BOOKS:
Thicker Than What?

By Noemie Emery

Noemie Emery on The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters by Charlotte Mosley

Charlotte Mosley. The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters. Harper. 864 pages. $39.95

Like the kennedys, whose path they crossed briefly, the Mitfords of England live on in books and in legend, as one of those truths so much stranger than fiction that invention can’t start to compete. Two fascists, one communist, one duchess, and one best-selling biographer/novelist are quite a good show for one English family, whose members spanned such a wide spectrum of twentieth-century life.

Together and separately, the six Mitford sisters — Nancy, (b. 1904), Pamela (1907), Diana (1910), Unity (1914), Jessica (Decca, 1917), Deborah (Debo, 1920) — were friends with Evelyn Waugh and with Lytton Strachey, friends with Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop, friends with the Duff Coopers and the Duchess of Windsor, friends with John Kennedy and Harold Macmillan; and went to mass Nazi rallies in Munich, to communist meetings in American suburbs, went to Court and to soirees at Clarence House, went to the inauguration and then to the funeral of President Kennedy, went to prison in London as dangerous persons, went to great houses in Paris and Ireland, and went to numerous fittings at the House of Dior. Among them, they wrote an immense number of books, many best-sellers, including Nancy’s romances and historical studies; Decca’s memoirs and muckraking exploits; Diana’s memoirs and biographical sketches, and Debo’s eight books on the restoration and running of Chatsworth, one of the kingdom’s great country houses, and her husband’s ancestral home. Their husbands included one fascist, two communist sympathizers (one a nephew of Winston S. Churchill; one an American of Hungarian-Jewish extraction), one scientist, one immensely rich heir to a beer-brewing fortune, one aimless, supremely incompetent ne’er-do-well, and one prominent peer of the realm.

Decca and Unity were “Bouds,” and spoke their own language; Decca and Debo were “Hens,” “Hons,” or “Henderson”; Decca and Nancy were “Sooze” and/or “Susan.”

As children and girls, the sisters were fanatically close to each other, forming subsets galore within their own larger union, communicating in an odd sort of elliptical shorthand that was almost like speaking in tongues. (Decca and Unity were “Bouds,” and spoke their own language; Decca and Debo were “Hens,” “Hons,” or “Henderson”; Decca and Nancy were “Sooze” and/or “Susan”; Diana was “Honks” (as were other Dianas), Nancy was “The French Lady” — as she became one in reality — and to Nancy, Debo was what she called her sister’s “real” mental age: “9.”) As adults, they were riven by giant-sized quarrels that mirrored the rifts of the twentieth century, and caused some intense conflicts of loyalties. There were four clever sisters — Nancy, Diana, Decca, and Debo — and two who were not; three who were ensnared by radical politics — Diana, Decca, and Unity — and three who were not; two who quarreled — Diana and Decca — and three others who tried to keep peace.

How well they kept it — or failed to — is laid out in The Mitfords, a collection of letters among the six sisters, introduced and edited by Charlotte Mosley, a daughter-in-law of third sister Diana, who has previously edited three books about Nancy, and has now expanded her view. The fascination lies in the incredible strength of their ties, under assault from the force of their differences, and in the question, not wholly answered, about the peculiar attraction of talented people to evil and extreme regimes.

The Mitfords’ engagement with radical politics began in the spring of 1932 when Diana, then married to the Hon. Bryan Guinness and the mother of two very young children, sat at a dinner party next to Sir Oswald Mosley, and fell deeply in love at first sight. “Kit,” as she called him, was not everyone’s idea of a catch or a hero — he was an energetic philanderer, married to a wife he had no intention of leaving, and a politician about to flush his career down the toilet by leaving his party to launch the British Union of Fascists, a mistake which would in the end send him to prison, make him a pariah within his own country, and essentially ruin his life. Nonetheless, Diana at once left her wealthy young husband, risked losing her children, estranged herself from her parents and brother (who forbade her to see her two youngest sisters), and put herself wholly at Mosley’s disposal, where she would remain for the rest of her life.

