The Pursuit of Laughter

‘Roar with laughter.’
Laura Thompson

‘Fascinating.’
Daily Telegraph

‘The dazzling beauty… wit pervades her writings.’
Anne de Courcey,
Daily Mail
Critics Choice

‘Sharp, funny, debunking…
[Mitford] laughter rings through.’
Evening Standard
Book of the Week

‘When she wielded her elegant stiletto, it was to unmask an ego… stuffed with lives and letters, each subject brightly and sharply illuminated.’
Valerie Grove,
The Times

‘Controversial opinions and catty humour prevail… The life in writing of a fascinating woman… It is impossible not to be dazzled… testimony to the sheer rigour of her thought and the crispness and elegance of her prose.’
Catherine Heaney,
Irish Times

‘An intimate portrait.’
Sunday Business Post

‘An impressively wide range… sketches of fascinating figures, from Cecil Beaton and the Duchess of Windsor to Putzi Hanfstaengl, Hitler of course and Dr Goebbels. She is at her most entertaining.’
Selina Hastings
Spectator

Diana Mitford’s bestselling collection of writings is expanded with articles on Oswald Mosley and Lord Berners in which she considers being a
fascist
. Like her literary sisters, Diana Mitford wrote widely, not only on her own fascinating, controversial life, but also recorded intimately placed observations of friends who also happened to have been leading political and social figures of the day. Many of the scintillating articles included here circulated only privately to a small group of subscribers, and are collected for the first time in this volume with a forward by her sister Deborah Devonshire.

Diana Mitford was the third of the Mitford sisters. She first married a Guinness, with whom she had two children, and then Oswald Mosley, with whom she also had two children. She then became a bestselling author with her autobiography
A Life of Contrasts
and
The Duchess of Windsor
. Deborah Devonshire is the dowager duchess of Devonshire, the youngest Mitford sister and a best-selling writer.

This volume is thematic rather than chronological so that there is a coherence for the
reader
. This seemed to make sense as its author in all likelihood held views consistently throughout her long life; to an extent the location is arbitrary as essays can at times come under several different themes or subthemes. Articles written for the privately printed
European
are not attributed and the diary has its own section. The remaining articles were mainly written for (the defunct)
Books and Bookmen
and the
Evening Standard
(Diana Mosley was the catch-all reviewer for A.N. Wilson as literary editor). ‘Paradise on Earth’ is
unpublished
. ‘Large Huts’, the portrait of Lady Evelyn Guinness, is edited from
A Life of Contrasts
, and the ‘Portraits’ are from
Loved Ones
. (1985). I am very grateful to Deborah Devonshire for the portrait of Diana at the beginning of this volume and reading my Editor’s Note and the articles, to Alexander and Charlotte Mosley for reading a first draft, to Jonathan and Desmond Guinness for reading this new edition, to Imogen Olsen and Debora Grosso for her assistance with the index, to Alexander Larman for his prepatory work on the articles, and to Duncan Fallowell for allowing the inclusion of Diana’s last interviews in this paperback edition.

Perhaps like everyone who only knew Diana Mitford from the media, I was not sure who to expect. We first got in touch when in 2001 her sister Deborah Devonshire had kindly suggested I should ask Diana to write a foreword for a book on their sister Nancy Mitford. I had just started a publishing company and watched an entertaining documentary on Nancy. There was at that time nothing on her in print and I wanted to reissue the
autobiography
Harold Acton had edited from the letters Nancy had been collecting for this
purpose
before she died. Diana and I had only corresponded about the elegant and copy-
perfect
foreword that had rolled off the fax.

Now I was about to have lunch at her home in Paris. The interviews that I had read in advance made it sound as if being in the presence of Diana could be nerve-racking on account of her strident political views—a very different person indeed from her Mitfordian autobiography
A Life of Contrasts
that I had also read.

I rang the doorbell next to the enormous
porte cochère
where she lived opposite the French Ministry of Defence, not at all sure how the day would develop. The concierge let me in and at the top of the stairs stood an attractive elderly lady with limpid blue eyes and striking white hair dressed in a well-tailored dove-grey dress. Although she moved
deliberately
, she seemed fit enough to run the Paris marathon. The first thing she said in the most extraordinarily elongated pre-War vowels was ‘You must always shout at me, I am
frightfully
deaf.' The second, ‘I was awfully worried, you are probably famished.' I had arrived by train from London but had forgotten about the one hour time difference and had been too embarrassed to tell Diana's maid on the phone the precise reason why I was delayed and had left it rather vague whether the general unreliability of public transport might have been to blame. But here I was an hour late, and she had been worried.

