The Mitfords
May. 18th, 2011 09:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessThe Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, by Mary S. Lovell and and Wait for Me: Memoirs, by Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire.
I can't resist big gossipy biographies about British aristocrats – an admitted weakness – and the bigger and more gossipier they are, the more irresistible they are. Thus, it was probably inevitable that I would pick up Deborah Mitford's Memoirs, and, after a moment, a volume covering the lives of her and her sisters, since between them the six Mitford sisters knew absolutely everybody. Not surprisingly, since one became an admired novelist, two diehard Nazis and intimates of Hitler, one a communist and American civil rights leader, and one a duchess and sister-in-law of one of the Kennedys. As their biographer notes, two of them were also among the very few people who could claim friendship with both Hitler and Winston Churchill; another had a torrid affair with Charles de Gaulle's second in command, a third was close friends with Maya Angelou, and so on. And on. And on. Even Scott Fitzgerald, Fred Astaire and Hillary Rodham Clinton sneak in here. It's like a roster of the 300 most influential people of the 20th century. (Lovell, clearly overwhelmed with the social schedule of three of the sisters, drops about 3/4 of the names, but the Duchess of Devonshire cheerfully includes every last one of them – I think it's about 800 people in total – perhaps feeling that even the dead would be hurt at getting left out. Frankly by page 400 I was reeling, and I freely admit that my eyes glazed over at the chatter about Charles and Diana's wedding because it was Just Too Much.)
Also, they inspired three Harry Potter characters: Narcissa Malfoy (loosely based on the third sister, Diana Mosley), Bellatrix Lestrange (less loosely based on the fourth sister, Unity Mitford), and Andromeda Tonks (loosely based on Decca Mitford.) This little tidbit is not in either book, and I'm not sure if anyone has informed Deborah Mitford that Helena Bonham Carter's performance was inspired by her sister's life. (The Bonham Carter family were acquainted with the Mitfords, although I don't know if Helena Bonham Carter ever met any of them. Quite possibly the Duchess of Devonshire since see above.)
As you might be guessing, the sisters were notorious. And as you might be guessing, both books turned out to be very problematic indeed, and not just because of the various royal weddings and presidential funerals and cheerful memories of Teddy Kennedy landing on the lawn.
First, a lengthier introduction, with names, to the Mitford sisters. Their father, a baron, was an English eccentric, and, worse for the sisters, the sort of English eccentric that liked to invest in get rich quick schemes that slowly and unsteadily erode away at the family income, forcing their lodgings to get worse and worse. Even in DD's restrained, more sympathetic portrayal, he comes across as utterly awful: bad tempered, undependable, insulting to his children, and – astonishingly for the father of four published and highly successful writers – a hater of books. This, and an ongoing succession of governesses, and apparent neglect from their mother, led to the girls growing up very much as individualists, and often as rebels. But he and his wife were related to the very top of English society – including, critically, Winston Churchill – which led to all six girls being introduced as debutantes, and gave them the connections to move everywhere in society.
In the case of Nancy, the eldest, this went poorly, leaving her at a loss for some years until she discovered her talent for writing, working first with society articles before turning to novels that embarrassed and alarmed her family (following in the footsteps of Evelyn Waugh, she used her family for models), but were bestsellers, giving her the financial independence and security she had craved, if not the emotional security of a solid relationship; she continually fell for unavailable men. Pamela, the second, became known as the boring one, although since John Betjeman fell in love with her, I'm assuming something was there, and she did marry an exciting scientist, and Lovell, to try to spice things up in this dull life notes that Pamela was one of the first women to fly across the Atlantic. So, not totally boring, although that's about it on the Interesting Things About Pamela list. (She's the only sister not to rate her own Wikipedia page.)
