All right, so Diana had Britain’s Fascist-in-Chief in tow, smouldering at her across the dinner table and chatting in baby talk down the telephone. But Hitler: do admit. That was something more. The man with the real power, the one who had putsched his way to the top and had the whole of Germany swaying to his oratory, whom even hard-headed British people sought to encounter on their visits to Munich. If Unity were able to write to her sister and say oh, by the way Nard, you’ll never guess who I’ve met. . . Well. In that sense, therefore, Hitler represented something comprehensible in the context of a young girl’s imagination, a bizarre crush plus an ace of trumps in the lifelong Mitford game of sister whist.
Do you understand the full meaning of any sentence—any phrase at all—in the above paragraph? I ask only because it is just one of many, many in The Six, a peculiar, jumbled account by Laura Thompson of the famous British Mitford sisters (yes, there were six of them, daughters all of David Freeman-Mitford, Baron Redesdale) who lived in an era when lovely grammatical English—which at least two of the sisters actually mastered—flourished. When a reader was spared such startling imagery as: “Death, which had sat fidgeting in the waiting room since the first day of war, had at last risen to claim great galumphing Boud, who had rampaged through life like an innocent puppy but had held so much unfathomable darkness.”
Both above excerpts refer, in their own lumbering way, largely to Unity Mitford, a madwoman with, like all her sisters, a stupid nickname (Bobo in her case) and a predictable fondness for her pet rat, Ratular: She was the Mitford sister who evolved into a dull and unintelligent Nazi (“I want everyone to know I’m a Jew hater,” she wrote), so taken with the guy who putsched his way to the top, in the author’s infelicitous phrase, that she visited Adolf Hitler in the fatherland some 140 times. Then she committed suicide inexpertly—the bullet aimed at her brain lodged in her head for more than eight years before death ceased its fidgeting—in other words, not soon enough to improve the flow of this indifferent book packed with multiple biographies.
Mitford-minders will also possibly recognize an initial glancing reference to Diana, a prettier and older version of Unity, who became, on falling for the famously lecherous British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley (whom she eventually married at the home of, yes, Joseph Goebbels), a fellow fascist, and was eventually packed off to prison.
So you see the problem, I’m certain. Six aristocratic sisters. Two of them (Deborah, who married the 11th duke of Devonshire, and Pamela, who didn’t even do that much) comparatively ordinary. Another two repulsive. And the final two—we get to these at last—really talented and fascinating. They are of course: the expert muckraker Jessica Mitford, a onetime Communist who authored The American Way of Death, an indictment of our funeral industry that became a bestseller and an inspiration for the film The Loved One; and Nancy Mitford, the crystalline novelist who wrote The Blessing, a cunning send-up of both British and French mores.
Still, one might ask oneself: If 75 percent of the Mitford girls were either unexceptional or total fruitcakes, why bother spending a minute in their company?
The answer lies in Nancy’s equally delightful novel The Pursuit of Love, published in 1945, which mythologized, actually canonized, the whole Mitford family—renamed Radlett in the book—and became a bestseller. Gone the Nazis and fascist members of the aristocracy; in their place, a more benign and eccentric “Uncle Matthew” who actually despises all foreigners, especially Germans. Nancy’s own imperfections are smoothed over: She has been recast in the novel as the lovely Linda, who falls eventually for the gallant and noble Fabrice de Sauveterre, a valiant French warrior against Nazism and a friend of de Gaulle.
Of course, eccentricities abound in the novel as they did in life, but in the fictional version they are the permissible, charming oddities of a great old family, defanged and much improved. The pet rat makes a cameo, reworked only slightly as a sickly mouse named Brenda who dies young. “No great loss I should say,” Uncle Matthew informs the young mourners. “That mouse stank like merry hell.” There are also several infidelities, some with bounders, or at least imperfect candidates for marriage, but these are waved away by the same delightful, ditzy Linda who says of her second flawed husband: “Well, he’s heaven. He’s a frightfully serious man, you know, a Communist, and so am I now, and we are surrounded by comrades all day…”
Impossible for any bit of dialogue to get more anodyne—which is just what clever Nancy had in mind when she set out to rewrite history as fiction: ideology unhinged from fanaticism, giddiness transmuted into gold. In her usual smart and incisive way Nancy Mitford was the queen of revisionism, the master sculptor who recast all the sisters in glitter. But that doesn’t mean that a biographer needs to do the same.
And that’s precisely the problem for the author of The Six, which is not meant to be a work of fiction. Thompson understands the value of well-executed literary propaganda, gets what Nancy was really up to. But she doesn’t know what to do about it, doesn’t really wish to defrock the myth entirely. Denuded, most of the Mitford girls seem like members of a lot of other families, lofty or otherwise: They are by turns awkward, interesting, puzzling, idiotic, sometimes vicious, and often plain stupid and exasperating. In The Six they acquire, thanks to Thompson—all of them, including the least worthy—the indifferent patina of absolution.
The Unity Mitford who constantly stalked a willing Führer? “If Hitler could turn on charm, the Mitfords embodied it,” the author notes complacently. The Diana of real life who married the repulsive Oswald Mosley, the fascist who waited on Mussolini? “[I]s it so hard to understand why she fell for this man who erupted into her life with the bounding force” of a wolfhound? Thompson actually asks.
Well, yes, it is hard to understand, with or without a wolfhound; but as it turns out, the author believes she can clear up the mystery in no time: “Our old friend sex played a huge part in all of this.”
Personally, I’m not too certain about Hitler’s charm (that isn’t the characteristic that immediately springs to mind when his name crops up) or, for that matter, about “our old friend sex,” as a rationale for everything. But I am damn sure that when a biographer relies on those two elements to explain away revolting behavior in her subjects she does a disservice to everyone: not least, the reader.
Judy Bachrach, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, is the author, most recently, of Glimpsing Heaven: The Stories and Science of Life After Death.
