Zoë Heller on Nancy Mitford

Some novelists emerge, as if from the head of Zeus, with their talents fully formed. 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. Nancy 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 oddities of Mitford family life – that her genius 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 read. The jokes are peerless, yes. I doubt I shall ever tire of reading Uncle Matthew’s outraged review of Romeo and Juliet or Linda’s horrified account of housework. But beneath the brittle surface of Mitford’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 several more obviously serious novels that impressed me in my youth, whose depths have since proved disappointingly plumbable, this unassuming bit of midcentury “chick-lit” has continued to yield riches.

Years of pressing the book on friends have taught me some caution, however. Readers who appreciate the novel 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, seems to be the voice – the unmistakable 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. Mitford’s narrator, Fanny, writes with such casual fluency that it is easy to forget the hard work that went into making her witty locutions. If Mitford has never quite received her due as a stylist – even her devotees classify her as a “guilty pleasure” – it is partly because her imitation of effortless chatter is too convincing.

Such attention that her style has received over the years has tended to emphasise its documentary value: it has been praised as a peculiarly vivid example of how the jeunesse dorée spoke in Thirties England, or, even more narrowly, as a 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. Here is Linda describing to Fanny 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 Ramon, 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, paratactic speech patterns, but it is also a deft dramatisation of the speaker’s complicated attitude towards her new social circle. Linda is in love with Christian – and eager to love what he loves – but she detects something absurd in the deadly seriousness of the comrades. 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 tend to sound most wide-eyed when they are being most satirical. (In The Blessing, Mitford sums up the typical English joke as, “naïve but penetrating”.) But by the time we get to the account of the lugubrious Ramon, 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 the novel’s attitude towards any number of grave causes. Various political philosophies are adumbrated in the course of the plot but, with the possible exception of Linda’s dreamy defence 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 an aristocratic Marxist – seems to be that equal degrees of absurdity and dullness exist at either end of the ideological spectrum.

For some, Mitford’s brazen indifference to big ideas, coupled with her minute attention to the love lives of the upper-classes – condemn her 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: “General subjects do not amuse you, only personalities.”

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.

I am not sure, however, that we serve Mitford well by attempting to shoehorn her into this tradition. She is too devoted to making fun of everything, too allergic to any admission of moral seriousness. If she is flippant about political causes, she is not, in any obvious way, earnest about her characters either. She tends to keep her protagonists at a coolly amused distance – focusing on their public performances of themselves and declining to ferret about in their private emotional states. Even the heroine of this novel remains a largely opaque entity, despite the many occasions on which her feckless behaviour cries out to be mitigated by some insight into her conscience.

Modern novelists might take on the task of depicting a heroine who rejects her newborn, but the chances are that they would psychologise the act – would ask the reader to enter into the horror and shame of not wanting one’s child. Mitford does none of that. She asks us, instead, to laugh at Linda’s jokes about the hideousness of little Moira and to accept that in the long run the child will be much better off with her ghastly, blue-haired stepmother. (Children in Mitford’s fiction are remarkably hardy, cynical little creatures.)

There is no use disputing that Mitford’s gleeful cruelties – her preference for amusing sinners over virtuous dullards, her highly stylised complacency in regard to social injustice and class inequities – are all potent provocations. And it may be that an era like ours, which sets such store by the uncomplicated generosity and “big-heartedness” of its popular writers, is particularly ill-suited to appreciating the astringent pleasures of her fiction. But if Mitford’s heart does not lie moistly on her sleeve, it is a mistake to conclude that it is nowhere about her person. A reader might wish that she wrote passionately and expansively about the miseries of war, the outrage of death and the sadness of being in a bad marriage. But it is simply wrong to read her teasing prose as a denial of those experiences.

She begins The Pursuit of Love in elegiac mode, with the contemplation of an old Radlett family photograph. “Click goes the camera and on goes life; the minutes, the days, the years, the decades, taking them further and further from the happiness and promise of youth.”

The muted note of pain in this passage continues to sound long after we are immersed in the gay doings of the Radlett girls. We hear it not in spite of the jokes, or as some sort of pious addendum to the jokes, but resonating from their very centre. While Mitfordian wit may flirt with facetiousness, it does not, ultimately, represent a dismissal of life’s profundities so much as the tough-minded means by which she and her characters cope with those profundities. Linda’s lady-killer lover, Fabrice, has principles for which he is prepared to risk his life: he simply wouldn’t dream of boring a lady with those principles at luncheon. Linda has plenty of private sorrows: it would just never occur to her to whine about them.

It is precisely the elegance of this discretion – the courage of it – that finally redeems Linda. More than her beauty or bouquet-like charm, what we are asked to admire in Mitford’s heroine is the bravery with which she pursues her rackety course. Unlike Fanny, who has found in marriage “a refuge from the storms and puzzles of life”, Linda has dared to stay out on the romantic heath. And if she is buffeted by the high winds of fleeting passions – if she falls in love with asses and often makes an ass of herself in the process – she has the good sense and the guts to never apologise, never explain. “Don’t pity me,” she tells Fanny when she returns from France, still married to Christian and pregnant with another man’s child. “I’ve had 11 months of perfect and unalloyed happiness, very few people can say that in the course of long, long lives, I imagine.”

Whether it is better to hold out, like Linda, enduring loneliness and infamy in return for the occasional feast of transcendent pleasure, or to settle like Fanny for an uninspiring diet of marital contentment, is one of the novel’s great questions. Fanny envies the glamour of Linda’s adventures, but she has too much sense not to be appalled by the uncertainty of a life lived according to sensibility. When she asserts, at the end of the novel, that Linda has found true love with Fabrice, she seems to be reassuring herself that Linda has, after all, “something to show” for her troubles. Fanny’s mother, the Bolter (who knows quite a lot about the ways of men like Fabrice), remains doubtful. But if her sceptical retort seems to point to a comfortless conclusion, Linda herself has shown us one further possibility: that a life lived with brio may have beauty and value, even if one ends up with “nothing to show for it”, and that the search for love is a noble endeavour whether or not it concludes in domestic bliss.

This is an extract from Zoë Heller’s introduction to Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, published in a new edition by Penguin at £8.99. t £8.99 (plus 99p p&p). Nancy Mitford by Harold Acton is published by Gibson Square at £7.99. t £7.99 (plus 99p p&p).0844 871 1515