The Bluestocking 346: Mitfords and protest art

they target the old masters and the stars of modernity

Happy Friday!

Every so often, you have to have a Cursed Holiday—one of those trips where nothing goes right. We had originally planned to go to Riga in the first week of July, but Rishi Sunak’s desire to escape being prime minister kiboshed that, and I couldn’t get a refund on the flights, so I switched them to November, thinking there might be a charming Christmas market or something.

Nope. One of Riga’s other main tourist attractions is the “Three Brothers”, which is literally just three old houses on a street.

get your thermal vest on

Also, I accidentally booked tickets not for the newly renovated Museum of the Occupation, as Jonathan had suggested, but instead a guided tour of the city’s former KGB prison, one of the most wholly evil places I have ever been. The tour concluded in the padded room where the Cheka shot dissidents, journalists and other miscreants; each bullet hole was labelled with a post-it note. By Sunday, we were looking forward to getting home again, only to get a text at the airport gate saying that our flight was cancelled because of Storm Bert and we would have to fly home the next day.

Also, I arrived in Riga with the tail end of one cold, and left with a new, worse cold—so I’m an octave lower than usual on this week’s Page 94. I’ve now lost my voice completely. Cursed. Roll on Christmas.

Helen

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Jessica (standing, right) with Nancy, Unity and Diana

Jessica Mitford’s Escape From Fascism (New Republic)

The question that later consumed [Jessica] Mitford—how could most of the family she loved either support or be sympathetic to Hitler?—has an obvious answer: These were “nature’s fascists,” downwardly mobile aristocrats living in great ignorance and fear. Muv was fanatically opposed to vaccines, and the family ate no pork because “Jews never get cancer.” Farve ranted about hating “Huns, Frogs, Americans, blacks and all other foreigners … children, the majority of my older sisters’ acquaintances [and] almost all young men,” while believing the category of “blacks” included the Spanish. Their son was killed in the Pacific Theatre because he refused to fight the Germans. Diana was always “casting about for something more exciting, more intriguing than the London season … something amazing, shocking,” and after adultery and divorce she found that in brown shirts. The much more interesting question is why Decca ended up married to a Jewish New Dealer and living in Oakland, California, in possession of a CPUSA membership card.

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Thanks to John Yorke for suggesting this piece, which he came across after reading Christmas Pudding, one of Nancy’s less good works, for his radio series on literature, Opening Lines. (I think it’s the one she wrote just for some cash and maybe to impress the unbearable Hamish St Clair-Erskine?)

Decca is now the most respectable of the Mitford sisters—two were fascists, one a duchess, one a comic novelist and one a lesbian chicken-obsessive—which is funny, considering her innate rebelliousness.

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Illustration by Fritz Lang

The Painted Protest (Harpers)

My mother lost both of her legs on the way to the Barbican Art Gallery. It was her day off, and she was going there to see an exhibition called Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art. She had just arrived in London on a coach from Oxford and was run over by a bus outside Victoria Station. This was on a Friday morning in early May. The next day, in my apartment in Manhattan, I received an unexpected call—my mother never calls me—from a trauma ward in West London. “I’m in a lot of pain,” she said in a loud, anguished, slurring voice I hardly recognized, “but I’m in very good hands.” A few hours later, I was on a flight home.

When I visited her in the hospital, Mom asked me whether the show was worth losing her legs for. “No,” I told her, though at that point, I hadn’t seen it. When I did, two weeks later, my answer proved correct.

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This Harpers cover story by Dean Kissick opens with one of the most arresting paragraphs I’ve ever read. The rest goes on to argue that the last few years in art have been dispiriting, with artists trying to so hard to make a statement about their outsider identities that they have forgotten to, well, be artful.

