‘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.]
