American Lady : The Life of Susan Mary Alsop (9781101601167) by Frances (INT) Caroline; Fitzgerald De Margerie Page A
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you don’t understand the point of Mildred. They worship her at the House—they can hardly bear to have a debate at all until she’s in her place there. She’s the best audience they’ve ever had. As for luncheon at Downing Street, why, she stays there when she’s in London.” 26
Although she had been cast as a blonde with a pageboy haircut, it was easy to recognize Susan Mary. Mitford’s keen eye for character had captured her friend’s devotion to Diana Cooper and taste for politics and intellectual aspirations, noting, “She puts aside certain hours every day for historical study.” 27 Mitford also took aim at Susan Mary’s popularity (“it was impossible to give a dinner party in Paris without her” 28 ) and adaptability (“she couldproduce the right line of talk in its correct jargon for every occasion” 29 ).
Although she seemed not to have recognized her cameo appearance in
The Blessing
, Susan Mary immediately identified herself in
Don’t Tell Alfred
when the book was published in 1960. Accommodating and reasonably immune to vanity, she was nevertheless hurt to find her sentimentality and love of ideas ridiculed. Fortunately, Nancy did not know the lengths to which Susan Mary went in her desire to seem well informed. At the time, nobody realized, for example, that Susan Mary’s letters to Marietta Tree were, occasionally, directly inspired by Janet Flanner’s gin-soaked columns about Paris for the
New Yorker
. Mitford would have surely included this information with acerbic relish.
All the same, Susan Mary sent a few copies of
Don’t Ask Alfred
to her friends. In truth, compared to other examples of wicked portraiture in which Nancy often indulged, Susan Mary’s character had been gently crafted. It was almost flattering, more teasing than caricature.
The Blessing
, nevertheless, had angered Susan Mary for its open anti-Americanism. Mitford was as virulent as a band of Stalinists in her hatred of the United States, a country she judged to be blundering, uneducated, and hideously modern. In her novel, she had concocted a talkative and self-important American named Hector Dexter whose job it was to persuade the recalcitrant French to swallow the bitter medicine of the Marshall Plan. The character was so grotesque and dislikable that Mitford turned him into a Communist mole to avoid being strung up by herAmerican friends. Still, there was an amusing truth in the portrait.
If Susan Mary had not liked the way Nancy had portrayed her countrymen, she was even angrier when her friend told her that the conversations she had heard around the Pattens’ dinner table had helped her fine-tune horrible Dexter. Susan Mary had no illusions about her country and blamed America’s lack of interest for all things foreign. She often mocked the grandiloquent style imposed upon American journalists, regardless of the context (“lots of words like history-making, soul-stirring, breathless, and of course, hero used freely” 30 ). Neither did she hold back from criticizing American doings she found absurd, such as the government’s distribution of cotton togas to several elected officials in the spring of 1950, supposedly as protection against radioactivity in the event of a nuclear war. She was shocked by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt that had begun in the State Department, and by the news that General MacArthur considered using the atomic bomb against China at the end of 1950 in retaliation for its involvement in the Korean War. In spite of all this, she felt that no foreigner, let alone Nancy, who had never set foot in America, had the right to be so negative. Their friendship grew distant, but pretty Mildred, “this ghastly pedantic blue stocking bore of a Mildred Youngfleisch,” 31 as Susan Mary would say with a sigh, had been immortalized.
In Sickness and in Health
Regular routines have a bad reputation and are rarely celebrated by those who practice them. Susan Mary
Although she had been cast as a blonde with a pageboy haircut, it was easy to recognize Susan Mary. Mitford’s keen eye for character had captured her friend’s devotion to Diana Cooper and taste for politics and intellectual aspirations, noting, “She puts aside certain hours every day for historical study.” 27 Mitford also took aim at Susan Mary’s popularity (“it was impossible to give a dinner party in Paris without her” 28 ) and adaptability (“she couldproduce the right line of talk in its correct jargon for every occasion” 29 ).
Although she seemed not to have recognized her cameo appearance in
The Blessing
, Susan Mary immediately identified herself in
Don’t Tell Alfred
when the book was published in 1960. Accommodating and reasonably immune to vanity, she was nevertheless hurt to find her sentimentality and love of ideas ridiculed. Fortunately, Nancy did not know the lengths to which Susan Mary went in her desire to seem well informed. At the time, nobody realized, for example, that Susan Mary’s letters to Marietta Tree were, occasionally, directly inspired by Janet Flanner’s gin-soaked columns about Paris for the
New Yorker
. Mitford would have surely included this information with acerbic relish.
All the same, Susan Mary sent a few copies of
Don’t Ask Alfred
to her friends. In truth, compared to other examples of wicked portraiture in which Nancy often indulged, Susan Mary’s character had been gently crafted. It was almost flattering, more teasing than caricature.
The Blessing
, nevertheless, had angered Susan Mary for its open anti-Americanism. Mitford was as virulent as a band of Stalinists in her hatred of the United States, a country she judged to be blundering, uneducated, and hideously modern. In her novel, she had concocted a talkative and self-important American named Hector Dexter whose job it was to persuade the recalcitrant French to swallow the bitter medicine of the Marshall Plan. The character was so grotesque and dislikable that Mitford turned him into a Communist mole to avoid being strung up by herAmerican friends. Still, there was an amusing truth in the portrait.
If Susan Mary had not liked the way Nancy had portrayed her countrymen, she was even angrier when her friend told her that the conversations she had heard around the Pattens’ dinner table had helped her fine-tune horrible Dexter. Susan Mary had no illusions about her country and blamed America’s lack of interest for all things foreign. She often mocked the grandiloquent style imposed upon American journalists, regardless of the context (“lots of words like history-making, soul-stirring, breathless, and of course, hero used freely” 30 ). Neither did she hold back from criticizing American doings she found absurd, such as the government’s distribution of cotton togas to several elected officials in the spring of 1950, supposedly as protection against radioactivity in the event of a nuclear war. She was shocked by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt that had begun in the State Department, and by the news that General MacArthur considered using the atomic bomb against China at the end of 1950 in retaliation for its involvement in the Korean War. In spite of all this, she felt that no foreigner, let alone Nancy, who had never set foot in America, had the right to be so negative. Their friendship grew distant, but pretty Mildred, “this ghastly pedantic blue stocking bore of a Mildred Youngfleisch,” 31 as Susan Mary would say with a sigh, had been immortalized.
In Sickness and in Health
Regular routines have a bad reputation and are rarely celebrated by those who practice them. Susan Mary
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