… because in a 24-hour period:
1. Charlie sent me some random texts about the Mitford Sisters. For no particular reason. But if you need to talk about the Mitfords, I am obviously your girl.
2. My cousin Mike hooked me up with someone who needed my expertise on Colonel Tom Parker. There was a deadline. I bombarded the poor guy (whom I have never met before) with so much information (including this), that I felt like a schoolmarm, but he was very excited to get the homework.
Perhaps this is the cause of the upsurge in Mitford-related questions. No new ground here. I’m kind of pissed at the description of Mosley as “chrome-domed,” which the last time I looked meant bald. Mosely was a nasty piece of work but not a bald and nasty piece of work. Shows you how little interest the author had in his subject. I, too, am fascinated by the Mitfords, in case you couldn’t tell.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/04/the-mitford-sisters-enduring-fascination
Mitford obsessives unite!! :) I haven’t read that article yet – but a couple of other Mitford obsessives have expressed dissatisfaction with it. // Mosely was a nasty piece of work but not a bald and nasty piece of work. // A very astute observation – I’ll check the article out, since, yes, everyone seems to be talking about it.
Why on earth someone has not tackled making a movie about those “children” in the 1930s is beyond me. It should be a mini-series, I suppose … I wonder if such a thing exists and I don’t know about it? (How could that be possible?)
I mean, Unity carving a swastika into their bedroom window, and Jessica countering by carving a hammer and sickle next to it? As Diana swooped over to Germany to attend the Nuremberg rallies?
Charlie and I discovered our mutual love of Decca (in particular) years ago – we had both read her collected letters, and loved Hons and Rebels.
The Mitfords are a topic I can discuss only with a choice few – and I have to “educate” people on who the hell they all are, just so they can keep up!
I got my friend Allison hooked.
What got you hooked?
I got hooked after I picked up a broken down paperback of Nancy Mitford’s “The Blessing.” (I’m a Nancyite, I suppose.) Then I read Nancy’s other fiction, discovered Evelyn Waugh and U and non-U, and somehow it just took off from there.
Love it! There are so many “ways in.” I think I read Nancy Mitford’s fiction before I had any idea that she was a member of this crazy family.
I love her correspondence with Evelyn Waugh – I have yet to make it fully through his published letters, but the bits I’ve read are awesome. I love that they were friends. Of course they were!!
Nancy, Pamela, and Debo stayed (somewhat) above the fray, as compared to the Trifecta of Political Lunacy in Unity, Jessica and Diana. But of course they all had their eccentricities – talk about knowing who you are and just BEING that, no holds barred. They all did that. And somehow the brother gets lost in the shuffle – or maybe he doesn’t? I know he was at the Nuremberg Rally with Diana and Unity. What was his deal, do you know?
Was he a Branwell Bronte-esque figure? Lost in a sea of powerhouse vaguely narcissistic sisters…
I seem to recall he was gay and maybe tormented about it?
Love those letters. I don’t know much about the brother, the sisters have always been so much more vivid that I’m afraid he has been neglected. A friend contends that Diana was and remained the worst from a political point of view. She never did denounce Hitler. You may or may not have read this obituary http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/celebrity-obituaries/1438660/Lady-Mosley.html which contains this little gem:
“Evelyn Waugh, who encountered Diana Mosley when she was just out of prison, told his daughter that he was shocked to observe that his friend was wearing a swastika diamond brooch. But then the Mitfords had been brought up to pay scant attention to the opinion of others. ”
This kind of sums it up to me.
Diana’s 1st husband was a Guinness, another fascinating family. Have you read much about them? Lady Caroline Blackwood is a good place to start. https://www.nytimes.com/books/01/07/08/reviews/010708.08spurlit.html
Also, two Pinterest boards devoted to the Mitfords
https://www.pinterest.com/source/fyeahthemitfords.tumblr.com
https://www.pinterest.com/ccookenz/the-mitfords/
In my unprofessional opinion, Unity suffered from delusions and some form of mania/mental illness. Not that that excuses her but she definitely was not playing with a full deck.
Diana, on the other hand …
She knew what she was doing. She knew what she believed. She married a Fascist. Hitler praised her to high heaven, and she got off on it. Those pictures of her laughing in delight in Nuremberg …
I did know about her marriage into the Guinness family – I haven’t read a biography just of Diana (I know there’s a recent one that’s out there, or – at least – it came out in the last 15 years) – but I did read the Sisters, a group biography. A bit forgiving, I think … but I do appreciate that the author focused on all of them, and that group dynamic – how a lot of their behavior was about pushing each other’s buttons. Kind of an extreme way to do it. Become a Nazi to piss off your Communist sister. I mean … what?
I think Diana was a True Believer. I hadn’t heard that swastika brooch story. It’s chilling, isn’t it?
And Oswald Mosley! Ugh! I’m a huge fan of Nicholas Mosley (his son), a novelist and playwright – whose book Hopeful Monsters deals intensively (and bizarrely: the book is difficult – or so I’ve been told – I found it a breeze) with that whole period between the World Wars – in both Berlin and in London. Mosley has not really denounced his father but definitely has used his own work – filled with ambiguity and sensitivity – as a corrective. Sort of redeeming the family line.
Thanks for the Pinterest links – I will do a deep dive into them!
I did not even know about Nicholas Mosely’s existence, let alone his book. Something to look forward to, thanks.
Another Decca (and Nancy) fan was Christopher Hitchens, as you probably already know.
I love that Hitchens was a huge Decca fan and I am not surprised!
In re: Nicholas Mosley – I look forward to hearing your thoughts! I’ve tried to branch out in Nicholas Mosley’s writing past Hopeful Monsters – but they all feel like dress rehearsals for that magnum opus. My response to that book is super personal – myopic even – and I haven’t read it in about 20 years but once upon a time, it was in my Top 5 favorite books ever. So take that for what it’s worth!!
I have given it to many friends to read, and many of them have put it down, exhausted by the narrative voice, by the lack of a real plot. I found the narrative voice thrilling. Your mileage may vary. I’ve written about it on the site quite a bit.
It’s really interesting to see him write about the burblings of fascism in England – and the flat-out civil war/revolution in Berlin post-WWI – the crushing of the Communists – but it covers everything – through the perspective of two characters: Eleanor, a Jewish scientist in Berlin (her mother is a revolutionary, in thrall to Rosa Luxemberg – there are lots of famous cameos), and Max, a British boy who grows up in the hothouse flower environment of the Bloomsbury group in England and becomes fascinated by botany and inherited characteristics. Because, of course. They meet, randomly, when he’s hiking through Germany – they’re college students – it’s 1932, 33 – and they keep meeting up – periodically – through the 40s, and on into the 50s.
They switch off narration.
It’s an intellectual tour de force. I don’t want to oversell it. Only one friend of mine – my friend Ted – responded to the book in the same visceral way I did. I believe it might even be out of print now.
It’s ordered from Amazon. I should also add that this issue of VF also has a story on Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine with great pictures if not much new info on Hollywood’s longest running sibling rivalry. But de Havilland is in fine form!
If you read the first 10 pages of Hopeful Monsters and are like: “oh my God, do I have to read 400 more pages of this?” … you are not alone! :)
But maybe you’ll thrill to it – and its ideas – like I did. Please check back! (No pressure.)
I have been hearing about that de Havilland/Fontaine piece – another one I have to catch up on.
I loved Nancy Mitford’s books on Louis XIV and Pompadour. I particularly remember her discussions of “impiety in medicine.” What stuck with me was that in a way you were better off a peasant than a royal, because royals were required to believe in their physicians (and not be “impious in medicine”) and submit, when necessary, to some truly horrifying “treatments,” including major surgery with no anesthetic. The Dauphine gave birth during an August heat wave and had a prolonged labor, during which her doctors flayed a sheep and wrapped the woman up in its skin. Why I remember this stuff is Mitford’s brilliant point that we should not judge these people too harshly for the terrible methods of execution they visited on criminals, since they themselves looked forward to similar tortures. To this day the phrase “impious in medicine” strikes me as a salient quality.