Exhausted by waiting for me, Diana retired for a while as I had a perfectly cooked lunch—prepared by her maid—in the dining room with fragrant white lilies, her favourite flower, while overlooking the large garden of the French Ministry of Defence where
various
functions were taking place in the dappled shade. When she re-emerged I had one of the most delightful afternoons I have ever had. The refreshing thing was that not for a
second
had I arrived at Mount Olympus for a steep climb. Evelyn Waugh, Lytton Strachey, John Betjeman, the Churchills etc had all been close friends, but opposite me sat a gorgeous no-nonsense nineteen year old with a razor-sharp mind in a neat ninety year old body who enjoyed laughing about many subjects as well as batting away questions on the 7 most
controversial
years of her long life. (Apart from A.N. Wilson's articles, Mark Steyn's column of
his seduction, Valerie Grove's interview when Diana published an expanded edition of her autobiography with me, and Duncan Fallowell's last interviews—reproduced here for the paperback edition—are probably the most true-to-life portraits—the photographs less often so as they seem to have been the ones from the end of a session with the
photographer
when Diana was getting tired.) At the same time, on her coffee table were several heavy tomes in German, English and French in various states of being read—if Britain liked intellectuals in the way France does, she might have wanted to be one.

After our meeting we became firm ‘fax friends'—Diana's joke. Over time arose the idea of this book—a collection of the diary she wrote from 1953 to 1960 and most of her
journalism
. Her last long-hand fax arrived two weeks before she died in the summer of 2003 when Paris was suffering under a prolonged heat wave. She did not want to move to an
air-conditioned
hotel and succumbed to the heat. I was deeply moved when her daughter-
in-law
Charlotte Mosley rang with the unexpected news. She was, in the poignant words of A.N. Wilson, ‘a friend whose conversations and letters I already miss with aching sadness'.

A wave of new books on the Mitfords have brought a fresh interest in Diana as a writer and wickedly original observer of the twentieth century (including Oswald Mosley, the love of her life). It prompted me to resume editing the book that follows.

In many ways
The Pursuit of Laughter
is Diana's life in writings. Her teenage self was shaped by two women, her nanny who said on her wedding day, ‘Don't worry no one will be looking at you', and her mother's childhood friend Violet Hammersley (‘Mrs Ham') whose literary connections made the sisters feel like ‘country bumpkins'. Diana quickly changed all that aged 19. At her burial next to her sisters, one of her Irish grandchildren—neither of us knew each other, though she looked exactly like Diana's photographs from the 30s—stopped me for a chat in the most likeably direct way, and I could see how Diana's friendships must have quickly multiplied away from home.

But the literary seeds only started in the 50s when the Mosleys moved from Wiltshire to Paris next to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Though no longer a supporter of the British Empire but an ardent European instead, Mosley decided not to mix in French domestic politics. There was also not much politicking left in Britain as it was distant and very hostile. He was banned from the British media for the time being, and so a publishing company was set up, Euphorion, after a character in Goethe's
Faust
sequel—released from jail Mosley had declared the death of fascism and was preparing his next aim. Diana gave her loyal support—though she was never a politician like his first wife Cimmie Curzon, who stood as a prospective MP for Mosley's party. The idea was that Euphorion would publish his books while Diana would be free to commission a cultural list. She announced her
translation
of Goethe's first
Faust
with a modest volley of three orders (the success of her 1985 translation of racing champion Nicki Lauda's autobiography would dwarf Goethe), but she was more fortunate with
Stuka Pilot
, a first-person account by the Luftwaffe's most
decorated
pilot. Though it was published without much hope as a list filler out of kindness to the author, British readers took to heart his anorak style and expert thrashing of Allied
forces; it became an instant bestseller.

More important however was the
European
, a cultural magazine with the same purpose. It circulated in a small number among an exclusive group of friends. From a standing start Diana edited from her home in Orsay a surprisingly professional monthly. At the age of 43, she was writing many of the light-hearted articles herself at the relentless pace required by a periodical. She wrote book reviews and a very witty diary for her friends to turn to when they received the latest edition. All are from her unexpectedly original point of view and in her distinctive Mitford style. Clearly in her element while 50s Paris was leading the world in fashion, ideas and literature, she wrote articles that were both waspishly funny, timeless and informed about anything from sex, to her friends, to prison. They were completely
separate
from Mosley's ponderous pieces about the great issues of the day that appeared
anonymously
—the point of the magazine. It is said that Flaubert's punchy send-up of the French in his
Dictionaire des idées reçues
is untranslatable in English because the British have no ‘received' ideas as such. But reading Diana's observations from France, there appears to be a stock room of hypocrisy and nonsense after all. Having been jailed from the beginning of the war for being married to Mosley (Diana never knew the 2004 news that it was not Nancy but her father-in-law, Colonel Guinness, who ensured that she ended up in jail) she was less than persuaded by the certainties of British culture. She had an unerring eye for rubbish logic that her sisters must have learned to fear or shriek about with laughter. Surprisingly for the wife of a notorious politician, she also reveals below that she voted only once in her life (for a Liberal Democrat in today's political terms, it seems). This volume gathers for the first time these privately printed essays and the diary.