Diana initially married one of the wealthy Guinness heirs, and then, bored, met and fell deeply in love with Oswald Mosley, one of 20th century England's most scummy men, bar none, and not just because he was a diehard fascist. The real problem with Mosley was that he was a hypocritical diehard fascist, who said loudly and often that the true problem with society was decadence and immorality, while leading a flamboyantly decadent and immoral life. Contemporaries compared his personality and morals unfavorably to Hitler's. To give Lovell her due, she tries very hard to give a balanced portrait of the man, who contemporaries also said had brilliant political instincts, was a brilliant, charismatic, mesmerizing debater and speaker, not to mention a great fencer, if hobbled by an overwhelming and terrible egotism, and if not for that whole unfortunate fascism thing might well have ended up as a prime minister.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to see Mosley as anything but a thoroughly despicable man: he cheated obsessively on his first wife (and kept a separate apartment with a huge bed on a raised dais to accommodate this), hurting her deeply before leaving her and his children for Diana. He continued to embrace fascism and nationalism even after World War II, and even campaigned on a platform that urged laws to prevent non-whites from entering Britain. Lowell tries to claim here that Mosley did this for "economic" reasons and that he wasn't "anti-black" (the quotes around "economic" are mine; the quotes around "anti-black" are hers) but I have to say that setting up immigration restrictions based entirely on skin color -- not country of origin or economic class, but skin color – sound pretty damn racist to me. Even his white contemporaries in the 1930s and 1950s, not exactly rousing times for racial parity anywhere -- called him racist because he was racist, even if he didn't "personally" hate any black people. (I can't find any evidence that he actually tried to meet any black people either.) He pursued and advocated for policies that deliberately injured black people, Indians and Pakistanis, and Jews. So, again, racist. Lowell's other attempts to say, "Well, Mosley wasn't really racist" are, to say the least, weak.
More on this on a bit.
Which leads us to Unity, who actually fell in love with Hitler.
No, seriously. She actually fell in love with Hitler.
Contemporaries found her doing target practice with guns, saying that she was practicing shooting Jews. I had to put the book down for a bit and step away. (This is not in the Duchess of Devonshire's memoirs.) When Germany declared war on Britain, Unity, seeing the end of her hopes of an alliance between Germany and England, and also the end to her hopes of marrying Hitler, shot herself in the head. This did not work the way she had hoped; Hitler paid for her medical treatment by Germany's best doctors, then arranged for her to travel to Switzerland, where her family picked her up and took her back to England. She suffered from brain damage and died a few years later.
This is a problem for her sisters and biographers to deal with. DD says, flatly, that the family knew Unity's views, and loved her anyway, and agrees that it is difficult to explain why, and that, in the end, she simply can't: that was just the way Unity was. Biographers have attempted to explain this as jealousy of her older, more talented sisters (forgetting that one of these more talented sisters was actually younger, and while the youngest sister of the group could certainly be classified as an elitist, she was not a Nazi.)
It is perhaps not surprising that the fifth sister, Jessica, known as Decca, fled the family at the age of 18, marrying a glamourous cousin who was off to the Spanish Civil War. She and her husband eventually emigrated to the United States. The husband then volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force and died. Decca remained in the U.S., marrying civil rights lawyer Robert Treufalt, joining the American Communist Party, working as an investigative journalist and professor, and more or less maintaining ties to most of her family members – not Diana.
The sixth sister, Deborah, who I'll be calling DD, married the younger son of the Duke of Devonshire, which made her the sister in law of Kathleen Kennedy, sister of John and Bobby and Teddy Kennedy. When the elder son died in World War II, Deborah's husband became the heir and later the Duke of Devonshire, working frantically (this part of her memoirs rings very true) to preserve as many of the castles with the Devonshire estate as possible. We have the Devonshires to thank for the ongoing appearances of Chatsworth, their chief home, in various Pride and Prejudice movies. Deborah battled problematic pregnancies and tragic stillbirths; her husband battled survivor guilt and alcoholism, and in between house remodeling and preservation, they threw a lot of parties.
Lovell's biography runs into problems right from the introduction, when she notes that it's "puzzling" that historians and the public have forgiven Decca for her Communist ties, especially after Decca admitted that she had been wrong about Stalin and decried Stalin's tactics, but adamantly refuse to forgive Diana or Unity, especially Diana. This lack of forgiveness, Lovell says, must be because Diana was "unflinchingly honest" (terms used by Lovell and DD, not me) and because she was so honest, refused to apologize for her support of the Nazis or admit that her association with Hitler had been a mistake. And, Lovell says, people have a problem dealing with Diana's honesty.
