Wigs On The Green

It is never really necessary to give a long or detailed review of a Nancy Mitford; you know you either like her or you don't. As I have explained previously, I have been particularly interested in this novel because, like the guy you cannot have because he's with your best friend, it has been teasingly unavailable for so long a time.

Was it worth the wait? As I say, you're either on board with Nancy or you're not, and as I've also said, I most certainly am. Wigs on the Green is as barbed as we would expect, although I agree entirely with Nancy's assessment that Eugenia, the character based on Unity, is in no way offensive to her inspiration. Of course Eugenia is ridiculed; she is a Fascist, and as Laura Thompson states in her wonderful biography of Nancy, Life in a Cold Climate, "the point is that the war against Fascism was necessary and Fascism, in Nancy's opinion, was not." Eugenia is a Boadicea figure, an Amazonian Britannia, and impressive indeed as such. And Unity, apparently, was exactly this in real life. The book seems to me to be a fond tribute and a gentle dig rather than a cruel satire, and is entirely befitting the political climate in which it was written. The Mosley figure, however, upon incurring Diana's wrath, Nancy did entirely cut from the book - he is mentioned, but never appears.

Wigs on the Green does not have the pacey wit of The Pursuit of Love, but equally it is not as narratively frantic as Pigeon Pie. It is biting: an artist character introduced as a "surrealiste" suffers a response from the wonderfully named Jasper Aspect "that he had once written a play which took place inside Jean Cocteau's stomach. 'Unfortunately I sold the film rights,' he added, 'otherwise you could have had them. The film was put on in Paris and many people had to leave the Jockey Club and stop being Roman Catholics because of it. I was pleased.'" The re-publication of Wigs on the Green also uncovers one of Nancy's cleverest satires - Peersmont, the asylum for lunatic peers, "built on the exact plans of the House of Lords, so that the boys should feel at home." A visit to this "bin" reveals a Duke who considers that "Socialists put a perfectly exaggerated value on human life...what on earth does it matter if a few people are killed, we're not at war, are we? We don't need 'em for cannon fodder." Nancy can stick the knife into her own kind with a lipstick coated smile. She also has a fair go at the institute of marriage, which she describes as "a great bore - chap's waistcoats lying about in one's bedroom, and so on." In fact, little is left out of the line of Nancy's witty fire.

This is another beautiful period piece, of a time and place, and by a class of person, very much rooted in the 'then'. For me, Nancy displays more brevity than Wodehouse, but does not come close to her great friend Evelyn Waugh, whose Decline and Fall is possibly the funniest satire of the era. And froth it may be, but life is all the sweeter for a bit of meringue.

Wigs on the Green: Reprinted

This Nancy Mitford has not, to my knowledge, been re-printed since WWII, after which jokes about Fascism ceased being funny and it was, probably correctly, deemed inappropriate. Nancy herself was doubtless unconcerned by this censorship, as her sister Unity, on whom the main character in the novel is based, shot herself the day that war broke out, unable to reconcile her love for her mother country with her Nazi obsession. So the question one must ask, I suppose, is this: is Penguin's imminent re-publication of Wigs on the Green an indication that the War is far enough away now that we can laugh at its causes; are we entering an era of growing right-wing sensibilities in which there is a sudden need to poke fun at Fascism; or are the Mitford's and their oeuvre currently so in vogue that previously held views on decency are being sacrificed for financial gain? Whatever the real reasons for the re-issue (and I suspect it is a mixture of several), I for one am delighted.

What I am not so delighted about is the cover design. I am afraid I am an utter snob when it comes to book covers - I could rant for England about my abhorrence of the current vogue for covers of 'women's literature' in the full spectrum of pinks with stylised twenties cartoon images of stick-like women holding any combination of lipstick /powder compact / Pomeranian dog / suitcase / shoes / shopping bags...oh, you know the ones, and I'm wearing myself out just thinking about describing them. Not only modern chicklit falls foul of this creeping horror, however; Molly Keane is these days an embarrassment to be seen with. In answer to this problem, I was given for Christmas a gorgeous dark brown leather book cover, soft as kid gloves and just as sophisticated, that slips easily over any paperback, ostensibly to protect said book, but really, and unashamedly in my case, to hide the cover from neighbouring commuters. Not to hide the title, I must stress, but to disguise the actual cover design, which so often belittles the calibre of content, as well as the woman reader.

Thankfully, I note also that the beautiful Capuchin Classics range is re-issuing Highland Fling in a few weeks, and with one of their wholly appropriate covers. I love their sparse line drawings and simple, neutral colours.

Anyway, jackets aside, it is fabulous to have Nancy back among us so prolifically. Lordy, at this rate, we'll all be having our hair shingled and calling each other 'hon' by the end of the year!

