So it amused her to write this book, to make her delicate little digs at the great Sir Ogre, and to see his mistress riled by it. Of course – as Jan Dalley astutely points out in her biography of Diana – the obvious butt of Wigs on the Green is Unity: ‘the satire fell mainly on poor crazy Bobo, a soft target, not on the adult sister who might bite back’. Nancy’s spite against Diana is subtler, and undeniably personal. The book is punctuated by little stabs at Diana’s situation: references to the stigma of divorce (Eugenia’s aunt will not let a divorcee in her house), and to ‘the tainted blood of an adulteress’. Nonetheless it was the political content that caused the offence. Diana resented any mockery aimed at the man she loved, and perhaps saw that the mockery was not even done with much bravery.
Certainly Wigs on the Green raised, in its apparently artless way, one of the great moral questions of fiction writing: how far is it acceptable to use the stuff of one’s own life as material? Where does responsibility to other people end, and to artistic truth begin? Was Nancy failing to play cricket by using Unity as her butt, by nonchalantly ridiculing what Diana took most seriously?
It is a key question with such a highly autobiographical writer – and one who did not attempt to hide the fact. Lord Redesdale probably never minded anything that Nancy wrote about him, but then (silly Highland Fling excepted) there was always love in the portrayals of her father. Lady Redesdale and Diana felt very differently. They sensed betrayal in some of what Nancy wrote, as if she had dealt with them casually, shown insufficient concern for their feelings. There is some truth in this. Despite appearances, Nancy was a real writer with real things that she wanted to say, whether they hurt or not. And beyond that there was a personal dimension to her motivation. Whereas, in portraying her father as Uncle Matthew, Nancy did so with a care for his vulnerability, she felt that the two women could handle whatever she wrote about them. They were the people who, as she saw it, made things more difficult for her than they need have been, by their superiority on the one hand, their coldness on the other. Without even realising it, she may have enjoyed taking them on in print as she could not in life.
But here is the oddest thing about the Wigs on the Green controversy: some of what Eugenia Malmains says, in her village-green hymns to Fascism, is what Nancy herself also believed.
In so far as she was a political animal, she described herself as ‘a sort of vague Socialist’: according to Diana, her views were the colour of ‘synthetic cochineal’, whilst Evelyn Waugh accused her, post-war, of moving to Paris after ‘having voted socialist and so done her best to make England uninhabitable’. Those who know Nancy from her dissection of class differences in ‘U and Non-U’, which labelled her for once and all as a raging snob, would no doubt find her view of herself as a Labour supporter highly hilarious. And indeed it is pretty hard to imagine her as a fan of, say, Tony Benn or Anthony Crosland, although sometimes the protected aristocrat has an indulgence towards this kind of politician that the middle-classes cannot afford.
Her centre-left leanings started, however, as a simple reaction against the extreme views held not just by Unity and Diana but by Tom (also pro-Fascist) and Jessica (Communist). Being a socialist in the 1930s was, for someone like Nancy, a slightly cop-out way of saying that she wanted none of any of it: all that drama and flag-waving and what nanny would call showing off. ‘I think,’ says Alexander Mosley, ‘she believed in the personal aspect of politics’, which is to say that she did not, could not, believe in ideologies. As the decade rolled on, tank-like, she would find this becoming more and more true and it would help shape her philosophy of living, her increasingly determined belief in a creed that celebrated jokes, moderation, civilisation, common sense and – above all – the pursuit of small-scale human happiness rather than a political heaven on earth.
Yet Eugenia Malmains, for all that her blind passion for Fascism is cause for mockery, is not entirely satirised. In fact Nancy seems a little uncertain as to whether Eugenia is a nutter or a sage; and this is not because she is trying to keep Unity sweet, it is because she sees (as perhaps occasionally she did at Blackshirt meetings?) the power of some of her views. This, for example, is delivered from the overturned wash-tub:
‘Respect for parents, love of the home, veneration of the marriage tie, are all at a discount in England to-day, society is rotten with vice, selfishness, and indolence. The rich have betrayed their trust, preferring the fetid atmosphere of cocktail-bars and night-clubs to the sanity of useful country life... The poor are no better than the rich, they also have learnt to put self before State, and satisfied with the bread and circuses which are flung to them by their politicians, they also take no steps to achieve a better spirit in this unhappy land.’
