Love in a Cold Climate
Read Love in a Cold Climate Online
Authors: Nancy Mitford
LOVE IN A COLD CLIMATE
Nancy Mitford, daughter of Lord and Lady Redesdale and the eldest of the six legendary Mitford sisters, was born in 1904 and educated at home on the family estate in Oxfordshire. She made her debut in London and soon became one of the bright young things of the 1920s, a close friend of Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman, and their circle. A beauty and a wit, she began writing for magazines and writing novels while she was still in her twenties. In all, she wrote eight novels as well as biographies of Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire, Louis XIV, and Frederick the Great. She died in 1973. More information can be found at
www.nancymitford.com
.
NOVELS BY NANCY MITFORD
AVAILABLE FROM VINTAGE BOOKS
Wigs on the Green
(1935)
The Pursuit of Love
(1945)
Love in a Cold Climate
(1949)
The Blessing
(1951)
Don’t Tell Alfred
(1960)
TO LORD BERNERS
INTRODUCTION
W
HEN NANCY MITFORD
sent a typescript of
Love in a Cold Climate
in October 1948 to her friend Evelyn Waugh for his comments, he wrote back: “The manuscript was a delight to read, full of wit & fun & fantasy. Whole passages … might be used verbatim in a book.” But he wanted her to do a complete rewrite before she published: “the book must be saved. So start again.”
i
Nancy declined, but she might so easily have agreed. Waugh had been a close friend since she made her London debut in the 1920s and a regular correspondent since she followed a lover to Paris after the war. He was also one of Britain’s premier novelists and one to whom she often turned for literary advice. Indeed he suggested the title of her earlier novel,
The Pursuit of Love
(1945), as well as the title of
Love in a Cold Climate
, which refers to the seeming inability, for much of the book and to her mother, Lady Montdore’s fury, of beautiful Lady Polly to fall in love or attract any marriage proposals.
Nancy felt bolstered in her refusal to oblige Waugh by the runaway success she had enjoyed with
The Pursuit of Love
. Admittedly the romantic adventures of the Hon. Linda Radlett portrayed there had been extremely autobiographical, and so perhaps easier for her to narrate than
Cold Climate’s
plot involving Lady Polly, the Montdore millions, and Cedric, the Nova Scotia–born heir. But Fanny, or the Hon. Frances Logan, Linda’s cousin and Polly’s friend, was a narrator who had “worked” in
Pursuit
and “works” too in
Cold Climate
. Readers of
Pursuit
had loved too the characters of Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie, whom Nancy had based on her parents, Lord and Lady Redesdale. Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie play important parts in
Cold Climate
. Mitford had a readership now, and she had found a landscape that could paint and rework.
She had, by her own account, worked hard, very hard, writing and reworking
Cold Climate
before she sent it to Waugh. Even today the sections covering Fanny’s and Polly’s contrasting youths, adolescences and romances read with a frightening wit and fluency. Take Fanny’s awed description of Lady Montdore the morning after a weekend house party ended at Hampton. The hostess was “drinking strong tea in bed among masses of lace pillows, her coarse grey hair frizzed out and wearing what appeared to be a man’s striped flannel pyjama top under a feathered wrap.”
With Polly’s disastrous marriage and the astonishing transformation of her mother, Lady Montdore, following the arrival at Hampton of young Cedric, a darker vein obtrudes. The climax to the book, apparently a happy if sophisticated ending, is like a devastating train crash whose images linger long in the mind. The wonder is that Waugh wanted to tinker with Mitford’s extraordinarily successful and intricate arrangement. Mitford later wrote that she considered
Cold Climate
her best novel.
ii
At any rate now she ignored
Waugh’s advice and published
Love in a Cold Climate
in July 1949 to considerable acclaim.
There were those who found the openly homosexual character Cedric hard to stomach, and
Ladies’ Home Journal
refused to serialize the book. But Nancy was pleased with the “human dragonfly” portrait that she had drawn of Cedric, using as her exquisite model the Hon. Stephen Tennant, friend of Cecil Beaton and later supposedly one of the models for Sebastian in Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
. Anyway she was used to controversy, and, having worked in the London bookshop G. Heywood Hill, knew that it helped sell books. Moreover, she was no stranger to outrage. Nancy’s mother Lady Redesdale remonstrated at one point in the 1920s, “Whenever I see the words ‘Peer’s daughter’ in a headline.… I know it’s going to be something about one of you children.”
iii
With the exploits of Nancy’s younger sisters—she was the eldest of the six Mitford daughters and older too than their only brother, Tom—we are not concerned here. But there is no doubt that Nancy shocked her parents with her choice of friends, once she had made her debut in London, in the 1920s and 30s. With a variety of writers and aesthetes such as Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton and other smart or bright young people in attendance, the capital’s gossip columns avidly in pursuit, Nancy shingled her hair, wore trousers, smoked cigarettes—and wrote the occasional column herself. There was not much money about, much gaiety, many parties, and much offense given to almost everyone of a more traditional outlook.
