She knew that husbands had mistresses. Her novels are full of that knowledge; many of her friends were living embodiments of it. But knowing about it is not the same as living through it. She could assume a kind of detachment when writing to the Elweses, but not when being taunted at the bridge table. The wisdom that she displayed about love in her books was often Nancy talking to herself, reasoning herself into adult acceptance of what was, in reality, hard and humiliating. Few philosophers are able to live by what they believe. Nancy – who, in her light and graceful way, was indeed a philosopher – became better at it than most, but not yet.
In her writing, the question that interested her was this: how to live a sensible and happy life while accepting, and embracing, the irrationalities of love. As a total romantic who nonetheless viewed the eighteenth century as the most perfect of all eras, this conundrum was bound to fascinate her; and it is the question that underpins almost all her books. Even her first two novels – plagued though they were by immaturity – are closely engaged with it. And by the time she had entered upon life with Peter Rodd, she knew far more of what she was talking about; as is clear from Wigs on the Green, the novel that she wrote in the first year of her marriage.
This book is known now, if it is known at all, for its timely parody of Fascism and the British Unionist Party. In 1934 Sir Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts were moving towards the height of their influence, and Nancy saw a subject ripe for mockery. Yet despite the showiness of this theme, it is not the book’s real focus. It simply takes its place within Nancy’s wider view of human beings, their rather pitiful silliness, their irrepressible deviousness, their machinations, above all their touching egotism. That is what interests her, and is the sane and ordinary context into which she puts her political satire.
Of course it was the satire that got the book noticed, within the Mitford family at least, where – as will be seen – it caused quite a brouhaha. Outside, few people paid much heed to Wigs on the Green. But the book is fascinating now, to those who love Nancy’s writing, because it shows such a marked development from the two novels that she wrote as a footloose girl. Here, for the first time, she appears in control of her material: she has an overview, an authorial distance. The book is no more than a pretty piece of marivaudage, apparently soufflé-light, but it is permeated by a cool and smiling cynicism that feels real rather than assumed. It also somehow feels connected to the fact of her marriage. It is perhaps surprising that Nancy began a book so soon – in the spring of 1934 – when one might have expected her to be lost in the bliss of her changed circumstances. The Rodds needed the money, so Nancy needed to write. But, although the book feels very different from what she wrote before, there is no sense that Wigs on the Green is suffused with the joys of love, sex, marriage and so on. Rather it is as if these things had blown the clouds away from Nancy’s mind and left it assured, clean and a little distanced. Here, for example, is her heroine Poppy St Julien, considering whether she wants to hitch her divorced cart to Jasper Aspect, who bears no small resemblance to Peter Rodd: ‘She was a good deal in love with Jasper, but not sure that she wanted to marry him. Certain aspects of his nature seemed far from satisfactory.’ Which is an odd way for a bride of three or four months to be expressing herself.
Far from being all about Sir Ogre, as Nancy called her brother-in-law to be, Wigs on the Green is in fact wholly intrigued by Peter. It is dedicated to him, and much of it gives the odd impression of having been written by him, or at least by someone engrossed with the casual male viewpoint. Nancy’s book is filled with bracing manly views on women; it is a very particular take on the pursuit of love. ‘The great thing about women... is that they have a passion for getting relationships cut and dried... Oh! what maddening creatures’, says Jasper. And then: ‘The precious little thing likes to have a nice long cosy chat between nine and ten am, she doesn’t realise that you, meanwhile, are shivering half-way up your landlady’s staircase with an old woman scrubbing linoleum round your feet.’ Jasper is a highly intelligent young man who chooses to be an upmarket sponger, and steals money out of women’s handbags just as Peter did out of Nancy’s: ‘wives aren’t expected to keep their husbands’, says his lover Poppy, to which Jasper replies: ‘I never could see why not. It seems so unfair.’
‘Not at all. The least the chaps can do is to provide for us financially when you consider that women have all the trouble of pregnancy and so on.’
‘Well, us boys have hang overs don’t we? Comes to the same thing in the end.’
