The Horror of Love (6 page)

The painting idea never came to much. Nancy, astonishingly, was permitted to attend the Slade, but realized very soon that she had absolutely no talent: ‘What a
very
depressing drawing. I wonder how you manage to draw so foully, ’ was her teacher’s comment. Even more astonishingly, the Redesdales allowed her, at the age of twenty-three, to move into a bedsit in South Kensington. Much to the dismay of Jessica, who was already saving up to run away, this lasted a mere month. The advancing heaps of underclothes on the floor just became too menacing (‘No one to pick them up, you see.’). Nancy wanted freedom, but not the kind that came with a basin in the corner.

Writing began to look like a serious way out. If one were posh but poor, gossip-writing was a useful source of pocket money. Nancy had paid for a visit to her friend Nina Seafield at Cullen Castle in Scotland by photographing the party for the
Tatler
. She went on to produce occasional pieces for
Vogue
– the plight of the bridal confidante in ‘The Secret History of a London
Wedding’, tips for the lady guest in ‘The Shooting Party’ (‘it is advisable to wear a little coat over your dinner dress … there are few houses where it is considered good form to rise during dinner and beat the breast in order to stimulate circulation’) – and then, through her family connection with the magazine, she secured a weekly column on
The Lady
, for which she attended the regular events of the Season, a Commem. Ball at Oxford, the Chelsea Flower Show, the Fourth of June. In the first three months of 1929, she had made a very respectable £22, and decided to try a novel.

As a debutante, she was well past her sell-by date, yet Nancy needed money for something other than the maintenance of her self-respect. In 1928, she had met Hamish St Clair Erskine, then in his first year at New College. The second son of the notorious roué the Earl of Rosslyn, Hamish, in James Lees-Milne’s words, was possessed of ‘the most enchanting looks, though not strictly handsome, mischievous eyes, slanting eyebrows. He was slight of build, gay as gay, always snobbish and terribly conscious of his nobility.’
⁴
The fact that Hamish was ‘gay as gay’ didn’t put Nancy off falling in love with him, even though he had had a sexual relationship with her brother Tom at Eton. Hamish’s one object in life was admiration, but along with his vanity he was endowed with huge charm and the ability to make his friends laugh until they wept, the best possible quality in Nancy’s eyes. She convinced herself that his heavy drinking, his love of sleazy nightclubs, his selfishness and irresponsibility needed only a firm, loving hand, and after five increasingly frustrating years on the deb circuit she was sure she was the woman to reform him. Flattered by her unconditional devotion and the regard in which she was held by her brilliant homosexual circle of friends, Hamish went along with the idea that they were engaged, sentencing Nancy to five years of humiliation and wretchedness.

Hamish’s sexuality was in some senses typical of the times. Many of Nancy’s contemporaries, including Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly and her brother Tom, had experienced intense emotional and sexual relationships with men at school and
university before turning wholeheartedly to women. In his Eton memoir, Nancy’s great friend Lord Berners conceded that ‘a good deal of this sort of thing went on, but to speak of it as homosexuality would be unduly ponderous. It was merely the ebullience of puberty.’
⁵
Since homosexuality was never spoken of, there was no pressure to nail one’s colours to the mast by ‘coming out’ and it was perhaps more acceptable for some young men to pass through this phase without defining their sexuality when they were still emotionally immature. Many others, however, were definitely ‘so’ and happy to remain that way, though beyond the safe nurseries of the public school and universities they had to contend with both crushing prejudice and fear of the law. One historian of Nancy’s generation has commented on the fact that ‘no English youth movement … has ever contained such a high proportion of homosexuals or – in an age when these activities were still illegal – been so tolerant of their behaviour’.
⁶
Jessica Mitford, recalling the homosexual culture of the all-male environments in which her peers spent their youth and early manhood, remarked that ‘some stuck to it, some didn’t, but nobody paid much attention either way’.

