This is the slightly modified text of an audio piece made for the literary podcast Tsundoku, ‘Tsundoku’ being the name we’ve borrowed from the Japanese for the pile of books by your bedside that you’re halfway through or are about to read or intend to read some day.
I’m taking a break from Dead White Males (see earlier post about Aldous Huxley) and, having come across a Nancy Mitford novel I hadn’t yet read, I decided to ask the same question – why should we read them? – of dead white females.
There is the broad question of why should we read the works of dead writers at all? The short answer is that if you want to understand the past, you have to read it the way it was told by people who were actually there.
You can read history books, you can research the archives, but you won’t get the same fully-coloured picture of what life was like for a particular type of person at a particular time and in a particular place.
As for watching period movies or TV series, chances are you are going to get a bowdlerised version of the story, because faithful reproduction is out and reworking history to suit modern tastes and sensibilities is in. Just look at that to me inexplicably popular franchise Bridgerton. Even leaving aside the vexed issue of colorblind casting, it’s just modern soap opera in fancy dress. Fine, if all you want is entertainment, but if you want to understand the past, you have to read those who wrote it, the way they wrote it.
I’ve always been interested in early 20th century history in England: from the Edwardian era at the start, when British power and prestige were at their peak, to the postwar years and the decline of empire.
The Mitford sisters lived through all this, and their writings illuminate the customs, culture and attitudes of their class over the years of tumultuous change.
The Mitford sisters were the 6 daughters of Lord and Lady Redesdale, who were almost caricatures of the landed gentry that called their grand country mansions ‘houses’, set in extensive grounds they called ‘parks’, and who spent their days riding, hunting, and shooting, and trailed by dogs. There was one son who went to Oxford but he was killed in the War. The girls had no formal schooling whatsoever, but they somehow acquired formidable literacy and extensive knowledge of European languages, history and politics.
Nancy was the oldest, and though they all were prolific letter-writers and memoirists, she became The Writer of the family, capturing in fiction the picaresque, larger-than-life, sometimes horrifying, often amusing, always fascinating adventures of herself and her siblings, most famously in her books The Pursuit of Loveand Love In A Cold Climate. Her sister Diana, a famous beauty of her time, married the heir to the Guinness fortune but left him for Oswald Mosely, leader of the British fascists. Adolf Hitler went to their wedding. Diana and Moseley were both interned during the war, dobbed in by sister Nancy as security threats.
Sister Unity was a thoroughgoing Hitler groupie. At the outbreak of World War 2, in Germany, she shot herself and the family took her back to England to live out the rest of her life as an invalid. Sister Jessica became a communist, eloped with a like-minded young man and went off to the Spanish Civil War, becoming the model for Linda, the doomed heroine in The Pursuit of Love, except that unlike Linda Jessica didn’t die in childbirth but went to America where she wrote The American Way of Death, a scathing commentary on the venality of the American funeral industry. She also wrote Hons and Rebels, an autobiographical account of her childhood, ‘hons’ being short for ‘honourable’, as in ‘the Honourable Misses Mitford’. It included such astonishing stories as how Lord Redesdale used to stage full-on mounted hunts in the ancestral park, with the children as prey. And the children loved it!
The younger sisters proved to be pragmatic and adaptable. Sister Pamela became a farmer; sister Deborah married the Duke of Devonshire and became the chatelaine of Chatsworth House. She was one of the first aristocrats to grasp that in postwar Labor-governed England you could not maintain these grand stately homes under the old semi-feudal tenancy regime, and she turned it into a money-making concern by opening it up for public visitation.
In Nancy’s fictionalised family saga, they are the Radletts, and the crazy patriarch is Lord Alconleigh. Don’t Tell Alfred is the third and last in the trilogy, after The Pursuit of Love and Love In a Cold Climate, which finishes at the end of WWII. Don’t Tell Alfred takes us forward in time to the late 1950s. As with the two earlier books it’s narrated by Fanny, daughter of The Bolter, ‘bolter’ being what the English aristocracy calls a woman who abandons her class destiny – to marry and produce heirs – to run off with an unsuitable suitor. Fun facts: both Princess Diana’s mother and Sarah Ferguson’s mother were upper-class bolters. Diana’s mother ditched Lord Spencer to marry an Australian sheep-station owner, and Fergie’s mother ran off with an Argentine polo player.
