The Horror of Love (10 page)

When she stated in her autobiography, ‘it goes without saying that apart from the politicians who gave the orders and the unfortunates who obeyed them, nobody in Germany or Britain knew anything about what was happening’, Diana Mosley was articulating what has become a conventional view of the Holocaust. But the fact that most evidence about what was occurring in Germany in the 1930s was dismissed as left-wing propaganda does not mean that either politicians or ordinary people were entirely unaware of what was taking place. Collective ignorance was a more effective cognitive defence when the full horror of the camps was revealed, and this justification for a crime of monstrous neglect has remained broadly unchallenged.

Nancy’s biographers have been at a loss to explain the political change of heart that took place between her attendance at Fascist rallies early in 1933, her increasing disaffection by July 1934 and her evident contempt by the time of
Wig’s
publication. How had the cheering supporter at Olympia become the sharp satirist of just a month later? Nancy was not a hypocrite: she simply changed her mind, as careful consideration of the chronology of her dissent demonstrates.

Before their marriage, in May 1933, Peter had lunched at the Café Royal with Harold Nicolson. He described the atmosphere in Germany, from where he had just returned after his ignominiously brief stint as a
Times
correspondent, as one of ‘complete terror’. Conceivably, Nancy and Peter might initially have thought, along with far more experienced political players than themselves, that Mosley’s brand of Fascism was to be a form of National Socialism-lite, the dynamism without the brutality. Curiosity and family feeling accounted for the rest.

However, the events of the Olympia meeting soured Nancy’s perception of Fascism irrevocably. As Mosley waited for the fanfares of trumpets and cheering to die down before beginning his speech, violence broke out in the crowd. Medical evidence from the sixty or so protesters who were taken to hospital
showed that Mosley’s Blackshirt guard had come prepared with knuckledusters and razors. In a civil yet pointed correspondence in the
Daily Mail
, Lord Rothermere firmly withdrew his support. ‘I have made it quite clear in my conversations with you [Mosley] that I could never support any movement with an anti-semitic bias, any movement which has dictatorship as one of its objectives or any movement which will support a “Corporate State” for the Parliamentary institutions of this country.’

In October 1934, between the publication of Nancy’s July article and the release of her novel in June 1935, Mosley addressed another crowd at Olympia in terms which were explicitly anti-Semitic. International Jewry, he stated, was mobilized six to one against Fascism, and he could prove that BUF members had been victimized by Jews, who ‘owe allegiance not to our empire but to friends, relatives and kith and kin in other nations, and they know that Fascism will not tolerate anyone who owes allegiance to a foreign country’. He concluded with the well-known statement that Britain would not fight Germany in a Jewish quarrel, a tacit admission of the persecution his followers were elsewhere so keen to deny as left-wing propaganda. In March 1935, in a speech at Leicester, his remarks were self-avowedly even more anti-Semitic, so much so that he received an encouraging telegram from the rabid German anti-Semite Julius Streicher.

Nancy had learned enough to turn her gushing support for Mosley’s charisma into what became an increasingly fervent hatred. The fact that in
Wigs
Fascism is seen as a joke has led her to be accused of political shallowness, an inability to react to the proximity in her own family of ‘a grotesque and sinister political movement’
⁷
with anything other than schoolroom in-jokes. Yet as the German newspaper
Der Spiegel
recently commented: ‘The ultimate way to shrink a myth is to make it laughable.’ Nancy recognized an innate silliness in Fascism and ruthlessly sent up the pompously childish posturing, the uniforms and the marching that so enthralled her sisters.

‘The Union Jack movement is a youth movement, ’ Eugenia cried passionately, ‘we are tired of the old … We see nothing admirable in that debating society of old and corrupt men called Parliament.’

At this point a very old lady came up to the crowd …‘Eugenia, my child, ’ she said brokenly, ‘Do get off that tub … Oh! When her ladyship hears of this I don’t know what will happen.’

‘Go away, Nanny, ’ said Eugenia.

