Welcome to Mitfordiana, the newsletter about Nancy, Pam, Diana, Unity, Decca, Debo, and me. This is the second installment of my series “Nancy’s Novels, in Order.” You can find my commenting policy here.
I’ve been struggling all week with coming up with something to say about Christmas Pudding that isn’t just what I said about Highland Fling. I’d never read Nancy’s second novel before, and it turns out that it’s almost exactly the same set-up as Highland Fling, except it takes place in the Cotswolds: there are big houses and people coming and going from them and young lovers failing to get their way and aesthetes being annoying. It’s funnier than Highland Fling, or at least I laughed out loud more often, but there is a sense that Nancy thought she had hit upon a formula for her life as a writer and then, dejected by the realities of making a living, wavers halfway through, and then I get sad for her.
This novel is notable for the inclusion of a prologue, which begins
Four o’clock on the First of November, a dark and foggy day. Sixteen characters in search of an author.
We then are treated to little descriptions of the various characters who will come to be more or less important to the story. From this opener— probably a good writing exercise, but maybe not to be published— you initially think this is going to be a murder mystery. Maybe the book would be better if there were a murder, or at least an event, like the fire in Highland Fling.
Instead, the book centers on the aimless actions of a young author, Paul Fotheringay, who has just published what he thinks is a tragic novel and which all the critics, and worse, his friends, think is a comic one. Clearly, his novelistic talents are useless, so he decides he must turn to biography, choosing a horribly sentimental nineteenth century poetess, and, unable to get access to her diaries via the usual means, disguises himself as the tutor of a senior boy at Eton and gets himself invited to the poet’s descendants’ Cotswolds house for the Christmas hols. There, of course, he falls in love with his erstwhile tutee’s older sister, Philadelphia (if anyone can tell me whether it was normal for rich English people c. 1910 to give their daughters the name of my favorite city, could you also explain why?). Philadelphia, a bored debutante stuck living with her hunting-obsessed mother, is also being wooed by a marquis lately returned from diplomatic work in Egypt, primarily to reestablish his relationship with Amabelle, a remarkably successful courtesan— excuse me, hostess. She is friends with Paul’s tutee and takes a house down the road for the season in order to meddle. Are you tired yet? Oh, and Sally and Walter, the bohemians we met in Highland Fling, are there. The arrival of their baby daughter has done nothing to temper their frivolities.
All these people do is complain about Socialism (lmao), bemoan the lack of hunting due to an outbreak of foot and mouth disease (lol), get drunk off illicit cocktails in somebody’s bedroom because their hostess refuses to provide champagne at parties (damn, really?), and wonder whether marriage is worth it. These activities are mostly funny, except the marriage bit. The men in this novel who are contemplating marriage only seem to think about it in terms of whether they believe themselves to be in love and therefore happy, while much, if not all, the women’s talk is about the financial realities of aristocratic heterosexuality.
Nancy wrote this novel shortly after her “engagement” to Hamish St. Clair Eskine imploded for once and for all, and found herself, aged 28, pretty broke and alone and living, yet again, with her parents. It didn’t help matters that in 1932 her younger sister Diana had just chosen to leave her millionaire husband (despite the fact that Guinness is good for you!) to take up with the still-married fascist Oswald Mosley and apparently suffered very little by way of financial struggle. While we’ll see Nancy’s reactions to all this political upheaval when we discuss Wigs on the Green (1935), I can’t help but think that Christmas Pudding is as much a complaint about the unfairness of marital finances as it is another attempt at the lighthearted teasing that made her first novel so much fun.
At one point, Amabelle mentions having seen the protagonists of Highland Fling, Jane and Albert, at a party in London. These two, you’ll remember, got married with no money and went off to Paris so Albert could work as an artist. “What a silly marriage that was, to be sure,” she comments, to which Paul replies, “Oh dear, it really is rather disillusioning. When one’s friends marry for money they are wretched, when they marry for love it is worse. What is the proper thing to marry for, I should like to know?”
Amabelle then says what is probably the most depressing thing I’ve heard from a Mitfordian mouthpiece: “The trouble is that people seem to expect happiness in life. I can’t imagine why; but they do.” Now this is a woman who reportedly charges £10000 if anyone wants to sleep with her, and has men young and old catering to her whims. But all this “love” brings no real happiness and after her long career she seems not to care very much about the money beyond the usual comforts. Instead, she will end this novel engaged to a farmer because she finds sheep disease fascinating. Amabelle’s goal is to be interested, and doesn’t much mind if she’s interesting as a result.
Given Nancy’s experience of ups and downs in love and wealth, this is not a bad goal for a woman novelist of twenty-eight to have hit upon. Although, in the early 1930s, it was just starting to become easier for women of a certain class to not necessarily have to choose between happiness and wealth, wanting to “have it all” is hard to shake off. Nancy, it must be said, fails to take her own advice, and shortly after Christmas Pudding is published, does end up unhappily married to Peter Rodd, whom Wikipedia describes as “an idler.” RIP to the Rodd-Mitfords.
But if you can hack it, “interest” is probably a good alternative. As the bankers tell us, once you have the safety of your £500 a year (£499 flowers, £1 everything else), the interest becomes pretty self-sufficient.
In tearing haste,
Diana