Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie (2 page)

Mitford always excels at the amusing paradox: success is not what a character thought it would be, true love and a happy marriage don’t necessarily go together, and it is possible to “adore that ironwork that looks like cardboard meant to look like ironwork.” In her way, Mitford explores issues of class, money, happiness, and respectability that Fielding, Dickens, and Trollope also examined, but, light as it is,
Christmas Pudding
reflects the changes that had been wrought upon English society; as befits a working woman living on her own in the recently minted twentieth century, Mitford is skeptical about the traditional happy ending that brings money and love together at the altar. Some couples in
Christmas Pudding
have money, others have love, but no one gets both. That this should be the case does not result in bitterness but practicality; of greater importance to her characters than domestic arrangements is a wide circle of amusing friends.

In 1933, she gave up on Hamish and took up with a young man named Peter Rodd. They were married on December 4. Rodd was an Oxford graduate and the opposite of a party animal; he was a lover of information and politics and appeared to have the chance of a promising career in any field, but he was slow to choose one. Eventually, he threw himself into the cause of the Spanish Civil War (July 1935–April 1939). He wasn’t the only one—Nancy’s sister Jessica Mitford, only nineteen, eloped with her second cousin Esmond Romilly, himself only seventeen, to Spain, where he served as a war correspondent for an anti-Franco London newspaper, the
Daily Chronicle
. In the first half of 1939, Nancy followed Rodd to Perpignan, France, where he was helping with the Spanish refugee effort. She wrote about it in letters and also later gave her experiences to the character Linda in her novel
The Pursuit of Love
. She honored her husband’s service, but the flood of refugees was both overwhelming and frightening, and Rodd was so preoccupied with them that he
did not pay much attention to his wife, which was becoming a troubling pattern.

Soon after she returned to England, Germany invaded Poland, and the English declared war. Every Mitford had political opinions—Jessica became a communist; another sister, Unity, was a notorious intimate of Adolf Hitler; and a third sister, Diana, was married to the head of the British Union of Fascists. Nancy attempted to explore some of these issues in her 1935 novel,
Wigs on the Green
, her least successful effort, which led to a falling out with Diana over her mockery of fascism. By the fall of 1939, the die had been cast, but military operations had not begun—the last few months of 1939 and the first few months of 1940 became known as “the Phoney War.”

In late 1939, Mitford wrote
Pigeon Pie
, and it was published in May of 1940, an almost unexcelled example of bad timing for a comic novel, which Mitford acknowledged in a new dedication in a postwar edition. However, in
Pigeon Pie
she makes excellent use of the material at hand. It is in many ways an advance over her first three novels, and an excellent satire of the response of the former Bright Young Things to an imminent and frightening war.

Mitford’s protagonist is Sophia Garfield, who expects war, and who thinks she knows what it will be like—the end of the world. But she learns about it only through a newspaper billboard, and life continues much as usual, except that a “nasty lady” on the train to London says, “You mark my words. This will mean a shilling on the income tax.” Sophia is more selfless. She volunteers at a first aid post, though she is not of much use—she merely answers the phone and keeps her eyes open. Sophia’s life is complex: she is married to a wealthy man whom she doesn’t love, who has opened the family home to a group of Bible-thumpers from the United States. She is having an off-and-on affair with an old friend, which she knows will never end in marriage. Her maid is German, and two of her young friends work in the Foreign Office and are, to some degree, in charge of the war effort. The
friend she is fondest of, Sir Ivor King, the King of Song, is a bald, world-renowned singer with “a remarkable collection of wigs,” whom the Foreign Office would like to enlist in a radio propaganda effort. All of her friends join the war effort, but, for now, most of their efforts go into self-promotion; one of her women friends, whom Sophia has known since they were children, passes herself off as a Russian princess and Mata Hari–like spy. Mitford winds up an amusing and neatly twisted plot in which Sophia uncovers a conspiracy.