Except.
This is not honesty.
This is self-delusion on a grand scale.
Diana Mosley was certainly not the only British person to support or admire Hitler in the years before World War II, before the revelations of the horrors of the concentration camps. But even leaving the evils of Nazism aside, for a moment, Diana Mosley's friendship with and support of Hitler destroyed her husband's career, landed her in jail, and led to her sister's attempted suicide and early death.
In no way can this be seen as a positive development. And of course people will continue to despise Diana, and not Decca: Decca admitted she was wrong. Also, Decca, beyond being a member of the American Communist Party and active in civil rights issues, also was a powerful investigative journalist who wrote several bestselling books, actually – in direct contrast to her sister, contributing something to society. And, although she fought in the Spanish Civil War, she did not offer friendship, political support and eternal devotion to Joseph Stalin. More than one person, including Hitler's girlfriend, believed that Unity would actually marry Hitler.
And while I don't think it's particularly helpful to attempt to judge/compare who was worse, Hitler or Stalin, it is pretty easy to judge/compare Decca, Diana and Unity. Decca spent her life fighting for the rights of others and lost her first husband to war; Diana spent her life raising money for fascist radio stations, spent World War II in jail and spent the years after the war living in lovely houses and holding to anti-Semitic views. Lovell tries to make us feel sympathetic to Diana's World War II plight, and it is true that Diana and her husband were incarcerated without a trial. It is also true that Winston Churchhill was worried about putting them on trial, partly because Diana was his cousin and related to several other prominent politicians and military personnel, and partly because given the mood of the country, a fair trial would have been difficult.
I am not being entirely fair to Diana here either: after the war, she did write a number of biographies and literary reviews and was not completely the mere leech on society that I am depicting her as. She also, by all accounts, was an extraordinarily charming woman who could easily put people under her spell, and could be kind and supportive and devoted to her husband.
But this isn't the only problem. Lovell's biography contains multiple small contradictions here and there, particularly in describing the marriage of the Mitford parents. Four of the sisters described the marriage and their family life as tense, awkward, emotionally abusive, and humiliating. Their lives seem to bear this out: only Decca, who ran away from the family managed two happy, contented marriages – and that only after a troubled adolescence. Diana's second marriage seems to have been a definite improvement over her first, and she and her husband were certainly deeply in love, but it, too, was marred by infidelity and other issues. Nancy never had a happy relationship; Pamela's marriage ended in divorce, and before that, she appears to have suffered from reoccurring bouts of depression; DD suffered from depression (admittedly triggered by outside factors) and married an alcoholic, and Unity, again, fell in love with Hitler. And although many of the sisters ended up as high achievers, they also experienced severe self-doubt and self-esteem issues throughout their lives. I suppose some of this can be blamed on the artistic temperament (especially in the cases of Nancy and Decca), but not all of it (especially in the case of Pamela.)
But Lovell – taking her cue from DD, the youngest daughter, who clearly wants to soften her childhood tales – chooses to try to undermine the four separate and credible accounts of a problematic childhood, accounts supported by close friends of the family and by the supposedly unflinchingly honest Diana Mosley, in favor of accounts by acquaintances who would pop in for a few hours and by the account of DD, who here and in other places prefers to soften her accounts.
Which leads me to the problems with DD's autobiography, which, when not talking about house restoring, goes into name-dropping on a grand scale with bits like, so, we had tea with Hitler for two hours which I suppose was remarkable but only because he delayed a train trip for two hours just to have tea with us because my sister was SO GORGEOUS and then we went and met the Kennedys (JFK and family) and danced with them. As one does. And the memoir is just filled with this sort of thing. I credit DD with being one of the few who can claim to have had tea and chatted with Hitler and then danced with John F. Kennedy but the effect is a bit quelling. Then, too, DD, despite attempts to show herself as an occasional impoverished aristocrat, has literally no idea what actual poverty is. Even BEFORE she becomes a duchess. Ooh, I was poor because while I was staying at Cliveden (home of the fabulously wealthy Nancy Astor) where we were served five or six course meals three to four times and day and chatting up with Winston Churchill I had to pay for my own stamps. I know. The horror. This is not helped by a scene later in the book where she explains that when she needs to relax, she of course goes to look at her privately owned Velaquez painting. As one does.) Sigh.
