Love in a Cold Climate
Why are some books compulsive, even when they seem so out of touch with one’s everyday concerns. Nancy Mitford’s ‘Love in a Cold Climate’ is, for me, a wonderful example. An extraordinary account of the life of the idle rich in the years before the 2nd World War, It is a book about rich, aristocratic people, people with titles and no jobs, and with some unacceptably undemocratic ideas about the role of women and who should get to vote. Despite all this, and if you are able to read it as a book from an era (published in 1945, it was set in the pre-war period) it is subversive and funny. It describes a group of people who know or are convinced they are the top of the pile and are entitled to the wealth and lifestyle which they enjoy. However, Mitford manages to gently send up their absurdities, and even includes a central clearly gay character who has a wonderful time and is allowed a happy ending
It is hard to say how she does it, but the tangled lives she describes become hypnotic. Against the odds you want to know what will happen, and , right up to the end the story seems improbable. That’s even more the case at the end when Nancy Mitford throws a completely unexpected and sudden change. This was a series of stories from another world, a class going into decline. The publisher’s blurb summarised it well:
“Love in a Cold Climate is a wickedly funny satire, brilliantly lampooning upper-class society. When Polly, a beautiful aristocrat, declares her love for her married, lecherous uncle – who also happens to be her mother’s former lover – she sparks off a scandal that has both disastrous and delicious consequences. Love in a Cold Climate is an unforgettable tale of the absurdities and obsessions of the elite.”
There’s a bewildering cast of players. Narrated by Fanny, the story explored the lives of Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie and their impossible children, together with the health-obsessed Davey Warbeck. However, far more important in many ways (and absolutely so in the mother’s view) are the Montdores, who are very grand, with a daughter Polly, who’s very beautiful but appears to lack sex appeal, and who ends up banished from the family and disinherited! The Montdores track down their replacement for Polly, a male heir, an almost lost distant cousin, Cedric, who was last heard of in Canada. He turns up, not as the anticipated provincial lumberjack but as an exotic, blond and beautiful Parisian gay man, and promptly entrances the formerly conservative and rather horrible Lady Montdore with her “worldly greed and snobbishness, her terrible relentless rudeness”.
Lady Montdore is a wonderful creation clearly crass, vulgar and tactless, and throughout the events of the novel never softens or acquires a heart of gold. Early on, Lady Montdore, Fanny and Polly share a car on the way home from a wedding: “Lady Montdore was wonderful when it came to picking over an occasion of that sort, with her gimlet eye nothing escaped her, nor did any charitable inhibitions tone down her comments on what she had observed.” It is a fine example of how Nancy Mitford lampoons and mocks her own class but can’t hide her affectionate view of them as she does so. Despite this, she does an excellent job in depicting assumed privilege and the high handedness that comes with it, especially the lack of sympathy for the situations of others.
At the same time, Lady Montdore is a compelling horror. She needs to feel that she is significant and exploits her presumed connections to the extent that even minor or disgraced aristocrats will serve her purpose. At the same time, her social crassness and lack of insight mean she doesn’t seem to realise that she is being used by those she thinks she is exploiting. She ignores her manipulative behaviour as she bulldozes her way through life, bullying her husband into being someone, bullying her child into marrying someone, in both cases order to make herself feel like someone. She is calculating and cunning, with nothing carried out without good reason. She observes everyone around her constantly, while making comments that seem innocuous but which barely hide her true feelings. She is a frightful snob, sneering at people who live suburban rather than country lives, who don’t possess ancient family silver or other heirlooms. However, her transformation into a bejewelled doll by the dazzling Cedric is ‘divine’. And Cedric, by the way, is amazing: camp, flamboyant, charming, hilarious, a flash of light in the gloom of Hampton.