Nancy was not the only Mitford to perceive an inherent absurdity in Fascism. Pamela, in spite of her own distinctly right-wing politics, also objected to Mosley’s ‘ridiculous, play-acting behaviour’.
⁸
Even in her letter to Diana describing the early Oxford rally, where she described him as a ‘wonderful speaker’, Nancy couldn’t resist exposing her sister to the reality of what Mosley’s supporters were doing. ‘There were several fascinating fights, as he brought along a few Neanderthal men with him … One man complained afterwards that the fascists’ nails had pierced his head
to the skull
. Bobo was wonderful, cheering on we few, we happy few. Longing to see you, darling …’ At this stage, Nancy’s absolute refusal to take her sisters’ politics seriously, employing a tone which permitted their relationships to continue in that arch, teasing Mitford style, was the only means she had of expressing her dismay to them, but there is an urgency to the comedy of
Wigs on the Green
, an attempt to defuse the myth before it went too tragically far. She herself regretted this attempt to reduce Fascism to nursery silliness, an approach that has taken three-quarters of a century to become palatable.

What would she have made of the fact that in 2009 stormtroopers once more paraded along the Unter den Linden in the guise of the tapdancing showgirls of Mel Brooks’s 1968 musical comedy
The Producers?
Doubtless she would have relished the detail that in publicity for the show the swastika, which is still banned as an unconstitutional symbol in Germany, had to be replaced with a large pretzel. Or of Daniel Levy’s film
The Truest
Truth About Adolf Hitler
, featuring a dog in Nazi uniform, a joke anticipated by Nancy in Eugenia’s pet, Reichshund? Or of the rap ‘Cool Mein Führer’, featuring Hitler going street in a baseball cap? The novel’s picture of Fascism in the 1930s does not demonstrate a ‘failure of imagination, ’
⁹
rather the hope that the movement would be recognized as the ridiculous showing off it then was. Perhaps what is really discomfiting about
Wigs
is that Nancy got there first, and the immeasurable pity that Europe took so long to get the joke.

Nancy had offered to let Diana see the book and excise any offensive passages, but she was not prepared to scrap it. She did make some amendments, observing to her sister, with her allowance from Bryan Guinness of £2,500 per year, that the Rodds’ finances had already been seriously affected by the novel’s having missed the spring list as a result. The sisters had a last day in Oxford together before publication on 25 June, after which Nancy had to endure the clouds of Diana’s displeasure. The estrangement begun by the book did not really end for ten years. Nancy and Diana met occasionally and wrote to one another, but after Diana married Mosley in 1936, Nancy was forbidden to stay at their Staffordshire home. The sisters did not really become close again until the Mosleys moved to the Temple de la Gloire at Orsay in the early 1950s.

6

THE PURSUIT OF HONOUR

I
n 1919, Prince Antoine Bibesco brought his fiancée, Elizabeth Asquith, to the bedside of his dear friend Marcel Proust. Proust, somewhat embarrassed to receive Miss Asquith
en déshabille
, nonetheless pronounced himself enchanted by the encounter. Many of Proust’s circle, however, disapproved of the bourgeois Jewish doctor’s son whose only object in life seemed to have been to ingratiate himself in the Faubourg. Although Proust had already published two volumes of
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
, they felt that he would make much better use of his genius if he were not so fond of society. A decade later, Maurice and Rose Palewski, whose son was also a close friend of Bibesco, were having similar thoughts. In 1927, Maurice had bought a property at Louveciennes, west of Paris in the Seine-et-Oise. He and Rose devoted their retirement to improving the property, but though Gaston had a room there, he rarely used it. He preferred strolling round the Invalides in intense discussion with his friend Marcel Fouchet, or talking vaguely about a thesis he intended to write on English painting, which never got further than the title. His concerned parents felt that having made such a promising beginning under Lyautey, their talented son was settling into eternal studentdom.

Proust’s
Pastiches et Mélanges
notes the encounter with Antoine and Elizabeth, whom he compares to a beauty stepped down from an Italian fresco. He also added a late subplot concerning a parvenu First Empire family and the attempts of ‘Saint-Simon’, convinced that the most vital interests of the state are founded
on the rights of dukes, to undermine them. The irony of the pastiche is not so much Saint-Simon’s absurdity, but that it is ‘Proust himself, “the little Proust”, who had travelled the Guermantes way and emerged far beyond’, who is speaking of the Faubourg Saint-Germain ‘from the standpoint of a social superior, with the bitter diction and violent syntax and in the haughty person of the great memorialist’.
¹
Gaston never aspired to despise, but he yearned desperately to belong.