It gets even worse when she tries to complain about her sister's incarceration during World War II FOR SUPPORTING THE NAZIS. (Most of this incarceration was under house arrest, and Diana herself was to look back at it as one of the best times in her life since she was allowed unlimited, devoted time with the love of her life.) DD also does not come off too well when she attacks her oldest sister, Nancy, for (justly) telling the British government that Diana might be a German spy. DD claims that this attack came from long held, pathetic sisterly jealousies. Or, you know, Nancy's knowledge that DIANA WAS A NAZI.
I really shouldn't have to keep focusing on this point, especially since Diana Mosley herself regarded her imprisonment more reasonably.
Things don't exactly improve when DD heads over to the States to visit her communist sister, Decca, and complains that none of the Communists are able to see other viewpoints and that just made the whole trip uncomfortable – plus, Decca stole some towels which was just rude – and immediately follows this up with a description of her trip to Brazil which was all marvelous because, parties, parties, parties. The odd thing is that here and there DD does show a hint of depth, especially when she discusses the death of those close to her in World War II, and when she talks, more bitterly, about her miscarriages, and the deaths of two children hours after birth, still painful to her decades later. She also notes her shock at how whites in Africa treated blacks when she travelled in Africa helping to represent the British empire. But apart from these moments, the self-awareness, it is lacking, in an often mind-boggling fashion. I grant that she is a duchess and all that, but she was also the sister of a civil rights leader, a friend of the Kennedys and Winston Churchill, and surely some of that must have slipped through? Apparently not.
And oddly, none of these people are studied or discussed in any great depth at all – the occasional anecdote, but that's about all. And we are not talking about boring people here: DD had tea with Hitler, Prince Charles, JFK, Fred Astaire, John Betjeman, Winston Churchill, Ted Kennedy, Lady Antonia Fraser and so on. Surely one of these people must have had been interesting, or had something to say other than a not very funny joke or anecdote about thinking that JFK really could be president one day? Ok, maybe not Prince Charles, but one of the others?
This leads to a related problem, one that leaks over to Lovell's biography: the excuses for racism, the attempts to cover up facts other than the number of famous people DD has met, particularly true in the case of Unity and Decca. DD clearly never got over Decca's betrayal, especially since she – supposedly her sister's closest friend and confidant – was never warned in advance. And DD was troubled by people questioning her ongoing loyalty to Unity. DD's response? To paint Decca as the bad guy, to claim that Nancy was just making things up, that Unity was just one of many girls who followed National Socialism (true, but she was one of only a very few girls to commit suicide over it), to say that her family life was really not that bad.
And then to follow this up by claiming that the two sisters she accuses of betrayal and exaggeration were Nancy the socialist and Decca the Marxist, and by becoming the Duchess of Devonshire –about as far from Marxism as you can get. I've always imagined Decca cheerfully explaining to her radical left – very, very radical left – friends that she was the sister of a real Duchess frantically trying to keep the great house of Chatsworth a going concern after centuries of happy oppression and imagining the responses.
Something very wrong is going on here, and it deserves a deeper look than Lovell gives it.
But for all my critiques of both books, I did want to mention one refreshing note. I have previously complained about biographies that take tremendous leaps to try to deny the existence of bisexuality. Not so these two. Possibly because the one Mitford son, Tom (tragically killed in World War II) was openly and flagrantly bisexual, often sleeping with men that his sisters were pursuing, and then turning around and sleeping with those men's wives, or possibly because of DD's straightforward whatever attitude towards gays and bisexuals (she unhesitatingly issued invitations to same sex partners of friends and relatives) this biography is open and accepting of gays, lesbians and bisexuals.
