The Horror of Love (34 page)

‘But isn’t it terribly nasty?’ asks Grace, whose Valhubert millions, lest we miss the point, derive from wine.

In both novels, the Dexters and their acolyte Mrs Jungfleisch, Nancy’s portrait of Susan Mary Alsop, embody everything Nancy thought she hated about Americans, from their inability to appreciate food to their terrifying earnestness. They are completely divorced from their bodies: they require drugs to sleep, eat and go to the lavatory, they rely on artificial sources of heat and coolness, they have no capacity for pleasure. So far, so obvious. Yet this dissociation of the
sensible
and the sensual has its roots in what Nancy perceives as a dereliction of duty on the part of the European governing class.

In
The Pursuit of Love
, Nancy derides Tony Kroesig who, of course, adores America, when he dares to criticize the House of Lords. Men like Lord Alconleigh, she argues, understand the people who work for them, because they share their land with them, live alongside them: they exist in a symbiotic relationship of rights and responsibilities which money-worshippers like Tony can never understand. In
The Stanleys of Alderley
, Nancy devotes a long passage to developing this theme.

We still put our trust in men of ample means, and in lords, but doubts are beginning to arise in the minds of those who observe the modern trend … These lords, divorced from the land which was the reason of their being, do they fly, shuddering with strange new fears hitherto unknown in this country, into the arms of alien creeds! And worse still, do they begin to hate and fear the people? The segregation of classes, which has resulted from the abandonment of the now impoverished land by its former owners, who prefer to seek their fortunes in the City to struggling for a livelihood on the acres of their ancestors, has been most harmful to the aristocracy, they are losing their hitherto immense knowledge of, and trust in, the people.

This is very immature writing, painful in its purpleness, not to mention disturbingly reminiscent of Eugenia Malmains at her most evangelical. Yet here, in the early Thirties, Nancy is trying to articulate a belief in what constitutes a mature civilization. She puts it very awkwardly: ‘We are the only adult nation and until the others come of age we must be their governess.’ In
Civilization
, Clive Bell argues for the necessity of a leisured elite to produce a culture which conforms to his definition of ‘sweetness and light’. It was precisely this which Nancy saw as lacking in American culture.

Americans, she thought, were simply not adults. This is sent up wonderfully in their attitude to sex. ‘In America, if you hold a woman’s hand you are expected to go round next day with divorce papers, ’ says Mme Rocher, while Albertine laments the fact that she had to marry her American lover in order to get him to perform in bed. Fear and hatred of sex leads to brutal bigotry. Nancy hated the ‘American’ line on gay men (compared ingenuously by Grace to the Jews in Germany), whom Hector describes as ‘sickly, morbose, healthless, chlorotic, unbraced, flagging, peccant, vitiated and contaminated’. For her, intolerance of homosexuality and insistence on monogamy were indicators of cultural immaturity, the evil genie hiding in the
Coca-Cola bottle. Summing up Bell’s arguments in his diary, the critic A.L. Rowse wrote: ‘The essence of civilization seems to consist in a self conscious cultural tradition, created by the dominant class.’

Philip Roth thinks much the same thing. In
I Married A Communist
, Roth identifies the fault with intolerant, McCarthyite America as stemming from the fact that it is a proletarian culture, one that has passed from poverty to plutocracy without ever supporting a dominant leisure class. It has never had the chance to grow up, thus its aesthetic philistinism is correlated with its political ignorance and prejudices. ‘The working man will conquer us all – out of his mindlessness will flow the slop that is this philistine country’s cultural destiny. We’ll soon have something in this country far worse than the government of the peasants and workers – we will have the culture of the peasants and the workers.’ When Roth makes the argument, impeccably qualified Great American Novelist as he is, it stands; when Nancy makes it, daughter of a lord, relaxed rather than anguished about sex and rather good at jokes, she is dismissed as a snob, or worse.