‘The girl’s a lunatic but she’s not stupid’, said Jasper...
What is definitively Nancy, in this speech of Eugenia’s, is the inveighing against rich people who desert their responsibilities. It is a theme to which she would return in The Pursuit of Love. There she contrasts the old Tory creed of Lord Alconleigh (that is to say, her father) – who has an intense relationship with his land, and a benevolent communion with its workers – with the brash new Conservatism of the MP Tony Kroesig (Linda’s first husband), who ‘was full of large, clear-sighted ideas for bettering the condition of the capitalist classes, and made no bones of his hatred and distrust for the workers. “I hate the lower classes”, he said one day...’ This was the kind of thing that Nancy despised, and that perhaps led her to call herself a socialist.
As both Harold Acton and Jonathan Guinness make clear, in their books, she was not really anything of the kind. Her political creed, such as it was, belonged to an earlier era. Wigs on the Green despairs of the present day – ‘Western civilisation is old and tired’ – and Nancy was in sympathy; but her own hankerings were not for a brave new world, more for a seemly shifting back to the certainties of the vanished one. And this she found, with considerable joy, in the work she undertook after Wigs on the Green: editing the letters of the Stanley family, to whom she was related through her father10.
Her cousin and friend Edward, Lord Stanley of Alderley, commissioned her to do the job, and she adored it. ‘I thought you might like to know that my search has been almost too successful’, she wrote in December 1937 to Robert Byron, from Alderley Park; ‘10000 letters all quite legible... Simply fascinating. I have been working 9 & 10 hours a day & am the Wonder of Cheshire, & have enjoyed every minute of it. Now the real work will begin...’
The letters are a delight, but the most revealing results of Nancy’s editing job are the introductions that she wrote for the two volumes: The Ladies of Alderley, published in 1938, and The Stanleys of Alderley, published the following year. They contain something like her ‘political’ philosophy. It is articulated in a style dissimilar to anything else she ever wrote, as if she has been infused with the orotund spirit of the age. Nancy removes her elegant mask, lays aside all irony and sly restraint, and expresses herself with total and unabashed sincerity.
During the whole of the nineteenth century the English and their rulers were in perfect accord, they understood and trusted the integrity of each other’s aims and methods, and consequently this country was enabled to achieve a greatness, not only material, but spiritual, which has never been equalled in the history of the world. Today [that is, in 1939] our rulers have a holy responsibility. Will they uphold or will they destroy that greatness...
We still put our trust in sensible men of ample means and in lords, but doubts are beginning to arise... These sensible men, are they by any chance afraid, afraid of losing their ample means? These lords, divorced from the land which was the reason for their being, do they fly, shuddering with strange new fears hitherto unknown in this country, into the arms of alien creeds; and worse still, do they begin to hate and fear the people? The segregation of the classes, which has resulted from the abandonment of the now impoverished land by its former owners, who prefer seeking their fortune in the City... h
as been most harmful to the aristocracy; they are losing their hitherto intimate knowledge of, and trust in, the people. The English are like a fine and nervous horse, which, ridden with good heart can surmount any obstacle, but which, when out of sympathy with its timid rider, will shy at the shadow of an ice cream cart or the distant growling of a dachshund.
This people must be ruled with generosity and dignity...
And if all of this reads a little as though Tom Lehrer had broken into a dead straight version of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, one must nonetheless respect it as the words of the ‘real’ Nancy – as real as the woman who, beneath her elegant dresses and frail frame, craved a day at the forefront of a cavalry charge. It is, of course, easy to dismiss what she wrote as the maunderings of a hopeless reactionary (although Evelyn Waugh, typically, called them ‘subversive’); but this is modern squeamishness, unable to consider the idea that, within Nancy’s massively sweeping statements, there might be the odd sunlit mote of truth. Her image of the English people as a ‘fine and nervous horse’ is bold and apt; her concept of attachment to land is profound. Nancy was no reactionary; she simply had the courage of her own convictions, and was not ashamed to distinguish between different types of snob and different types of money.