One of those who was permitted to see her was Unity, then 18 and a surly and difficult child, who became besotted with Mosley, then with fascism, and then by extension with Hitler; who went with Diana to Germany in 1934 when she made her first visit and in most senses never came home. “From then until the outbreak of the war, Unity lived mostly in Germany,” Charlotte Mosley informs us. “Hitler became her god, and National Socialism . . . ‘my religion, not merely my political party’. . . . Heedless of the inhumanity of the regime, she embraced the Nazi creed unquestioningly, and let it take over her life.” Haunting a restaurant Hitler was known to frequent, she wrangled an introduction in February 1935, and in short order became part of his personal circle, perhaps as he recognized the publicity value of having a large Nordic goddess of the English nobility as a permanent part of his camp.

As girls, the sisters were fanatically close, forming subsets galore within their own larger union, communicating in an odd shorthand that was almost like speaking in tongues.

With Diana going back and forth doing business for Mosley, the blonde sisters became fixtures among la crème de les dregs of high Nazi circles, and soon overwrought tales of their exploits, “incongruously written in the gushing tones of breathless excitement normally reserved for romantic fiction,” began to circulate between the two of them, and between them and home. “Poor sweet Fuhrer, he’s having such a dreadful time,” Unity wrote to an unimpressed Nancy, and she also confessed she had trembled “all over” when first in his presence. “I stood for about 1/2 a minute saluting about 5 feet from him,” she wrote of one chance encounter. “When I got to the hairdresser I felt quite faint, and my knees were giving, you know how one does.” One who did know, alas, was her far more intelligent sister, who wrote of wanting to take her small children to Munich so that they could be “blessed” by being close to the great personage. When she married Mosley (whose wife had died three years earlier) in a secret ceremony in 1936 attended by high Nazi figures, Diana wrote to her sister, “The wedding itself was so beautiful, and the [sight] . . . of the Fuhrer walking across the sunny garden from the Reichkanzlei was the happiest moment of my life.”

Not all the Mitford family members were quite so enthused about the Führer, or as taken by his radiant charms. After Pamela met him, she remembered mainly the menus, and 17-year-old Debo ignored him to look at a handsome young man in a band. Pam was too vague, and Debo too sane, to be moved by extremists, but Decca veered hard in the other direction, eloping in 1937 with Esmond Romilly (a nephew of Clementine Churchill), an ardent left-winger who shared her budding devotion to communist theories, and who had fought with the Loyalist Army in Spain. Under his influence, she turned against most of her family, and set off a permanent break with Diana, whose activities she now regarded as criminal, and whose politics she now abhorred. She did not break, however, with Unity, who saw no reason why the two sisters should sever their ties. “I hate the Communists just as much as [Esmond] hates Nazis, and it naturally wouldn’t occur to me nor would I want to make friends with a lot of communists, if I had no reason to,” Unity wrote in her perky and childlike manner, “but I don’t see why we shouldn’t personally be quite good friends.” Nancy, who viewed the whole thing with disdain and amusement, wrote a satirical novel about it, Wigs On the Green, which cost her a five-year-long break with Diana, and expressed her own views in a letter to Debo — “I have always said that there wasn’t a pin to be put between Bolshies and Nazis except that the latter, being better organized, are probably more dangerous” — and by penning a tongue-in-cheek ditty in honor of Unity: “Call me early, Goering dear/ For I’m to be Queen of the May.”

There was no May time for Unity on September 3, 1939, when France and England declared war on Germany: Fittingly enough, she went to the English Garden in the middle of Munich and shot herself in the head. Sent by Hitler by private train to a clinic in Switzerland, she was brought home by her mother and Debo, where she would live eight more years as an invalid, with, in Mosley’s words, “the mental age of a twelve-year-old . . . in whom religious mania had replaced Hitler mania,” and who was “untidy, clumsy, and incontinent at night.” Mosley’s call to his followers on May 9, 1940, to “resist [Hitler’s] invasion with all that is in us” did not prevent his arrest two weeks later, or that of Diana one month after that. (Released in November 1943 due to Mosley’s life-threatening case of phlebitis, they were kept under house arrest until the war ended. Before her arrest, Diana had been denounced by her sister Nancy; and Nancy and Decca would both protest loudly when they were released.) Decca was now in America, where she had gone in 1939 with Esmond Romilly, and where she had stayed after he was killed in action in the Royal Canadian Air Force in December 1941. In 1943, she married Robert Treuhaft, a left-leaning lawyer (his firm would one day employ the young Hillary Rodham), and one year later joined the American Communist Party, temporarily cutting all ties to her family. “She had made a conscious effort to break away,” writes Charlotte Mosley. “Her deep well of feelings for her sisters remained intact, but mistrust had entered their relations and behind the long-standing jokes and teases was a wariness that was never dispelled.” At the end of the war, Unity was dead, Diana and Decca were permanent enemies, Nancy was sending darts off in varied directions, Diana was living a life of great strain as the devoted protector of an unemployed politician despised by his country, and Debo was about to emerge as the heart of the family, the clearinghouse for all the battling elements, and the core around which all spokes converged.

