Hons and Rebels

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford is probably my very favourite memoir (though the devotee of fiction I am, I must admit haven’t read very many). My fondness for it most likely arises from the fact that the book overall very much reads like fiction. It is, in effect, a bildungsroman with so many fantastical elements, flights of destiny and eccentric characters, that it hardly seems true that such people lived- yet the sheer forcefulness of their personalities, most of all its authoress, the indomitable Jessica Mitford- commands belief in their existence as living and breathing figures of history.

Further reading such as Mary Lovell’s excellent biography: The Mitford Sisters and Charlotte Mosley’s The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters reveal that several elements of Hons and Rebels were embellishments and some, outright fiction, yet this revelation, for myself anyway, does not diminish the delights of this memoir- nor the extraordinary life of its author.

Hons and Rebels’ closest fictional precedents are of course, Nancy Mitford’s two most famous novels: The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. These two novels deserve a post entirely devoted to them, so I won’t go into detail here, only to say that the similarity lies foremost on the shared, exquisite rendering of the same famous family: Baron Redesdale and his six notorious daughters.

I have included short biography of each sister below (as they are too fascinating not to mention):

• Nancy, famed novelist and notorious snob (having also written Noblesse Oblige, a seminal essay on the linguistic differences between U (Upper) and Non-U).
• Diana, ‘the nearest thing to Botticelli’s Venus’, whose famed beauty obscured a more sinister personality. She was briefly married to Bryan Walter Guinness, of Guinness Beers fame before famously bolted into the arms of Oswald Mosley,  leader of the British Union of Fascists. Their wedding was held in the home of Joseph Goebbels. The chief guest of honour? Adolf Hitler.
• Pamela, the ‘Rural Mitford’, who for years was the model of domesticity with her husband, the famous physicist, Derek Jackson. Yet she would later divorce her husband a live out her days as the companion of Giuditta Tommasi, an Italian horsewoman.
• Unity, the most maddening, enigmatic and elusive of all the Mitford girls, whose desire to be different found the most fatalistic source in Adolf Hitler. Unity’s obsession of the Furhrer would lead her to the innermost circles of the Third Reich-as Hitler’s unofficial mistress-and later to tragedy. An attempted suicide on the day that Britain declared war on Germany would lead her to be brain damaged for the rest of her short life.
• Deborah, whose ambition to become a duchess was perfectly fulfilled when she married Andrew Cavendish and become chatelaine of Chatsworth (the inspiration for Pemberley).

And of course my very favourite Mitford, Jessica (Decca): The eponymous rebel who among many other things would reject her family’s wealth and fascination with fascism by eloping with her cousin (and Sir Winston Churchill’s nephew) Esmond Romily to fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, run away to America, open a bar in Miami, become a communist from 1943 and an active figure in the American Civil rights movement, become a famous muckraker- redefining investigative journalism through her seminal essay on the American funeral industry: The American way of Death-at the same time keeping correspondence with some of the most notable figures of the 20th century as Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou,Winston Churchill, Evelyn Waugh and Hilary Clinton among others. At age 76 she also tried her hand at music, releasing an album: Decca and the Dectones.
Only a tiny sliver of of Decca Mitford’s extraordinary life is recorded in Hons and Rebels (she would later write a sequel on her communist days in A Fine Old Conflict). What is recalled in this all too brief memoir though is deeply diverting, funny but also very moving.

Reading this as an adult rather than a child (I really rather regret the fact that my eleven year old self was deprived of this book), what strikes me most is Jessica’s deep fury and resentment at her parents for a sheltered childhood and lack of education, the type of anger that quietly pervades both Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and a more recent counterpoint Lyn Barber’s An Education.  It was in fact Jessica Mitford’s great regret that she never attended university. As someone who often begrudges the fact that she has spent so much time at university, this fact is both deeply moving and heartening.

Nevertheless, Hons and Rebels is generally very funny and deeply entertaining, peppered with figures who appear closer to Wodehouse and Waugh than E.M. Forster. Baron Revesdale (Farve) the most memorable of the lot is as indomitable, peerless and ridiculous as his fictional counterpart, Uncle Matthew. Hons and Rebels is abound with all the hallmarks of great children’s literature: naughty children, secret languages (Boudledidge), running away accounts and a menagerie of animals and above all,  a highly memorable rendering of a momentous period of English social history.

