Zo� Heller on Nancy Mitford

By Zo� Heller Published: 1:34PM GMT 08 March 2010

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

Some novelists emerge, as if from the head of Zeus, with their talents entirely formed. Others shilly-shally for a integrate of books until, for reasons that have as majority to do with possibility as with effort, they start on an idea, or a character, or even an opening judgment that liberates whatever is majority engaging in their essay selves. Nancy Mitford had constructed 4 functions of novella by the time The Pursuit of Love was published in 1945, but it was usually in this novel her initial try to constraint the oddities of Mitford family hold up that her competence spoken itself.

The Pursuit of Love competence be pretty described as a comic novel a light comic novel even but it is as well spiky and intelligent, I think, to validate as an exactly cosy read. The jokes are peerless, yes. I disbelief I shall ever tire of celebration of the mass Uncle Matthews angry examination of Romeo and Juliet or Lindas frightened comment of housework. But underneath the crisp aspect of Mitfords quick mind there is something forever some-more unhappy at work something that is good to obstacle you and lift you in to the dim undercurrent when you are slightest awaiting it. In contrariety to multiform some-more patently critical novels that tender me in my youth, whose inlet have given valid disappointingly plumbable, this artless bit of midcentury "chick-lit" has one after an additional to produce riches.

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Years of dire the book on friends have taught me a small caution, however. Readers who interpretation the novel lend towards to love it with a dotty passion; others, who shun the enchantment, are good to depreciate it with roughly next to fervour. The wilful factor, in possibly case, seems to be the voice the observable Mitford trill, in whose light, splendid cadences an complete hard-to-shock and easy-to-bore perspective of hold up is done manifest. This voice is not essentially a voice, of course; it is the apparition of a voice, painstakingly combined in prose. Mitfords narrator, Fanny, writes with such infrequent fluency that it is easy to dont think about the tough work that went in to creation her smart locutions. If Mitford has never utterly perceived her due as a stylist even her devotees systematise her as a "guilty pleasure" it is partly since her fabrication of free gibberish is as well convincing.

Such courtesy that her character has perceived over the years has tended to emphasize the documentary value: it has been praised as a strangely clear e.g. of how the jeunesse dore spoke in Thirties England, or, even some-more narrowly, as a proof of Mitford family idiolect. The achievement, in alternative words, has been accepted to be one of transcription rather than of writing. But the felicities of Mitfords character cannot, in fact, be marked down to category or period, or even to Hon-ish locutions. There is caring there is art in the majority artless-seeming passages of this novel. Here is Linda describing to Fanny the man who will turn her second husband:

Well, hes heaven. Hes a frightfully critical man, you know, a Communist, and so am I now, and we are surrounded by comrades all day, and they are superb Hons, and theres an anarchist. The comrades dont similar to anarchists, isnt it queer? I regularly thought they were the same thing, but Christian likes this one since he threw a explosve at the King of Spain; you contingency contend the romantic. Hes called Ramon, and he sits about all day and broods over the miners at Oviedo, since his hermit is one.

This is an exquisite travesty on a immature womans dizzy, paratactic debate patterns, but it is additionally a apt theatrical representation of the speakers difficult perspective towards her new amicable circle. Linda is in love with Christian and fervent to love what he loves but she detects something ludicrous in the lethal aspiring of the comrades. The tonal eminence in between her genuine bend ("Hes a frightfully critical man … they are superb Hons") and her wily entertainment (" … but Christian likes this one since he threw a explosve at the King of Spain") is a pointed one not slightest since Mitfords characters lend towards to receptive to advice majority wide-eyed when they are being majority satirical. (In The Blessing, Mitford sums up the standard English fun as, "naïve but penetrating".) But by the time we get to the comment of the sorry Ramon, and the desirous stupidity of the last clause, "because his hermit is one", there can be no disbelief that Linda has succumbed to the enticement of a classic, Mitfordian "tease".

Lindas amused reply to comrade ardour is not untypical of the novels perspective towards any series of grave causes. Various made at home philosophies are adumbrated in the march of the tract but, with the probable difference of Lindas unreal counterclaim of Englands ancien rgime, nothing of them are taken remotely seriously. The seminal doctrine of Lindas dual unsuccessful marriages the initial to a Tory with Nazi sympathies, the second to an elegant Marxist seems to be that next to degrees of stupidity and tedium exist at possibly finish of the ideological spectrum.

For some, Mitfords contemptuous insusceptibility to big ideas, joined with her notation courtesy to the love lives of the upper-classes reject her novels to inconsequentiality. Fannys husband, Alfred, speaks for generations of Mitfords detractors when he rebukes his mother in Love in a Cold Climate for the trinket of her preoccupations: "General subjects do not entertain you, usually personalities."