Debo had married Andrew Cavendish, second son of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, in April 1941. Three years later, in May 1944, they became Kennedy in-laws, when Andrew’s big brother Billy married John Kennedy’s favorite sister in a war-time wedding. Four months after that, Billy was killed in action in France, and Andrew and Debo were heirs to the dukedom; the duke died six years later and they became duke and duchess, inheriting Chatsworth, one of the kingdom’s great country houses, and crushing death duties of 80 percent. Debo would spend the next 50 years restoring Chatsworth and making it viable, and viewing the great and the royal through the prism of Mitford irreverence: John Kennedy became “the Loved One,” after he asked her one day if her “loved ones” were with her, and she noted his “sweetness” and “pathos” and sex life, writing to Nancy, “People in England say it’s 1/2 hour with him, including shaking hands.” The Queen Mother was “Cake,” after she loudly exclaimed over the cake at a wedding, and her residence, Clarence House, was “Cake’s dump.” “The opening of Parliament was as beautiful . . . as ever,” she wrote in one 1965 letter, “but I’m sorry to say the peeresses smelt. . . . Their huge & dirty diamonds surmounted their huge & dirty dresses, & as for the Life Peeresses, their wild grey hair had been specially tousled for the occasion, talk about being dragged through a hedge backwards, but where did they find the hedge?”

Debo noted John Kennedy’s “sweetness” and “pathos,” and wrote to Nancy of his sex life: “People in England say it’s 1/2 hour with him, including shaking hands.”

Debo, whose husband would join the somewhat center-left Social Democrats, and whose own taste in statesmen ran to John Kennedy and “Uncle Harold” Macmillan, nonetheless served as the link between the rival totalitarian arms of the family, commiserating with Diana about her life’s disappointments, flying to Oakland to mend fences with Decca, entertaining her and her family three years later, when she came to England for the first time since 1939. Decca was reunited with her mother and three of her sisters, but not with Diana, whom she declined to see. For the rest of their lives, the two sisters were connected only through references passed back and forth by Nancy and Debo, and alternating currents of yearning and anger. They did not meet until 1969, when Nancy was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and then, four years later, during Nancy’s last days. “I felt very drawn to Decca,” Diana wrote on the latter occasion. “I felt all my old love for her come flooding back, & have quite forgotten her bitter public attacks on me, or at least quite forgiven them.” But the truce was not lasting, the feeling died quickly, and the old rift resumed.

Nancy’s death was the first major loss to the adult sisters’ unit, removing one of its most distinct voices, and eliminating also one of the few points of contact to whom both Diana and Decca could speak. After this, the diminished core of four sisters would find themselves re-fighting old battles, as scars were ripped open by a series of memoirs — books about Unity, books about Mosley, memoirs by Decca, memoirs by friends and by other family members, documentaries, articles, television programs, and even a musical play. Rows broke out over things said and written, interviews given to unfriendly authors, projects cooperated with or turned down by various sisters, and portraits emerging of family members with which other members failed to agree.

“The established pattern was that of Diana and Deborah seeing eye-to-eye, Pamela following their lead, and Jessica disputing their version of family events,” writes Charlotte Mosley:

Because Diana and Jessica never communicated, and Pamela and Jessica wrote only occasionally, most of the disagreements were expressed in angry letters between Jessica and Deborah. Jessica dreaded being cut off . . . completely, but resented Deborah appointing herself arbiter . . . especially since as she wrote to a friend, “I am three years old than she is.”