How did Nancy understand Peter so quickly and so thoroughly? Her portrayal is sympathetic, non-judgmental, attracted yet almost resigned; clear-eyed in a way that she never managed to be about Hamish. She describes Jasper’s modus vivendi, living ‘from one day to another, picking up by fair means or foul enough cash for the needs of the moment and being dragged out of the bankruptcy courts about once every three years by protesting relations’: Lady Rennell would surely have nodded in recognition.
Nancy did not merely have a handle on her husband, but on her own situation. Why else would she have Jasper say, about a girl whom he hopes to marry, and whose engagement has just been broken off: ‘In the case of Lady M. we have a powerful ally in the Rebound. Fantastic what a girl will do on the Rebound’ –? That is Nancy laughing at herself, with all the unflinching charm of which she was capable. Was Peter willing to get the joke as well? Was he flattered? Or was he a little appalled by the adoring new wife who saw through him so easily?
There are other dry delights in Wigs on the Green, and there are some tremendous jokes. The aristocrats’ asylum, ‘Peersmont’, which is run in the image of the House of Lords – and where a ‘Toll of the Roads’ bill is heard by the inmates – is worthy of Lewis Carroll. The authentic Mitford cocktail of robust sanity and sparkling delicacy – a half of Guinness topped with a crisp splash of Krug – is starting to pour forth with ease. What Nancy does not quite have yet is the assured benevolence that would later inform her writing: a realism that does not need to be cynical, a sense of the ridiculous that does not need to sneer. In Wigs on the Green this is starting to emerge, but there is still an edginess about her, as if she is confusing maturity with world-weariness. This, for example, is Poppy on whether she should leave her rich husband and marry Jasper: ‘In a position in which many women would be weighing an old loyalty against a new passion, she found herself wondering whether it would be possible to smuggle her writing-table out of the house, should she decide to throw in her lot with Mr Aspect.’ This slightly terrifying honesty, this cool understanding of female susceptibility is Nancy through and through; but there is something else – a desire to shock or even perhaps to hurt – that would later slip unregretted from her writing.
And was she trying to shock or to hurt when she used the political passions of her sisters Diana and Unity as material for her book? They, certainly, were far from happy about it. ‘Peter says I can’t put a movement like Fascism into a work of fiction by name and so I am calling it the Union Jack movement, the members wear Union Jackshirts & their Lead is called Colonel Jack’, Nancy wrote to Diana in November 1934 (one can imagine the reaction). By then the book was almost finished, but the letter – breezy and chock-full of niceness about Mosley – invited Diana ‘to edit [it] before publication because although it is very pro-Fascism there are one or two jokes & you could tell better than I whether they would be Leaderteases’.
All very well, but by then the deed was done, and anyway it was Nancy’s very breeziness that was the cause of the problem. Diana felt that a basic insult had been perpetrated upon Fascism by putting it into a comic novel. In fact an even greater insult was the dismissive way in which Nancy treats it: commentators give the impression that political satire sits plum in the middle of the book, like a dark and dangerous doberman, yet what strikes one is how unimportant it is all made to seem. This may be because some of the references to Fascism (specifically to Colonel Jack) were excised to placate Diana, but it is als
o a question of tone. Into Nancy’s book goes Unity, reproduced to the life as Eugenia Malmains, a handsome young giantess with ‘the aspect of a young Joan of Arc’ and ‘eyes like enormous blue headlamps’. She is pursued by Noël and Jasper, but her own sole passion is for declaiming ‘Social Unionist’ speeches on ‘an overturned wash-tub on Chalford village green’. Meanwhile, as she rants on the sidelines, the book remains preoccupied with its good, sound, normal themes of love and money: company too frivolous, in the eyes of Nancy’s sisters, for Fascism to consort with.
Because of this refusal to ‘take fascism seriously’, Nancy has been called politically naïve: as if the massiveness of the theme was beyond her, and she could only respond to it with mockery. Yet this is, one might say, the opposite of the truth. Nancy made fun of Fascism precisely because she did understand it. Beneath all the regimentation, the uniforms and the marching men, she perceived something innately silly. And she realised that taking away the trappings, planting Fascism squarely in the world of the Gloucestershire village green, where Eugenia denounces her nanny as the pacifist enemy and eats twopenny chocolate bars between orations, was the surest way to reveal this silliness. ‘When you find schoolgirls like Eugenia going mad about something, you can be pretty sure that it is nonsense’, says one of her characters.
