Nicholas Mosley - John Banks Interview Transcript 7 - 2

On the bench outside Peaklet Cottage, Sussex, May 20, 1991. 
Topics: The role of William, the young aristocrat, in Accident, and Mosley's views of aristocrats, including himself. 
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JB - Let's go back to Accident for a moment. The boy in Accident, the student William, is an aristocrat, and he's the one who dies in the car accident. He was drunk, but he wasn't driving, he was the passenger, and he's killed. Why?  

NM - Oh why, well! Oh well, I was making a rather clever-clever point in Accident, a jokey point that William talked about with his tutor at Oxford. And the sort of jokey point I was making was that aristocrats haven't got a role in modern life, other than to be some sort of sacrificial victims, because the old role of aristocrats... ok, they had power, but then also they were also the frontline soldiers in war, they were the knights in armor. And right up to the time of the First World War they were the frontline troops, they were the young officers who went out to France; if you were a young upper-class aristocratic chap you were out in France as soon as you could go and you were the first over the top and you were the first to be killed.  Of course, all the people behind you were also killed. But in a way you were expected to be the frontline troops if you were an aristocrat, the first over the top.  And most of them were; of course like all societies they had terrible black sheep, who were the last over the top [chuckles] but they were sent off... 

 J - Well I'm steering you not too subtly around to the question about your role as an aristocrat. You've been on the frontline, and you've done some farming! 

N - Yes, well I was like that, I was... when I was eighteen and the war was two years old there was no question at all, I was going to join the infantry, I'd join an infantry regiment and if anyone went over the top then I'd go over the top, yes that's true. But to go back to Accident, the point I was making seriously, but a bit sort of fancifully, was, ok, now there's no longer that sort of 'over the top' war, war's become so technical, technological - H-bombs etcetera - there isn't any role for that sort of courage anymore. To be very brave now, in something like the Gulf War, you have to be a real technical, you have to fly an aeroplane, very complex machinery. And one of the aristocratic roles is not to understand much about machinery! So, I was saying in Accident, now there's no longer the old-fashioned war, there's no more role for the aristocrat, and this student William and his tutor, Stephen, joked about his: Stephen teased William - now, come on, you aristocrats don't have anything else to do, what are you going to do now...go into the city and make a lot of money? (which is what a lot of so-callled aristocrats do now) And so William in the story of Accident did become a sort of victim, he became a victim of his own innocence and self-confidence, which didn't make sense, so he was the one who was killed in the car smash - because he was being taken for a ride by the Austrian girl and the older man, not his tutor but the friend of his tutor who was called Charlie - who was having an affair with the girl who he thought was his girlfriend - so he was taken for a ride and had a car smash and was killed. But that was a story, I didn't want to make a very heavy symbolic point about this I don't think, apart from the jokey thing.
 
J - But your being an aristocrat, your being a lord, has certainly come into your writing, certainly influenced your writing, hasn't it?

N - Well, I don't know. Obviously my having a private income has influenced my writing, but of course my private income came not from my aristocratic forebears but from my marvelous great-grandfather who was a Chicago real-estate man way back in 1860. He made pots of money in the 1860's, and by the time the 1880's and 1890's came along he'd made a great fortune in America, moved to Washington, and my grandmother Mary Leiter, his eldest daughter, came over to Europe to find an aristocratic husband, found an aristocratic husband, my grandfather, and so these two sides met. She had the money and my grandfather had the title, as it were. So the social fact that obviously my life has been very influenced by is having a private income, and my private income came from the Chicago real-estate man. 

J - Well it's brought you into contact with influential people. 

N - Yes, sure that's true. When I was a young child my father and mother knew a lot of influential people, both in the arts world and in the politics world. As I got older my father got more out of the establishment world, because when he started his Fascist movement he became not acceptable in the obvious establishment world. But I had my two aunts who had lots of friends in the establishment world, in the aristocratic world of politics and that sort of thing, sure. So I used to come across those people in my early teenage days. How much that's influenced my writing I really don't know. There was a time when people used to make the accusation that my books were about glamorous people, and I used to get cross about that, I'd say, well, what's glamorous about it? I still don't know what to say about that. Certainly I wanted my books to be about interesting people; I wanted my books always to be about people who "had a go," and I was different, always, but this was my instinct, I don't think this was a matter of my social background or anything. I wanted to be different from people who wrote about hopeless drips, whether they were upper-class, middle-class, lower-class. And of course the fashion in novel writing, as I grew older, became more and more to write about people who were failures - I mean. "failure" is such a sort of dismal word - but people who thought life was a pretty hopeless business, a gloomy business. But the reason I didn't want to write those sorts of novels - I wanted to write about people who got on with things, had an interesting life - I don't know whether that was anything to do with my upbringing or not. That's just what I thought was interesting about writing novels.

J - It seems that you didn't like much of what you saw in that social environment. 

N - Sure, when I was young, sixteen or seventeen, when one is apt to be hostile to the older generation, I was extremely hostile. I used to think that what the older generation had done with the world was an absolute mess. This was when the war had started, and I used to think that wars are made by the older generation, and so on. And I had very strong feelings against upper-class charm. This was a bad word when I was young, "charm." My friends and I used to say, all these terrible people going [mimicks] darling this and darling that, how lovely, and we knew it was all absolute nonsense, saying behind their backs, God what an awful person, and so on. And my generation thought we'd never be like that; well, of course, lots of young men think like that, that's ok. But, of course, now I think life's a lot more complicated than that. The wheels of society have to be oiled, or something like this, to a certain extent, but so long as everyone knows what is oil and what isn't oil, it doesn't matter. There's no way you can run a society where, when you're introduced you say, How do you do, you really have got such and awful face! Social life is all a bit of a con; you just have to know what's acceptable and what's not.