Nancy Mitford: The Pursuit Of Love

[novella]

I'm some way into the first of these two novels, bound as a one book. Nancy Mitford is funny as hell. Every page has a great line that I want to remember and pull out at the psychological moment. Plus, I'm really enjoying the aristo milieu. (I can understand, though, how it might grate on present-day English readers.) She describes a family of cousins growing up at Alconleigh, a huge Georgian pile built strictly for sheltering a succession of barons and their spawn between their forays into various bloodsports (bad paraphrase, but you get the idea). The first time she experiences a well-heated house is very funny, just one in a million good laughs the book has.

Well, maybe I'll post back when I'm done. I'm thinking Nancy Mitford is a seriously underrated social satirist.

 

[Shade]

I read The Pursuit of Love some time ago and it quickly became one of those books I couldn't remember much about (and is no doubt in due course to become one of those books I can't remember whether or not I've read) and then I read something that reminded me of Mitford and I decided I had to have a go at Love in a Cold Climate. Mitford, after all, was best buds with one of my tippermost-toppermost, Evelyn Waugh, she came from an authentically eccentric background (her sister Diana married British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley, another sister Unity fell in love with Hitler, shot herself in the head at the start of the second world war: and missed), and seems to have the pedigree of all that Waughy-Wodehousy upper-class whimsy that I have such a soft spot for.

But the format was the problem. I picked up a one-volume trilogy of Pursuit, Cold Climate and The Blessing. In teensy tiny type, each of the three novels takes up about 170 pages. In individual form they are each about 250 pages. What this means is that a few pages includes a lot of prose but doesn't actually get you very far through the book, and I found that I couldn't get through more than about 10 pages at a time, and even then was dabbing my brow afterwards. And maybe I had overdosed on that sort of whimsy, with Benson's Mapp and Lucia and Wodehouse's Leave it to Psmith having passed through my hands and mind not long beforehand, so that I felt sated before I had begun. There's no denying that Mitford can crack a gag, although I think her writing not as elegant as Waugh nor as fluffily charming as Wodehouse. The main problem is that absolutely nothing happens in the book (or the poor 70 pages I got through) other than people congregating at country houses to dine and discuss their, and others', love lives. Wodehouse's plots may be ludicrous and hammy but at least they're there.

So I put it to one side, and will no doubt return to it when I have forgotten everything about it that I couldn't get on with in the first place.

 

[novella]

But the format was the problem. I picked up a one-volume trilogy of Pursuit, Cold Climate and The Blessing. In teensy tiny type, each of the three novels takes up about 170 pages. In individual form they are each about 250 pages. What this means is that a few pages includes a lot of prose but doesn't actually get you very far through the book, and I found that I couldn't get through more than about 10 pages at a time, and even then was dabbing my brow afterwards.

Yes! My copy is like that, too. Why is that? The book is a nice handy size, but the paper is so thin (but good quality) and the type is so small, that gaining ground is a bit of a slog. But the writing amuses me.

I so love her portrayal of the bluff and violent Uncle Matthew. The cruelty throughout stands in contrast to Wodehouse and Waugh (whom I also love), so I'm seeing this as a cross between Wodehouse and Edward St. Aubyn, that aristo novelist who wrote the cruel and hilarious Patrick Melrose Trilogy (called Some Hope in the US). I enjoyed him equally.

 

[novella]

PS, Shade: I'm trying to suss out pronunciation of "Waughy." Can we say Waughist? Or even Waugh-like, as in "the Waugh-like Harry, like himself, assume the port of Mars. . ." ? Waughsian?

 

[Shade]

I'll compromise on Waughish.

Edward St Aubyn, that's interesting - I remember his books knocking about here (ie in the UK) some years ago but I never picked them up, and I suspect they're now out of print. Will have to have a look at his stuff. I think he might have been one of the first crop of Granta Best of Young British Novelists from 1983 - a decent pedigree as it included Amis, McEwan, Ishiguro, Barnes etc.

 

[Sybarite]

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

Semi-autobiographical novel from the literary Mitford sister, this tells the story of an upper-class, landed English family between the wars, concentrating on the romantic exploits of one daughter, Linda, who is partly based on the author herself.

Beautifully written, wryly amusing and really quite sharp in its description of the foibles of the class from which she herself came, Mitford's 1945 novel is a fascinating picture of a way of life that is now gone.