Neither poison pen nor mudraking all the way. Good fun, though.

The Mitford sisters and I – we go back a long way, literally speaking. I first came across them in March 2009 http://bit.ly/x7dPDE after following the exploits of the Rt Hon Unity Mitford, whom I described in a recent Tweet as ‘a U Brit brat + a Winston Churchill relation + a Hitler “groupie”.’ The Mitford sister younger to her was Jessica (aka “Decca”), the adventurous one with leftist inclinations who ran away from her stately home to fight in the Spanish Civil War and was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in the US for a while also happens to be JK (Harry Potter) Rowling’s self-acknowledged “heroine”. After reading Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Mudraking (Alford a Knopf, New York, 1979) - rescued by me as usual from my consigned-to-the-back-rack-and-conveniently-forgotten book collection - I couldn’t but concur with Rowling’s summing-up of her as “[i]ncurably and instinctively rebellious, brave, adventurous, funny and irreverent”. I can vouch that Poison Penmanship is a series of delectable (what I’m tempted to call) belles-lettres. From among them, I would rate the following as strictly falling in the “mudraking” category of investigative journalism in the US, at times accidentally so: You-All and Non-You-All, the 3 funeral pieces, Maine Chance Diary, Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers, My Short and Happy Life as a Distinguished Professor, and the 2 Sign of the Dove pieces. What comes across from her writing is what Rowling told us: “I love the way she never outgrew some of her adolescent traits, remaining true to her politics – she was a self-taught socialist – throughout her life.” And, “… she liked nothing better than a good fight, preferably against a pompous and hypocritical target” like the funeral trade, San Jose State University, Famous Writers correspondence school. Elizabeth Arden, the American South in the fifties, you name it. All told a rip-roaring read.

Bizarre behaviour.

I just finished reading David Pryce-Jones' Unity Mitford A Quest (Star, London 1981). It had been lying hidden in one of our cupboards until it caught my eye serendipitously one fortunate afternoon. Many of the events it covers took place before I was born and some, when I was a child. It is a difficult read what with all the Germans and other Europeans peopling it, German, Hungarian and Czech place names and, above all (or, uber alles, as Unity Valkyrie Mitford would probably have preferred it), the dry and clinical style of writing that Pryce-Jones uses. It's a psychological thriller in a sense. It scared me no end to enter into Unity's mind. It ticked like the mind of a latter-day groupie of a rock star or a movie star. She was a British aristocrat by birth and upbringing, related to Winston Churchill. Yet, she was a Fascist, anti-Semite and more Nazi than the Nazis. She followed Hitler, somehow intuiting his movements and whereabouts and managing to be in the right place at the right time to catch his eye. The Nazis thought she was a British spy. The book suggests she was an ardent fan of Hitler who apparently saw her as the perfect specimen of Aryan (Nordic) womanhood. There has of late been speculation if Unity had Hitler's love-child. http://digbig.com/4ymtm and http://digbig.com/4ymtn. Pryce-Jones goes to great lengths to cite hearsay evidence to prove that there was nothing sexual about the Unity-Hitler link-up. Nor, according to him, did she have an affair with the Hungarian aristocrat and closet-Nazi Janos Almasy, the brother of of Lazlo (aka 'The English Patient"). Unity fervently hoped that Germany and England would be allies and jointly "police" the world. When they went to war, her inner world imploded and she tried to commit suicide. Weird!