Because her mother bolted, Fanny was raised by Lord and Lady Alconleigh in the company of their own children, her Radlett cousins. Traumatised by her mother’s absence and craving stability, she marries Alfred Wincham, a quiet, rather dull Oxford don who lives up to his promise as a devoted husband and father. They have four sons, one of them the orphaned child of Fanny’s cousin Linda, the one who died giving birth to the son of her aristocratic lover Fabrice, a French army officer killed in the war.
The story starts with Alfred being appointed British ambassador to Paris, an unlikely circumstance given Alfred is a theologian, not a diplomat. But Nancy Mitford having lived there from the end of the war until her death in 1973, it’s the natural choice for her satire on the manners, fashions and preoccupations of the Anglo-European elites at the time.
Don’t Tell Alfred was first published in 1960. I’m reading Penguin’s 2015 reissue.
It’s the first book I’ve come across that has the trigger warning about ‘depictions of prejudices that were commonplace in British society at the time it was written. These prejudices were wrong then and they are wrong today’. Penguin goes on to say they are publishing it as written because to do otherwise would be to pretend that such prejudices did not exist.
Good for them, and I might have missed something, but I’m not sure what prejudices they’re talking about. There’s no outright racial prejudice, because all the characters are white Anglos or Europeans.
It could be the class prejudice. Let’s not forget that it was Nancy Mitford who wrote the guide to ‘U’ (as in Upper-class) and non-U speech. How you could tell instantly who was ‘upper’ by whether they looked into a ‘mirror’ (lower) or a ‘looking-glass’ (upper). Or whether they had a ‘mantelpiece’ – (so common) or a ‘chimneypiece’ (the correct form). But this was all very tongue-in-cheek and she was actually criticised by writer and fellow aristocrat Evelyn Waugh for revealing the secret codes of their class.
You’d be on more solid ground with the class prejudice if you noted the way servants are only referred to as functionaries, with no authorial interest in their lives.
When Fanny and Alfred’s second son David arrives home from a part of the world described only as ‘the East’ , with a hippy-ish girlfriend and a baby in tow, Fanny says she’ll send her maid up to help them unpack. Fanny is interested in the infuriatingly taciturn girlfriend, and the baby, but only because they’re attached to her son. The girl may well be as ‘common’ as the maid, in whom she has no interest, but we never find out. All Fanny gets from David in response to her prying about the girl, the baby and their plans is a series of vaguely Buddhist pieties on the meaninglessness of social status, and time, and material possessions, and bourgeois morality….
David scorns his parents’ wealth and social standing, while taking full advantage of the comforts they offer. Mitford’s tone here is deeply satirical, both of David’s hypocrisy and of the half-baked eastern philosophy he spouts. Is THIS the ‘wrong’ prejudice Penguin is talking about? Is Mitford being anti-Asian? Before they learn that the baby, Chang, is actually the child of David’s Zen guru, they note that it is ‘yellow’. This could be construed as a racial slur, but Fanny adores the baby and wants to keep him.
There is of course that underlying assumption, present in English writing from Shakespeare’s time, of British superiority over foreigners in general. In the two earlier books in the trilogy, there’s a lovely comic thread to do with Lord Alconleigh’s oft-stated disdain for the non-British. When Linda is briefly stranded at a railway station in Paris before she is rescued by Fabrice, taken to his palatial Paris home and made his mistress, she wails ‘Fa(ther) is right! Abroad is beastly, and foreigners are fiends!’
In Alfred, Mitford’s British characters express the same exasperation with the ways of foreigners, in the privacy of the British embassy, of course.
If anything, Mitford’s strongest prejudice is against.….Americans. There’s the character who comes back from Soviet Russia, having once spouted fashionable pro-socialist views but now finding any number of excuses for the failings of the Workers Paradise. He comes across as an arrogant blowhard.
The wife of the American ambassador is a rich vein of satire. When this Mildred meets David, the son in thrall to eastern mysticism, she gives full rein to then contemporary psychobabble: she talks enthusiastically about the ‘interchange of ideas between sentient contemporary human creatures’ and ‘exploding the forms and habits of thought imposed by authority.’
Fanny says ‘one saw why she was such an asset in society; she could produce the right line of talk in its correct jargon for every occasion’.
There are two central comedic plotlines in Don’t Tell Alfred. The first is the refusal of the wife of the previous ambassador to vacate the premises.
The second is a diplomatic row between Britain and France over some uninhabited rocks in the English Channel known as Les Isles Minquieres.
In handling these nuisances Fanny and Alfred are plagued by the presence of the local correspondent for The Times of London, who for some reason has it in for Alfred and who never fails to spin against him in any diplomatic brouhaha.