The people in Love in a Cold Climate are bumbling and self-centred. They don’t really have to think about anything because the world is handed to them on a plate. Indeed, Mitford is constantly illustrating the ignorance and disregard that characterises this class. However, her sympathy is evident, as she charts an undercurrent of sadness that arises from people not living the life they want but having to meet the expectations of others. Alongside that sympathy, for much of the time she is scathing about the way some families live their lives and raise their children. I felt sorry for both Fanny, abandoned by her parents and no longer in contact with her father, and Polly, whose mother is controlling and whose father is distant and ineffectual. Both young women have been affected by their upbringings and are trying to make the best of their unhappy situations. Often funny, it is easy to overlook the wisdom and insights buried within the comedy.
Fanny is the perfect narrator. She is naïve but not too naïve, understanding more than she lets on, and using her reputation for innocence to extract tasty gossip from her elders. She provides a certain detachment as the story’s narrator, and in doing so gives breathing space to her observations. Her supposed innocence and naïveté create an atmospheres in which the people she observes feel secure enough to be indiscreet, and Fanny can deliver to the reader an uncluttered view of life within her class. However, it’s also the case that Mitford can be a bit sneaky and she throws in a quite marvellously unexpected ending to the story, one on which in which quiet Fanny plays a key role.
The book explores notions of class, particularly the friction between old money and new typified by the resistance of the upper classes to the elevation of banking families to ‘Society’, and the jealousies between the aristocracy and the upper middle classes represented by the academics among whom Fanny goes to live. Mitford is insightful, illustrating the expectations that ‘Society’ places on its members – to be interesting, to behave as the rules say they should, to marry well and appropriately – all of which she depicts as going hand in hand with the excitement but also the boredom of forbidden love, people hopping in and out of relationships, beneath a veneer of respectability.
Mitford puts across the simultaneously repressed and fascinated British attitude to sex well. Everybody in the book gossips about sex, and who is doing what to whom and how, while at the same time being reluctant to really talk about it. Jassy and Victoria quiz their married sisters and the newly married Fanny about ‘IT’, but the older women are vague in their descriptions. I don’t think Mitford thought much about the attitudes held in her society towards sex, they were what they were (still are, which is why our tabloid newspapers are still full of who did what to whom and how) and she incorporates them into the novel as a seamless part of the overarching attitudes of the British upper class.
The book is a satire, using overdrawn characters to fuel Mitford’s critique of the British aristocracy. However, in some ways the overblown elements of the story are more about social settings and actions, rather than dramatic characters. Mitford describes the kitsch imported French chateau that is Hampton, filled with lesser treasures because it will pass out of the immediate family, with the things of most value kept in the London house that will pass to Polly. The bewildering conversations at the first dinner party Fanny attends at Hampton, are meaningless in content but it is as if they are designed to set off their participants in a certain and rather fascinating light.
Mitford knows her class very well and makes fun of the paths trodden and words spoken more than she does individual characters. Is it a chronicle of the country lives of the upper classes in between the world wars, or is it slightly nasty satire? It was written after the war, at a time when society was changing, becoming marginally more equal, moving towards being a meritocracy, albeit one powered by access to money. I can’t help feeling that Nancy Mitford was looking back fondly and humorously to a time that had passed.
In a sense, Nancy Mitford is speaking to a perspective that is true for many of us. If you ever watched the US version of the TV show ‘The Office, in the series finale Andy Bernard reflects on his days at the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. Thinking back on his past – on the friends he made and the fun times he had – he says, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” Is that right? Are we able to look back at the past and accurately recall things, and in so doing recall the “good old days”, even if we didn’t know they were like that at the time? Nancy Mitford is describing many of the stories of the past in her world, and much of what she writes is tinged with nostalgia. Are we likely to sew the past as if it was the “good old days?”
Some psychologists have concluded there is evidence to suggest we frequently tend to remember and recollect past events in a more favourable light than when they actually occurred. They even have a term for it, describing it as rosy retrospection. This is a version of the more general comment that it is a human tendency to see things “through rose-tinted glasses”, describing events in a positive light and often better than they really are. This memory bias applies to all of us – and it explains why we often recall the past much more fondly than the present. More generally, rosy retrospection represents one example of the way memory is not as accurate or reliable as we would like to believe. Memory is surprisingly fallible.
