strange and random happenstance: The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

A Life of Contrasts: An Autobiography by Diana Mitford
Published by: Gibson Square Books
Publication Date: 1977
Format: Paperback, 281 Pages
Rating: ★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Diana Mitford felt stifled in her life with her family. When she went to Paris she got a sense of the enormity of the world and how she was admired for her beauty and wit. As soon as she could she made a prosperous marriage to the heir of the Guinness fortune and started her life surrounded by artists and poets and writers to fill the void she felt in her life. Yet this wasn't her true calling. Her true calling was to Oswald Mosley, the dynamic and married politician who founded the British Union of Fascists. She left her husband for him and spent her life dedicated to his causes and his happiness. They did eventually marry in Germany with Hitler as one of the only guests at the ceremony, which was one of the reasons they spent much of the war in prison. In A Life of Contrasts, Diana finally tells us her side of the story that captured headlines and made her one of the most memorable to those very notable Mitford sisters.

Frank Pakenham, the 7th Earl of Longford, had said of Diana in a review of her memoirs that she "lacked a dimension." I can think of no more perfect an insult than this for a woman who in her own writing comes across as a shallow, unfocused, self-centered, self-impressed, socialite. She is one dimensional, never bothering with anything below the surface. In fact, if you were to scratch her, I bet there would be more surface below the surface. Apparently being "the most glamorous Mitford Sister" means being the most superficial. Before reading about her life in her own words I wasn't predisposed to like her based on what I knew, but after reading Mary S. Lovell's book The Sisters, I was willing to give Diana the benefit of doubt. I was fully willing to let Diana surprise me with insights and details to the events of her life. To hear more about her feelings and thoughts on her marriages. But none of this presented itself. She had no depth coupled with a scattered writing style wherein she would change the subject every paragraph and sometimes every sentence. She never picked a thought and stuck with it unless it was to parrot Walter Mosley's ideologies to such an extent that I was made sick to my stomach and she literally disgusted me as a human being. I was left with the distinct feeling that the world would have been a better place without her in it, because really, what good did she ever contribute to society? Being pretty doesn't count, just FYI.

Diana's shallowness is evident in every line she writes in this book. Like minor celebrities she name drops like no tomorrow assuming that we will know who everyone is and be impressed with how much they love and adore her. Guess what Diana? Your day has come and gone and so have all your comrades in arms. Name drop all you want, all it shows is your own flaws in being needed to be validated by those around you because you had no inner life to sustain yourself. To need constant validation with artists demanding to paint her or draw her just made me want to smack her. The fact that Evelyn Waugh (one of the few celebrities I actually knew) was in love with Diana makes me not think more of Diana, but makes me think less of Evelyn.

Diana is also infuriatingly self-impressed, by all means Diana, don't translate all the French, Italian, and German for those who don't speak or read it to show us how worldly you are, I'm not going to bother to look it up on the assumption that it's just more of the same shit that came before. Also, with the book, she was given the chance to tell her side of the story, a story that has had many commentators and writers over the years, and she failed miserably. Her wedding to Bryan Guinness was glossed over in two seconds, as was her second marriage to Mosley. The fact that her sisters have written in more depth on her life shows that Diana has absolutely nothing to offer us.

Yet, it was this shallowness counterbalanced with bizarre political tracks that made me furious with her. You could feel at those times that it wasn't her voice by that of her master's, Walter Mosley. She was too shallow to have any true beliefs of her own so when she latched onto her idol Mosley, well, she took him all, even his opinions. Now that I've reached the "political tirade" section of my review, I firstly want to address the Hitler question. Diana has taken a lot of flack over the years for being unwilling to change her view of Hitler after the outbreak of war and his true desires and ambitions were revealed. Personally, I don't think that this in particular is what she should be criticized for. Hitler had to have been a charismatic and personable man in order to amass such a following and accomplish all that he did. I'm sure in a one on one setting he could be delightful. Therefore I don't blame Diana for being unwilling to take something back when her own experiences where different to public opinion. It was her opinion, one she is perfectly willing to stick to.

What I do think Diana should be criticized for is her parroting of horrid antisemitism. Yes, she is entitled to this view, but that doesn't mean it makes me like her, accept her, or even settle my nauseous stomach at some of the things she said. I came to not only really dislike her on a human level, but I revolt against all her ideologies. She actually states that what happened in the Holocaust could have been prevented if the Jews had just left Germany. Apparently they had plenty of warning, so they should have just moved on. Forget that these people have homes and lives and families, if they had just got up and gone history could have been different. In fact, in her opinion, if everyone would just go back where they came from, everything would be better for her. She didn't even want immigrants in England! While she never really outright states that she hates those who are Jewish or Black, the fact that she wants everyone to go back to where they came from shows a severe xenophobia that appears to be the sole aspect of her personality that isn't about her appearance. Also, extra ironic seeing as she lived in France and was therefore an immigrant herself. So by all means, if you want to read about a narcissist who will occasionally expound vitriolically on Jewry, well, Diana Mitford Mosley is the Mitford for you. She definitely isn't the Mitford for me.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: A Life of Contrasts, Antisemitism, Autobiography, Diana Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, Facist, Germany, Hitler, Mitford March Mach Deux, Oswald Mosley, The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, WWII

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell
Published by: W. W. Norton and Company
Publication Date: March 17th, 2003
Format: Paperback, 640 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

The Mitford sisters were the most dynamic family in England during the 20th century. They were front and center for world events, two of them even being so reviled in their own country that they were the subject of public scorn and debate in the houses of parliament. Despite a slightly unconventional upbringing with no medical care, little schooling, and constantly moving houses due to monetary issues, all six of the sisters would leave their mark on the world. Nancy as a great author, Pamela as a loving aunt, Diana as a notorious fascist married to Oswald Mosley and imprisoned with him, Unity who was in Hitler's inner circle and tried to kill herself when WWII was declared, Jessica who became the red sheep of the family with her Communist leanings as well as a noted journalist, and then Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire.

