The Pursuit of Love
PENGUIN BOOKS
The Pursuit of Love
Nancy Mitford (1904–73) was born in London, the eldest child of the second Baron Redesdale. Her childhood in a large, remote country house with her five sisters and one brother is recounted in the early chapters of
The Pursuit of Love
(1945), which, according to the author, is largely autobiographical. Apart from being taught to ride and speak French, Nancy Mitford always claimed she never received a proper education. She started writing before her marriage in 1932 in order ‘to relieve the boredom of the intervals between the recreations established by the social conventions of her world’ and had written four novels, including
Wigs on the Green
(1935), before the success of
The Pursuit of Love
in 1945. After the war she moved to Paris where she lived for the rest of her life. She followed
The Pursuit of Love
with
Love in a Cold Climate
(1949),
The Blessing
(1951) and
Don’t Tell Alfred
(1960). She also wrote four works of biography:
Madame de Pompadour
, first published to great acclaim in 1954,
Voltaire in Love, The Sun King
and
Frederick the Great
. As well as being a novelist and a biographer she also translated Madame de Lafayette’s classic novel
La Princesse de Clèves
into English, and edited
Noblesse Oblige
, a collection of essays concerned with the behaviour of the English aristocracy and the idea of ‘U’ and ‘non-U’. Nancy Mitford was awarded the CBE in 1972.
Zoë Heller is the author of three novels:
Everything You Know
;
Notes on a Scandal
, which was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2003; and
The Believers
.
NANCY MITFORD
Introduction by Zoë Heller
PENGUIN BOOKS
To Gaston Palewski
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 1945
Published in Penguin Books 1949
Reissued with a new introduction in this edition 2010
Copyright © the Estate of Nancy Mitford, 1945
Introduction copyright © Zoë Heller, 2010
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author of the introduction has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196473-7
Contents
Introduction
Some novelists emerge, as if from the head of Zeus, with their talents fully formed, their distinctive styles already in place. Others shilly-shally for a couple of books until, for reasons that have as much to do with chance as with effort, they happen upon an idea, or a character, or even an opening sentence, that liberates whatever is most interesting in their writing selves. Mitford had produced four works of fiction by the time
The Pursuit of Love
was published in 1945, but it was only in this novel – her first attempt to capture the sui generis oddities of Mitford family life – that her genius finally declared itself.
The Pursuit of Love
may be reasonably described as a comic novel – a light comic novel even – but it is too spiky and intelligent, I think, to qualify as an altogether cosy or comforting novel. I have revisited it many times over the last thirty years and if I have been drawn back in most instances by a slightly lazy desire for familiar, reliable pleasures, the actual experience of reading the book has never failed to surprise that complacent expectation. The jokes are peerless, yes. I doubt I shall ever tire of reading Linda’s horrified account of housekeeping or Uncle Matthew’s outraged review of
Romeo and Juliet
or Davey’s devastating analysis of the Radlett family’s ‘museum-quality’ mineral collection. But beneath the brittle surface of this novel’s wit there is something infinitely more melancholy at work – something that is apt to snag you and pull you into its dark undertow when you are least expecting it. In contrast to some of the more obviously serious novels that impressed me in my youth, whose depths have since proved disappointingly plumbable, this unassuming bit of mid-century ‘chick lit’ has not only held up beautifully over time, but continues to yield riches.
Years of pressing the book enthusiastically on friends and loved ones have taught me some caution, however. Mitford’s fiction is strong meat. Readers who appreciate it at all, tend to love it with a dotty passion; others, who escape the enchantment, are apt to despise it with almost equal fervour. The decisive factor, in either case, would seem to be the voice – the unmistakable, arresting Mitford trill, in whose light, bright cadences, an entire hard-to-shock and easy-to-bore view of life is made manifest. This voice is not
actually
a voice, of course; it is the illusion of a voice, painstakingly created in prose. The narrator of this novel, Fanny, writes with such immediacy and casual fluency – her tone is so natural and true – that it is easy to forget this fact. ‘The charm of your writing,’ Evelyn Waugh once wrote to Mitford, ‘depends on your refusal to recognize a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language.’ Indeed, if Mitford has never quite received her due as a stylist – if even her devotees are inclined to classify her as a ‘guilty pleasure’ – it is perhaps because the sound of light, extemporaneous chatter in her prose is too convincing.
