Helmintholog

So to a party to celebrate Granta’s 100th issue. I arrive late, having started at the wrong tube station and walked from Queensway to the Portobello Road in pouring rain. On the stairs up to the auditorium is Martin Amis, deep in conversation with someone I don’t recognise; inside the Twentieth Century Theatre everyone is facing away towards the stage, where there are speeches in progress. At the back of the crowd, straight in front of me, listening, Ian MacEwan, Annalena, Ian Jack; and then I look to my right and see Richard Williams, who worked on the magazine for a while. He whispers to me “I think I was here in 1968, for a concert by Quintessence; or was it the Third Ear Band?”.

The room is extremely noisy after the speeches, and I work my way to the other end, where I am talking to a woman who is writing a history of twentieth century art when we are approached by a distinguished looking gent: widow’s peak of silvery curls, quite tall, substantial; air of quizzical command. I have him down for a writer of military histories.

“Are you”, he says to my companion, “Suzy Israel?” No, she says.

Suzy Israel is the name on the RSVP, a figure of shadowy power who is Sigrid Rausing’s PA.

Would you recognise her? asks the distinguished gent. No.

Ah, he says. You see, I don’t quite know who invited me to this party.

Well, says she: there are Sigrid and Eric, meaning the couple who own the magazine, pointing them out where they talk a few yards from us.

He pulls from his pocket the invitation, an imposing rectangle of white card. On the back of it he has written two names. The top one is Martin Amis. Could we point him out?

“Can’t see him from here”, I say, “but then he is very short.”

The second name, he can’t make out. It is Ian somebody.

“MacEwan?” I suggest.

“Yes: that’s it. Is he famous?”

“Well, yes,” I say. “But I can’t point him out in the crowd: he, also, is very short.”

The art woman and I are now both studying the distinguished gent unashamedly, so as not to catch each other’s eye. He maintains an admirable sang-froid.

“I’m here”, he says, “because I am a a member of parliament. I chair the committee on human trafficking, and this, along with human rights, is a subject that interests Sigrid Rausing. The trouble is that it is very hard to meet trafficked women. They do exist, I know. But it is very hard to find them.”

We urge him to go and talk to his hostess, which he does, and I am left to reflect that this earnest and slightly ridiculous figure does more good for the world than almost all of the people in the room whom I normally think of as upholding civilisation. It’s not that I disparage culture. But I do think that working to end the slave trade is more admirable and much less absurd than producing second-rate literature, which some at least of the participants at this celebration must be guilty of from time to time.

There is more to the story I told in the previous entry about the SS man who found he was a Jew. Here is how it ended, in Unity’s telling to Diana.

Of course poor Heinz was completely erledigt [shattered] when he heard it, & wanted to shoot himself at once, which it seems to me would have been the best way out.

Though, officially, he doesn’t count as a Jew as both the grandparents were baptized. But for Heinz, being a real Nazi ‘aus überzeugung’ [by conviction], that naturally made no difference. His father made him promise not to do anything until they had had a reply to their Ersuch [request] to the Führer, but so far there has been no reply, & in the meanwhile of course he is having what is practically a nervous breakdown. Well it seems that there are several half-Jews who have, at one time or another, been allowed to remain in the Party on account of special Verdienste [services]. So they hope that he also will, though of course this will anyhow, from his own point of view, have ruined his life. So she came to ask me if I would help her, & I told her that if she would write a personal letter to the Führer I would give it to him personally. Isn’t it awful for them, poor things. I must say it gave me an awful shock when she told me.