I can't resist big gossipy biographies about British aristocrats – an admitted weakness – and the bigger and more gossipier they are, the more irresistible they are. Thus, it was probably inevitable that I would pick up Deborah Mitford's Memoirs, and, after a moment, a volume covering the lives of her and her sisters, since between them the six Mitford sisters knew absolutely everybody. Not surprisingly, since one became an admired novelist, two diehard Nazis and intimates of Hitler, one a communist and American civil rights leader, and one a duchess and sister-in-law of one of the Kennedys. As their biographer notes, two of them were also among the very few people who could claim friendship with both Hitler and Winston Churchill; another had a torrid affair with Charles de Gaulle's second in command, a third was close friends with Maya Angelou, and so on. And on. And on. Even Scott Fitzgerald, Fred Astaire and Hillary Rodham Clinton sneak in here. It's like a roster of the 300 most influential people of the 20th century. (Lovell, clearly overwhelmed with the social schedule of three of the sisters, drops about 3/4 of the names, but the Duchess of Devonshire cheerfully includes every last one of them – I think it's about 800 people in total – perhaps feeling that even the dead would be hurt at getting left out. Frankly by page 400 I was reeling, and I freely admit that my eyes glazed over at the chatter about Charles and Diana's wedding because it was Just Too Much.)
Also, they inspired three Harry Potter characters: Narcissa Malfoy (loosely based on the third sister, Diana Mosley), Bellatrix Lestrange (less loosely based on the fourth sister, Unity Mitford), and Andromeda Tonks (loosely based on Decca Mitford.) This little tidbit is not in either book, and I'm not sure if anyone has informed Deborah Mitford that Helena Bonham Carter's performance was inspired by her sister's life. (The Bonham Carter family were acquainted with the Mitfords, although I don't know if Helena Bonham Carter ever met any of them. Quite possibly the Duchess of Devonshire since see above.)
As you might be guessing, the sisters were notorious. And as you might be guessing, both books turned out to be very problematic indeed, and not just because of the various royal weddings and presidential funerals and cheerful memories of Teddy Kennedy landing on the lawn.
First, a lengthier introduction, with names, to the Mitford sisters. Their father, a baron, was an English eccentric, and, worse for the sisters, the sort of English eccentric that liked to invest in get rich quick schemes that slowly and unsteadily erode away at the family income, forcing their lodgings to get worse and worse. Even in DD's restrained, more sympathetic portrayal, he comes across as utterly awful: bad tempered, undependable, insulting to his children, and – astonishingly for the father of four published and highly successful writers – a hater of books. This, and an ongoing succession of governesses, and apparent neglect from their mother, led to the girls growing up very much as individualists, and often as rebels. But he and his wife were related to the very top of English society – including, critically, Winston Churchill – which led to all six girls being introduced as debutantes, and gave them the connections to move everywhere in society.
In the case of Nancy, the eldest, this went poorly, leaving her at a loss for some years until she discovered her talent for writing, working first with society articles before turning to novels that embarrassed and alarmed her family (following in the footsteps of Evelyn Waugh, she used her family for models), but were bestsellers, giving her the financial independence and security she had craved, if not the emotional security of a solid relationship; she continually fell for unavailable men. Pamela, the second, became known as the boring one, although since John Betjeman fell in love with her, I'm assuming something was there, and she did marry an exciting scientist, and Lovell, to try to spice things up in this dull life notes that Pamela was one of the first women to fly across the Atlantic. So, not totally boring, although that's about it on the Interesting Things About Pamela list. (She's the only sister not to rate her own Wikipedia page.)