Such attention as her style has received over the years, has tended to emphasize its documentary value. It has been praised as a peculiarly vivid example of how the jeunesse dorée spoke in 1930s England, or, even more narrowly, as a charming demonstration of Mitford family idiolect. The achievement, in other words, has been understood to be one of transcription rather than of writing. But the felicities of Mitford’s style cannot, in fact, be reduced to class or period, or even to Hon-ish locutions. There is care – there is art – in the most artless-seeming passages of this novel. Examine the insouciant sentences, the frothy dialogue, carefully, and you will find that they are as precise as algebraic equations: you cannot tinker with their syntax or vocabulary without irrevocably harming the result. Here is Linda, describing to Fanny, in typically breathless fashion, the man who will become her second 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, and they are terrific Hons, and there’s an anarchist. The comrades don’t like anarchists, isn’t it queer? I always thought they were the same thing, but Christian likes this one because he threw a bomb at the King of Spain; you must say it’s romantic. He’s called Ramón, and he sits about all day and broods over the miners at Oviedo, because his brother is one.’
This is an impeccable spoof on a young woman’s dizzy, para-tactic speech patterns but it is also a rather deft dramatization of the speaker’s complicated attitude towards her new social circle. Linda is in love with Christian – eager to love what he loves – but at the same time, she detects something absurd in the deadly seriousness of the comrades and in her unlikely involvement with them. The tonal distinction between her genuine reverence (‘He’s a frightfully serious man… they are terrific Hons’) and her sly amusement (‘. . . but Christian likes this one because he threw a bomb at the King of Spain’) is a subtle one – not least because Mitford’s characters have a tendency to sound most wide-eyed when they are at their most satirical. (In her novel
The Blessing
, Mitford sums up the typical English joke as, ‘naive but penetrating’. Even so, by the time we get to the account of the lugubrious Ramón, and the inspired silliness of the final clause, ‘because his brother is one’, there can be no doubt that Linda has succumbed to the temptation of a classic Mitfordian ‘tease’.
Linda’s amused response to Communist earnestness is not untypical of this novel’s attitude towards any number of grave causes and important historic movements. Various political philosophies are adumbrated in the course of the plot, but, with the possible exception of Linda’s dreamy defences of England’s ancien régime, none of them are taken remotely seriously. The seminal lesson of Linda’s two failed marriages – the first to a Tory with Nazi sympathies, the second to Christian – would seem to be that equal degrees of absurdity and dullness exist at either end of the ideological spectrum. The only point at which Linda can be said to lose her intense charm is when she tries, briefly, to take politics seriously. (Much to Fanny’s relief, the experiment is doomed by Linda’s constitutional inability to feel ‘wider love for the poor, the sad and the unattractive’.)
For some, Mitford’s brazen indifference to big ideas, coupled with her minute attention to the sex and love lives of the privileged upper class, condemn this, and all her other novels, to inconsequentiality. Fanny’s husband, Alfred, speaks for generations of Mitford’s detractors when he rebukes his wife in
Love in a Cold Climate
, for the triviality of her preoccupations: ‘[G]eneral subjects do not amuse you, only personalities.’
Of course, Alfred and his fellow critics tend to take a rather narrow view of what constitutes the ‘general’. There is, after all, a long and honourable history of women writers who have used small canvases and gossipy plots in the service of expansive moral themes. (Jane Austen, lest we forget, devoted the entirety of her estimable oeuvre to posh people’s love lives and never once got round to mentioning the French Revolution or the slave trade.)