The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters

I love an Edwardian evening... Coal fire spitting softly in the grate, snowflakes catching in the light of the streetlamp outside, the whole house quiet and warm and comforting. I curled up on the sofa in an old loose cardigan and read the first 100 pages of The Mitfords.

I love a good letter writer, too. Rupert Brooke is a particular favourite, by turn sweetheart and caustic rat, imbued with exactly my sense of humour. And I am delighted to be able to say that the Mitford girls live up to my high epistolary standards. Deborah and Nancy are far and away my favourites, each snappy and funny with, frequently, hints of surrealism. But it is only in reading her letters, in hearing her own personal voice, that I am for the first time able to get some kind of feeling for Unity, always the hardest sister to generate empathy for. She is a giddy schoolgirl, letter after letter simply babble about how many times she has met Hitler and where and for how long and what he said and what he did when she replied and how many times he touched her on the arm and how many times on the shoulder... it becomes quite wearing, whilst at the same time being a real insight into her extraordinary, and perhaps slightly frightening, psyche. The pre-war correspondence between her and Diana is, of course, of the greatest historical significance of all the letters, but is also the most tedious, and I find myself skipping paragraphs in order to get to the next cheering 5 line missive from Nancy. This in no way belittles the weight of the horror that Unity and Diana both refused to attach to their beloved Fascism, but in fact adds to the complicated strands that made up the Mitford family tapestry.

Women Who Read Are Dangerous

Is there anything brings greater pleasure to a bibliophile than a longed for Amazon delivery? Arriving home from work this afternoon, I found a box sitting in the porch - I have treated myself to two books I was hoping Father Christmas might bring, but which were clearly too inflammatory for his sleigh: The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (thus rendering my last post, in which I said my next journey Mitfordwards would be an attempt to trace Wigs on the Green, a blatant lie), and the beautiful Women Who Read Are Dangerous. Neither are books I intend to sit and read from cover to cover, but rather will be dipped into. And of course, my first move when I had ripped the box from around them was to dip.

The Mitford epistles cheer me nearly as much as Wodehouse. The style, the humour, the ludicrous abbreviations and nicknames transport me to another world. More on these as I read.

Women Who Read Are Dangerous was brought to my attention by an article in The Guardian shortly before Christmas. I looked for it, unsuccessfully, in Waterstone's, and decided in the end to order it blind online - after all, how wrong could I go with such a title? I am not disappointed. It's a lovely large hardback, chock full of colour plates; simply, paintings and photographs of women reading. The Virgin Mary, in 1333, hides her devotional book from a visiting angel; in 1952, Marilyn Monroe loses herself in Ulysses. The commentary is intelligent, interesting and captures its reader perfectly:

"She is young and in her own bed. Her parents allow a certain amount of bedtime reading, but all too soon her mother or father will come to turn the light out, tell her that it's time to sleep. The door will be left open when the parent leaves to to ensure the light stays off. The girl will wait until she hears her parents' voices in another room, knows they are occupied with other matters. Then she will make a cave under the blankets, open her book inside the cave.
This girl knows the value of a good flashlight; she leaned that from Nancy Drew. She will read until she falls asleep, and neither her parents nor anyone else will ever be any the wiser."

My own childhood could not be better captured by my own hand. And if you gasped at its accuracy with regard to your own, I urge you to order yourself a copy of this delicious publication.

Last book of the year...

It's not usual that I should be in a position to start a new book on the first of January; however, I finished Hons and Rebels on the thirty first, and opened Marghanita Laski's Little Boy Lost (about which more later) at the dawn (literally) of the new decade. There is something pleasingly tidy about that.

I'm a huge Nancy Mitford fan - there, it's said - and of course am fascinated by the whole Mitford family. Although I have quite a collection of books by and about them, I had not yet read Hons and Rebels, Decca's account of the girls' upbringing, and decided it was high time I did. It was enjoyable - and of course, deeply moving - but by the author's very nature was throughout more serious in tone than other biographies, and for me, is not as delicious as either Mary S Lovell's The Mitford Girls or Laura Thompson's wonderful Life in a Cold Climate. The latter in particular, though ostensibly about Nancy, captures the whole brood vividly, and realises an aristocratic England of the twenties and thirties that is, for better or for worse, long gone. My personal predilection for the glamour of the first half of the twentieth century is constantly fed by the vast number of books about this family, and indeed, by the books Nancy herself wrote. My next journey Mitfordwards will be Wigs on the Green (which I have half-heartedly been trying to track down for some time), Nancy's parody of her sister Unity's fervant (and indeed, fatal) Nazism. I recently came across original penguin paperbacks of The Water Beetle and Noblesse Oblige, two of her works of non-fiction, which now sit proudly on my shelf under a pair of black and gold art deco shoes. And with that thought, I commit the readings of 2009 to the library of the past and reach for the first of this year's offerings.