Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie

In her 1954 biography of Madame de Pompadour, the famous mistress of French King Louis XV, Nancy Mitford writes, “Then there were the hours of chat, and here Madame de Pompadour had an enormous asset in his eyes; she was very funny. Hitherto the King’s mistresses had told few jokes and the Queen even fewer; he had never known that particularly delightful relationship of sex mixed up with laughter.” In Madame de Pompadour, surely Nancy Mitford’s devoted readers recognize the author herself. She might be restrained by custom (and the censor) from writing much about sex, but she excels at mixing romance with laughter, and at adding goodly portions of astute observation, neat character drawing, and daring opinions.
Christmas Pudding
(published in 1932, when Mitford was twenty-eight) and
Pigeon Pie
, written in the last months of 1939 and published in 1940, are not as well known as works Mitford wrote after the war, such as
Love in a Cold Climate
, but they foreshadow Mitford’s mastery of the comic form and her light but expert style. They also explore interesting issues of class and fashion, and they excavate many of the traditions of English comic form. But, most important, they are fun to read, which was likely Mitford’s dearest intention.

Nancy Mitford came by her literary talent legitimately. Her paternal grandfather, the first Lord Redesdale, wrote two volumes about his adventures in the British Foreign Service, stationed in, among other places, St. Petersburg, Beijing, and Japan. Her maternal grandfather, Thomas Gibson Bowles, founded the
original British version of
Vanity Fair
magazine (1868–1914) and wrote many of its articles. Mitford herself was an avid reader as a child who, according to her friend and biographer Harold Acton, made obsessive use of her father’s richly endowed library. (Her father, the second Lord Redesdale, bragged that he had only read one book in his life, Jack London’s
White Fang
, which he maintained was “so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another.”) Mitford was educated mostly at home, but she was sent to a finishing school when she was sixteen. One of the best opportunities school offered was a spring trip with a group of other girls to Paris, Rome, and Venice. Mitford made excellent use of her chance—she wrote copious and amusing letters to her mother and other friends. Subsequently, after a rather dull year of “coming out” (into London society), she moved into her family’s house in London and emerged as a significant member of the 1920s “Bright Young Things” generation, a fashionable, notorious group of friends that also included writers Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, and Sacheverell Sitwell.

In spite of her prosperous upper-class background, Mitford started out like most young authors—she had no source of income and turned to writing articles for a few pounds each for
Vogue, Harper’s
, and other popular magazines. At one point she was offered a gossip column for
The Tatler
, which she declined, but she did accept a position writing a column for
The Lady
: “A sort of running commentary of current events.… They are sending me to everything free, the Opera, the Shakespeare festival at Stratford, etc.”
^*
The pay was five and a half pounds per week (about four hundred dollars in 2013 currency).

Novels had never been Mitford’s greatest reading pleasure—for that she preferred nonfiction, especially the works of Thomas Carlyle (also a great favorite of Charles Dickens) and Thomas
Babington Macaulay—but her life of parties and adventures proved to be excellent fodder for her first work of fiction,
Highland Fling
(1931), and her second,
Christmas Pudding
(1932). She felt no hesitation about transforming the world in which she lived and the people she knew into literary scenes and characters (a great English tradition), but she did not have the same sort of literary aspirations as her friend Evelyn Waugh. She wrote for money, and also for her own enjoyment. Her sister Jessica reports, “For months, Nancy had sat giggling by the drawing room fire, her curiously triangular green eyes flashing with amusement, while her thin pen flew along the lines of a child’s exercise book.” Acton, who was then also living in London, reports that Mitford later was ashamed of her first novel, but it was a commercial success: “in a Christmas firecracker way, it was effective,” and it sold well. Nancy wrote to Acton, “I had a letter from an aged friend of mama’s saying that the silliness of my young people is only equalled by their vulgarity and that if by writing this I intend to
devastate
and lay
waste
to such society I am undoubtedly performing a service to mankind.”

Mitford’s romantic affairs were not going well, but they afforded her plenty of inspiration. She had a long and unsuccessful relationship with her first love, Hamish St. Clair-Erskine, who led an intimidatingly aggressive life as a bon vivant (in one letter she compared him to Lord Byron). None of her friends approved of the relationship. When she received some money from the sale of
Highland Fling
and decided to save it for her wedding, Evelyn Waugh told her, “Don’t save it, dress better and catch a better man.” In early 1931, Hamish was sent to America by his parents, much to Mitford’s dismay: “How can I possibly write a funny book in the next six months … when I’ve got practically a pain from being miserable and cry in buses quite continually?” She had, however, met an interesting woman, who was possibly the inspiration for Amabelle in
Christmas Pudding
, a “sweet and divine old tart called Madame de P.… She is nice and has lovely parties.” And not only
was Hamish unfaithful; a year later, after his return from America, he went to Ireland and lost fifty pounds (equivalent to about thirty-eight hundred dollars today) betting on a horse. Mitford sent him twenty pounds, complaining that she had to use savings she had been planning to spend on clothing (“what is rather galling is that he always grumbles at me being so inexpensively dressed”). In the same letter, she remarks, “The book [
Christmas Pudding
] is rather good you know if only I can ever finish it.”

Christmas Pudding
uses a similar premise to
Highland Fling
: a group of mismatched characters, young and old, find themselves thrown together at a country house for the Christmas season. The closest it has to a protagonist is Paul Fotheringay, who has just published a novel, “pouring forth into it all the bitterness of a bitter nature,” only to have it become a tremendous success, hailed for its humor. Paul’s destined beloved, Philadelphia Bobbin, has had something of the same “coming out” season as, perhaps, her author did. Now back home in the country, she “sat in her mother’s drawing room and looked at the fire. She hoped that death would prove less dull and boring than life.” Paul and Philadelphia must be brought together, and Mitford does this by means of Philadelphia’s brother, Bobby, who is still at Eton, and therefore about seventeen years old, and whose personality Nancy based on Hamish. Unbeknownst to his mother, Lady Bobbin—a foxhunting countrywoman with many horses and no patience for urbanity or much else—Bobby is planning his cosmopolitan future, to be lived, most decidedly, indoors.

Christmas Pudding
centers on a party, at which each character arrives in some difficulty. Paul is pretending to be a tutor for Bobby in order to gain access to the letters of a Bobbin ancestress, whose writing might be sentimental and conventional enough to shift the tone of his literary career. Lady Bobbin can’t go hunting because of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in her parish. The benign Amabelle, a woman of a certain age who has been married and divorced many times, is looking for true love, or
maybe just a comfortable home. Almost everyone has secrets that must be kept from at least some of the other characters.