Fanny calls in Uncle Davey, the family fixer whose charm and general savoir-faire have rescued the Radletts on previous occasions. He’s an upper-class eccentric in the grand tradition, but well-connected on both sides of the Channel. Fanny hopes he might be able to schmooze the dug-in previous ambassadress, mollify the French government over the Isles Minquieres, counter the animosity of the hostile newspaperman and most importantly, talk sense into her wayward children.
Both her eldest sons did well at Oxford but have chucked all that in for eastern mysticism in David’s case, and in the case of oldest son Basil, bumming around Europe, making money out of showing tourists around and planning to cadge more money off his wealthy grandfather to maybe set up a travel agency.
He talks like a beatnik, sort of. He calls people ‘kiddo’, and talks about ‘discs’, and of ‘pop’ and ‘jazz’ as if these categories are interchangeable. Elvis and rock ‘n roll don’t get a mention, although this is the late fifties. Mitford has inklings of the coming youth revolution but hasn’t quite grasped its lingo, I fear.
The two youngest boys are also a worry. They’ve run away from Eton and turn up in the retinue of a pop singer called Yanky Fonzy, and they talk of going ‘driftin’ with Yanky, ‘driftin’ being slang for ‘touring’.
Fanny and Alfred are not happy about their sons’ youthful rebelliousness, and there’s a certain amount of handwringing about Young Folks Today – cosseted, undisciplined, ungrateful etc etc – which strikes a contemporary, even a timeless note.
But their dismay is pretty mild. Alfred says he wouldn’t mind so much the boys calling him ‘Dad’ instead of Father, if only they didn’t pronounce it ‘dud’. Fanny reflects that her generation of young women were more outrageous in their rebellion against class destiny … her cousin Linda for instance running off with a communist and becoming pregnant to a married Frenchman who picks her up at a railway station.
There’s another young person in the story. Fanny’s niece Northey, an animal-loving proto-vegan recruited to the Embassy as a social secretary. She’s a scatterbrain, but she is pretty and immediately attracts a suite of male admirers, from whom she gleans vital social and political gossip, thus proving herself very useful to Fanny and Alfred. She causes Fanny some anxiety about unsuitable romantic liaisons but….
There’s a kind of underlying assumption that familial wealth and privilege will prove irresistible in the end and that the kids will eventually come home to it. As did Linda, and indeed Auntie Bolter, when the going got tough during the War.
Yanky Fonzy ….. it’s a curiously unlikely name for a fifties pop sensation. It’s actually a rather contrived play on words by Mitford which she uses as the comic punchline for the novel.
A riotous crowd turns up in the British embassy courtyard apparently yelling ‘Minquieres Francais!’, to the dismay of those within who think they’ve got a diplomatic incident on their hands over the disputed islands. But these supposed French patriots turn out to be a crowd of Yanky’s fans following their idol to the British Embassy, whence he has been brought by the Ambassador’s teenage sons. The crowd are actually yelling Yanky! Fonzy!
I came across a review of Don’t Tell Alfred written by the unapologetically elitist Evelyn Waugh shortly after the book’s publication in 1960. He concedes Nancy Mitford has created a nice social satire with it, while adding: ‘it is of course at heart a socialist tract.’ !
Don’t Tell Alfred isn’t especially insightful or funny. It’s a later-life work from a woman for whom the confines of class and social status have increasingly narrowed her ability to see the bigger, changing social picture. Mitford only dimly perceives the coming decline of the British aristocracy in the postwar world; Evelyn Waugh’s powers of perception seem to have atrophied altogether.
But you won’t find anything half as illuminating about class, time and place in Downton Abbey.
The Blessing is Nancy Mitford’s book about having a baby. It’s years since I’ve read it, so I barely remember it except that as with Don’t Tell Alfred it has the same detached, ironic tone Mitford uses when discussing personal and family matters. No gushy sentimentality here about the joys of motherhood. When you are pregnant you are ‘in pig’, and there’s no moaning about the ordeal of childbirth – it’s all very stiff upper lip for Mitford’s upper-class gels.
Nancy Mitford wrote a number of biographies of important historical figures, including Louis XIV, of France, ‘The Sun King’. I read it recently and found it a bit hard-going. It assumes the same familiarity with the history of European aristocracy on the part of her readers as she had by virtue of her own aristocratic breeding. It’s as if she’s only writing for readers of her own class. And it is, frankly, quite stodgy. There’s a lot to be said for the imperatives that drive modern biographers to make their stories lively and palatable, not to mention saleable, to people of all backgrounds.