And she was right: right to dismiss political extremism as the sort of behaviour that nanny would call showing off. She was right to show that, for all its exalted aims, most followers of Fascism were motivated by simple xenophobia; right to show the banality of the Nazi creed by giving this speech to Poppy: ‘I’m sure Hitler must be a wonderful man. Hasn’t he forbidden German women to work in offices and told them they need never worry about anything again, except arranging the flowers? How they must love him.’ She was right, too, to show that Fascism was, for Unity, a glorious opportunity to validate her own oddity. Yet it is also true that Nancy’s airy, ironic and civilised soul did not truly grasp the tumultuous passions that had been raised in Europe, and in her own family, by the political situation. She saw it all later, of course. But in 1934 she thought that it could be treated, like everything else, as a joke: this was not political naïvety, but it was a failure of imagination (does a Voltaire ever truly understand a Wagner?), a wrongful belief that rationality would triumph over a very certain kind of dark romance.
Most surprisingly – ‘we were young & high spirited then and didn’t know about Buchenwald’7 – she and Peter had actually attended some of Mosley’s meetings, including the famous Olympia rally of June 1934 (‘Prod looked very pretty in a black shirt’). According to Diana, the Rodds were Blackshirts ‘for sort of a year. I never say that because it hardly seems fair, because she became so anti. And so that was that. But yes, they were.’ So much for Peter’s pink politics –! although almost certainly they went along to the meetings in a spirit of curiosity, as if on a rather special kind of family outing. Nancy may have been influenced by the fact that Tom Mitford had become pro-Fascist: his views were always something that she wanted to respect, although she was defeated in the end by his enduring Germanophilia.
Meanwhile Diana and Unity attended the first Nuremberg rally, in late 1933, and, after this, became more and more enamoured of the Fascist viewpoint. Hard not to think that Unity was strongly influenced by her sister in this: calm, majestic Diana, whose every move was made to seem the right one by her serene self-confidence. Of course Unity eventually went much further in her association with Nazism, but it was Diana who showed up initially with a cause, and a man to espouse it. Unity, whose aspect was that of Diana’s slightly strange, overgrown, malformed twin, was almost bound to be impressed by this impregnable package.
Diana had gone to Munich in 1933 partly to put distance between herself and Mosley (who was not behaving satisfactorily after the death of his wife), but also to make contacts in Germany that would later be of use to him. Her attendance at Nuremberg was a relatively reasoned act, therefore, however much she was emotionally impressed by what she saw. To Unity, however, the event was an epiphany, and from then on she never looked back. She moved to Munich, began feverishly to learn German and, by March 1935, was in a position to introduce Diana to Adolf Hitler, whom she had met the previous month (her method of procuring an introduction was simple: she sat every day at a table in his favourite restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria, and bestowed upon him her perfect Aryan gaze). Back in England, the activities of the British Unionist Party were gaining ever more attention. The Olympia rally had seen the pro- and anti-Fascist brigades ranged against each other in violent combat: it was a moment in which the obligation to take sides in 1930s politics became theatrically clear. Not that Nancy saw it that way. Once again, she refused to take it seriously; once again, she was right and wrong to do so. In Wigs on the Green she parodied the whole affair as a historical pageant, set in a country house garden, that Eugenia tries to turn into a Union Jackshirt rally (she writes a speech for the character of George III which begins: ‘Hail! And thanks for all your good wishes, we are happy to be among our loyal Aryan subjects of Chalford and district...’). The pageant is disrupted by a band of pacifist aesthetes who not only take on the Fascists but also prove themselves better fighters. Chief amongst the aesthetes is a man called Mr Leader: a pointed dig at Mosley, whom Nancy always called ‘The Leader’ when she was not calling him something worse.
