The Pursuit of Laughter by Diana Mosley

5 April 2012

When I had the great good luck to become literary editor of this paper back in 1997, the then editor, Max Hastings, made just one request before offering me the job. He wouldn't interfere otherwise, he promised — and indeed he never did, apart from personally ensuring particularly good coverage of military history — but he didn't want any more "bloody Lady Hitler".

My predecessor in these pages, AN Wilson, had, for seven years, made Diana Mosley, then in her eighties, his lead reviewer, sending her books on all kinds of subjects, from the IRA to Francis Fukuyama, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Dirk Bogarde, whores to elephants, all now collected here.

Knowing Diana Mosley to be a wholly unreformed admirer of the Führer, not to mention respecting the chain of command, I was happy enough to comply.

Only five years later did I feel a twinge of regret. In 2002, Martin Rynja, the libertarian publisher of Gibson Square — currently in a spot of bother for having dared to take on The Jewel of Medina, the novel about one of the wives of the Prophet — re-issued Diana Mosley's 1977 autobiography, A Life of Contrasts, in paperback.

I read it and was, despite myself, quite charmed — although also chilled by, for example, her chapter comparing Hitler favourably to Churchill.

That was how it happened that in June 2003, Diana Mosley wrote for this paper for the last time. From Paris came a word-perfect fax, reviewing Bill Deedes's At War With Waugh in pert style. A couple of months later, on 11 August 2003, she died, aged 93, in the great heatwave that killed so many elderly people in France that year.

Martin Ryjna has now invented a second book for Diana Mosley, by collecting the journalism she wrote in different papers and magazines, including the eccentric monthly Books & Bookmen and the limited-circulation cultural magazine she herself produced in the Fifties, The European.

However, as Ryjna says in his introduction, it is her Evening Standard reviews that are her best, clearly being written to amuse her editor here, whatever the subject.

In all these reviews, Diana Mosley has a consistently sharp, funny, debunking and assertive tone, always confident enough not to need to dress up what she's saying in pomposity or jargon of any kind, quite happy to end a sentence with a throwaway "who knows?" There's a clear Mitford voice here that she shares with her sisters and that no doubt went right back to her early life. "Visiting children considered us a noisy family, there was no question of being seen and not heard. We argued, teased, screamed with laughter at family jokes," she remembers. That laughter rings through these pieces.

She also, of course, had met many of the people she was called upon to discuss. Reviewing The Macmillans by Richard Davenport-Hines, she states: "He did not bare his teeth aggressively, as Davenport-Hines says he did. When he bared his teeth he was trying to smile. It was just that they stuck out too far." Remembering Evelyn Waugh: "He was not at his best when drunk, but who is?" And she carried on in just the same manner with those she knew only on the page, too. Reviewing the letters of Arthur Balfour, she says "There seems to be something flabby and bloodless about the man ... He was like a cat which has 'been to the vet'." Both her syntax and her diction are splendidly archaic and upper class — "motor" for car, "charabanc" for coach, "smash" for crash. She talks freely of "lunatics" and worse. It's one of the great "don't care" styles — she really didn't give a hoot what anybody she didn't esteem might think, now or later..

"It is one of the strangest evidences of human vanity that a person should care about the opinion of posterity; the opinion, that is, of descendants of the crowds milling along Oxford Street, or the Boulevard des Italiens, or in and out of St Mark's on an August afternoon." Haughty? Of course — but divertingly so. She offers this account of her career as a democrat: "I have never voted in a parliamentary election in my life, not that I am a conscientious objector to voting but simply because I have never been able to face the idea of sharing responsibility for sending either of the pair of troglodytes standing, in any constituency where I happened to be on the register, to the House of Commons." So this is all very amusing. And then you come to the section in this book titled "A Talent To Annoy: Germany".

Here you are brought up short. Here she assaults Churchill again and defends her adored Hitler and "the brilliant Dr Goebbels", in whose house she was married to Oswald Mosley, with Hitler in attendance.

There's nothing in these published essays quite as disgraceful as the way she glossed over the Holocaust in her autobiography, saying only that Germany's great crime had been "the killing of helpless prisoners". Or the way, in her 1989 appearance on Desert Island Discs, she said: "I don't really, I'm afraid, believe that six million people were killed. I think this is just not conceivable. It's too many." But still her completely unrepentant support not just of her beloved Mosley but of "the Führer" as she continued to call him (attentive to titles, she liked to snub Churchill by referring to him as "Mr Churchill") is ultimately indefensible and that fact has to be faced, not sidestepped or swept under the carpet. In his introduction, Martin Rynja, who came to know her in her last years, talks vaguely of her as "a delightful friend with a complex connection to modern history". In her Foreword, her surviving sister Deborah Devonshire no more satisfactorily says: "Diana's political views and the opposite ones held by my sister Jessica were irrelevant to me from my apolitical stance." It's just no good trying to put her sustained admiration for Hitler and the Nazis to one side like this. Another sister, Nancy Mitford, had been considerably more forthright back in 1940, telling the Foreign Office: "She's madly pro-German and I think something should be done to restrain her activities." As indeed it was — to Diana Mosley's lifelong indignation.

Much though I enjoyed reading most of these reviews, grateful as I am to Gibson Square for putting them between hard covers, I ended the book thinking anew that Max Hastings had had a pretty good point..

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