Warning: May contain Nancy Mitford

When one of Nancy Mitford’s bestselling novels, The Pursuit of Love (1945), was reissued by Penguin a couple of years ago, it carried a trigger warning.

The book, Penguin warned, contained “prejudices that were common in British society” and that were “wrong then” and are “wrong today”. The warning is a typically sanctimonious woke perversion, but its idiocy stands out even against that backdrop.

That’s like warning that The Hunchback of Notre-Dame may be offensive and traumatic to vertebrally challenged persons.

One would be hard-pressed to name a single novel set in pre-woke times that doesn’t portray prejudices our lumpen intelligentsia now consider vile. Practically any Dickens novel, anyone? Gulliver’s Travels? Clarissa? Vanity Fair? Huckleberry Finn?

They all represent an artistic, usually satirical, sometimes caricatured, take on society with all its good points, but also its failings of mind, morality and character. Prejudices, both good and bad, often come in for rough treatment, and the understanding of which are good and which are bad changes from one era to another.

So why not put a blanket warning on every such novel, to the effect that it “may contain literature”? Or, in this case, “may contain Nancy Mitford”?

Her The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949) happen to be among my favourite novels, as distinct from those I consider the greatest. The greatest novels try to paint a picture of universality on a vast canvas, something that impressed me no end in my youth.

With age, I began to look for universality elsewhere, reading fiction mainly for style, wit and social observation. That’s where Nancy Mitford can hold her own against anyone, coming close to her lifelong friend Evelyn Waugh (the correspondence between them is among the best epistolary literature of the 20^th century).

The two novels I mentioned are autobiographical, with most characters being thinly disguised members of Mitford’s own family, one of the most aristocratic in Britain. She was the eldest of Baron Redesdale’s six daughters, and the two novels sketch the aristocratic interbellum life she knew intimately.

If Nancy’s talent brought her fame, two of her sisters, Diana and Unity, could only manage infamy. Diana married Oswald Mosley, the leader of British fascists. As Nazi sympathisers, in effect agents, she and her husband were interned for the duration of the Second World War.

Unity was even worse. She was Hitler’s friend, confidant and, according to some historians, lover. Throughout the ‘30s Unity was involved in active pro-Nazi propaganda, supporting Hitler’s regime in word and deed (I’ll spare you the salacious details). When Britain declared war on Germany, Unity shot herself in the head, but survived and lived as a vegetable until 1948.

Nancy is usually described as a mild socialist, which by the standards of her siblings (mostly either fascist or communist) is practically apolitical. Her novels certainly are. They are just trenchantly written and brilliantly observed pictures of the life she knew.

The Pursuit of Love, about which Penguin feels duty-bound to prewarn readers, is largely satirical, and most of the satire is aimed at the character of Uncle Matthew, based on Nancy’s father.

Uncle Matthew is introduced with a description of his chimney-piece, above which “hangs an entrenching tool, with which, in 1915, Uncle Matthew had whacked to death eight Germans one by one as they crawled out of a dug-out. It is still covered with blood and hairs, an object of fascination to us as children.”

Clearly, in common with many Englishmen of his age and class, Uncle Matthew was inclined towards Euroscepticism, which he proved throughout the narrative with his offhand references to ‘the Hun’, ‘frogs’, ‘dagos’, ‘wops’ and foreigners in general. They were collectively dismissed as ‘fiends’.

When the Second World War started, Uncle Matthew’s sister (loosely based on the socialite Idina Sackville) brought her Spanish lover into the family home. Uncle Matthew was aghast. “Can’t have too many dagos here,” he fumed.

However, it turned out that the Spaniard knew how to get around food shortages by procuring groceries and cooking delicious meals. That reconciled Uncle Matthew to the offensive presence of the ‘dago’.

Even this brief description shows that Nancy didn’t extol xenophobia – any more than Mark Twain extolled racism in his portrayal of Nigger Jim. Twain seethed at bigotry, Mitford only smiled at it in her understated English way, but the satirical effect is similar.

So what’s there to warn against? Denouncement of racism? Caricature of xenophobia? Penguin editors and our lumpen intelligentsia display the ideologised obtuseness of the Soviet sensors who made cultural life impossible. Soviet writers were sentenced to imprisonment for the acts their characters committed, the words they uttered.

The approach was purely formal: the author was culpable even if his own feelings about such characters were negative. The context didn’t matter; only the text did.

Yet let’s assume for the sake of argument that the author himself shared his protagonists’ failings. For example, neither Shakespeare nor Dickens can be described as Judeophiles, and both Gogol and Dostoyevsky were virulently anti-Semitic.

Some readers may wince when reading some of their passages, but surely they can form their own judgement without being told “look, moron…”? If I winced all the way through Atlas Shrugged, should I have been warned in advance about the novel being aesthetically inept and philosophically fascistic?

People talk about an encroachment by the nanny state, but the situation is actually more sinister than that. Some nannies may be quite peremptory, but most, I’m sure, genuinely think everything they do is for their charges’ benefit.

Our lumpen intelligentsia, on the other hand, are entirely self-serving. They work against, not for, the people about whom they profess so much love – and what’s worse is that they know it because the people tell them.

The Times recently polled its readers, asking “Should books containing prejudices carry trigger warnings?” A whopping 88 per cent answered ‘no’. Practically everyone, and one would think The Times aims at precisely the audience that should jump up and salute every manifestation of sanctimonious woke rubbish.

Like the Soviet ghouls of yesteryear, today’s ideologists are schizophrenically divorced from real life. They create a picture of virtual reality in their minds and enforce it by every means at their disposal, from massive propaganda to coercion.

The relative weight of the two is different in our ‘liberal’ democracies, but that’s only a difference of means, not ends. The desired end is exactly the same: replacing the actual reality of life with the virtual reality of ideology.

That effort usually starts modestly and then escalates by incremental steps. The destination is clear: banning, ideally burning, the books falling short of the fake morality concocted by modern ideologues. But that’s a race won by a slow and steady progression.

Some books, like The Pursuit of Love, carry idiotic warnings. Others, like those by Roald Dahl, are rewritten. Still others, like Huckleberry Finn, are taken out of libraries. That’s how tyrannies start: with short but gradually lengthening steps.

Unless they are stopped, blazing bonfires await at the end of the journey, immolating books and, in due course, their authors. Such is one of the lessons history teaches. Alas, we agree to play truant.