The Pursuit of Love & Love In A Cold Climate
Nancy Mitford
I was given this book as a present ten years ago by a friend. I kept it because I felt guilty about throwing out a present. I’m glad I did, I enjoyed them. They reminded me of Brideshead Revisited in bits.
Here are my memorable quotes:
Lost dreams
“They are there, held like flies in the amber of that moment - click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from the happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.”
Humour
Matt getting disciplined:
“Matt, however, regarded such hidings as a sort of natural phenomenon, unconnected with any actions of his own, and submitted to them philosophically enough.”
Lady Montdore’s charm:
“Her knees cracked like revolver shots but her smile was heavenly.”
Absurd:
“Lady Patricia who seemed half in the clouds, saying yes and no to Aunt sadie and what a monstrous thing it was to let the Skilton village idiot out again specially now it was known what a fast runner he was since he had won the asylum 100 yards.”
Nouveau Riche
On the Kroesig’s, the tasteless but rich banker family Linda marries into:
“Inwardly their spirit was utterly commercial, everything was seen by them in terms of money. It was their barrier, their defence, their hope for the future, their support for the present, it raised them above their fellow men, and with it they warded off evil. The only mental qualities that they respected were those which produced money in substantial quantities, it was their one criterion of success, it was their power and glory.”
Fading love
Linda, falling out of love with Tony Kroesig:
“The young man she had fallen in love with, handsome, gay, intellectual and domineering, melted away upon closer acquaintance, and proved to have been a chimera, never to have existed outside her imagination.”
Fanny’s mother, the Bolter, on whether Linda would have ended up happy with Fabrice:
“‘But I think she would have been happy with Fabrice,’ I said. ‘He was the great love of her life, you know.’ ‘Oh, dulling,’ said my mother sadly. ‘One always thinks that. Every, every time.‘”
Marriage
Fanny on a realistic marriage:
“Alfred and I are happy, as happy as married people can be. We are in love, we are intellectually and physically suited in every possible way, we rejoice in each other’s company, we have no money troubles and three delightful children. And yet, when I consider my life, day by day, hour by hour, it seems to be composed of a series of pin-pricks. Nannies, cooks, the endless drudgery of house-keeping, the nerve-racking noise and boring repetitive conversation of small children, their absolute incapacity to amuse themselves, their sudden and terrifying illnesses, Alfred’s not infrequent bout of moodiness, his invariable complaints at meals about the pudding, the way he will always use my toothpaste and will always squeeze the tube in the middle. These are the components of marriage, the wholemeal bread of life, rough, ordinary, but sustaining; Linda had been feeding upon the honey-dew, and that is an incomparable diet.”
Linda, being challenged on how she can know she doesn’t like her daughter after her birth:
“I can always tell if like people from the start, and I don’t like Moira, that’s all. She’s a fearful Counter-hon, wait till you see her.”
Ageing
Fanny’s observations on talking to adults about age:
“It’s quite useless to discuss questions of age with old people, they have such peculiar ideas on the subject. ‘Not really old at all, only seventy’, you hear them saying, or ‘quite young, younger than me, not much more than forty.’ At eighteen this seems great nonsense, though now, at the more advanced age which I have reached, I am beginning to understand what it all meant because Davey and Aunt Emily in their turn seem to me to look as they have looked ever since I knew them first, when I was little child.”