Unity is in many ways less unpleasant than Diana, whose combination of intelligence with quite psychotic self-deception is horrible. In later life, she is constantly roused to indignation because vulgar lower-class people will claim that her husband was anti-Semitic (is if there were anything wrong with that) or, most exquisitely, when a journalist quotes her as saying she was “very fond” of Hitler. This seemed to her a monstrous misunderstanding of “Off the Record”. So the last word goes her refutation, in 1976, of the suggestion that Unity might have made a snobbish remark about the Queen Mother, who was known to the Mitfords as “Cake”:¹

The nastiest, well one of the nastiest, is Mr Float [The rector of Swinbrook] … He (apparently) told such an obviously false story of Bird [Unity] saying, in conneciton with the abdication, that Cake was like a shop girl. It is so particularly offensive and silly and, as we know, Birdie had strong race feelings, but not so much as a soupçon of class feeling and thus its something she couldn’t have said.

Italics in the original. What does it take to have such an inexhaustible fountain of self-righteousness?

¹ Hence “Cake’s Dump”, a reference by Debo to Clarence House.

I was given a copy of the Mitford sisters’ collected letters, and have sunk, enthralled, into its currents, occasionally surfacing, sputtering and expostulating, to read whole chunks out loud to the nearest victim. The nicknames and the silliness no longer come as news. Even Nancy’s prolonged death from cancer was something I knew about, though it is much more affecting in real time, so to say. But the letters of the fascist sisters, Diana and Unity, in the Thirties, came as a real shock. Knowing someone was a Nazi is entirely different from reading the unmediated reactions of a Nazi to the world around them. Here is Unity after and evening with Hitler:

The next evening, the Führer got into quite a rage twice; the first time with Kannenberg,¹ for whom I felt heartily sorry! The second rage, however, was over Reichsminister Gürtner & the new laws he is making. He got angrier & angrier, & at last thundered — you know how he can — like a machine-gun – ‘Das nächste Mal, dass die Richter so einen Mann freilassen, so lasse ich ihn von meiner Leibstandarte verhaften und ins Konzentrationslager schicken; und dann werden wir sehen, welches am stärksten ist, the letter of Herr Gürtner’s law oder meine Maschinen Gewehre!’² It was wonderful. Everyone was silent for quite a time after that.

It is no doubt very wrong of me to suppose that there are people in the Cheney circle who feel very sorry for the cook when he is chewed out unfairly. Because, after all, they do not send disagreeable judges to be tortured in concentration camps for failing to send others there. This is an important distinction.

Then there was the scandal that touched Unity’s life earlier that summer. She writes to Diana, who would completely understand:

What I couldn’t tell you on the telephone was this. You remember my little friend from Vienna who you said was like an Indian, & his pretty blonde fiancée who asked the Führer for an autograph in the Osteria. Well yesterday she telephoned & said could she come & see me for five minutes, but her fiancé mustn’t know anything about it. So this morning she came, & she was here when you telephoned. You know Heinz, her fiancé, was a member of the SS in Vienna — I believe since 1932. He was a tremendously enthusiastic Nazi & really risked everything for the cause during the Schuschnigg Regime. Well it seems that just after the Machtübernahme his father, also a member of the Partei, who had brought him up to be very ‘nationaldenkend’ [nationalistically minded], told him that both his (Heinz’s) mother’s parents were Jewish. Of course poor Heinz was completely erledigt [shattered] when he heard it, & wanted to shoot himself at once, which it seems to me would have been the best way out.

I begin to sympathise with the husband of Cynthia Heimel, who made a special pilgrimage to Swinbrook on their honeymoon to piss on Unity’s grave. The marriage didn’t last but the gesture deserves to be remembered.

The other great shock of these memoirs was to discover that Unity’s main lover was an Austrian in whose family castle I have stayed — it’s now a sort of very upmarket B&B, run by the daughter and son-in-law of the Count Almasy who knew her. Strange to think of the night there resounding once with Mitford shrieks.

There is something about Austrian castles, is there not? The other one we atayed in on that holiday is now owned by Seyss-Inquart’s godson.

¹ His cook

² ‘Next time the judges let that sort of man free, I’ll have him arrested by my bodyguards and sent to a concentration camp; then we’ll see who is stronger, the letter of Herr Gürtner’s law or my machine guns!’