Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896-1933.
Secker & Warburg (London), 1982. £8.95.
Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family 1933-1980. Secker & Warburg, 1983. £8.95.
________

In the foreword of the first volume of memoirs, Rules of the Game, Mosley writes:

My purpose in writing this book is not to provide a biography of my father nor to give a comprehensive account of his politics...  I have tried to write a personal story of him and of my efforts to understand him. His child had to make these efforts to make sense of himself.

       Beyond the Pale begins with the period immediately following the death of Nicholas's mother, Cimmie (Cynthia Curzon); Nicholas is nine, attending Abinger Hill public school, and his father, forty-six, has just founded the British Union of Fascists. The next few years are marked by political and romantic intrigue, and glamorous holidays on the Mediterranean. By 1937 Oswald has married Diana (Guinness, née Mitford). Diana and her sister Unity have become friendly with Hitler, and Oswald's Blackshirts, having encountered setbacks in their bids for election, have become notorious for their anti-Semitic campaigns in the East End of London. At fourteen Nicholas goes on to Eton. Oswald and Diana were imprisoned in 1940, on the grounds that they were a threat to national security, and Oswald was detained either in prison or under house arrest until May 1945.  In 1942 Nicholas went from Eton to the Rifle Brigade; he served mainly in Italy, and was awarded an MC. For a time after the war Oswald restricted himself to writing (he published two books), but by 1948 he was back in active politics, and he last ran for Parliament as recently as 1966.  In 1959 there was a serious rift between father and son, largely because Oswald had not given up his extremist views, and they were not reconciled for several years.  Nicholas started at Oxford in 1946, specializing in philosophy; he was married in 1947. There are only a few paragraphs which are specifically about his writing career, having to do mainly with the relationship between his first books and his feelings about the war, and with his reassessment of his literary goals at the time of his friendship with Father Raymond Raynes. It is appropriate that the story of his personal life should end here: there are hints at the end of Beyond the Pale that his future is displayed in the dimension of fiction.

       Though the what-happens-next narrative of the memoirs is absorbing - and important, no doubt, from the point of view of political or cultural history - there are several other subtexts, as it were, which are of greater consequence for literature and philosophy: one examines the dynamics of Oswald's character; another traces the formation of Nicholas's character and conceptual scheme in the light of his efforts to cope with his rather extraordinary environment; and another, by far the most allusive, explores the connections between his style of thinking and writing, past and present, and the images and themes which are prominent in the fiction.

       Oswald Mosley was a virtual embodiment of paradox. He was handsome, charming, wealthy, an innovative thinker and a brilliant orator. However, despite his cleverness, he still struck the poses and tried to play the role of the legendary hero and lover. As Nicholas says, people are also victims of their talents. He seemed to think that to get people to follow him he needed only to state a rational program. In reality he charmed his supporters, and his programs were promoted in such unconventional ways that they were perceived as either unworkable or extremist (some of them were) and few of them came to anything. Although he disclaimed racism, he allowed anti-Semitic propaganda to he published in the party paper; and although he denied that there were connections with Mussolini, for a time Mussolini helped fund the British Union of Fascists. Before the war, Oswald's Blackshirts marched in quasi-military uniforms calling for law and order, thereby helping to generate the conditions for riot. Although he characterized the period of confinement as an opportunity for reflection and reappraisal (Faust and Zarathustra are prominent), after the war he seemed to have "stepped back on to some wheel of repetitions." His private life seems to have mirrored this pattern of douhle-dealing and self-deception. The customs of the time appear to have been such that infidelity was not by itself dishonorable; Oswald's unconventionality was expressed in his enthusiasm for the game and in his choice of partners. But the correspondence between his parents that Nicholas has published demonstrates that there was also love and mutual dependence, "the heartfelt, caring, genuine dependence of children-husbands on their mother-wives." It should he added that the relationship between Oswald and Diana, his second wife, lasted until his death, approximately forty-five years...  Nicholas describes a conversation with his father in 1980, just ten days before his death:

He told me - as he had used to tell me so many years ago - how good his first marriage had been; and now of course his second marriage was very good, hut what he wanted now, with and for everyone, was reconciliation. He said  - Throughout the thirties, you know, it was as if I had two wives: do you think that was immoral? I said - Ah, Dad, immoral!....  I told him that I wanted to write something about his life; that I wanted to try to write the truth; that no one of course ever quite caught the truth, but if one made efforts then these could stand for it.

       One of Nicholas's most effective images is of himself as a child being always on the periphery of the grown-up world, like a spectator of a performance - which to him was either incomprehensible, seeming to be mad, or like the activities of gods. This is also the attitude expressed by the teenager Bert in Nicholas's novel Imago Bird (1980), and anyone familiar with Mosley's fiction will quickly recognize that in his scheme autobiography and fiction are just different aspects, as it were, of the same effort. The memoirs do not by any means dwell upon Nicholas's problems of adjustment; however, their causes and symptoms (particularly his stammer) are made clear enough. Obviously his father's public life has always been a difficulty, even before he understood political events. At Abinger Hill:

Perhaps I liked to think that my family was unique, incomparable -nothing to do with anything so vulgar as being upper-class. Was not my father after all a rich, ex-socialist, would-be dictator fascist baronet?

It was the first time I was struck with the idea that if life was not to seem meaningless there had at moments to be a regard for something beyond either the conventions of games or self-interest; there had to be what might be called - for want of a better phrase  -  an effort at truth.