Gaston’s connection with Proust was through Jacques-Emile Blanche, the painter whose Sunday afternoon salons formed an important centre for his early Parisian social life. The décor of Persian rugs and chintz gave Gaston an advance taste of the ‘artistic’ houses he would come to know later in Chelsea. Proust had contributed the preface to Blanche’s
Propos de Peintre
, but this friendship, ‘an amity armed to the teeth’,
²
collapsed when Proust’s star outshone that of his friend. Chez Blanche, Gaston came to know many of the living prototypes for Proust’s characters; while his parents fretted about his idleness, he was setting out on his course
du côté de chez Guermantes
.

It was through Blanche that Gaston met Antoine Bibesco, who lived on the enchanted Ile St Louis, at 45 Quai Bourbon. His mother, Princesse Marthe Bibesco, played duets with Fauré and knew Liszt, Wagner and Debussy. She became a friend and lifelong correspondent of Gaston’s. There were Vuillards on the gold-leafed walls which, with their antique mirrors, presented a mosaic appearance that Proust compared to San Marco; Odilon Redon and Bonnard were regular visitors. Antoine and Elizabeth lived above, amid eighteenth-century vases and panels by Boucher. Their parties were international and political. Antoine, who would have been in his forties when Gaston first knew him, was a successful diplomat. Gaston met Leon Blum, the poetess Anna de Noailles, Lord Lloyd, in an atmosphere which, he wrote, ‘was one of those privileged environments where one can capture the essence of a civilization: it was that of French Europe’. It was this ‘essence’, in which Nancy and Gaston shared such a fervent belief, that coloured both their lives with joy and melancholy.
Gaston was fascinated by Antoine’s family in much the same manner as he was later fascinated by the Mitfords. They used a private language – secrets for example, were ‘tombs’ and anyone who violated them ‘hyenas’ – and, of course, he ‘tutoyed’ Proust.

The Bibescos knew everyone, including the originals of Proust’s impossibly grand Guermantes family, derived from the Castellanes and the Talleyrand-Périgords. Boni de Castellane, who contributed some aspects of the character of the Marquis de Saint-Loup, had been ‘the most brilliant young man in Parisian society’ until his American wife grew tired of his extravagance. Boni’s mother was a model for the Princesse de Guermantes, his aunt, the Princesse Marie de Radziwill (
née
Castellane, her mother was a Talleyrand-Périgord) once thanked him for taking her to luncheon at the Ritz by saying she was particularly grateful as she had never before dined at an inn. Gaston obviously remembered Boni’s anecdotes about Aimery de la Rochefoucauld, nicknamed ‘Placement’ for his addiction to etiquette, as this makes its way into
The Blessing
. Marriage for love is all very well, but why exchange a few nights of passion for a whole lifetime at the wrong end of the table?

Gaston’s attitude to his own family was ambivalent. He was proud of his father and had a close relationship with his Diamant-Berger cousin Marcel. He never concealed either his Polish or his Jewish roots, but nor did he ever emphasize them. Jean-Paul was much more interested in his family history and visited Poland several times, persuading Gaston to accompany him there in 1921, when they visited an aunt at Wilno on a trip which also included Poznan and Warsaw. Presumably both Palewski boys knew Polish, though their parents had not insisted that they follow the Jewish faith, and they both converted to Christianity. In 1923 in the chapel of Saint Joseph de Cluny in Paris’s fourteenth arrondissement, Gaston was received into the Catholic church by Abbé Mugnier, a fashionable priest who was much sought after as a confessor by smart Parisiennes. His godfather was Henri Bremond, a former Jesuit and distinguished literary critic. Gaston’s choice of spiritual counsellors does not appear
uncalculated – this last step to assimilation contained an element of social ambition – but in his own writing he reveals himself on occasion as a sincere, if somewhat sentimental Christian.