These are, after all, the views that she expressed more elliptically in The Pursuit of Love, a book which leaves one in no doubt that Nancy loved, in her deepest soul, her vision of an older England. And they help to explain her ambivalence towards Eugenia Malmains, whose philosophy is both viscerally stirring and innately ‘alien’.
Is it significant that, in the acknowledgments page of the first volume of the Stanley letters, Nancy writes: ‘My husband read the manuscript and encouraged me’, while in the second volume there is no such sentence? In 1938 she had at least kept up a semi-pretence of marital communion. By 1939 she was not bothering, for at that time there was not much left of the Rodd marriage.
The Mitfords were in disarray altogether, in fact; no wonder Nancy had so enjoyed losing herself in the world of the Stanleys: ‘Secure in their financial situation... Secure in their domestic relations... Secure in their religious beliefs and in the knowledge of immortality... Above all, secure in their Whig outlook, they never questioned the fact that each individual has his allotted place in the realm and that their own allotted place was among the ruling, the leisured and the moneyed classes.’ By comparison with this mid-nineteenth-century nirvana, the late 1930s must have seemed as though chaos had come again.
Diana was married to Mosley, Unity was in Germany swooning over Hitler; and Jessica had done her bit for the far left by eloping, in 1937, with her cousin Esmond Romilly. She met him in glamorous circumstances, when he was invalided home after fighting for the Loyalist Front in the Spanish Civil War. Irresistible, of course, and her nineteen-year-old heart had leaped just as Linda Radlett’s does when she meets the Communist Christian Talbot, who ‘talked without cease’ about ‘the betterment of the world through political change’, and who gets away with it because he is so sexy. Like Christian, Esmond Romilly was coolly enthralled with the idea of so deliciously pretty a comrade-in-arms. Jessica, meanwhile, had become more like her Fascist sisters than she would have cared to realise: in tangled thrall to both a creed and a man.
‘Linda has always felt the need of a cause’, says Fanny in The Pursuit of Love, to the wise old sophisticate Lord Merlin, whose throwaway reply cuts straight to the heart of the matter. ‘“Cause,” he said scornfully. “My dear Fanny, I think you are mixing up cause with effect. No, Christian is an attractive fellow...”’ How Nancy must have annoyed her sisters, with the implication that neither Fascism nor Communism would have seemed quite so fascinating had they come in plainer wrappings than Mosley and Romilly –! But then neither man would have been so desirable without the visionary fires that burned in his eyes. Look at Unity with Hitler. At any rate man plus cause – in whatever relative quantities – equalled falling head-over-heels into another life. And Jessica, having told her mother that she was on a girlish weekend in Dieppe, flew heedless of consequences into the arms of her red-flag-waving lover.
The instant, hapless family reaction was to try and entice her home again. Because of their pinkish sympathies, Nancy and Peter were sent by the Redesdales on a mission to the south of France, where Jessica and Esmond were then holed up: ‘We saw them at the end of the gangplank’, Jessica later wrote in Hons and Rebels, ‘Nancy, tall and beautiful, waving at us with her gloves, and Peter, rather square and stocky, hands in pockets in his usual “tough” attitude. They were completely surrounded by press photographers, and we descended the gangplank in a barrage of popping bulbs.’
Nancy made doomed attempts to persuade her sister that she should give up the idea of going to Spain. ‘Decca, really you are a naughty little thing, worrying us all like that’, was the general tone, at least according to Jessica’s recollections. ‘Poor Muv has been in floods ever since you left, and so has Nanny. Nanny keeps saying you didn’t have any suitable clothes to fight in.’ Now this, as is usual with Jessica, sounds not quite believable. Nancy surely said nothing quite so silly, although she probably said nothing very serious either. Impossible to imagine her having the will or the desire to change another person’s mind for them; her style was far more languid and laissez-faire than that. In 1955 Nancy would comment upon Jessica’s desire to visit Russia11 with her second husband: ‘The awful thing is it won’t teach them (that’ll teach them) because nothing ever does teach people.’ That, essentially, was her view; and so, back in 1936, she simply left Jessica to it. Having made her dramatic bid for freedom, Jessica was hardly going to return like a lamb to the fold, especially as the whole episode had attracted hitherto unknown levels of Mitfordian publicity. ‘You were the first one in the family to be on posters’, Nancy said. ‘Boud was frightfully jealous.’