Diana initially married one of the wealthy Guinness heirs, and then, bored, met and fell deeply in love with Oswald Mosley, one of 20th century England's most scummy men, bar none, and not just because he was a diehard fascist. The real problem with Mosley was that he was a hypocritical diehard fascist, who said loudly and often that the true problem with society was decadence and immorality, while leading a flamboyantly decadent and immoral life. Contemporaries compared his personality and morals unfavorably to Hitler's. To give Lovell her due, she tries very hard to give a balanced portrait of the man, who contemporaries also said had brilliant political instincts, was a brilliant, charismatic, mesmerizing debater and speaker, not to mention a great fencer, if hobbled by an overwhelming and terrible egotism, and if not for that whole unfortunate fascism thing might well have ended up as a prime minister.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to see Mosley as anything but a thoroughly despicable man: he cheated obsessively on his first wife (and kept a separate apartment with a huge bed on a raised dais to accommodate this), hurting her deeply before leaving her and his children for Diana. He continued to embrace fascism and nationalism even after World War II, and even campaigned on a platform that urged laws to prevent non-whites from entering Britain. Lowell tries to claim here that Mosley did this for "economic" reasons and that he wasn't "anti-black" (the quotes around "economic" are mine; the quotes around "anti-black" are hers) but I have to say that setting up immigration restrictions based entirely on skin color -- not country of origin or economic class, but skin color – sound pretty damn racist to me. Even his white contemporaries in the 1930s and 1950s, not exactly rousing times for racial parity anywhere -- called him racist because he was racist, even if he didn't "personally" hate any black people. (I can't find any evidence that he actually tried to meet any black people either.) He pursued and advocated for policies that deliberately injured black people, Indians and Pakistanis, and Jews. So, again, racist. Lowell's other attempts to say, "Well, Mosley wasn't really racist" are, to say the least, weak.
More on this on a bit.
Which leads us to Unity, who actually fell in love with Hitler.
No, seriously. She actually fell in love with Hitler.
Contemporaries found her doing target practice with guns, saying that she was practicing shooting Jews. I had to put the book down for a bit and step away. (This is not in the Duchess of Devonshire's memoirs.) When Germany declared war on Britain, Unity, seeing the end of her hopes of an alliance between Germany and England, and also the end to her hopes of marrying Hitler, shot herself in the head. This did not work the way she had hoped; Hitler paid for her medical treatment by Germany's best doctors, then arranged for her to travel to Switzerland, where her family picked her up and took her back to England. She suffered from brain damage and died a few years later.
This is a problem for her sisters and biographers to deal with. DD says, flatly, that the family knew Unity's views, and loved her anyway, and agrees that it is difficult to explain why, and that, in the end, she simply can't: that was just the way Unity was. Biographers have attempted to explain this as jealousy of her older, more talented sisters (forgetting that one of these more talented sisters was actually younger, and while the youngest sister of the group could certainly be classified as an elitist, she was not a Nazi.)
It is perhaps not surprising that the fifth sister, Jessica, known as Decca, fled the family at the age of 18, marrying a glamourous cousin who was off to the Spanish Civil War. She and her husband eventually emigrated to the United States. The husband then volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force and died. Decca remained in the U.S., marrying civil rights lawyer Robert Treufalt, joining the American Communist Party, working as an investigative journalist and professor, and more or less maintaining ties to most of her family members – not Diana.
The sixth sister, Deborah, who I'll be calling DD, married the younger son of the Duke of Devonshire, which made her the sister in law of Kathleen Kennedy, sister of John and Bobby and Teddy Kennedy. When the elder son died in World War II, Deborah's husband became the heir and later the Duke of Devonshire, working frantically (this part of her memoirs rings very true) to preserve as many of the castles with the Devonshire estate as possible. We have the Devonshires to thank for the ongoing appearances of Chatsworth, their chief home, in various Pride and Prejudice movies. Deborah battled problematic pregnancies and tragic stillbirths; her husband battled survivor guilt and alcoholism, and in between house remodeling and preservation, they threw a lot of parties.
Lovell's biography runs into problems right from the introduction, when she notes that it's "puzzling" that historians and the public have forgiven Decca for her Communist ties, especially after Decca admitted that she had been wrong about Stalin and decried Stalin's tactics, but adamantly refuse to forgive Diana or Unity, especially Diana. This lack of forgiveness, Lovell says, must be because Diana was "unflinchingly honest" (terms used by Lovell and DD, not me) and because she was so honest, refused to apologize for her support of the Nazis or admit that her association with Hitler had been a mistake. And, Lovell says, people have a problem dealing with Diana's honesty.