By the time of
Don’t Tell Alfred
, Nancy is a much more accomplished writer than the gauche and simplistic author of
The Stanleys
. American immaturity is gestured at, in Hector’s delight in teenagers (shades of the Lecherous Lecturer), in Mme Rocher’s inability to believe that the young might require amusing, in M. Bouche Bontemps’s contempt for the cult of health, in people who think cleverly about Karl Marx but are not adult, in an American school being ‘a large light building with a swimming pool’, in Mrs Jungfleisch’s very name, pronounced ‘Youngflesh’. Fanny acts as a moderator for these views, gently deflecting their conceit and questioning their assumptions. The crescendo of
Don’t Tell Alfred
is Fanny’s drive with CharlesEdouard de Valhubert across the battlefields of the Marne to visit Fabrice’s mother, the Duchesse de Sauveterre. Charles Edouard has moved on from the stubborn urbanity of
The Blessing – ‘
Nature I hate’ – and launches into an elegy for the
passing countryside. ‘I love this country so much, but now it makes me sad to come here. We must look at it with all our eyes because in ten years’ time it will be utterly different. No more stooks of corn or heaps of manure to dot the stubble with light and shade, no more peasants in blue overalls, no more horses and carts, nothing but
mécaniciens
driving tractor and lorries.’

Here is Nancy’s love for the atmosphere of Fontaines-les-Nonnes, here her gently mourning memories of the bleakly beautiful landscape of her adolescence. Charles-Edouard’s Enlightenment insistence that towns are the only civilized place to live is softened by a more English Romanticism, a melding of a culture that celebrated artifice and one which valued its lost relationship with the land. He goes on to speak of Europe, of the world as it has been for a thousand years, each country with its own discrete architecture and cuisine, as compared to the uniformity seen everywhere. Venice survives, but Rome is engulfed in an ‘American rind’ of skyscrapers and tangles of wire. He concludes that since his children have never known this world, the gap created by unshared experience has produced the greatest divide between generations the world has ever seen. This is the statement made by Albert in
Highland Fling
, but Nancy now identifies America, not the First War, as the origin of fission. Fanny counters that if the next generation are happy and good, then a few apple trees don’t really matter, but Charles-Edouard argues:

Will they be happy? I think modern architecture is the greatest anti-happiness there has ever been. Nobody can live in those shelves, they can do no more than eat and sleep there; for their hours of leisure … they are driven onto the roads. That is why a young couple would rather have a motor car than anything else – it’s not in order to go to special places but a means of getting away from the machine where they exist.

This idea of a communally rooted culture torn up by a soulless, impersonal, mechanized society is close to the German
sociological idea of
Gemeinschaft
. Nancy’s feeling, expressed from
The Pursuit of Love
onwards, is that there is a crucial connection between elite culture, the standards of elegance and taste set by the educated and cultivated, and the life of the land, of the people. American society is what happens when this connection is fractured. Charles-Edouard continues that this is how the Americans have lived for a generation, and the consequences are ‘gloom, hysteria, suicide’. Fanny responds with the platitude that his preferred period to live in, any time between the Renaissance and the Second Empire, would only be viable if he were a privileged person. ‘If I were not, I wouldn’t be me.’ True, Fanny concedes. Men of the type of Charles-Edouard and Uncle Matthew ‘would not have been themselves if they had not always been kings in their own little castles. Their kind is vanishing as surely as the peasants, the horses and the avenues, to be replaced, like them, with something less picturesque, more utilitarian.’

Bell’s argument, Nancy’s argument, founders on this, the ‘picturesque’. A political philosophy which is essentially aesthetic is no redoubt against evil – or money. De Gaulle’s politics of grandeur had ceded their place to financial negotiations, confirming Roosevelt’s view in the late Thirties of France as a decadent country even as American money restored the civilization Nancy revered. Sweetness and light is simply an inadequate response. This is the mournful theme of Evelyn Waugh’s
Put Out More Flags;
his characters, he wrote in his dedicatory preface to Randolph Churchill, ‘are no longet contemporary in sympathy, they were forgotten even before the war, but they lived on delightfully in holes and corners’. He and his kind, who had fought for what they professed to despise as Bright Young Things of the Twenties, were no more than ‘a race of ghosts’. His profound depression towards the end of his life, compounded by Vatican II, had as its source this despair at a world he could not, nor wished to understand. Nancy’s response was more robust. She deplored the submersion of all that she believed in by American values, but if civilization was to be wiped away by a cleansing tissue, she was determined to go down laughing.

