Mitfordmania

I suppose if there's a Mitford sister we are all conditioned to dislike it has to be Diana.
Married first to Bryan Guiness (breweries) and then to Oswald Mosley at that secret 1936 wedding attended by both Goebbels and Hitler, the name Diana (Mitford) Mosley is inextricably tangled up with my own thoughts about Nazi atrocities.
My uncertainty was further compounded by that incredible BBC TV programme earlier this week about the young Polish girl, Rutka Laskier whose diary, written as a thirteen year old in the Polish ghettos, has been published. We caught the programme quite by chance late on Monday evening and both Bookhound and I were reduced to a sickened silence at the end. Living just twenty miles from Auschwitz Rutka's ending was inevitable making the original film footage unbearably heart-rending, and though I will often avoid programmes like this because I know I will be left in bits, this one was utterly compelling.
All I knew of Diana had engendered a form of antipathy by osmosis which now I see, given husband number two, is quite an appropriate word to use. But actually on closer analysis Nazi sympathies was about all I knew of Diana and so the arrival of The Pursuit of Laughter : Diana Mosley Essays, Articles, Reviews & a Diary of The Most Glamorous Mitford Sister edited by Martin Rynja and published by Gibson Square offered the chance to try and balance the prejudices and look at the writing. In fact I'd been lucky enough to get a glimpse of an early photocopy manuscript of the final book and knew, even as I flew through the A4 sheets, that this was going to be my favourite sort of book.
Conglomeration might sound slightly derogatory but it's not meant to. I covet literary conglomerations and a book that incorporates such a wide variety of writing as this one earns a place at my right hand and I shall be dipping into it for ever more. My finished copy arrived on Christmas Eve and alongside Irene, Marilynne and Mikhail with some Peggy, Henry (James) and George ( Eliot) thrown in The Pursuit of Laughter has added a rich element to the seasonal reading feast.
Diana herself was something of a stickler for getting the facts right (Don't know, so won't say) and nothing seemed to annoy her more than a report about herself, a family member or a friend that was riddled with inaccuracies, so it seems wise to have offered the introduction to this volume to her sister Debo Devonshire. Debo sets the scene to Diana's life and times perfectly in context and one assumes with an accuracy that would have pleased Diana; personal and public scandals and a strictly enforced family moratorium forbidding contact meant that these two sisters didn't really get to know each other well until after the war.
Personal qualities emerge even before you have turned the first page which created for me a 'new' Diana.
'An aura of beauty surrounded her...she was beautiful when she was born in 1910 and remained beautiful till her death aged 93...'
Unfailingly loyal to those she loved, and each reader will have to decide this for themselves, but suddenly as I read I had to ask myself, can you blame someone for being compassionate and possessing such valid and enviable personal human qualities for which Diana certainly suffered, and all in the interests of being true to herself. Yet you get the impression it would not have occurred to Diana to be otherwise, denouncing was never an option and reading back over Letters Between Six Sisters it's possible to see where much of this had its origins.
If Diana was your friend then expect her to leap to your defence, she must have been one of the very few trying (though failing) to see the Duchess of Windsor in the last lonely years of her life. In many ways the pages of this book achieve exactly the same as, according to Debo, Diana achieved in life,

'It was interesting to see her with people who were prejudiced against her politically or in any other way. You could watch the hackles go down as the person slowly succumbed to the charm and intelligence he met so unexpectedly.
Her honesty floored her critics. They did not expect it and did not know how to deal with it.''

Likewise suitably disarmed of many of my pre-conceived judgements, and incidentally how amazing that a book can achieve something so spirit-gifting , what became clear as I read The Pursuit of Laughter was Diana's huge and wide-ranging intellect, her towering sense of humour matched with a gentle yet razor-sharp and incisive way of telling it like it was. Numbering among her circle some of the great names both political and literary of the twentieth century, Diana knew her world intimately and shares endless anecdotes and literary asides about the lot of them. Debo points out for example that Diana was the only person to know both Hitler and Winston Churchill well.
Page after page of fascinating reading so I think this is in the end another book to add to the essential Family Mitford shelf and I for one am glad of it.
Long may this publishing of Mitfordmania continue.