BIOGRAPHY: The Horror of Love,By Lisa Hilton, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 290pp. £20
WE NEED A NEW WORD – Mitophile, perhaps, or Mitoholic, or Boudledidgelist – to convey the sense of being obsessively interested in, or an obsessive collector of, Mitford marginalia. For publishing houses the Mitfords are the gift that keeps on giving. What's the current tally of books? God knows, but the 834 pages of Letters Between Six Sisters(2007) apparently represent just 5 per cent of their correspondence. Oh the horror, as the gals might say.
This latest offering concerns the love affair between Nancy Mitford and Gaston Palewski, but it is not, writes Lisa Hilton sternly, a “Mitford” book. It is, of course, but it’s not a Mitfordfest: Farve, Muv, Bobo, Boud, Tuddemy and Decca appear infrequently and under their baptismal names. Nobody breaks into Boudledidge – the sisters’ private language – or mentions the size of Diana’s eyes. Most Mitford books lead to Germany and goose-steppers, but, refreshingly, this one goes to France and electoral politics: Palewski was a Gaullist before the word was coined and, later, a government minister.
Heroism brought him into Mitford’s orbit: in 1941 he arrived in London to support Charles de Gaulle’s quixotic mission to rally the Free French. Hilton shows how indispensible Palewski was as a conduit between the impossibly arrogant 6ft 5in general and his bemused British hosts. If de Gaulle was all hauteur, Palewski was all charm and diplomacy. He was also an inveterate womaniser who hit on married women as they were less trouble. He didn’t reckon on Mitford.
She was almost 38 when they met, the unhappy, childless wife of a feckless dilettante who had proposed to every woman in London – on one occasion, two in a single night – before Mitford accepted him, because she was on the rebound from a five-year infatuation with a notorious homosexual (and onetime lover of her brother’s). Witty and elegant she may have been, but her experience of love was zilch. Finding a man who actually liked women – liked talking to them and sleeping with them! – she hung on for dear life. When Palewski returned to Paris after the war, she followed, and stayed the rest of her life, cancelling engagements when he wanted to meet.
Mitford biographers seem to end up apologists for their subjects. The authors of The House of Mitford get all defensive over Diana (yes, it was wrong of her to say she wasn’t fond of Jews, “but we have never seen anyone taken to task for saying they were not fond of, for example, Germans”). Here, Hilton is keen to defend Nancy from accusations of unrequited love. If Palewski shows any interest – phoning when he gets back from Algiers! allowing her visit him in Venice! – Hilton crows triumphantly. When Mitford gets needy – “I long for your voice so passionately I can’t imagine today without you being there . . . Yesterday, I stayed shut in the house all day expecting you to telephone” – Hilton points out quickly that these “are after all, love letters. Lovers do not generally write to inform the beloved he or she is not much missed.” I agree. But where are the love letters from Palewski? He can’t have written even one sweet thing, because no lines of his are quoted.
He liked her and was flattered by her devotion, but he didn’t love her. He was her passion; she was one of his amusements. But why does this make her the loser? Why should she need defending? His effect on her was cataclysmic. Before Palewski she wrote a few brittle novels, now out of print. Through him she found her elegant, bittersweet style and her romantic hero: the insouciant Frenchman, roaring with laughter, who illuminates her books. Nancy Mitford is not a great novelist, but she is a superlative light novelist – an area that must be difficult to succeed in or we’d have more Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Palewski was the enabling muse. Do we bother defending Dante or Yeats from the charge of unrequited love? No, because the benefit was all theirs.
But I wish she'd found the courage to be more truthful in her work. She was guilty of two fictional deceits: first, she makes Fabrice de Sauveterre, Palewski's alter ego in The Pursuit of Love, fall passionately in love. This is wishful thinking – the real Palewski, like many womanisers, never fell in love. (He married, aged 70, for wealth and position.) In Mitford's defence, however, there is a suggestion that Fabrice's passion is the product of wartime hysteria (he dies before he can prove it), and in a later book, The Blessing, the philandering Charles-Edouard de Valhubert is unrepentent and forces his poor wife through a sour sentimental education.
Mitford’s other deceit is more serious: she makes Palewski, in both fictional guises, an aristocrat – and no minor aristocrat but a hugely wealthy duke and count. Palewski was actually a second-generation Polish Jew with no family money or connections. Why turn this fantastically clever, self-made man and patriotic immigrant into his opposite? Do wealth, position and generations of breeding ever produce that particular brand of energy, charm and recklessness? The actual wealthy French aristos, as far as I can gather from Hilton’s book, were not rushing off to join de Gaulle: they were collaborating like crazy with the Vichy regime.
Both Mitford and Palewski were total snobs. (He was delighted to be fictionally shot up the social ladder.) But then so are most people: the books would never have sold that well had the hero been a Polish Jewish immigrant. But what a tremendous tease on Diana and Unity!
Bridget Hourican is a journalist and historian. Her most recent book is Straight from the Heart: Irish Love Letters(Gill Macmillan)