Here in Hons and Rebels, Jessica succinctly encapsulates the insouciance and the excesses of the Jazz age, England’s dangerous flirtation with fascism, the growing malcontent of Western Europe and the outbreak of radical thought, as well as the impending World War. The combative political tension of the period is succinctly expressed and yet satirically figured in Decca’s description of her shared room with her (ironically) favourite sister Unity:

“We divided it down the middle, and Boud (Unity) decorated her side with Fascist insignia of all kinds- the Italian ‘fasces’, a budge of sticks bound in rope, photographs of Mussolini framed in passe-partout; photographs of Mosely trying to look like Mussolini; the new German swastika; a record collection of Nazi and Italian youth songs. My side was fixed up with my communist library, a small bust of Lenin purchased for a shilling in a second-hand shop, a file of Daily Workers. Sometimes we would barricade with chairs and stage pitched battles, throwing books and records until Nanny came to tell us to stop the noise.”

Hons and Rebels pg. 71

Hons and Rebels has also been greatly loved by good deal of notable people. Perhaps solely due to his excellent writing on Jessica Mitford -including a preface to Hons and Rebels– I have begun to loathe Christopher Hitchens just a little bit less. More welcome however was the discovery that Hons and Rebels was also J.K. Rowling’s favourite book as a child and that Jessica Mitford was a personal hero and as well the namesake for Rowling’s first child.

Like Rowling, I’ve begun to regard as Mitford as a great personal heroine, not so much for her politics (for it is clear that she could be as wilfully stubborn and close-minded as her sisters) but her great capacity for wit, her irrepressible naughtiness, her muckraking ways and her deep interest in the sufferings of those less fortunate from her. Most of all I admire her vivid voice, the keenness of her eye and her indefatigable ability to face the vicissitudes and disappointments of life- not retiring to the drawing room, but kicking and screaming.

Review: Arms and the Man, Sydney Theatre Company

Love is in the air – at least on the nib of Bennelong Point better known to us as the Sydney Opera House. How else can you ascribe for the number of romantic comedies currently on offer? If you were to visit the Opera House last weekend (26th-27th September), you could have your pick between three very choice offerings: Cole Porter’s maritime romantic comedy – Anything Goes, Gerwshin’s political romantic comedy, Of Thee I Sing (my review of that show here) or George Bernard Shaw’s wonderfully romantic anti-romance, Arms and the Man, part of the Sydney Theatre Company’s 2016 MainStage season.

Contrary to what Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady implies, Pygmalion – undoubtably Shaw’s most famous play – is not a romance, or at least, a romance between the two people you think it is. In fact, Shaw was so incensed by the notion of a romantic reunion between Eliza and Higgins that he wrote a post-script essay as part of the 1916 edition of Pygmalion: ‘What really happened’. (Spoiler: Eliza sticks with Freddy). In such a way, Shaw and Louisa May Alcott would have got on famously, if only to commiserate on the beast that was 19th century shipping.

Yet audiences were so clamorous for a happy ending that they eventually got it – much to Shaw’s dismay- in the excellent 1938 film adaptation of Pygmalion, which itself became a template for Lerner and Lowe’s famous musical. In many ways, our collective, yet understandable, need to romanticise Pygmalion is a great pity, because it cheapens what is, in essence, a great feminist fable. The whole purpose of Pygmalion is the self-discovery of a young woman, separating herself from the narcissism of Pygmalion/Higgins vision to become a singular, self-reliant individual. It seems sad to me to want to foist a young woman, so full of vitality, on an anti-social grump more than 20 years her senior who, in general, looks upon her most with the fondness of one admiring a prize winning science project. Therefore, if you are looking for a romantic comedy by the inimitable Shaw, Pygmalion will just not do. So why not try Arms and the Man instead?

I do have to warn that looking for romance in a Shaw show is a double edged sword, because even his most romantic plays are often about the upending of romance as it is one. In this particular play, Shaw seeks to dismantle every notion of romance – from the cupid’s bow and arrow variety and beyond. All forms of sentimentality, but especially those bed partners: patriotism and warfare, are particular victims of Shaw’s needlepoint wit. This dismantling comes in the form of the two rivals for our heroine Raina’s affection. Does true love await in the form of Sergius Saranoff, her dashing, moustachioed fiancee – every inch the heroic soldier of her fantasies, or Captain Bluntschli, the unsentimental soldier for hire, who runs from gunfire at every opportunity and keeps chocolates in his pockets instead of cartridges. The audience is never in doubt of who Raina will ultimately choose – but isn’t that half the fun?

