I knew this book was coming out and my partner who is a library sleuth brought it home for me. It is not what you would expect this is the story of Nancy Mitford, the author who wrote her classic books around her family and her life with witty observation and let's face it the British aren't into therapy. I guess that is why they are such good authors and dramatists.
This books tells the story of how the socialite Nancy met her Colonel Palweski of the Free French during WWII. Working in a London Book store during the war she began to meet a lot of French soldiers who had managed to escape France and to organize themselves under DeGualle. She meets the Polish by birth but French by adoption Colonel and it is love at first sight. Although Nancy is married to a Mr. Rodd a marriage, that had seen better days. The Colonel realizes she is the kind of society lady he finds most alluring. Nancy has never known a man of his type, part rogue but a charming one.
The resulting collaboration helps the Colonel to aspire to being a politician, diplomat and party leader. Nancy goes on to become a famous author, outside her family name.
Nancy and the Colonel remain lovers and end up in different cities. The Colonel becomes the Ambassador to Rome.
The joy of this book is the fact you are reading about a French/English lover affair in a era when civility was still the norm. Gaston was considered, 'doue pour faire plaisir aux femmes". to put it bluntly, build for love. Nancy brought up in the English upper class, did not expect to meet a man such as Gaston very sophisticated and with Nancy's charm and wit the two were meant to be. However, marriage was not necessarily going to happen for them. Oddly for all of Gaston's accomplishments it was Nancy who made him famous as, Fabrice, in her wonderful book, Love in a Cold Climate which I have already written a blog on. However the third summer of the war provided them with coup de foudre of that third summer, was to provide them both with the most significant personal and emotional attachment of their lives.
Gaston's story has been told as an accessory to Nancy's life, which has been documented as part of the myth of her beautiful. fanatical, compelling family. It is also the story of one of the most passionately exciting periods of French history, illuminates not only the life of an extraordinary man, but the world of one of the most popular and influential writer's of the 20th Century.
Each of her novels is an education for women, 'The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold' climate where Nancy's romantic philosophy become civilization and adult. 'The Blessing' provides her heroine, Grace with an education to accept, her French husband's infidelity. 'Don't Tell Alfred', is an exploration of and a warning against the imported American worship of youth.
The point made is the one essential for happiness is not self exposure or mutual dependency but great good manners. None of this is very revolutionary but by looking at modern woman's magazines we are still bewildered, enthralled and terrified by our failure to achieve what feminism has taught us we deserve. For all Gaston's selfish career obsessed philanderer: Nancy was febrile, needy and given to shrieking, yet the discipline, tenderness and gentillesse of their relationship exposes the limitations of modern sexual mores.
'"I've given up everything", I said, " My friends, my family, my country," and he simply roared with laughter and then of course so did I.'
You can not help but love, Nancy Mitford, the writer and her observations.
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