Washing one's mother's linen

Spectator, The, Oct 28, 2000 by Gilmour, David

It is a pity she is so much more conscientious about clothes and jewellery than she is about geography. Las Palmas, it is now quite well known, is not in Majorca. Simla is as much in the Darjeeling Hills as Dundee is in the Spanish Pyrenees. And the author of a biography of Diana Mosley, completed though awaiting its subject's death before publication, should perhaps know that the Shaven Crown, the inn where Diana lived at the end of the war, is not near Moreton-in-Marsh in Gloucestershire but in Shipton-under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire.

Famous people sometimes try to prevent biographies being written about them, invariably without success; their works and sometimes their papers have already become public property. But unfamous people who lead deliberately private lives should be protected by their families from salivating journalists and their prurient readers. No one can blame the author and the publisher for producing this book, but one is bound to wonder why Curzon's grandchildren helped them to do it.

Nicholas Mosley is a fine novelist and a somewhat tormented confessional writer. I think he was right in his biography to reveal so much about his father's sex life because it helps explain the political failure: one cannot build a career or a political party on a gondola with one's mistress. But I do not see what historical or other purpose is served by releasing his Aunt Irene's pathetic diaries to Ms de Courcy. Still less do I understand why David Metcalfe should wish to destroy the reputation of his mother, who becomes two arch-villainess of a book that includes the more worthy candidates, Wallis Simpson and Diana Mosley.

I knew Baba well at the end of her life when I was writing a biography of her father. She was kind, humorous, intelligent and lovable; despite an age gap of half a century, we were close friends. She told me several times that she hated the idea of anybody writing about her, and she rejected Jock Murray's offer to publish any memoirs she might care to write. I cannot believe Mr Metcalfe was unaware of this or that he did not anticipate the result when he gave Baba's letters and diaries to Anne de Courcy.

It would be interesting to know, therefore, why he wants the world to learn that his mother could be unkind, negligent and many other things, or that (as the author tells us three times) she had inherited her father's `powerful libido'. Perhaps it is a question of revenge, a mutation of the Oedipus complex with the parents reversed. Perhaps he will explain in these pages why I am wrong to feel outraged. Perhaps he will convince us that washing one's mother's linen in public is not a peculiarly grimy form of filial betrayal.

David Gilmour is the author of a life of Lord Curzon.