He was furious about the book and, after his marriage to Diana in 1936 (in Goebbels’ drawing-room, with Hitler present), refused to have Nancy at their home in Staffordshire. Unity’s reaction one can only guess at. By the time of the book’s publication, in June 1935, she was far enough gone in her passion for Nazism to have written a letter to Der Stürmer8 whose postscript read: ‘I want everyone to know I am a Jew hater.’ This made her immensely welcome in the Führer’s inner circle, but it also meant that Nancy cared little for her opinion of Wigs on the Green. ‘Darling Head of Bone & Heart of Stone’, she wrote to Unity, ‘Oh dear oh dear the book comes out on Tuesday... Oh dear I wish I had never been born into such a family of fanatics... Please don’t read the book if it’s going to stone you up against me.’ For all its sisterly wheedling, the tone of this letter is essentially indifferent.
With Diana, as always, it was different. The only time Nancy strikes a note of anxiety in her letter to Unity is when she refers to ‘Nardie’ (another nickname for Diana): ‘Oh dear, I am going to Oxford with Nardie tomorrow, our last day I suppose before the clouds of her displeasure burst over me.’ Which they did, inevitably, causing Nancy genuine disquiet. After all, Diana was her equal within the family. She was the White Queen with the dark and mysterious soul who stood in opposition to her blacker but simpler sister, and her antagonism was something that Nancy both feared and provoked.
Yet a year earlier Nancy had written another tease on Oswald Mosley. He appeared as a character called the Little Leader in her unpublished story ‘Two Old Ladies of Eaton Square’.9 Diana had apparently not minded about this: perhaps she was unworried by jokes about the Leader arming himself with ‘Ex Lax the delicious chocolate laxative’ (Mussolini’s men used castor oil upon their opponents), or perhaps she dismissed it as a one-off. The sisters were close in 1933, providing mutual support at a time when Hamish was dumping Nancy and Mosley was dancing between mistresses. Therefore Diana probably saw no spite in what Nancy wrote, only the usual irresistible urge to shriek.
When the tease reappeared, however, in Wigs on the Green, full-grown and ready for public consumption, she felt very differently. And although Nancy may have hoped that Diana would take the book in the same spirit as she had taken ‘Two Old Ladies of Eaton Square’ – or even that she would see it as a friendly warning – she cannot really have thought she would get away with it. Excising a few passages was a concession of sorts. But the book was always going to cause trouble within the family, and Nancy must have known it.
Her letter to Diana just before publication is sternly self-defensive, but clearly uncomfortable.
&n
bsp; ...I read it all through & found that it would be impossible to eliminate the bits that you & the Leader objected to. As you know our finances are such that I really couldn’t afford to scrap the book then. I did however hold it up for about a month (thus missing the Spring list)...
...I am very much worried at the idea of publishing a book which you may object to. It completely blights all the pleasure which one ordinarily feels in a forthcoming book.
And yet, consider. A book of this kind can’t do your movement any harm. Honestly, if I thought it could set the Leader back by so much as half an hour I would have scrapped it, or indeed never written it in the first place...
In which case, Diana no doubt thought, why did you write the damn thing?
It was a question of principle. Nancy held to her right to publish her book, and Diana held to her right to condemn it: both, in true 1930s style, saw their beliefs as more important than their relationship (although literary rather than bloody, it was a stand-off along the lines of the one envisaged by Jessica and Unity, when each imagined what they would do if ordered to shoot the other). Yet as Nancy herself always said in her books (including Wigs on the Green), with women it is the personal that counts, and there was a personal element to this conflict with Diana. Without even realising it, Nancy may have been perturbed by her sister’s immersion in this cause and this man. She saw that they brought to Diana a fulfilment that she herself could barely comprehend. Nowadays, of course, it is a deep mystery that Diana – so civilised, so beautiful, so full of humour – should have thrown in her lot with Fascism and Mosley. But she did it at a time when things were very different, and she stuck to it (above all else, she was loyal to her husband). Mosley was a charismatic and attractive man – women fell for him constantly – and, whether one likes it or not, his sexual appeal was bound up with his political daring. Although Nancy saw through his demagogic pyrotechnics, she may still have been put out by the sparks that flew between him and her sister; no one ever looked at her the way that Mosley looked at Diana.
Life in a Cold Climate Page 15