Such a clash of personalities and all in one family couldn't help capture the attention of the world. But this book explores not just the public image, but all the horrors of their lives; the marriages (7), the divorces (3), the children (14), the miscarriages (7+), the stillbirths (3), the lost children (2), the abortions (2), the deaths in the war (2), the attempted suicides (2), Cancer (2), the list goes on and on; because once you look into a person's life, you realize the sadness that is masked by the joie de vivre and the sparkling wit.

Very rarely have I experience this phenomena, but I am reading a book and I start to notice things, really just little things, but soon they gain momentum. The text is uneven, but obviously skewed purposefully. One section is lavished with attention, the littlest details are lingered on, while other sections are rushed through like an oncoming train, speeding past important details to get back to that other subject. The more you read the more obvious it becomes that the author doesn't love what they are writing. Why would you write something that you didn't love? Yes, I could go into contracts and all that here, but I won't. Instead, perhaps it's because there is one small aspect that they are fascinated with and were sadly saddled with the rest. They are not writing the book they want to write, and it shows.

The most obvious example I have is the book Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem. This book is part of the 33 1/3 series that has an author cover an album track by track. Lethem did the Talking Heads album "Fear of Music." You can see that he loves this band, but you get the distinct impression that this isn't the album he wanted to write on. What happened with Fear of Music is that, aside from being the worst book I've ever read, is that there was this imbalance, like in The Sisters, where you could feel the author's discontent and it resulted in your discontent, which eventually escalated into rage, and then you and your book club are coining the phrase "rage reading" to signify how the book made you feel as you pushed through to the bitter end.

An unhappy author leads to an unhappy reader. Letham loves Talking Heads but didn't love the album he was saddled with, much like Mary S. Lovell loves Unity Mitford, while the remaining five sisters she couldn't care less about. Look at it this way, for 200 pages occupying 10 years of the 20th century, roughly 40% of the book, Unity is front and center. This book covers 106 years but 40% is in the war years. Yes, a lot did happen to the Mitfords during this time... but still... this leads to decades of Jessica and Nancy's lives being glossed over and we hardly know what Pamela was up to! If this book was equal in weight Unity should have only occupied about 16% of it. In simpler terms, Mary S. Lovell really needed to just write a biography on Unity and not have disguised it as a biography on "The Sisters." Therefore right from the start, the author was not the ideal candidate to write this book because she didn't have a love of the subject.

A lack of love can lead to many problems. Mainly you wouldn't care if you fudged the details, got some things wrong, moved space and time, because if it wasn't about that one slightly deranged Nazi loving Mitford, what does it matter right? Well, to us readers who wanted to read about the Mitfords, it matters a lot. Also it brings into question the whole idea of accuracy. If I can find errors in this book, big, obvious glaring errors, how can I trust anything that she is telling me? The first warning signal was when the author said that the Mrs. Simpson affair with the King was all the newspapers were talking about. NO! People might have been talking about it, but out of loyalty to King and country the story didn't break in the newspapers till literally DAYS before the abdication, not months, not early in the year, I believe the author hints at February, but DAYS before it happened, in DECEMBER! So right there, anything that she says might be a lie or wrong.

The author also distorts facts into her favor. She's loosey-goosey with dates having things timeslip to when it suits her. In the chapter about the year 1938 she has moved events that happened in 1937 to better fit her narrative (just check the footnotes to see what I'm talking about). Past, present, and future apparently can all happen when Mary S. Lovell decrees it. Borrow a bit from the future, add bit from the past and viola, this certain year was made a little more interesting, but a lot more inaccurate. Not to mention her other foibles of how she refers to herself in the footnotes... pick first or third person, stop switching it up already! Or that she assumes you know every minor celeb from the day, you know what they say about assuming... only, you're the ass Mary, not me.

So, I'm guessing by now I've pretty much turned you off reading this book, so my work here is done. The Sisters is a flat, skewed history that lacks the sparkling wit and vivacity of any of these amazing sisters. Yes, I might have learned a few new things about them, but I don't know if I can trust the source at all so it's really all hearsay. But then again, reading up on the Mitfords, they had a tendency to mythologize their own lives, so can anything we learn about them be the whole truth? Well, one thing is certain, you're not going to get any sort of truth in this book. And for such a literary family, it's a sin to pick up secondary source materials. If you want to know more about them read Nancy's books, pick up Decca's or Diana's autobiographies, choose from the vast books of Debo's. Why bother with anything else when you can get a first hand account? Sure they might be trying to make themselves look better or exaggerating a story for laughs... but it's how they would have wanted you to know about them, not through some hack writer, but through their own words... which Mary S. Lovell borrows freely to pad her book, which makes her own writing appear even more wane.