I did say it wouldn’t always be science fiction. And I also promised it wouldn’t always be white males. Although some might consider a dead white upper class woman not much of an improvement…
The six Mitford sisters, daughters of a baron, were famous during their heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. If not infamous. Pamela married renowned physicist and jockey (yes, really) Derek Jackson, before divorcing him in 1951 and spending the rest of her life with an Italian horsewoman. Diana married Oswald Mosley and was a committed fascist. Unity was an ardent supporter of Hitler, and tried to commit suicide when Britain declared war on Germany, but failed. Jessica was a communist, and an active member of the American Communist Party. Deborah married the Duke of Devonshire. And Nancy, the oldest, was a famous novelist. She wrote about people like her sisters and friends and acquaintances, the “Bright Young Things”.
Between 1931 and 1960, Nancy Mitford published eight novels. Wigs on the Green (1935, UK) is the third of these. It’s a thinly-veiled pastiche of two of her sisters, Unity and Diana. This means a lot of it is about that sort of unquestioned fascism which has characterised the English upper classes since, well, since William the Conqueror, probably. Mitford’s characterisation of Mosley so upset her sister Unity, she removed three chapters from the book. And the novel was not reprinted until after Mitford’s death.
In Wigs on the Green, one of the Bright Young Things (they are actually overwhelmingly dim, so “bright” does not apply to their IQ) comes into a sum of money from an aged aunt and quits his job. A freeloading friend persuades him to “holiday” in the village of Chalford, so one or the other can woo nearby sixteen-year-old Eugenia Malmains, England’s richest heiress. Eugenia is a fully-paid up acolyte of Captain Jack and the Union Jackshirts (in other words, Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists). It would be tempting to say this is all gentle mockery, but fascism is not really a fit subject for “gentle mockery”. It needs to be punched. And you would think that would be even more true in 1935, when Adolf fucking Hitler was actually running Nazi Germany, than today, when you have a bunch of low-IQ white boys scared they’re going to lose their privilege…
The plot of Wigs on the Green is complicated by the fact neither of the two men are particularly attracted to Eugenia, although her young age does not seem to be an obstacle. Happily, other more appealing prospects soon cross their paths, including the bohemian wife of a local landed gentry, and the fiancée of a young duke who jilted him at the altar and has run away to hide. But they too have their problems — thankfully not political.
The whole ends in a grand fete at the Malmains estate, in which a Eugenia-planned celebration of Union Jackshirtism is reduced to chaos when a nearby colony of artists, upset that their patroness — the aforementioned bohemian wife — has abandoned them, stages a violent response.
But it’s not just Union Jackshirtism as a piss take of Mosley’s fascism. The jokes at Mosley’s expense — at least those which remained in the novel — are hardly pointed. Eugenia spouts some ignorant teenage nonsense, misattributes the name of her dog and horse, and… That’s about it. If Unity was upset at this, she must have been remarkably thin-skinned.
More notable are the attitudes of the non-fascists. They’re upper class —the former in the “U and non-U”, as later defined by Nancy Mitford — and it’s their unthinking expectation of privilege, not just the wealth that will come their way should they put in the effort to attract it, but their belief that all those about them exist only to see to their comfort and whims. And they see no problem in worsening everyone else’s lot if it means the attentions they pay to the upper classes will be more complete and assiduous. As Mitford herself puts it:
“Think of Sussex,” she said with a shiver, “how agreeable it would be if England could become much poorer, smaller, inconspicuous among nations and civilized once more.”
“Becoming poorer won’t necessarily make her more civilized,” said Jasper. “Civilization is dependent on one economic factor and that is extreme inequalities of wealth.”
Sound familiar? Perhaps, despite being written in 1935, it has present-day applications?
True, Wigs on the Green is a satire, and Mitford is targeting her own class as much as she is her two sisters. But is it possible to satirise your own peer group from within? Some might say that’s the best possible place from which to do it — and I’m reminded of Sharon McCrumb’s Bimbos of the Death Sun (1988, USA), a comedic murder-mystery set at a science fiction convention — but surely there’s also an unavoidable blindness in as much as the satirist is part of the target group? And there’s a link to Henry Green, whose debut novel was called Blindness (1926, UK), but whose Party Going (1939, UK) was very much inspired by the Bright Young Things. (I thoroughly recommend Green, he was an excellent writer.)
Mention of Henry Green inevitably leads to mention of Evelyn Waugh, as the two were both friends and rivals, although Mitford’s fiction was much closer to Waugh’s than Green’s. Both Waugh and Mitford began their careers writing about socialites of the 1920s and 1930s. Waugh is, perhaps, better-known, and even now has been adapted for film and TV far more often than Mitford. And yet… Mitford’s novels are more likeable. Waugh was, arguably, the better prose stylist — but his humour was cruel, his snobbery desperate, and his books often racist. He was also a horrible person — during WWII, he was deemed the officer mostly likely to be shot by his own troops. He was made a commando in order to keep him safe from the men he had commanded. (This is all fictionalised in Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, although the protagonist, Guy Crouch, is a much nicer person than Waugh.)
Mitford’s humour tended more to the absurd than the cynical, and she had no reason to be a grasping snob like Waugh, as she was actually born into the social group she satirised. In Wigs on the Green, more so than in the previous two novels by her I’ve read, the latter seems to be less of an advantage…
But I’d still say Mitford was a better read than Waugh.