Jessica married soon afterwards in Bayonne. ‘Esmond was the most horrible human being I have ever met’, Nancy later wrote in a letter to Evelyn Waugh, an opinion widely shared. Even Jessica admitted in Hons and Rebels that Esmond was ‘a gifted hater’, although she wrote that he had mellowed and matured by the time of his death, in the war, in 1941. She remained wholly loyal to his beliefs; again, despite political polarisation, the similarity to Diana and Unity is striking.
For the Redesdales, it must have felt as though they were sustaining one body blow after another: as parents they were two ageing punchbags. Their confusion about the unravelling of the fabric of their family is palpable. They had no notion of how to stop any of it and, despite their Canute-like efforts to hold back the tide of rebelliousness, it grew ever more overwhelming. At first they were appalled when Diana left Bryan Guinness and set herself up as Mosley’s mistress. Then they were furious when Diana took Unity to Nuremberg in 1933: ‘I suppose you know without being told how absolutely horrified Muv and I were to think of you and Bobo accepting any form of hospitality from people we regard as a gang of murderous pests’, wrote Lord Redesdale. ‘That you should associate yourself with such people is a source of utter misery to both of us... What we can do, and what we intend to do, is to try and keep Bobo out of it all.’ Which would be funny, when one thinks of what Unity subsequently got up to, were it not so ghastly. Within a year her parents had accepted Unity’s move to Munich, as at least giving her a purpose in life. Not only that, Lady Redesdale had also become smitten by Germany; even her husband, whose hatred of the Hun had hitherto been a consuming passion, found himself quite taken with both the place and its politics. Possibly Tom’s influence had led his father to this position, for he could do little wrong in Lord Redesdale’s eyes.
But the gameness with which the Mitford parents tried to go along with their children was almost pathetic. Sydney had an enjoyable tea with Hitler (‘I fear the whole thing was wasted on Muv, she is just the same as before’, wrote Unity to Diana), David too became impressed by him, and both Redesdales attended the Nuremberg rally of 1938. This admiration was not unusual: it
is well known that amongst the British upper-classes there was considerable sympathy for the Nazi regime (‘von Ribbentrop had the most elegant embassy in London’, Nancy was later to recall, in a tone of helpless amazement. ‘Everybody went! They deny it now, of course...’12). Yet the feeling persists that the Redesdales were fundamentally swayed, not so much by the mighty oratory of the Führer, as by the desire to keep a weak handle on the mysterious passions of their children. They would probably have remained unmoved by Nazism had it not been thrust upon them.
What Lord Alconleigh describes in The Pursuit of Love as ‘the Thin End of the Wedge’ was being inserted into the Redesdales’ lives at every possible opening. In the book, the process refers to a banished labrador being let into the house for five minutes (‘Oh, I see – the thin end of the wedge. All right, this time he can stay...’). In reality it referred to more cataclysmic events, like Diana’s and Jessica’s marriages. Oswald Mosley had been viewed as the devil in a black shirt, but now he was greeted with muted relief, as at least legitimising Diana’s position. Jessica’s elopement had been seen as a complete catastrophe, but once again there was the mitigating factor of marriage and so, obediently, Sydney attended the Romilly wedding. The Redesdales tried, as they always had, to establish some sort of order. They refused to receive Mosley, they refused Deborah permission to visit the Romillys when they moved to London. But they surely felt that the incipient anarchy of the Mitford childhood, created by this alarmingly diverse group of autonomous and imaginative beings, had finally been let loose. At last the inmates had taken over their posh Cotswold prison: they had broken free and were running merrily amok, thumbing pretty noses at their warders. What a long road had been travelled, from the days when the heavens were seen to fall over Nancy’s powdered nose and reddened lips.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 16