Some of the best parts of
Pigeon Pie
are Sophia’s observations. Of the Phoney War she says, “The party looked like being a flop, and everyone was becoming very much bored, especially the Americans who are so fond of blood and entrails. They were longing for the show, and with savage taunts, like boys at a bull-baiting from behind safe-bars, they urged that it should begin at once.” When suspicious things begin to happen at the first aid post, Sophia notices them piecemeal, and then begins to put them together. Of course she foils the enemy, but how she does it is both savvy and amusing.

By September 1940, the war had commenced in earnest, and Mitford was writing letters about both her own and her husband’s travails: attempts to save orphaned children, friends losing their homes, narrow escapes from bombs falling close at hand. Acton reports on Mitford’s general good humor through the war: “When so many mooched about with long faces Nancy’s resolute cheerfulness was a tonic.… She appeared younger than her age and her humour had the gaiety of girlhood.” In 1945, at age forty-one, she finished
The Pursuit of Love
, which was an instant hit. Her marriage was falling apart, her sister Unity had attempted suicide, her sister Diana had spent a scandalous three years in prison as a Nazi sympathizer, and her only brother, Tom, had been killed in Burma. But Nancy was in receipt of a nice sum of money, and she bought a share in a bookshop and decided to move to Paris.

Over the next thirty-eight years, Mitford wrote three more novels (
Love in a Cold Climate, The Blessing
, and
Don’t Tell Alfred
). Her last four novels were more complex and sophisticated than her first four—she gained a deeper understanding of her characters and the world that spawned them. Her style remained realistic and crystal clear, meaning that her satire goes down smoothly but with the bite of intelligence. Her love life remained irregular; she and Rodd separated and were divorced, and she had a long affair with a prominent French military and government official. She continued to be known as one of the famous, or notorious, Mitford clan.

According to Acton, France was where her literary career flowered, where she wrote in the form she had always preferred. After translating the seminal French novel
The Princess of Cleves
into English in 1951, she wrote four biographies—
Madame de Pompadour
(1954),
Voltaire in Love
(1957),
The Sun King
(1966), and
Frederick the Great
(1970)—and published a book of essays,
The Water Beetle
, in 1962. Her biographies are knowledgeable, but chatty and amusing, giving the reader a sense, similar to that in the novels, of coming to know Mitford’s subjects personally. They are not as “light” as the novels, but the novels themselves are not in fact as light as Mitford’s tone allows the reader to make them. They are perceptive about psychology and history, and they allow different voices to compete on stage; they are a record of their times and beautifully wrought works of art, as well.

Christmas Pudding

Four o’clock on the First of November, a dark and foggy day. Sixteen characters in search of an author.

Paul Fotheringay sat in his Ebury Street lodgings looking at the presentation copies of his book,
Crazy Capers
, which had just arrived by post. He thought of the lonely evening ahead of him and wondered whether he should telephone to some of his friends, but decided that it would be of little use. They would all be doing things by now. He also thought of the wonderful energy of other people, of how they not only had the energy to do things all day but also to make arrangements and plans for these things which they did. It was as much as he could manage to do the things, he knew that he would never be able to make the plans as well. He continued sitting alone.

Walter Monteath was playing bridge with three people all much richer than himself. He was playing for more than he could afford to lose and was winning steadily.

Sally Monteath was trying on a dress for which, unless a miracle happened, she would never be able to pay. She looked very pretty in it.

Marcella Bracket was ringing up a young man and hinting, rather broadly, that he should take her out that evening.

Amabelle Fortescue was arranging her dinner table. She wondered whether to put a divorced husband next to his first wife, and decided that it would be a good plan; they always got on famously with each other now that this was no longer a necessary or even a desirable state of things.

Jerome Field slept in his office.

Miss Monteath, nameless as yet, slept in her pram.

Bobby Bobbin, at Eton, was writing a note to an older boy.

Philadelphia Bobbin sat in her mother’s drawing-room and looked at the fire. She hoped that death would prove less dull and boring than life.

Lady Bobbin tramped Gloucestershire mud and cursed the foot and mouth disease which had stopped the hunting that beautiful, open winter.