Except.
This is not honesty.
This is self-delusion on a grand scale.
Diana Mosley was certainly not the only British person to support or admire Hitler in the years before World War II, before the revelations of the horrors of the concentration camps. But even leaving the evils of Nazism aside, for a moment, Diana Mosley's friendship with and support of Hitler destroyed her husband's career, landed her in jail, and led to her sister's attempted suicide and early death.
In no way can this be seen as a positive development. And of course people will continue to despise Diana, and not Decca: Decca admitted she was wrong. Also, Decca, beyond being a member of the American Communist Party and active in civil rights issues, also was a powerful investigative journalist who wrote several bestselling books, actually – in direct contrast to her sister, contributing something to society. And, although she fought in the Spanish Civil War, she did not offer friendship, political support and eternal devotion to Joseph Stalin. More than one person, including Hitler's girlfriend, believed that Unity would actually marry Hitler.
And while I don't think it's particularly helpful to attempt to judge/compare who was worse, Hitler or Stalin, it is pretty easy to judge/compare Decca, Diana and Unity. Decca spent her life fighting for the rights of others and lost her first husband to war; Diana spent her life raising money for fascist radio stations, spent World War II in jail and spent the years after the war living in lovely houses and holding to anti-Semitic views. Lovell tries to make us feel sympathetic to Diana's World War II plight, and it is true that Diana and her husband were incarcerated without a trial. It is also true that Winston Churchhill was worried about putting them on trial, partly because Diana was his cousin and related to several other prominent politicians and military personnel, and partly because given the mood of the country, a fair trial would have been difficult.
I am not being entirely fair to Diana here either: after the war, she did write a number of biographies and literary reviews and was not completely the mere leech on society that I am depicting her as. She also, by all accounts, was an extraordinarily charming woman who could easily put people under her spell, and could be kind and supportive and devoted to her husband.
But this isn't the only problem. Lovell's biography contains multiple small contradictions here and there, particularly in describing the marriage of the Mitford parents. Four of the sisters described the marriage and their family life as tense, awkward, emotionally abusive, and humiliating. Their lives seem to bear this out: only Decca, who ran away from the family managed two happy, contented marriages – and that only after a troubled adolescence. Diana's second marriage seems to have been a definite improvement over her first, and she and her husband were certainly deeply in love, but it, too, was marred by infidelity and other issues. Nancy never had a happy relationship; Pamela's marriage ended in divorce, and before that, she appears to have suffered from reoccurring bouts of depression; DD suffered from depression (admittedly triggered by outside factors) and married an alcoholic, and Unity, again, fell in love with Hitler. And although many of the sisters ended up as high achievers, they also experienced severe self-doubt and self-esteem issues throughout their lives. I suppose some of this can be blamed on the artistic temperament (especially in the cases of Nancy and Decca), but not all of it (especially in the case of Pamela.)
But Lovell – taking her cue from DD, the youngest daughter, who clearly wants to soften her childhood tales – chooses to try to undermine the four separate and credible accounts of a problematic childhood, accounts supported by close friends of the family and by the supposedly unflinchingly honest Diana Mosley, in favor of accounts by acquaintances who would pop in for a few hours and by the account of DD, who here and in other places prefers to soften her accounts.
Which leads me to the problems with DD's autobiography, which, when not talking about house restoring, goes into name-dropping on a grand scale with bits like, so, we had tea with Hitler for two hours which I suppose was remarkable but only because he delayed a train trip for two hours just to have tea with us because my sister was SO GORGEOUS and then we went and met the Kennedys (JFK and family) and danced with them. As one does. And the memoir is just filled with this sort of thing. I credit DD with being one of the few who can claim to have had tea and chatted with Hitler and then danced with John F. Kennedy but the effect is a bit quelling. Then, too, DD, despite attempts to show herself as an occasional impoverished aristocrat, has literally no idea what actual poverty is. Even BEFORE she becomes a duchess. Ooh, I was poor because while I was staying at Cliveden (home of the fabulously wealthy Nancy Astor) where we were served five or six course meals three to four times and day and chatting up with Winston Churchill I had to pay for my own stamps. I know. The horror. This is not helped by a scene later in the book where she explains that when she needs to relax, she of course goes to look at her privately owned Velaquez painting. As one does.) Sigh.