Alfred and his associate critics lend towards to take a rather slight perspective of what constitutes the "general". There is, after all, a prolonged and fair story of women writers who have used small canvases and gossipy plots in the make use of of expanded dignified themes.

I am not sure, however, that we offer Mitford well by attempting to shoehorn her in to this tradition. She is as well clinging to creation fun of everything, as well allergic to any acknowledgment of dignified seriousness. If she is sprightly about made at home causes, she is not, in any viewable way, aspiring about her characters either. She tends to keep her protagonists at a coolly amused area focusing on their open performances of themselves and disappearing to seek out about in their in isolation regretful states. Even the brave woman of this novel stays a mostly ambiguous entity, notwithstanding the most occasions on that her feeble poise cries out to be mitigated by a small discernment in to her conscience.

Modern novelists competence take on the charge of depicting a brave woman who rejects her newborn, but the chances are that they would psychologise the action would ask the reader to come in in to the abhorrence and contrition of not wanting ones child. Mitford does nothing of that. She asks us, instead, to giggle at Lindas jokes about the hideousness of small Moira and to accept that in the prolonged run the kid will be majority improved off with her ghastly, blue-haired stepmother. (Children in Mitfords novella are in couple of instances hardy, asocial small creatures.)

There is no make use of encountering that Mitfords spirited cruelties her welfare for comical sinners over only dullards, her rarely stylised relief in courtesy to amicable misapplication and category inequities are all manly provocations. And it competence be that an epoch similar to ours, that sets such store by the basic munificence and "big-heartedness" of the renouned writers, is utterly unsuitable to appreciating the harsh pleasures of her fiction. But if Mitfords heart does not distortion moistly on her sleeve, it is a inapplicable designation to interpretation that it is nowhere about her person. A reader competence instruct that she wrote sexually and expansively about the miseries of war, the snub of genocide and the dolour of being in a bad marriage. But it is simply wrong to examination her fooling around poetry as a rejection of those experiences.

She starts The Pursuit of Love in elegiac mode, with the speculation of an old Radlett family photograph. "Click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, receiving them serve and serve from the complacency and guarantee of youth."

The pale note of suffering in this thoroughfare continues to receptive to advice prolonged after we are enthralled in the happy doings of the Radlett girls. We listen to it not in annoy of the jokes, or as a small sort of divine annexation to the jokes, but resonating from their really centre. While Mitfordian quick mind competence coquette with facetiousness, it does not, ultimately, paint a exclusion of lifes profundities so majority as the tough-minded equates to by that she and her characters cope with those profundities. Lindas lady-killer lover, Fabrice, has beliefs for that he is rebuilt to risk his life: he simply wouldnt mental condition of tedious a woman with those beliefs at luncheon. Linda has copiousness of in isolation sorrows: it would only never start to her to bemoan about them.

It is precisely the magnificence of this option the aplomb of it that eventually redeems Linda. More than her beauty or bouquet-like charm, what we are asked to admire in Mitfords brave woman is the aplomb with that she pursues her rackety course. Unlike Fanny, who has found in matrimony "a retreat from the storms and puzzles of life", Linda has dared to stay out on the regretful heath. And if she is buffeted by the high winds of passing passions if she falls in love with asses and mostly creates an donkey of herself in the routine she has the good clarity and the courage to never apologise, never explain. "Dont empathize me," she tells Fanny when she earnings from France, still tied together to Christian and profound with an additional mans child. "Ive had eleven months of undiluted and stark happiness, really couple of people can contend that in the march of long, prolonged lives, I imagine."

Whether it is improved to hold out, similar to Linda, fast lonesomeness and calumny in lapse for the occasional take a break of conceptual pleasure, or to solve similar to Fanny for an uninspiring diet of marital contentment, is one of the novels good questions. Fanny envies the glorious of Lindas adventures, but she has as well majority clarity not to be confounded by the doubt of a hold up lived according to sensibility. When she asserts, at the finish of the novel, that Linda has found loyal love with Fabrice, she seems to be calming herself that Linda has, after all, "something to show" for her troubles. Fannys mother, the Bolter (who knows utterly a lot about the ways of men similar to Fabrice), stays doubtful. But if her distrustful repartee seems to point to a desolate conclusion, Linda herself has shown us one serve possibility: that a hold up lived with brio competence have beauty and value, even if one ends up with "nothing to show for it", and that the poke for love is a eminent attempt either or not it concludes in made at home bliss.

This is an remove from Zoë Hellers key to Nancy Mitfords The Pursuit of Love, published in a new book by Penguin at �8.99. t �8.99 (plus 99p p&p). Nancy Mitford by Harold Acton is published by Gibson Square at �7.99. t �7.99 (plus 99p p&p).0844 871 1515