It was difficult for an inexperienced young woman to judge whether a wavering young man might not yet turn out to be good husband material, but Nancy was not entirely naïve. Evelyn Waugh gave her an embarrassed lecture at the Ritz about ‘sexual shyness’ in men after Hamish confessed that he didn’t think he would ever be capable of sleeping with a woman, and one of James Lees-Milne’s lovers agonized for months to prepare himself for the great event. The Duchess of Devonshire suggests Nancy was quite unaware that Hamish was thoroughly homosexual. ‘Those days, you know, I don’t think she knew he was queer … otherwise why would she have said she was engaged to him?’
⁷
Nancy was certainly sophisticated enough to make jokes about ‘pansies’ in her letters: to Mark Ogilvie-Grant she wrote that she had had tea with his mother ‘and inadvertently gave her one of your letters to read in which a lift boy is described as a “Driberg’s
delight”’. Mrs Ogilvie-Grant had no idea what this meant – ‘Dear Mark has
such
an amusing gift for describing people’ – but clearly Nancy did. Or did she? She might have been able to find her friends’ pashes on boys amusing without really considering or knowing what was involved. Certainly her relationship with Hamish could not have been more asexual. She described an evening staying with Nina at Cullen Castle, when she and Hamish draped themselves in chiffon and put vine leaves and roses in their hair. Nancy curled Hamish’s locks with tongs and ‘he looked more than lovely’. Assuming Nancy wasn’t simply stupid, was she playing along with Hamish’s tendencies in the blind hope that he would grow out of them? Or was there something about cavorting in fancy dress that appealed to her own undeveloped and apprehensive sexuality?

Hamish was safe in a way that other suitors weren’t. Nancy had one serious admirer, Sir Hugh Smiley, who was everything a debutante’s anxious mother could wish for. Sir Hugh, of the Grenadier Guards, proposed several times during 1932. Nancy considered it, but couldn’t talk herself into pretending to love him. The prospect of his ‘gingerbread mansion’ was tempting – ‘one could be so jolly well dressed and take lovers’ – but behind her attempts at sophistication, there was a real fear of the confinement marriage could bring. She had had relationships with at least three other quite eligible young men, but she stuck with Hamish, who made her miserable, giggling with him over poor Sir Hugh’s shoulder as he sat at a nearby table at the Café de Paris. She had written to Tom: ‘If only I had any real talent I would so much rather remain single like Edith Sitwell.’ Then, immediately, she backed out: ‘No, I think it would probably be nicer to be married really or shall I become a celebrated demi mondaine, one of the really snappy ones?’ To Mark Ogilvie-Grant she explained that she thought financial independence was the greatest human happiness, and even at the lowest points of her relationship with Hamish she kept working away at it, grasping faintly but firmly at the prospect of another life, one that could be lived on her own terms.

And Hamish did make her extremely miserable. The ‘engagement’ dragged on and on, opposed by both families. Nancy’s letters to Mark Ogilvie-Grant alternate between protestations of Hamish’s innate goodness, wince-inducing descriptions of his cleverness – ‘Hamish was funny yesterday … he had five glasses of brandy and crème de menthe (on top of sherry etc.) and then began to analyze himself. He said “the best of me is that I can talk Homer to Maurice [Bowra, celebrated Warden of Wadham College] just as well as Noël Coward to you, in fact I am clever enough to amuse everybody”’ – and lacerating despair. During one of the many severances of the engagement, she wrote that she had tried to commit suicide by gas. It came out as a joke: ‘It is a lovely sensation just like taking anaesthetic so I shan’t be sorry any more for schoolmistresses who are found dead in that way.’ Nancy explained that she had been put off by the thought of the distress her corpse might cause to her pregnant hostess – suicide as bad manners – yet to have gone through the motions at all, and evidently needing somehow to talk about this, indicates a genuine agony, even if the exposed wound had to be immediately concealed beneath a cicatrice of laughter.

Nancy told Mark that Lord Rosslyn said she might have his son if she could make £1,000 per year and certainly her primary motivation in publishing her first novel,
Highland Fling
, was to make money. The circumstances of its composition could hardly have illustrated more clearly the ignominious position in which she found herself as an unmarried elder daughter: the book was finished in Paris, at 12 Rue de Poitiers, the flat of the Guinness family, into which Diana had recently made a brilliant marriage. Her wedding to Bryan Guinness, the clever, good-looking heir to the immense Guinness fortune, had taken place on 29 January 1929. At just nineteen, Diana was possessed of a fantastically wealthy husband who adored her, a London house and a position at the pinnacle of the fashionable intellectual London society to which both she and Nancy had so yearned to belong during the endless waiting out of their adolescence in the country. In November that year, the Guinnesses, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy
went to Paris. Diana was halfway through her first pregnancy and would rest in bed in the mornings while her husband and friends worked respectively on
Singing Out of Tune, Labels
and
Highland Fling
. If Nancy was irked that her younger sister was now considered a suitable chaperone, she did not allow it to spoil the pleasure to be taken in her beloved city. When their work was over the group enjoyed visits to the theatre or galleries, including a significant exhibition of Surrealist art, with dinner and dancing in the evenings.

