Books: Nancy’s Allergy

THE WATER BEETLE (150 pp.)—Nancy Mitford— Harper & Row ($3.50).

“Russians, like Americans, tend to loathe me on sight,” Nancy Mitford confesses. Her U.S. publishers do not take this as seriously as perhaps they should, unless, of course, they believe that many will pay $3.50 for the pleasure of being loathed right back.

Nancy Mitford is a clever and graceful writer, and in this collection of autobiographical and travel pieces, she ranges easily over Ireland, Greece, England. Russia and France. But readers are advised to treat lightly her sly suggestion that she is like Hilaire Belloc’s artless water beetle who

If she ever stopped to think

Of how she did it, she would sink.

Just why Russians should loathe her is not clear. On a visit in 1954. she noted that “all is privilege in that country,” and observed with an English country girl’s disapproval a prevalence of goats, “sure sign of poverty and fecklessness.” She generally avoided giving offense, and she found Stalin, who was safely dead, a “dear old soul.”

It is Americans who get her in a tizzy. They were bad enough in Russia, what with their great piles of luggage—”nasty-looking Americans, very rude.” But they also crop up in Florence, and when Nancy kindly points out the Duomo, they inquire: “Until what time do the stores remain open here?” In their “plastic garments,” they occur in Ireland, where they say, “Pourdon me,” and ask nuns to close a train window. Nor is England’s most hallowed ground safe from the profane American. “Although they descend from people who could not succeed in Europe and furiously shook its dust from their feet, they have a sentimental feeling for ancestors. They even look for them in England, nurturing a strange belief that in some country churchyard Hoggefeller and Potemkine lie dust to dust with Hogward and Potkin.”

A sad case, perhaps, of an allergy, in a country churchyard. Nancy Mitford is really a terrible tease, but she should remember that a tease should never lose her temper, and that when she calls someone Hoggefeller, smile.