Of course, once psychologists get hold of something, they keep going. Some thirty years ago, two psychologists described three stages in the way we offer a positive gloss on events that might have been less enjoyable. The first stage, which they describe as rosy projection, involves anticipating events more positively than they will be. In other words, if you’re really looking forward to something, you’re more likely to falsely remember it as being more positive after the event. The second stage – dampening – involves minimizing the pleasure of current experiences (compared to past ones). Rosy projection and dampening increase your likelihood of engaging in the third and final stage, which is – you guessed it – rosy retrospection. You’re especially prone to this when an event is a positive one, you’re personally involved, or the event is self-contained (self-contained meaning that the event doesn’t have any important consequences that might possibly affect the way we remember it in the future.
All that, of course, leads us on to forgetting. Psychologists have even more fun with forgetting. On the positive side, they are prone to offer all sorts of exercises, diets and other behaviours which will keep us from forgetting too often. As usual, the cures are often worse than the problem, and you won’t be surprised to learn one of the simplest ways to keep the brain healthy and prevent forgetting is to stay active and exercise: they suggest staying active is important because overall it keeps the body healthy. When the body is healthy the brain is healthy and less inflamed as well. \Active older adults appear to have had less episodes of forgetting compared to those older adults who were less active. In the same vein, a healthy diet can also contribute to a healthier brain and aging process which in turn results in less frequent forgetting.
In a way far more exciting than taking daily walks, and far more interesting than the healthy body and mind school to stop forgetting, Sigmund Freud theorized that people intentionally forgot things in order to push bad thoughts and feelings deep into their unconscious, through a process he called ‘repression’. This he theorised was a defence mechanism, that “ensures that what is unacceptable to the conscious mind, and would if recalled arouse anxiety, is prevented from entering into it.”
Freud developed a complex model, of which the first stage was what he called “primal repression”, a process that blocked feelings from entrance into the conscious”, as well as a second stage of repression, repression proper (an “after-pressure”), which affects mental derivatives of the repressed representative. In the primary repression phase, he thought it was highly probable that the immediate causes of repression were outbreaks of intense anxiety. This was to have more recent expression in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, who maintained that there is no ‘mechanism’ as such that represses unwanted thoughts. He suggested that “all consciousness is conscious of itself” we will be aware of the process of repression, even if skilfully dodging an issue” (quoted by John Wilson, “Sartre and the Imagination: Sexuality & Culture. 20 (4).
Was Nancy Mitford engaged in at least some rosy reconstruction in her portrayal of the idle rich, giving their activities a gloss of fun and value, when the world she was describing was full of misery and declining values, not just among the rich but across society as a whole. Given that she was a part of the culture she was describing, was she repressing some of what she knew, or simply picking and choosing among her own memories to offer an enticing, funny and silly portrait?
Isn’t that like everyone? Except in our darker moments, we like to portray ourselves in a good light. Sometimes that might be showing we are thoughtful caring and even virtuous. On other occasions we prefer to give our actions and our thoughts a veneer of silliness or humour, as if, foolish us, we couldn’t help making a mistake or doing something slightly silly. Of course we suffer from darker moments, reflecting on past mistakes, and more than trivially foolish behaviour. But these are actions, motivations and views that we are likely to keep close, maybe relating them to a close partner, and sometimes to no-one. These are the moments that haunt us and can reappear in our thoughts when times are gloomy, when the world seems out of sorts, or when some crisis has unfolded, and we imagine our contribution was central. Are those real memories? Or are they another part of that strange internal psychology that twists and reshapes what did happen to suit our later aspirations and fears. Nancy Mitford conveys all that well, as she tells the story and then how the characters retell and reimagine it. Beware, as it’s not just the Montdores of this world who distort their world – we do it too!