‘I loved thee in life too little, I loved thee in death too well,’ sang Lord Leamington Spa at a concert in aid of the Jollier Villages Movement. Later on he sang ‘Fearful the death of the diver must be’, and for an encore, ‘Under the deodar’. Lady Leamington Spa agreed with the chairwoman of the movement that her husband had a charming voice. ‘Our son is musical like his father,’ she said proudly.

Squibby Almanack, the said son, sat with the three fair and slightly bald young men who were his friends at a Bach concert, in Bond Street.

Major Stanworth drove his Morris Cowley along the high road between Oxford and Cheltenham. He was on his way to the preparatory school where his little boy was having mumps rather badly.

Michael Lewes was sending out invitations for a garden party at H.B.M. Residency, Cairo. He thanked heaven several times aloud that he was leaving the diplomatic service for good at Christmas.

The Duchess of St. Neots was talking scandal with an old friend. Any single one of the things she said would have been sufficient to involve her in an action for criminal libel. Her daughter by a former marriage, Miss Héloïse Potts, was listening from an alcove where she very much hoped to remain undiscovered.

Sixteen characters in search of an author.

There is a certain room in the Tate Gallery which, in these unregenerate days, is used more as a passage-way towards the French pictures collected by Sir Joseph Duveen than as an objective in itself. There must be many lovers of painting who have hurried through it countless times and who would be unable to name or even to describe a single one of the flowerings of Victorian culture which hang there, so thoroughly does the human mind reject those impressions for which it has no use.

Indeed Paul Fotheringay, until, on the second day of November, he found himself sitting in this room, had been unaware of its very existence. He now observed that it was mostly hung with large and unpleasant works of the ‘Every picture tells a story’ school, interspersed with some rather inferior examples of pre-Raphaelitism and a few careful drawings by Ruskin. He sat on a hard and shiny bench and gave himself up to the contemplation of an elderly lady who was struggling, with but little success, to reproduce the handsome but unprepossessing features of Mrs. Rossetti. For it was copying day in the Tate. Paul wondered how she managed to keep the paint so beautifully smooth. He thought it very clever of her. Whenever he had tried to express himself on canvas, the result had invariably been a mass of dirty bumps; his own particular style of course, and, he liked to think, a not unpleasing one. Nevertheless, he was perfectly aware that even if he wished to do so he was incapable of producing that oleographic smoothness which seemed to come so easily to the elderly copyist.

Soon, however, his thoughts left the exterior world and turned upon his own inward wretchedness. When a man is harassed beyond endurance through the two most important aspects of life; when the labour of months bears a bitterer fruit than that of failure; and when, at the very same moment, she whom he adores shows herself once and for all unworthy of adoration; then indeed is that man unhappy.

So thought Paul; and writhing beneath the duplicated gaze of Mrs. Rossetti he considered for the hundredth time the two causes of his present depression, namely, the behaviour of his fiancée, Marcella Bracket, and the reception by the public of his first novel,
Crazy Capers
, which had been published that week. It would be difficult to say which was the more wounding. The reception accorded to his novel, indeed, appeared at first sight to have been extremely gratifying. The critics, even those of them who had been neither at Eton nor at Oxford with him, had praised it extravagantly, and with a startling unanimity; the cheque which he would eventually receive from his publisher promised to be a great deal larger than those which must so often (and so fortunately) prevent young authors from ever again putting pen to paper. The book, in fact, was an undoubted success. Nevertheless how could praise or promise of glittering gain compensate in any way to the unhappy Paul for the fact that his book, the child of his soul upon which he had expended over a year of labour, pouring forth into it all the bitterness of a bitter nature; describing earnestly, as he thought, and with passion, the subtle shades of a young man’s psychology, and rising to what seemed to him an almost unbearably tragic climax with the suicide pact of his hero and heroine, had been hailed with delight on every hand as the funniest, most roaringly farcical piece of work published for years. He who had written with one goal always before him, sincere approbation from the very few, the exquisitely cultured, was now to be held up as a clown and buffoon to jeers and senseless laughter from the mob.