Books in Brief: Unity Mitford

Unity Mitford: An Enquiry into Her Life and the Frivolity of Evil, by David Pryce-Jones (Dial Press, 292 pp., $9.95). If there are any who don’t know—and there’s no reason why anyone should know unless he or she is old enough to have been reading newspapers in the late 1930s, or belongs to the probably larger group of adult readers who are today’s Hitler buffs —Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford was that one of the six notorious daughters of Lord and Lady Redesdale who expressed her rebellion against parental stupidity by becoming a rabid Nazi. Since the catastrophic events that followed Chamberlain’s reluctant declaration of war on September 3, 1939 tended to make Unity’s particular extremism less socially acceptable than her younger sister’s Communism or her older sister’s British Fascism, she has become a sort of minor vampire among yesteryear’s Forces of Darkness. An absurdity. For as one reviewer has already pointed out, Mr. Pryce-Jones’ subtitle should have read not “the frivolity of evil” but “the evil of frivolity.” There were not a few high-spirited, dim-witted society girls a century earlier who threw themselves at the feet of Napoleon, Lord Byron, and Simón Bolivar. In later, worse, times, Unity Mitford had the misfortune to fall in love with a romantic hero who was not only sexually impotent but psychically so warped that he was able to make a whole race the scapegoat for his early deprivations. The author reconstructs the chain of events that led up to the infatuated girl’s attempted suicide on that September 3 with long quotes from the dozens of surviving friends and eyewitnesses, producing in the process a great deal of needless repetition and confusing chronology. Yet such is the ingenuity of his painstaking detective work, and the intrinsic fascination of that nightmarish decade that came so close to destroying Western civilization, that one reads to the end. And not without profit. The portrait of Hitler that emerges is more believable and revealing than most of what the historians have provided. Focusing on the Führer’s pleasure in the English girl’s company, and his solicitude for her care during her last days in Germany, it is even a sympathetic portrait. Yet it is all of a piece with the dictator’s sick personality, as the author acutely observes: “In Munich Hitler was still the hopeful bohemian who would not drag himself off to bed, nor attend to business in the morning. In Munich he was the coffee-house maestro, out to harvest his due applause in person. His vanity, his fitfulness, created a vacuum around him, and Unity rushed into it, one might-have-been artist to another. . . . What she and Hitler recognized in one another at the most profound level, one feels, is that neither of them was capable of the kind of complete relationship which involves identifying with someone else. Their mutual feelings had warmth and stamina precisely because nothing could come from them. Circumstances prohibited the actual bodily contact both dreaded while needing to overcome that dread in themselves. Day after obsessive day in the Osteria Bavaria [cafe], Unity was acting a lady’s version of a prostitute, waiting for the pickup. In one respect he was a historical Big Daddy, patting the heads of blond children, and in another respect he was a final item in an intimate treasure hunt, the object which could never be brought home. Finally, as the lover who never was, he could fulfill a false madonna ideal which seems a perfect projection of barren Swinbrook. She did not have to restrain herself from what was, so to speak, a masturbation of the spirit.”

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Selden Rodman

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Unity Mitford: An Enquiry into Her Life and the Frivolity of Evil, by David Pryce-Jones (Dial Press, 292 pp., $9.95). If there are any who don’t know—and there’s no reason why anyone should know unless he or she is old enough to have been reading newspapers in the late 1930s, or belongs to the probably larger group of adult readers who are today’s Hitler buffs —Unity Valkyrie Freeman-Mitford was that one of the six notorious daughters of Lord and Lady Redesdale who expressed her rebellion against parental stupidity by becoming a rabid Nazi. Since the catastrophic events that followed Chamberlain’s reluctant declaration of war on September 3, 1939 tended to make Unity’s particular extremism less socially acceptable than her younger sister’s Communism or her older sister’s British Fascism, she has become a sort of minor vampire among yesteryear’s Forces of Darkness. An absurdity. For as one reviewer has already pointed out, Mr. Pryce-Jones’ subtitle should have read not “the frivolity of evil” but “the evil of frivolity.” There were not a few high-spirited, dim-witted society girls a century earlier who threw themselves at the feet of Napoleon, Lord Byron, and Simón Bolivar. In later, worse, times, Unity Mitford had the misfortune to fall in love with a romantic hero who was not only sexually impotent but psychically so warped that he was able to make a whole race the scapegoat for his early deprivations. The author reconstructs the chain of events that led up to the infatuated girl’s attempted suicide on that September 3 with long quotes from the dozens of surviving friends and eyewitnesses, producing in the process a great deal of needless repetition and confusing chronology. Yet such is the ingenuity of his painstaking detective work, and the intrinsic fascination of that nightmarish decade that came so close to destroying Western civilization, that one reads to the end. And not without profit. The portrait of Hitler that emerges is more believable and revealing than most of what the historians have provided. Focusing on the Führer’s pleasure in the English girl’s company, and his solicitude for her care during her last days in Germany, it is even a sympathetic portrait. Yet it is all of a piece with the dictator’s sick personality, as the author acutely observes: “In Munich Hitler was still the hopeful bohemian who would not drag himself off to bed, nor attend to business in the morning. In Munich he was the coffee-house maestro, out to harvest his due applause in person. His vanity, his fitfulness, created a vacuum around him, and Unity rushed into it, one might-have-been artist to another. . . . What she and Hitler recognized in one another at the most profound level, one feels, is that neither of them was capable of the kind of complete relationship which involves identifying with someone else. Their mutual feelings had warmth and stamina precisely because nothing could come from them. Circumstances prohibited the actual bodily contact both dreaded while needing to overcome that dread in themselves. Day after obsessive day in the Osteria Bavaria [cafe], Unity was acting a lady’s version of a prostitute, waiting for the pickup. In one respect he was a historical Big Daddy, patting the heads of blond children, and in another respect he was a final item in an intimate treasure hunt, the object which could never be brought home. Finally, as the lover who never was, he could fulfill a false madonna ideal which seems a perfect projection of barren Swinbrook. She did not have to restrain herself from what was, so to speak, a masturbation of the spirit.”