It gets even worse when she tries to complain about her sister's incarceration during World War II FOR SUPPORTING THE NAZIS. (Most of this incarceration was under house arrest, and Diana herself was to look back at it as one of the best times in her life since she was allowed unlimited, devoted time with the love of her life.) DD also does not come off too well when she attacks her oldest sister, Nancy, for (justly) telling the British government that Diana might be a German spy. DD claims that this attack came from long held, pathetic sisterly jealousies. Or, you know, Nancy's knowledge that DIANA WAS A NAZI.
I really shouldn't have to keep focusing on this point, especially since Diana Mosley herself regarded her imprisonment more reasonably.
Things don't exactly improve when DD heads over to the States to visit her communist sister, Decca, and complains that none of the Communists are able to see other viewpoints and that just made the whole trip uncomfortable – plus, Decca stole some towels which was just rude – and immediately follows this up with a description of her trip to Brazil which was all marvelous because, parties, parties, parties. The odd thing is that here and there DD does show a hint of depth, especially when she discusses the death of those close to her in World War II, and when she talks, more bitterly, about her miscarriages, and the deaths of two children hours after birth, still painful to her decades later. She also notes her shock at how whites in Africa treated blacks when she travelled in Africa helping to represent the British empire. But apart from these moments, the self-awareness, it is lacking, in an often mind-boggling fashion. I grant that she is a duchess and all that, but she was also the sister of a civil rights leader, a friend of the Kennedys and Winston Churchill, and surely some of that must have slipped through? Apparently not.
And oddly, none of these people are studied or discussed in any great depth at all – the occasional anecdote, but that's about all. And we are not talking about boring people here: DD had tea with Hitler, Prince Charles, JFK, Fred Astaire, John Betjeman, Winston Churchill, Ted Kennedy, Lady Antonia Fraser and so on. Surely one of these people must have had been interesting, or had something to say other than a not very funny joke or anecdote about thinking that JFK really could be president one day? Ok, maybe not Prince Charles, but one of the others?
This leads to a related problem, one that leaks over to Lovell's biography: the excuses for racism, the attempts to cover up facts other than the number of famous people DD has met, particularly true in the case of Unity and Decca. DD clearly never got over Decca's betrayal, especially since she – supposedly her sister's closest friend and confidant – was never warned in advance. And DD was troubled by people questioning her ongoing loyalty to Unity. DD's response? To paint Decca as the bad guy, to claim that Nancy was just making things up, that Unity was just one of many girls who followed National Socialism (true, but she was one of only a very few girls to commit suicide over it), to say that her family life was really not that bad.
And then to follow this up by claiming that the two sisters she accuses of betrayal and exaggeration were Nancy the socialist and Decca the Marxist, and by becoming the Duchess of Devonshire –about as far from Marxism as you can get. I've always imagined Decca cheerfully explaining to her radical left – very, very radical left – friends that she was the sister of a real Duchess frantically trying to keep the great house of Chatsworth a going concern after centuries of happy oppression and imagining the responses.
Something very wrong is going on here, and it deserves a deeper look than Lovell gives it.
But for all my critiques of both books, I did want to mention one refreshing note. I have previously complained about biographies that take tremendous leaps to try to deny the existence of bisexuality. Not so these two. Possibly because the one Mitford son, Tom (tragically killed in World War II) was openly and flagrantly bisexual, often sleeping with men that his sisters were pursuing, and then turning around and sleeping with those men's wives, or possibly because of DD's straightforward whatever attitude towards gays and bisexuals (she unhesitatingly issued invitations to same sex partners of friends and relatives) this biography is open and accepting of gays, lesbians and bisexuals.
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Date: 2011-05-18 05:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-18 06:34 pm (UTC)Although as far as I know none of the Mitfords had wands or anything.
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Date: 2011-05-18 06:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-05-19 01:03 am (UTC)