was her inspiration and, contrary to Wordsworth's description of poetry being emotion recollected in tranquillity, the momentum behind her writing was emotion in full spate How poignant the exchange between Linda and Fabrice when war has broken out and he warns her that soon she must return to England:

'So where would you go?'

'To my own house in Chelsea and wait for you to come.'

'It might be months, or years.'

'I shall wait,' she said.

Like Palewski, readers were, and still are, riveted by the barely fictionalised accounts of her upbringing. Anything eccentric or funny found its way into her stories, and some of the more fantastic sounding details such as, in The Pursuit of Love, Uncle Matthew's entrenching tool hanging above the fireplace, 'an object of fascination to us as children', and the dyed doves at Merlinford, really existed: the former in the house of a family friend, Sir lain Colquhoun of Luss, at his home on Loch Lomond (though I do not know if it was still covered in blood and hairs as described in the book) and the latter at Faringdon, the home of Lord Berners, where they can be found to this day. The interest in her family must, despite Nancy Mitford's sisters' much publicised activities, be largely due to her hilarious yarns. (Though it ought to be said that the sisters themselves, with the exception of Debo, did not see their childhood as riveting and exciting; they wished only to get away from the constraints of their dowdy rural existence.) There is something infinitely cosy about the club-like existence of the lions' Cupboard, and the sanctuary it represents for Fanny and her cousins is similar to the retreat these novels provide for the reader, whether as an escape from care, or to raise the spirits.

The post-war novels are eminently readable; the plots move along smartly, with unexpected but just plausible turns such as Polly's marriage to Boy Dougdale, in Love in a Cold Climate, and the deus ex machinalike appearance of Fabrice, as Linda sits sobbing on the platform at the Gare du Nord. Her light touch, such as the reserved Aunt Sadie's hints to Polly in an attempt to put her off her forthcoming marriage to Boy (Always remember, children, that marriage is a very intimate relationship, it's not just sitting and chatting to a person, there are other things, you know') and her acute ear and memory for dialogue, make the books accessible and very funny. There are passages which after many re-readings still have the power to make me laugh out loud. One of these is the out-of-touch Lady Montdore's complaint about Polly's lack of success with boys:

'What can be the matter with Polly? So beautiful and no B. A. at all.'

'S. A.,' said Lady Patricia faintly, 'or B.O.?'

'When we were young none of that existed, thank goodness. S. A. and B. 0., perfect rubbish and bosh — one was a beauty or a jolie/aide and that was that. All the same, now they have been invented I suppose it is better if the girls have them. Their partners seem to like it, and Polly hasn't a vestige, you can see that.'

Also, the description of Uncle Matthew coming across Cedric Hampton on Oxford station:

Cedric went to the bookstall to buy Vogue, having mislaid his own copy. Uncle Matthew, who was waiting there for a train, happened to notice that the seams of his coat were piped in a contrasting shade. This was too much for his self-control. He fell upon Cedric and began to shake him like a rat; just then, very fortunately, the train came in, whereupon my uncle, who suffered terribly from train fever, dropped Cedric and rushed to catch it. 'You'd never think', as Cedric said afterwards, 'that buying Vogue Magazine could be so dangerous. It was well worth it

though, lovely Spring modes.'

For all the novel's funniness and merriment, the end of The Pursuit of Love is genuinely affecting, particularly the poignant final lines, when after Linda's death Fanny's mother, the Bolter, comes to see her daughter and her new baby:

'Poor Linda,' she said with feeling, 'poor little thing. But Fanny, don't you thing it's perhaps just as well? The lives of women like Linda and me are not so much fun when one begins to grow older.' I didn't want to hurt my mother's feelings by protesting that Linda was not that sort of woman.

'But I think she would have been happy with Fabriee,' I said. 'He was the great love of her life, you know.'

'Oh dulling,' said my mother sadly. 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.'

It is no small accomplishment to make a book both funny and sad; The Real Charlotte and The Towers of Trebizond are two others that come to mind in what is, to my knowledge, a short list.