Given a few minutes, I’m sure I could come up with plenty of counter-examples to this thesis, but this article definitely chimes with my recent experience of walking round art galleries—and going to the theatre lately, too. Almost every one of the descriptions of contemporary art contained herein sounds shallow and self-obsessed, such as “a text painting that read ANONYMOUS HOMOSEXUAL; and, on an outdoor patio, a bronze nude self-portrait of a transgender artist on a plinth that said, simply, WOMAN.” The author concludes that an attempt to make meaning—to turn art into political resistance—has overwhelmed any interest in craft: “Celebrations of identity made in such deeply traditional styles are progressive in content but conservative in form.”

Another pressure against virtuosity is that it is considered to the mark of an unsophisticated rube not to “get” modern art, and to say things like “my toddler could have done that”. Sadly, though, that premium on sophistication has let some absolute charlatans put a few coat hangers together and pretend it’s a commentary on late capitalism. Culture has become politics by other means—many modern artworks provoke nothing in you when you see them, and then rely on the wall-text to tell you how important the statement that they’re making is. Stop it! I can read a book if I want to ponder information. Make something that takes my breath away.

Here’s perhaps the most brutal line: “protesters don’t even bother to glue themselves to contemporary paintings to protest the oil industry—it wouldn’t draw enough attention or ire, so they target the old masters and the stars of modernity.”

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Quick Link

1. Peer Review: nifty little tool from Tortoise that allows you to explore the different “blocs” in the House of Lords as if they were World of Warcraft classes: rebel, ghost, bishop etc.

2. “‘The real function of the murder in the quiet village,’ Fredric Jameson observed in Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality, ‘is for order to be felt more strongly.’ Osman takes Jameson’s rule to another level. The murders aren’t merely a temporary disruption that allows order to be restored more firmly at the end: preserving the status quo in Coopers Chase is one of the motives.” In the LRB, Thomas Jones reviews Richard Osman’s crime novels. Although I enjoyed the Thursday Murder Club series, I found the stitching a bit too obvious in his latest book, We Solve Murders. I also developed a haunting suspicion that the action had been set in unnecessarily glamorous locales (Dubai, the Caribbean, a private island off South Carolina) so that Richard Osman could offset all his recent holidays against tax.

3. That recommendation came from Caroline Crampton’s newsletter, which has some very offbeat recommendations, and so I recommend it.

Talking of which, some books I have recently read:

Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite. Short, enjoyable, if somewhat overpraised—it won the Baillie Gifford prize—life of John Donne. Rundell writes like one of those pre-internet magazine journalists who weren’t afraid to deliver crisp dismissals, safe in the knowledge the pile-on had not yet been invented. Did not make me want to read any more John Donne.

Jilly Cooper’s Riders. Some cask-strength 1980s politics here: the hero, Rupert Campbell-Black narrowly avoids shagging a 14-year-old groupie, effectively rapes his wife, and beats his horse so savagely that the horse remembers and bears a grudge, which becomes a crucial plot point. You can see why they adapted Rivals instead.

Adrian Edmondson’s Berserker. I read this memoir because I was a teenage Bottom fan, and the sections on being in a double act—and then the double act falling apart—are very compelling. As a teenager, I thought Rik Mayall was the sexiest, most dangerous live wire you could possibly imagine. As a mature adult, I acknowledge that he was probably exhausting to be around. Edmondson is also surprisingly moving on the griefs and reliefs of middle age: he suddenly realises one day that he doesn’t have to be a comedian any more.

Next on my reading list: I went to the Baillie Gifford prize dinner last week, and—confession time—swapped my gift bag with my tablemate so that I could have Sue Prideaux’s shortlisted biography of Paul Gauguin, Wild Thing. Her book on Friedrich Nietzsche, I Am Dynamite!, is one of the best things I read last year (honestly, I knew Nietzsche was a nutter, but I had no idea that Wagner was such a freak, too). I will report back on this one—one publishing exec told me that Prideaux had dealt very “bravely” with the topic of Gauguin’s time in the South Pacific, which suggests this might be a book that would have struggled to find a publisher a few years ago.

See you next time! Below is where we should have gone on holiday rather than the Baltic coast in November: