I am not sure, however, that we serve Mitford well by attempting to shoehorn her into this tradition. She is too devoted to making fun of everything, too allergic to any admission of moral seriousness. If she is flippant about political causes, she is not, in any obvious way, earnest about her characters either. She tends to keep her protagonists at a coolly amused distance – focusing on their public performances of themselves and declining to ferret about in their private emotional states. Even the heroine of this novel remains largely opaque to us – a ‘flat’ character in Forsterian terms, as opposed to a ‘round’ one. Fanny offers breezy, rather banal speculations on how ghastly it must be to be married to Tony, or how blissful it must be to have an affair with a Frenchman, but we see for ourselves almost nothing of Linda’s interior life – despite the many occasions on which her feckless behaviour cries out to be mitigated by some insight into her conscience.
Any number of modern novelists might take on the daring task of depicting a heroine who rejects her newborn, but the chances are that they would psychologize the act – would ask the reader to enter into the horror and shame of not wanting one’s child and so on. Mitford does none of that. She asks us, instead, to laugh at Linda’s jokes about the hideousness of little Moira and to accept that in the long run, the child will be much better off with her stepmother, the ghastly, blue-haired Pixie Fairweather. (Children in Mitford’s fiction are remarkably hardy, cynical little creatures.)
The writer, Andrew O’Hagan is among those who find something ultimately repugnant in such show-off cruelty. He identifies Mitford’s style as an exemplar of the ‘posh aesthetic’ – a beguilingly witty school of English prose at whose centre lies a moral void. ‘The posh aesthetic appeals to people who want life’s profundities to scatter on the wind like handfuls of confetti. The great enemy of the posh aesthetic is effortfulness, which is why aristocrats find the middle classes so absurd. All that labour, all that seriousness: so much more stylish to laugh at death, etc… For the devoted toff, effort and compassion are embarrassing in life and horrific on the printed page.’
There is no use disputing that Mitford’s levity, her undisguised preference for amusing sinners over virtuous dullards, her highly stylized complacency in regard to social injustice and class inequities, are all potent provocations. And it may be that an era like ours – an era that sets such store by the uncomplicated generosity and ‘big-heartedness’ of its popular writers – is particularly ill-suited to appreciating her astringent pleasures. Even so, O’Hagan’s account of Mitford’s style does not seem to me entirely accurate. If Mitford’s heart does not lie moistly on her sleeve, it is a mistake to conclude that it is nowhere about her person. And if her humour often flirts with facetiousness, it does not, in the end, I think, represent a dismissal of ‘life’s profundities’, so much as a rigorously unsentimental way of coping with those profundities. It would be a very obtuse reader who failed to notice the murmur of pain in this novel, the hints of desolation lurking within its merriment.
The novel begins, in fact, in explicitly elegiac mode, with the contemplation of an old Radlett family photograph. ‘There they are, held like flies, in the amber of that moment – click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth.’ Fanny moves the narrative along quickly, thrusting us into the gay doings of the young Radlett girls, but the muted note of anguish that is struck here – the minatory intimation of life’s pain and disappointment and brevity – continues to sound throughout the novel. We hear it, not in spite of the jokes, or as some sort of pious addendum to the jokes, but resonating from their very centre. Think of Davey and Linda and Fanny in the linen cupboard at Alconleigh, wittily forecasting the way in which their inter-war generation will be traduced in future decades. Somewhere in the course of this breezy exchange, the perspective telescopes and we find ourselves glimpsing the skeletons beneath the skins of these gorgeously alive people.
A reader might wish that Mitford wrote passionately and expansively about the miseries of war, and the outrage of death, and the sadness of being in a bad marriage. But it is simply wrong to read her teasing prose as a denial of those experiences. Nor is it quite accurate to say that Mitford is embarrassed by earnestness and effort: she is embarrassed by the
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of these things, certainly, but the hard work that it takes to keep up a ‘good shop-front’ is something she admires very much. Linda’s lover, Fabrice, who speaks so eloquently in defence of ‘
les gens du monde
’, does in fact have principles for which he is prepared to risk his life: he simply wouldn’t dream of boring a lady with those principles at luncheon. Linda herself has plenty of private sorrows: it would just never occur to her to whine about them publicly.
It is the elegance of this discretion – the courage of it – that ultimately redeems Mitford’s heroine. More than her beauty or bouquet-like charm, what we are asked to admire in Linda is the bravery with which she pursues her rackety course. Unlike Fanny, who has found in her marriage to Alfred ‘a refuge from the storms and puzzles of life’, Linda has dared to stay out on the romantic heath. And if she is buffeted by the high winds of fleeting passions – if she falls in love with asses and often makes an ass of herself in the process – she has the good sense and the guts to never apologize, never explain. ‘Don’t pity me,’ she tells Fanny when she returns from France, still married to Christian and pregnant with another man’s child. ‘I’ve had eleven months of perfect and unalloyed happiness, very few people can say that, in the course of long long lives, I imagine.’
Whether it is better to hold out, like Linda, enduring loneliness and infamy in return for the occasional feast of transcendent pleasure, or to settle like Fanny for a steady but uninspiring diet of marital contentment, is one of the great questions of the novel. Fanny envies the glamour of Linda’s adventures, but she has too much sense not to be appalled by the radical uncertainty of a life lived according to sensibility. The possibility that her friend will end up with ‘nothing to show’ for her troubles, frightens her. And when she asserts, at the end of the novel, that Linda has found true love with Fabrice, this seems to be her way of reassuring herself that Linda’s existence has, after all, had meaning, that her pursuit of love has not been in vain. Fanny’s mother, the Bolter (who knows quite a lot about the ways of men like Fabrice) is doubtful. But if her sceptical words – the final words of the novel – seem to point to an utterly comfortless conclusion, Linda herself has shown us one further possibility: that a life lived with passion and brio may have beauty and value, even if one ends up with ‘nothing to show for it’ and that the search for true love is a noble endeavour, whether or not it concludes in domestic bliss.
Zoë Heller
T
HERE
is a photograph in existence of Aunt Sadie and her six children sitting round the tea-table at Alconleigh. The table is situated, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, in the hall, in front of a huge open fire of logs. Over the chimney-piece plainly visible in the photograph hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children. In the photograph Aunt Sadie’s face, always beautiful, appears strangely round, her hair strangely fluffy, and her clothes strangely dowdy, but it is unmistakably she who sits there with Robin, in oceans of lace, lolling on her knee. She seems uncertain what to do with his head, and the presence of Nanny waiting to take him away is felt though not seen. The other children, between Louisa’s eleven and Mart’s two years, sit round the table in party dresses or frilly bibs, holding cups or mugs according to age, all of them gazing at the camera with large eyes opened wide by the flash, and all looking as if butter would not melt in their round pursed-up mouths. There they are, held like flies, in the amber of that moment–click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from that happiness and promise of youth, from the hopes Aunt Sadie must have had for them, and from the dreams they dreamed for themselves. I often think there is nothing quite so poignantly sad as old family groups.