Customs and dictates of society may change, but human nature, emotions, human relationships and their attendant problems do not. Nancy Mitford has a thorough grasp of these, and expresses herself lucidly and convincingly on matters such as Linda's unsatisfactory relationship with her Kroesig in-laws, and Polly's rows with her mother. Many a reader must empathise with the distress of Linda, who, by now ensconced in Paris and madly in love with Fabrice, overhears a conversation in which two strangers are discussing a certain Jacqueline whom they think to be his great love. And how acute those lines in The Pursuit of Love, when Linda 'waited for that other sound, a sound more intimately connected with the urban love affair than any except the telephone bell, that of a stopping taxi cab'. She is good at portraying almost all characteristics, virtues or vices.

Of the characters, Uncle Matthew is the most vivid and memorable. A unique and hilarious figure, he was, apart from the strictness, far removed from the stereotyped distant Victorian father. He was hands-on with his family, taking them to the House of Lords, organising the child hunt, roaring at them while chub fuddling. But, having clicked my way through some of the 548 websites mentioning Nancy Mitford, I am surprised at the affection he inspires amongst modern readers; I had presumed his xenophobia, displays of temper towards his children and general political incorrectness would, in these days of judging past standards by those of today, have been considered inappropriate as a subject for humour. Cedric (drawn from the exotic and flamboyant Stephen Tennant) in Love in a Cold Climate also makes an impression, and with him Nancy Mitford accomplishes the difficult task of transferring charm to the printed page. The same cannot be said, however, in her attempt to do so with Northey in Don't Tell Alfred: 'Charming Northey, how to describe her?. .

there was something indescribably lovely about her, she radiated affection, happiness, goodwill towards men.' I found little lovable about this early exponent of animal rights: rather, she comes across as a goodygoody without being particularly good and an affected and self-centred tell-tale. It appears that Nancy Mitford did not send the manuscript of Don't Tell Alfred to Evelyn Waugh as she did with The Blessing and Love in a Cold Climate, but had she done so he surely would have pointed out the tiresomeness of the girl.

Apart from the failure of Northey, Don't Tell Alfred, published in 1960, is generally less successful as a novel than its predecessors. Nancy Mitford, as she said herself, was out of sync with the rapidly changing post-war world, and she was more successful at portraying the inter-war years through a young person's irreverent eyes than the post-war youth culture as seen by a partly bemused, partly disapproving yet trying-to-be-tolerant middle-aged parent. Don't Tell Alfred's unenthusiastic critical reception was not helped by the emergence of the new literature of working-class realism by authors such as John Braine and Alan Sillitoe, and a corresponding contempt for comedies of manners about the upper classes. But it has the unmistakable touch of its author, and plenty of examples of her wit, such as the newspaper columns of the trouble-making journalist Arnyas Mockbar (based on Sam White, the Evening Standard's Paris correspondent, who threatened to sue over his portrayal), which are accurately observed representations of the mixture of distorted half-truths and lies that can be found today in tabloid journalism. Sales were good, with 50,000 selling in the first two months, but Nancy was hurt by the novel's poor notices, and as she had used up most of her autobiographical material in The Pursuit of Love, and found the construction of plots and invention an increasing struggle, she wrote no more novels, turning her attention instead to her highly successful historical biographies.

In 1969 Gaston Palewski got married, an eventuality Nancy had always dreaded, and which now removed the fulcrum of her existence. Around the same time, she started suffering from undiagnosed Hodgkin's disease, from which she died in 1973, after four and a half years of agonising suffering. Her sister, Diana Mosley, said of Nancy during this time, 'The awful thing is, she doesn't come first with anybody' and really this comment could be applied to her whole life. It is a sad epitaph for someone who has given — and continues to give — so much pleasure and happiness.

Sophia Topley is the author of The Duchess of Devonshire's Ball and The Mitford Family Album. This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Books and Company.