In particular, the openness about homosexual liaisons within this loose amalgam of revelers and the “camp” appearance of the men in question repulsed many. But at the same time, and as the interwar novels that Nancy’s friends wrote—Waugh’s
Vile Bodies
and
Handful of Dust
, Henry Green’s
Party Going
and Anthony Powell’s
Afternoon Men—
bear witness, these Bright Young Things
who found their elders and the certainties of prewar England hilarious had not found anything to put in place of those certainties.
Love in a Cold Climate
, though written in Paris and in 1948, both holds its own against the books mentioned above and is witness to that same despair. However, there is one difference: the character of Fanny.
In Fanny Wincham née Logan and in
Cold Climate
, Nancy Mitford developed—as she did not in
Pursuit
where Cousin Linda is the focus—an “I person” whom we accompany through several stages of growth. Fanny is first seen as a nervous adolescent but becomes a willing bride, a confident wife, and loving mother. And her character, the husband she chooses and loves (an Oxford don), and her married home (a North Oxford terraced house) are utterly unlike those of anyone in Nancy’s original “set.” Her domestic concerns are quite unlike those either of the mistress of a grand country house and London residence, or of a Bright Young Thing going to parties and drinking cocktails. There is even, heaven forbid, hardly a servant to create “the servant problem.” “I was obliged to get up very early and cook Alfred’s breakfast, but I did not mind. He was my own husband, and the cooking took place in my own kitchen; it all seemed like heaven to me,” writes Fanny in
Cold Climate
.
The reader may think himself or herself fully engaged with the beautiful blankness of Polly, the lecherous attentions of Boy Dougdale, or the tantrums of Lady Montdore. In fact, Mitford has us keeping half an eye on Fanny and her fretting that Alfred might read a book or commit some other heinous crime while staying with Uncle Matthew. We are seeing in Fanny the woman that Nancy Mitford might have been, had she married the right man instead of moody, feckless Peter Rodd, had she had the children that agonizingly never appeared, had she enjoyed prolonged domestic contentment rather than intermittent doses of happiness with Gaullist politician and womanizer Gaston Palewski. In Fanny Wincham—the choice of name echoes that of Fanny Price, the cousin at Mansfield
Park—Mitford created, for all the snobbery that pervades her world, a woman who is truly modern and middleclass in the best sense of the word. Fanny’s values are never those of her Radlett cousins at Alconleigh, nor is her head turned by the impossibly magnificent life at Hampton with the Montdores. For Mitford makes it clear that life is fairly conventional and down-to-earth at home with Aunt Emily and Uncle Davey, who have been to Fanny as mother and father ever since her own mother, “the Bolter,” left her father.
Nancy Mitford used to say later in life that she had never loved her mother, and Lady Redesdale, especially to her elder children when they were young, appears to have been a vague and remote figure. In Mitford’s depiction of Fanny’s relatively “normal” home life before marriage, her marriage to the intelligent, austere Alfred, and her love of her home and family we may see the poignant wish of Nancy Mitford for what might have been. But these were not wishes that she voiced outside of the pages of her book.
For her family as well as for her friends, Nancy Mitford kept up a front. For the public she was the stylish lady writer, photographed in Parisian chic, holidaying in Venice or in the South of France with princes and millionaires. Her correspondence, her conversation were legendary for their verbal fireworks. But after she had died in great pain in Versailles in 1973, tended by the sisters who had loved her but had suffered too from her sarcasm and spikey wit, one of them wrote to another, “I know she had success as a writer but what is that compared to things like proper husbands and lovers and children—think of the loneliness of all these years, so
sad
.”
iv
Despite all her artistry, in short, there had been no one for whom Nancy came first.
With Fanny, however, and with
Cold Climate
Mitford triumphed. She created someone who always came first with her Alfred, and he
with her. The curiosity is that when Mitford went on to write a book exclusively about Fanny,
Don’t Tell Alfred
(1960), Fanny no longer came first with her husband. In that novel, Alfred has been appointed British Ambassador to Paris and official duties occupy him.
Don’t Tell Alfred
is a hilarious portrait of high society life in Paris and of internal embassy politics, with Fanny’s escapades as ambassadress central to the plot but the ambassador himself a largely absent figure and, when present, more irritated than loving. That, however, is another story. Meanwhile glorious
Love in a Cold Climate
awaits.