Evelyn’s second novel,
Vile Bodies
, was published the following January, dedicated to Bryan and Diana. It was a huge success, though Nancy confessed herself disappointed in it. Much has been made by some critics of the influence of anxiety in Nancy’s relationship with Evelyn, perhaps similar to that which many attribute to Edith Wharton in her relationship with Henry James. At this stage of her career, Nancy was certainly in awe of Evelyn’s abilities, though later they developed something of a relationship of peers, if not equals, when it came to their writing. However,
Highland Fling
is interesting in that it sheds light on how Nancy’s own work may have influenced Evelyn’s. The book is an uneven comedy of manners, using the stock device of an ill-assorted house party assembled to shoot in the Scottish highlands, to pit Bright Young Things against the older generation with attitudes to art as one of their battlegrounds. At one point the pretentious Albert Gates insists on declaiming from T.S. Eliot’s 1925 ‘The Hollow Men’ – ‘Shape without form, shade without colour\Paralysed force, gesture without motion’ – in a scene that anticipates Anthony Blanche’s recitation of
The Wasteland
to the Christchurch hearties in
Brideshead
.

Eliot’s poem is complex and allusive, drawing on references as diverse as Dante, Joseph Conrad and Guy Fawkes, concerned with the difficulty of faith in a post-war world. Nancy’s use of it sends up the Bright Young Things’ pretensions as much as their elders’ conservativism. The feckless Walter Monteath’s own attempt at Modernist poetry, ‘With angels rising from the Guinness foam’, is a neat in-joke, yet the inclusion of the Eliot
reference adumbrates Nancy’s thoughtful, rather poignant position on the
querelle des generations
. To General Murgatroyd, aesthete Albert addresses a diatribe which might have come from the Bright Young Things’ manual:

It was your war, and I hope you enjoyed it … But let me tell you, even when you have succeeded, even when you have brought another war upon us, it won’t be any good. None of my generation will go and fight. We don’t care for wars, you see. We have other things to think about … people of your class notoriously enjoy wars and fighting … Your very recreations consist in killing things. But in future you will do well to avoid stirring up the great civilized nations against each other.

He is put in his place by the folklore bore Mr Buggins (whose wife languishes sinisterly offstage in a lunatic asylum), who observes that four years in the trenches have deprived his generation of their spirit and self-respect.

Everybody knows – you are at no pains to conceal it – that the young people of today despise and dislike the men and women of my age. I suppose that never since the world began have two generations been so much at variance. You think us superficial, narrow-minded, tasteless and sterile, and you are right. But who knows what we might have become if things had been different?

Much of the novel is little more than a series of set pieces based on the more notorious antics of the younger set. A mock funeral refers to the sham wedding staged in January 1929 by Robert Byron, Elizabeth Ponsonby and Oliver Messel, while Albert’s art exhibition recalls the Bruno Hat hoax got up by Diana, Bryan and their friends, in which Tom Mitford posed in a wheelchair and false moustache as a naïf artist with works hurriedly mocked up by Brian Howard in the style of Picasso
and Braque. Some of Nancy’s lighter themes are gestured at – the perennial dowdiness of Englishwomen, a prototype of the immortal Bolter in Mrs Fairfax, the discomfort of country-house life – yet there is also a nascent engagement here with those issues that develop subtly but persistently into her maturity as a novelist: the consequences of war, the meaning of civilization and the role of art and the intellect. In her first novel, true, they are slight, barely showing their whiskers amid the barrage of inconsistently successful jokes, but they are there nonetheless. There is also, early on, a rather harsh description of the heroine, Jane Dacre, which reads like Nancy brutally setting out her sense of her own inadequacies at the age of twenty-eight.