22

A L’OMBRE DE L’EMBRASSADEUR EN FLEUR

B
ack in his Renaissance palace, Gaston found that politics had taken a deliciously
quattrocento
turn. Pius XII had died, and Gaston found himself in the position of an Ascanio Sforza or Giuliano della Rovere, plotting to install a pro-French candidate on the papal throne. In the aftermath of the liberation, when the provisional government was struggling to establish its authority with the Communists, Gaston had contacted the papal nuncio to Paris, Monseigneur Roncalli, in the hope that he could influence the ‘
prêtres ouvriers’
who had contacts in the party to work towards a degree of national concord. The Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu called these ‘worker priests’ ‘the greatest religious event since the French Revolution’. Established in 1940, the ‘
ouvrier
’ order were integrated into secular life, often working in factories or trade, with the aim of reinforcing the Catholic faith among a social group in which it was in marked decline while contributing to the war effort. Many of them joined the Communist party and took part in strikes and demonstrations, which aroused the suspicions of Rome, and the order was dissolved in 1954.

Gaston credited Roncalli with a great intelligence combined with a blunt good sense drawn from his peasant roots (so they had much in common) and was encouraged by the prelate’s interest, though Roncalli sighed that the worker priests
would
carry on getting married. Roncalli was Gaston’s type of priest, a man of deep integrity who was at home in the salons of the Faubourg, including that of Mme Abrami, where he and Gaston
had first been introduced. Gaston did what he could to promote Roncalli’s candidature to the Holy See and was rewarded when his old acquaintance became Pope John XXIII. Protocol forbade the pontiff to make direct contact with foreign ambassadors, but the day after the election, Gaston found the Prince di Colonna, an assistant to the Vatican, in his office.

‘What happy wind blows you here?’

‘The wind of Saint Peter.’

The prince explained that although the pope might not telephone the palazzo, he had asked that his thanks and personal blessing be conveyed to the French ambassador.

The ambassador’s thoughts remained in the sixteenth century when he wrote a paper on the historical causes of contemporary weakness in Italian democracy. Provincial absolutism, he argued, had created a lethargy which was only swept away by the French Revolution, but the legacy of this had left a social and intellectual gap between Italy and her European neighbours which it was still struggling to fill. This was not, it must be said, a particularly scintillating analysis – it reads as though cribbed from Guicciardini – but his conclusion was more provocative. Italy had not yet achieved democratic equality; the Italian people remained politically immature. A prescient point, given the present-day antics of Silvio Berlusconi.

Gaston the kingmaker was finally enjoying his day in the sun. The Italians, though, were disturbed by the restoration of De Gaulle, which to them, naturally, had disquieting overtones of II Duce. Gaston called a meeting at the Embassy for prominent Romans, who listened to his explanation of Gaullist policy with a polite lack of conviction. The temptation to Fascism, they felt, would be too strong after what they perceived as a ‘military coup d’état’. Gaston’s efforts towards greater mutual understanding were also impeded by trade relations in the Maghreb. Paris was increasingly concerned by the engagement of the Italian government in North Africa. Following a commercial treaty of July 1957, Gaston learned that one of the main Moroccan industries, phosphates, was moving under Italian control, while
Enrico Mattei, the director of the ENI, was negotiating an interest in Algerian petrol. The French felt that this implied a dangerously pan-Arabic approach to trade in the region and Gaston warned Mattei in a meeting against any prioritization of Italian over French interests in the Maghreb. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs admitted that it was under American pressure to pursue Italian trade agreements, so the French were now anxious that Algerian rebels would be supplied with Italian arms. The matter dragged on, and Gaston continued to pay ‘indignant’ visits on the subject into the spring of 1959, when De Gaulle made a state visit to Italy.