Illustrating war as an absurdity – not as a noble quest but merely as war for war’s sake – is hardly a revolutionary concept for audiences today. But we only have to think about what the world was like for Shaw when he wrote it to understand the extent of his subversiveness. The play was primarily written in 1894 and is set during the two-week long conflict between Serbia and Bulgaria in 1885, when war still remained unalterably fused with the concepts of identity and honour. This notion of honourable warfare – perceived or real – would be denuded in the trenches of WWI, but it would be not be completely destroyed until the advent of WWII. But in 1894, where duels of honour were still being fought, war would still be as much a playground for the wealthy and the upwardly mobile as for the conflict itself – a petri dish designed to make robust men out of boys. The figure of Captain Bluntschli-a mercenary who chooses his next assignment purely because “Serbia was closer”-shows us how absurd the notion of men fighting for a cause so much removed a general sense of reality. Similarly, the posturing Sergius shows us the pitfalls of mistaking maschismo and self-aggrandism as a form of nobility and heroism.

The above paragraph makes the play sound like serious stuff, too serious to be pleasurable, but it is an altogether delightful play, as is Richard Cottrell’s chocolate box of a production. For one thing, this production of Arms and the Man should be seen if only to be seen. Though I’ve been become much more accustomed to a bare, minimalistic set, it is wonderful to see a play which a proper one- and none so beautiful as this. This  19th century Bulgaria created by the mind of a porcelain maker and fantasist. Almost entirely white, as if blanketed in snow – the revolving set has a magical, Hans Christian Andersen fairytale-ish quality to it. This effect is rather dazzling, amplified by the lavish candy-coloured costumes – bustles in bright blue and green – and intricate period detail. It’s a world that one could easily imagine setting The Nutcracker quite comfortably.

Director Richard Cottrell’s production of Travesties was my first Tom Stoppard play, and so I naturally have very fond memories of his work. His production was the first play I ever went to watch by myself, and it was wonderful. Comedy – most importantly, period comedy – is very much Cottrell’s forte. This particular production felt a little comically broader than the text really needed – specifically within two performances – but Cottrell has a way of letting witty dialogue crackle, prick or float when occasion demands, and this play is especially demanding.

Arms and the Man’s cast is very small, eight to be exact – but in general, they are all goodies. For the impulsive Raina, Andrea Demetriades gives a robustly funny, modern performance. It’s a tricky role to play both an obnoxious, spoiled brat and yet, an incredibly appealing young woman, and I think she acquits herself rather well. Sometimes I felt she played the role too broadly, too childish – a problem I felt was also shaped by Charlie Cousins’ similarly broadly drawn Sergius, who takes to posturing quite literally – but perhaps it’s altogether too much to quibble about the largeness of a performance in a farce. The rest of the cast I can more unequivocally claim as wonderful – particularly the work of Deborah Kennedy and William Zappa as Raina’s parents. I’ve always been a huge admirer of the multitalented Mitchell Butel ever since his performance as Princeton in Avenue Q, and I was not disappointed in his Captain Bluntschli. It’s hard to make a character so prosaic, particularly attractive. In the wrong hands Captain Bluntschli can actually be rather quite dull. The BBC 1989 production starring Helena Bonham Carter shows that this character is not inherently arresting as a – lets say – Mr Darcy.  Yet I think Butel succeeds greatly in this role, exuding a espirit of intelligence – a quiet knowingness – that instantly lets you know why Raina would dub him so quickly and so affectionately, her “chocolate cream soldier”.

While it’s not exactly the transcendently funny production that I was quite hoping for, Arms and the Man is unquestionably enjoyable theatre. With such a dazzlingly beautiful looking production studded with winning performances, it’s not hard to see why Arms and the Man proved to be one of Shaw’s most successful, incandescent and relevant of comedies – as well as blissfully romantic, in its own wry way.

The Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Arms and the Man runs until October 31st.