Diana's
pièce de resistance
followed with her autobiography,
A Life of Contrasts
published by her friend Hamish Hamilton in 1977. It is safe to say that there is no light-hearted
autobiography
quite like it and one imagines that anyone with even a flicker of interest in
literature
, society and politics of the twentieth century ought to read it. Diana mentioned she was particularly proud of the Waughian portrait of her idiosyncratic mother-in-law Lady Evelyn Guinness (reproduced on p. 58 below) which she had carefully crafted to get right. Colonel Guinness (later the first Lord Moyne) receives only a passing mention as she seems to have been put off by him—in 1928 his mind was on increasing Britain's beetroot
production
as minister of agriculture (he was murdered by Zionists in 1944 when Churchill gave him the Middle East of the Empire to look after). Later she wrote her best reviews for A.N. Wilson, literary editor from 1990 to 1997 of the
Evening Standard
. While being fair minded she sent up books in sentences that are as elegantly handled as a Chanel dress. Her review, for example, of saving the elephant—of which, as far as one knows, she had no knowledge—is a laugh and miles removed from being ill-informed, sour or grindingly Puritanical. Entirely a-religious, she dissects throughout her writings church tenets in a way that dispatches all cant in a devastating and amusing way.

This collection reveals much about the broadly populated avenues of Diana's thinking. She writes about her finding clever friends and observing that ‘what they lack in good nature
they make up for over and over again in the amusement and interest they provide.' It seems to have been a compass for her life. She recalls in the portrait of her husband—included in this paperback edition for the first time—an instance a few years before his death in 1980, when he disagreed in no uncertain terms with her. Mosley's biographer Robert Skidelsky, who was there, said after hearing him for a while, ‘“Oh, Kit [Mosley],
poor
Diana!” I turned to Robert: “Don't worry. One doesn't live with Kit for forty years and get upset by a few insults.” Later on, when Kit came to say goodnight, he said, “It was
dreadful
of you to say that to Robert; he will imagine I am
rude
to you.” When I laughed, he began to laugh too.' Perhaps no wonder her favourite book was
Wahlverwandschaften
[passions of choice], one of Goethe's most complex works—it is the jokes, Diana mentioned.

In many ways Diana belonged to the tradition of literary figures from previous
centuries
who, apart from literature, felt most pressingly the irritation—and vice versa—of their friends and relatives in politics. Reviewing Mrs Hammersley's translation of the prolific seventeenth-century letter-writer Mme de Sévigné, Diana says they ‘could almost have been written yesterday. She walked in the woods, received her grand neighbours, chatted with the abbé, read a great many books, and never stopped assuring her correspondents that she was not in the least bored [p. 351].' This last assurance was a tease directed at Mrs Hammersley (who thought of herself as a poor exile on the Isle of Wight), but Diana shared an outlook that was identical to Mme de Sévigné's. In the 30s Hitler had burst on the scene from nowhere—no one from the European ruling classes had ever heard of his family (even the name Hitler was made up). When asked by James Naughtie in 2002 on national radio what she would do if Hitler came through the door, she said without a pause, ‘I think you would be just like me and would ask him to tell a few things… He was a
mystery
person.' If her frank curiosity was a relic from the past, so was her
ancien-régime
incarceration
in Holloway Prison in Islington on the secret testimony of her (then) ex-father-
in-law
, who happened to have Churchill's ear—Churchill was Diana's close relative through her mother who was his cousin. A talent to annoy can be a risky thing in such
circumstances
. In previous centuries she herself would no doubt have written many letters from prison. But in our modern age she was only allowed two, plus one to parliament—every so often. Instead the first cue to writing came in the 1950s with the private articles below.

This book seeks to show what those close to Diana saw in her, a delightful friend with a complex connection to modern history; a conundrum that tells us something about
ourselves
, too. Her brilliance lay in the art of conversation and friendship with many people, reflected in
The Pursuit of Laughter
.

Martin Rynja
November 2008