Poor Hitler

Andrew O’Hagan

• BuyThe Mitfords: Letters between Six Sisters edited by Charlotte Mosley
  Fourth Estate, 834 pp, £25.00, September 2007, ISBN 978 1 84115 790 0

People who are serious about the business of not taking themselves seriously can have enormous fun as writers. The world of posh writing is full of minor writers getting away with murder, as in this passage from Julian Fellowes’s recent novel Snobs:

They lived in a large flat in Elm Park Gardens, which was almost at the wrong end of Chelsea and not quite to Mrs Lavery’s taste. Still, it was not exactly Fulham nor, worse, Battersea, names that had only recently begun to appear on Mrs Lavery’s mental map. She still felt the thrill of the new, like an intrepid explorer pushing ever further from civilisation, whenever she was invited for dinner by one of her friends’ married children. She listened perkily as they discussed what a good investment the ‘toast rack’ was or how the children loved Tooting after that poky flat in Marloes Road. It was all Greek to Mrs Lavery. So far as she was concerned she was in Hell until she got back over the river.

The writing is undistinguished, the language is clichéd and the values are shot to hell, but the paragraph knows how to present grotesque thinking as common sense, and to do so with the kind of ease that passes for charm in posh writing. It is as right for the occasion as a birthday cake, a little too much perhaps, a little pink, and not necessarily very good for you, but quite delicious. Anybody interested in the question of literary style – or the history of felicity – will understand why it used sometimes to be said that the right had the best jokes. They did have the best jokes, if one understands a joke to be a remark that succeeds at someone else’s expense, or at the general expense of earnestness, of which there has been a necessary preponderance on the left. In any event, most of England’s great stylists were right-wing – or became so – and it is hard to think of many caring novelists making light of a crisis in Abyssinia.