Holy shit, Jincy, I have not read that book and now I need to.
“Impiety in medicine.” No wonder Waugh loved her.
// The Dauphine gave birth during an August heat wave and had a prolonged labor, during which her doctors flayed a sheep and wrapped the woman up in its skin. //
I mean …
it’s amazing the human race has survived at all.
Sheila, I do love your corner of the internet!!
I just got my copy of Vanity Fair, and read it last night. I suppose if I knew nothing about the Mitford family it would have made for more interesting reading, but it seemed a bit flippant? Not sure if that is the word I am looking for, but I’ll go with it.
This family intrigues me so much, they way they grew up, interacted with each other-the parents. Maybe it is because of what you say here..
//talk about knowing who you are and just BEING that, no holds barred. They all did that.//
That is so true, they seemed to be exactly who they were, no apologies. I’m not sure how I got hooked, I know I saw a PBS adaptation of Love in a Cold Climate quite a while ago, but I don’t think that was it. Several years ago I started reading Nancy’s novels-and absolutely loved them-and it may have started from there.
I haven’t read Hons and Rebels, and I should remedy that immediately!
The person looking for information on Colonel Tom Parker must have thought he hit the mother lode when you jumped in to help him out.
In re: Jessica’s writing: she also wrote a classic study of the funeral home business in the United States. She was a total muckraker. It was an expose – it also makes for great reading!! (Incidentally, Evelyn Waugh’s vicious hilarious novel The Loved One is about the funeral business in Los Angeles. The connections abound!)
Hons and Rebels, though, is her memoir and her view of her childhood, her crazy sisters … I believe it was from Hons and Rebels that we got the image of Jessica and Unity battling out their political views by scratching swastikas/hammer-sickles in their bedroom window.
Love in a Cold Climate is also wonderful!
And yeah, this poor guy in re: Colonel Parker. But he really was excited to get started on his research, so I hope I helped him. Colonel Parker was such a lying conman (as well as a genius promoter) that who can know what was really true, ultimately. Fascinating man.
The American Way of Death! That’s the awesome title of Jessica’s book about the big business of funerals in the US.
and of course – of course – Christopher Hitchens was friends with Jessica and would write the introduction to her impressive published correspondence.
Hi Sheila
Another one interested in the Mitford sisters here. Their fiction, their excentricity, they being 6 girls, their wonderful hair, for God’s sake, how could all have had this gorgeous hair?
When I read Lovell’s The Sisters, I was impressed by the fail of Unity, her return to Switzerland with an inoperable bullet in her head, her lost personality, difficulties to walk, etc. Cared by her mother, (by the way, what would the mother say about her children? nobody recorded that?), listening to Germany’s rendition on the radio, no future of any kind.
Maybe they all had British humor to accompany them.
Cla – yes: their hair! Each one was so stunning and the pictures of all of them all together – before they all started hating/warring with one another – are just hauntingly gorgeous. Such strong personalities. Such amazing clothes. And those icy-blue pale eyes.
I always wonder about the parents, too. They were clearly very hands off and those kids ran wild. It actually sounds like kind of a fun – albeit totally unstructured – childhood.
Debo was the last one to die – just a couple of years ago – and she seemed to have had a happy and satisfying life. And she’s another one – like Diana and Unity and Jessica and Nancy – who said to herself early: “I want to be a Duchess.”
And voila. She became a Duchess!
I am so thrilled at all of the Mitford fans commenting here.
Okay reading the Vanity Fair piece now – I know James Wolcott! – :)
I had forgotten that Diana and Oswald married in Joseph Goebbels’ house with Hitler present. Disgusting. I’m glad she was imprisoned for the entirety of WWII.
I wonder if Decca and the Dectones are on iTunes.
Two songs on iTunes, which I am going to buy immediately. They cover “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”
Jessica Mitford covers “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” – it’s just too good to be true. Maxwell’s Silver Hammer & Sickle?
https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/decca-and-the-dectones/id213653782