It was as if we were outside normal categories of space and time: we were like revolutionaries meeting to discuss our plans for the world in Siberia.
...for myself they were times cut off from the crazed projections of the outside world.... Of course I myself may have made something of a legend about all this: hut this was what it seemed like - we were conspirators believing that we might alter the world: shadows coming together beneath high walls with spikes on top like crowns of thorns.

One of the points of these books - biography or autobiography - has been the attempt to create an attitude by which the darkness in people (there is always darkness) might be made to seem not so much evil as somewhat ridiculous: evil may thus be exorcised: ridiculousness becomes life-giving...
Both in war, and in the battles one has with what one is and what one becomes, the questions are - how does one survive? but also and perhaps more practically - what are the parts of one that one comes to feel are worthy of survival?

       Nicholas's image of himself as both a victim and a survivor is not merely a literary contrivance: obviously this sense of himself originated in his youth.  It is ironical that the circumstances which generated his alienation also helped him to devise a means of coping with it. This pattern is evident in the memoirs; however, its clearest thematic expression is in Imago Bird. In a former essay, "Sleight-of-Language" (Review of Contemporary Fiction 2, 2), I have discussed a scene in which Bert's father, who seems to have the character of Nicholas's father, is caught with another woman. The resulting reparteé between his parents casts Bert adrift, obscuring the ordinary significance of the event, but it also demonstrates how - in order to escape responsibility, or for higher purposes - the significance of events can be altered and made liberating. The crux of this is that through his exaggerated self-consciousness Nicholas was able to make himself at home on the periphery of the mad, grown-up world. Without such a strong father and without his intellectual encouragement, in more ordinary circumstances, Nicholas might not have survived. These are the seeds of his view that survival depends upon an ability to see oneself in relation to other parts of oneself and convention; in this way one might escape entrapment in conventions, which he perceives as a kind of death. A Nietzschean style is appropriate: it might be said that with a personality in such disarray, he was easily started down the path of self-overcoming and self-creation.

       Near the end of Beyond the Pale Mosley has quoted several paragraphs from one of his 1946 Cxford essays - this one on Hume. He asks, "But what is this 'I' that possesses the faculty of entering into itself?... What then is this primary Self?"  This is not a startling commentary on Hume, but we are invited to see that in his own project of self-understanding Nicholas had already gone well beyond the style of his father's preoccupation with Nietzsche.  On the following page there is this statement of his attitude toward writing:

It seemed to me that novels might be a way of using words by which one could not only set out what one saw of life but by this see the way in which one saw; and through this, because it was to do with not being trapped by life, something might change.

       None of Mosley's protagonists is more articulate on the problems of the detached "primary Self" than Anthony Greville, whose memoirs constitute Natalie, Natalia (1971). What does one do about the gap between private experience and the conventions of linguistic and behavioral expression, and what becomes of morality once one recognizes that it is not the following of injunctions? Greville says: "In a dark wood, at the middle tine of life, I went on trying to explain myself to myself. I might waylay myself like a bandit." I have talked about his practical strategy for this elsewhere; of course, only an indirect strategy would work. His approach to the literary problem of self-expression is to devise a style which reflects the movement of the self in function rather than in space and time. This is the self whose acts of observation order the thing observed, thus there is a sense in which if it is effective, the literary style becomes the style of the self (but whose?). In general terms the quality of Nicholas's - or Greville's or Bert's or Jason's - private experience is not unique; but with regard to philosophical concerns, we might say that he has tried to devise a technique for gaining access to the "liveliness" we experience in trying to fit things together, searching for patterns and connections. As it happens, this is a variant of the task which the philosopher Stephen set for fiction in the novel Accident (1965).

       Mosley's approach to these problems of personal integration, expression, and practical morality has been an aesthetic one, in two specific respects. His literary work has been part of his strategy regarding his personal circumstances, and, further, one of the main purposes of his work has been to explore the similarity - not to put too fine a point on it - of the techniques and processes of personal integration, expression, and practical morality with the techniques and processes involved in the creation and assessment of aesthetic objects proper. In outline this could be interpreted as an implementation of a Nietzschean program, the theory being supported by experiments designed to give a precise sense to the notion of personal style. This is the general import of his protagonists' investigations of psychological orientation, patterns of interaction, and strategies for generating liveliness. Their integrity is manifested in their ability to see themselves in relation to conventional patterns. The literary aspect of this is shown in their determination - seeing themselves as symbols - to avoid being trapped in conventional narrative structures. As Jason says (naturally Jason is also interested in such things as not-acting), "We can come alive again after the last act."

       Mosley's literary work may also be described as an exploration of the relationship between the aesthetic and the instrumental qualities of fiction. Some important elements of his view can be brought out by considering his attitudes toward language. His remarks about his stammer are especially interesting: he says, for example, that it might be "some effort to get back to that state before the confusion of languages," that it is "the protection of oneself both from other people's aggression and from one's own aggression against others," and that it is the "often ludicrous outward sign of an inward contradiction; it is as if the sufferer were half conscious of having swallowed paradoxes as if they were some snake." In Imago Bird the psychiatrist Dr. Anders gives Bert a diagnosis which is similar to the one given Nicholas in 1947. Nicholas says:

He spoke not of elocutionary techniques but of states of mind: stammering was some failure of relationship with oneself. One was too close: if one could stand back from one's words as it were, then words might be freed, but watching them one might deal with them. He would say - But perhaps you don't want to get rid of your stammer.