Decca despised Diana’s husband and politics; Diana did not despise Decca’s, but resented instead what she saw as her acts of private unkindness, such as urging that Mosley be kept in jail when he was ill with phlebitis, or urging Diana be jailed in the first place, which parted her from her newborn infant as well as from her three other young sons. Still, Diana made efforts to see her, which Decca rejected, the reason being, as she wrote to Debo, that she had once loved Diana too much. “Having really adored her all through childhood, it makes it 10 times more difficult to just have casual meetings.” Diana would now and then show her ambivalence. “I can’t help (half) feelings of fondness,” she wrote to Debo, adding a rather strong qualification: “She probably can’t help being spiteful & obtuse & underneath everything there is Decca, somebody one loves.” Then a new squall would blow up and dispel the warm feelings. “Over the years . . . since Decca ‘demonstrated’ in an attempt to get Kit & me put back in prison . . . I have never reacted in any way to her pinpricks,” Diana wrote in 1980:

I don’t mind in the least what people’s politics are. . . . But what happened with Jebb’s silly film shows the depths of seething hatred Decca feels for us. . . . I am well aware that her life in many ways has been awful, but not quite awful enough to excuse her behavior. As far as I go, I put her out of my mind.

In the end, only death put an end to their attachments, and their arguments: Jessica dying in 1996, assertive as ever; Diana six years later, at age ninety-three. Debo lives on, since 2004 the dowager duchess, in a small, lovely house not too far from Chatsworth; with no sisters to love, or to write to, or fight.

The mystery remains of why three out of six gifted and privileged sisters not only embraced two of the most vicious political movements that ever existed but also went to their graves unrepentant, long after the gulags and gas chambers had become common knowledge and evidence of more criminal acts was well known. Unity seems to have been an odd duck from the very beginning; the type of lost soul who is drawn to strange causes, a groupie writ large long before groupies existed, who attached herself not to an actor or a rock star, but to a very bad actor on the political scene. Decca is another recognizable figure, the upper-class radical, not unlike the Weathermen of the late 1960s (though with a great deal more talent and discipline) or today’s film stars, who gush over Castro and Hugo Chavez. The hardest nut to crack is Diana, whose remarkable blind spot regarding the Nazis contrasts with her nature as seen in this book. “Of all the sisters, the contradictions in Diana’s character are perhaps the most difficult to reconcile,” writes Charlotte Mosley:

The latent anti-Semitism and racism . . . were at odds with her innately empathetic nature. Her admiration for a barbaric regime, whose essential characteristic was dehumanizing its opponents, jarred with the qualities of generosity and tolerance that led her family and many friends to cherish her. Endowed with originality and intelligence, priding herself on intellectual honesty, she never acknowledged the reality of Hitler’s criminal aims.

To the end of her life, Diana denied that her beloved Kit’s fascist movement had ever done a thing to warrant the concern of his countrymen, and maintained that Hitler was a man of great charm and of “brilliant intelligence,” at least when she’d met him in 1935. Later in life, she would speak of the “crimes,” and admit that Hitler was part of a “terrible history,” but she never connected the terror and crimes to the “charm” and the “brilliance” that caused them. Fanatically devoted to her husband’s well-being, she let nothing shatter the air of sangfroid that she had assumed on behalf of her family. But between the end of the war and Mosley’s death more than 30 years later, she suffered crippling headaches on a near-daily basis, for which no physical cause could be found.

What might have happened if Diana had never met Mosley, or if he had been a more commonplace politician, or if she had been seated beside someone else? She would have been a society beauty who mingled with writers, Unity would have found different ways to embarrass her family, and Decca, with less to rebel against in her own family, might have rebelled in a less extreme fashion herself. Nancy would still have written her books, Debo would still have been a duchess; the family would still have been known, but it would have avoided the kind of notoriety that some of its members, at least, never wanted, and a particular exchange between Debo and Diana would not have taken place. In it, Debo describes a conversation with Pamela about the whereabouts of a certain family keepsake: “I asked what happened to the Chicken’s Mess & she said Birdie [Unity] craved it so she gave it to her & Bird gave it to Hitler & this made us laugh so much that we completely collapsed. It was the way she said it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”

And in their world, of course, so it was.