Nancy Mitford

‘I suspect there was a neurotic dichotomy between Nancy’s barbed pen and her warm heart.’ Thus wrote Harold Acton in a memoir of his friend Nancy Mitford. The eldest of the famous Mitford sisters, she didn’t hesitate to apply her barbed pen to satirical purposes, often using her own family as raw material. 

It would be instructive to look at Mitford’s comic fictionalisation of three deeply serious episodes in the history of the 1930s to ask how much lies beneath the surface frivolity. Was she actuated primarily by a ‘talent to annoy’ or by an underlying compassion?

Wigs on the Green (1935) satirises the British Union of Fascists in a farcical plot turning on the conflict between ‘Union Jackshirts’ and pacifists in a sleepy English village. Although Mitford toned down some elements before publication, the book offended her sisters Unity and Diana, notorious for their fascist leanings, and she resisted its republication later.

Pigeon Pie, written in the autumn of 1939, presents the ‘phoney war’ as if it were a children’s game in which warring nations must pick teams. By the time of publication in mid-1940, hostilities had begun in earnest and Mitford’s playfulness seemed out of step. In private life she threw herself into the war effort on the home front. 

In The Pursuit of Love (1945) she drew on her own experiences of working in a refugee camp at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Her heroine’s laughable incompetence at the tasks required of her mirrors Mitford’s own incapacity in such an unfamiliar situation.

In each example I see a determination to ‘tease’, a childish temptation to shock, a high-spirited disregard for consequences – evidence, certainly, of ‘neurotic dichotomy’ but also of a defensive armour she created to protect a sensibility attuned both to political realities and to individual suffering.

[My photo, taken in 2017, shows Heywood Hill bookshop, where Nancy Mitford worked during the Second World War – note the blue plaque on the wall.] 

Instead of a Critic

This is my new volume of essays. 

From the cover blurb:

"Instead of a Critic brings together pieces written over twenty years or so in search of whatever links them. The topics range from Anglo-German cultural relations and the refugee flight from Nazi Europe to myth, pictorial art and the ‘Two Cultures’ question. It touches on performance, whether in cinema, dance, ‘straight’ theatre or the American Musical. Above all, it expresses an enthusiasm for literature and what literature can do."

Instead of a Critic: Essays Written and Unwritten (Minos Press, 2022).

ISBN-13: ‎978-1739632205

Available from Amazon UK, Amazon US and other retailers. 

Table of Contents:

Introduction                                                             

Aldous Huxley: Between Art and Science              

Rupert Brooke                                                        

Bloomsbury                                                            

Rosamond Lehmann                                              

Katherine Mansfield and Germany                      

Kafka: The Significance of Clothes                        

Franziska zu Reventlow                                        

Rilke and Cézanne                                                 

On Translating Poetry                                           

Three Poems by Hofmannsthal                             

Hofmannsthals in Exile                                         

Egon Wellesz                                                         

The Gender of Mr W. S.                                          

Nancy Cunard Sees Josephine Baker                  

Hedy Lamarr                                                       

Louise Brooks                                                      

Wedekind in English                                           

Sondheim at 90                                                    

Mitford Connections                                           

Myth: Its Manufacture and Recovery                  

Blood for the Ghosts                                            

Newton and Supermac                                        

The Two Cultures

About the Author

Lola Kirke

Lola Kirke was weathering the perils of touring when I caught up with her on a Zoom call to Seattle. She’d just checked into – and quickly out of – the “world’s scariest hotel” and her original tour manager had gone down with Covid. But she was delighted to be out again post-pandemic and promoting a new album, Lady For Sale, her second release following her 2018 debut, Heart Head West. The sound is alt-Country meets 80s/90s disco and rock. It’s a big production. Locked down with producer Austin Jenkins, she had “nothing to do except obsess over music,” she explains: “We demo’d the shit out of those songs!” Despite some upbeat grooves, “it’s actually kind of a sad album. It’s dealing with a lot of doubt and pain and longing. But the narrative of the record does become triumphant.” “Triumphant” surely describes the video accompanying the lead single, ‘Better Than Any Drug’, which finds Lola cavorting around the house as if drunk on a new love.

Though born to a musical family – her English father, Simon Kirke, was drummer with fabled bands Free and Bad Company – Lola is perhaps better known as an actress than a singer-songwriter, having notched up the lead in hit Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle and several acclaimed movie roles. How does she compare the two activities? “At the level I’m at you make no money as a musician – but it feels a lot more creative.” She gets a buzz from making music videos: “I haven’t felt that way on a film set in a really long time!” And then there’s the thrilling realisation when she hits the stage with a live band that “we’re all making sounds at the same time, and they work!”

 

Early reference points for her music included Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Alice Coltrane, but a recent move to Nashville introduced her to another cultural world. “I was inspired in a different way,” she reflects. She’d always listened to classics like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, but Tanya Tucker emerged as a big influence for her recently, alongside younger discoveries like Miranda Lambert. New genres can require using your vocal capacities in new ways. She tells a scary story about acting a film scene with her sister Jemima (also an actress). The script required her to scream at her sister. She “went for it, but not in a healthful way” and burst a blood vessel on her vocal cord. Specialists advised surgery but Lola was too busy with work at the time. Happily, there was no lasting damage to that already smoky voice.   

 

The title track of the new album, ‘Lady For Sale’, distils a theme she returns to several times in our conversation, the need to sell her work – sell herself – in the marketplace. “I didn’t feel I was being validated. I’ve spent my whole life wanting to connect with others and ultimately that’s not going to be possible unless I really try to sell myself.” She’s on a “roller-coaster of self-worth” at the moment, buoyed up by fans’ compliments, buffeted by online abuse about her appearance. She sounds envious of the simpler world her father grew up in, before Twitter, before Instagram: “I don’t know what it was like to live in a world where you weren’t always interfacing with your own press.” Lola’s solution is to “create, like, another self that you’re OK with sharing with others.” She admires Billie Eilish in this regard: “she’s still selling, but there’s something really potent about what she’s selling.”

 

Lola Kirke plays London's Moth Club on September 13th. 

(First published in RnR magazine.)

New book!

UK publication date 26 May 2022.

US publication date 29 July 2022.

Laura Nyro (1947-1997) was one of the most significant figures to emerge from the singer-songwriter boom of the 1960s. She first came to attention when her songs were hits for Barbra Streisand, The Fifth Dimension, Peter, Paul and Mary, and others. But it was on her own recordings that she imprinted her vibrant personality. With albums like Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry she mixed the sounds of soul, pop, jazz and Broadway to fashion autobiographical songs that earned her a fanatical following and influenced a generation of music-makers. In later life her preoccupations shifted from the self to embrace public causes such as feminism, animal rights and ecology – the music grew mellower, but her genius was undimmed. 

This book examines her entire studio career from 1967’s More than a New Discovery to the posthumous Angel in the Dark release of 2001. Also surveyed are the many live albums that preserve her charismatic stage presence. With analysis of her teasing, poetic lyrics and unique vocal and harmonic style, this is the first-ever study to concentrate on Laura Nyro’s music and how she created it. Elton John idolised her; Joni Mitchell declared her ‘a complete original’. Here’s why.

Published by Sonicbond. ISBN: 978-1789521825.