When a child I spent my Christmas holidays at Alconleigh, it was a regular feature of my life, and, while some of them slipped by with nothing much to remember, others were distinguished
by violent occurrences and had a definite character of their own. There was the time, for example, when the servants’ wing caught fire, the time when my pony lay on me in the brook and nearly drowned me (not very nearly, he was soon dragged off, but meanwhile bubbles were said to have been observed). There was drama when Linda, aged ten, attempted suicide in order to rejoin an old smelly Border Terrier which Uncle Matthew had had put down. She collected and ate a basketful of yew-berries, was discovered by Nanny and given mustard and water to make her sick. She was then ‘spoken to’ by Aunt Sadie, clipped over the ear by Uncle Matthew, put to bed for days and given a Labrador puppy, which soon took the place of the old Border in her affections. There was much worse drama when Linda, aged twelve, told the daughters of neighbours, who had come to tea, what she supposed to be the facts of life. Linda’s presentation of the ‘facts’ had been so gruesome that the children left Alconleigh howling dismally, their nerves permanently impaired, their future chances of a sane and happy sex life much reduced. This resulted in a series of dreadful punishments, from a real beating, administered by Uncle Matthew, to luncheon upstairs for a week. There was the unforgettable holiday when Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie went to Canada. The Radlett children would rush for the newspapers every day hoping to see that their parents’ ship had gone down with all aboard; they yearned to be total orphans – especially Linda, who saw herself as Katy in
What Katy Did
, the reins of the household gathered into small but capable hands. The ship met with no iceberg and weathered the Atlantic storms, but meanwhile we had a wonderful holiday, free from rules.
But the Christmas I remember most clearly of all was when I was fourteen and Aunt Emily became engaged. Aunt Emily was Aunt Sadie’s sister, and she had brought me up from babyhood, my own mother, their youngest sister, having felt herself too beautiful and too gay to be burdened with a child at the age of nineteen. She left my father when I was a month old, and subsequently ran away so often, and with so many different people, that she became known to her family and friends as the
Bolter; while my father’s second, and presently his third, fourth, and fifth wives, very naturally had no great wish to look after me. Occasionally one of these impetuous parents would appear like a rocket, casting an unnatural glow upon my horizon. They had great glamour, and I longed to be caught up in their fiery trails and be carried away, though in my heart I knew how lucky I was to have Aunt Emily. By degrees, as I grew up, they lost all charm for me; the cold grey rocket cases mouldered where they happened to fall, my mother with a major in the South of France, my father, his estates sold up to pay his debts, with an old Rumanian countess in the Bahamas. Even before I was grown up much of the glamour with which they had been surrounded had faded, and finally there was nothing left, no foundation of childish memories to make them seem any different from other middle-aged people. Aunt Emily was never glamorous but she was always my mother, and I loved her.
At the time of which I write, however, I was at an age when the least imaginative child supposes itself to be a changeling, a Princess of Indian blood, Joan of Arc, or the future Empress of Russia. I hankered after my parents, put on an idiotic face which was intended to convey mingled suffering and pride when their names were mentioned, and thought of them as engulfed in deep, romantic, deadly sin.
Linda and I were very much preoccupied with sin, and out great hero was Oscar Wilde.
‘But what did he
do
?’
‘I asked Fa once and he roared at me – goodness, it was terrifying. He said: “If you mention that sewer’s name again in this house I’ll thrash you, do you hear, damn you?” So I asked Sadie and she looked awfully vague and said: “Oh, duck, I never really quite knew, but whatever it was was worse than murder, fearfully bad. And, darling, don’t talk about him at meals, will you?” ’
‘We must find out.’
‘Bob says he will, when he goes to Eton.’
‘Oh, good! Do you think he was worse than Mummy and Daddy?’
‘Surely he couldn’t be. Oh, you are so lucky, to have wicked parents.’
*
This Christmas-time, aged fourteen, I stumbled into the hall at Alconleigh blinded by the light after a six-mile drive from Merlinford station. It was always the same every year, I always came down by the same train, arriving at tea-time, and always found Aunt Sadie and the children round the table underneath the entrenching tool, just as they were in the photograph. It was always the same table and the same tea-things; the china with large roses on it, the tea-kettle and the silver dish for scones simmering over little flames – the human beings of course were getting imperceptibly older, the babies were becoming children, the children were growing up, and there had been an addition in the shape of Victoria now aged two. She was waddling about with a chocolate biscuit clenched in her fist, her face was smothered in chocolate and was a horrible sight, but through the sticky mask shone unmistakably the blue of two steady Radlett eyes.