Of Autumn, Diana Mosley's Orgasms, and Eleanor Roosevelt's Scullery Girlhood

This fall has been unbelievably gorgeous. Perfused in a hard bright light, like living in a Gerard Manley Hopkins-inspired snowglobe or something –

Margaret, are you grieving
Over golden grove unleaving?

I spent the weekend in somewhat more of a solitary confinement than I might have wished. L and C were off at a funeral in New Jersey, and I’ve written before about my curious habit of loading up every other week with social engagements so that I spend two weeks every month more-or-less alone.

The corpse was a childhood friend of L’s, and I like L and could well imagine my own state of mind had I kept in touch with any of my childhood friends and one of them had croaked, so when L got back, I made myself available for debriefing.

Too much information.

“She was incontinent for three years!” L babbled. “She hated doctors, would never go to one. So poor Helmut” – the childhood friend’s husband – "struggled to take care of her, and she was just a mess. Finally, she developed this cellulitis, and Helmut had to take her in. And the doctors discovered she was riddled with cancer. And ten days later, she died.”

“Very sad,” I said. “I suppose that’s the advantage of having children – someone to do reality testing with the spouse who presumably, after 40 years of marriage, is living in a kind of folie a deux –“

“I keep wondering: If they’d found the cancer earlier, could they have done something about it?”

“How old was Arlene?” I asked.

“Eighty-three,” said L.

Of course, it’s a bit odd to be having conversations about 83-year-old people and not automatically consign them to the status of “walking corpses.” But L is 75. And I’m 62. An 83-year-old is more-or-less my demographic cohort.

“Chemotherapy is brutal,” I said. “There are quality of life issues to be considered. And, of course, it depends upon the type of cancer and its staging. Statistically, it’s not all that successful –“

“But I’d want it,” L said. “Wouldn’t you?”

Probably not.

Although since I’m a suspicious person, having typed those words, I must now run shrieking to the New Age store where they sell sage and purification candles, you know, because now I’ve created a hole in the probability continuum, which means a week from now I’ll be diagnosed with end stage lung cancer. Or something.

Maybe that’s why autumn seems so hard and bright and beautiful to me this year? Because I’m in a phase of my life when I can’t help but resonate with endings?

###

I did a lot of basic scut work over the weekend, raising the level of the revenue reservoirs. Ran Jan Dalley’s biography of Diana Mosley, the least sympatique of the Mitford sisters. Diana apparently is the original of Nina in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Although Brideshead Revisited is one of my favorite novels, I don’t like anything else that Waugh has written, and I loathed Vile Bodies when I read it a billion years ago or so.

The biography confirmed my impression that Mosely’s hold over Diana was sexual.

Despite their heated conversations about sex in the Hon Cabinet, one can hardly imagine any of the Mitford sisters masturbating, and of course, the boys they came in contact with wouldn’t have known anything about pleasing a woman sexually. Bryan Guinness, Diana’s first husband, wanted nothing so much as a large, happy family administered according to the Anna Karenina principle: Diana spent half of her brief marriage to him pregnant. The other males floating around her purview were hardly candidates for a physical affair. Although Evelyn Waugh was madly in love with her for a year or so, he was obviously a deeply closeted homosexual.

I do think there are many more of us around who respond sexually to partners of both genders than today’s pop culture and militant LGBT credos would have you believe, but Waugh was not one of us. He was totally gay. Yeah, yeah, he eventually remarried after She-Evelyn ditched him and had his own Tolstoyvian big family, but one senses strongly that his heart wasn’t in it, and that his fascination with Catholicism was much like Tom Cruise or John Travolta’s fascination with Scientology: The precepts were in place to keep him from relapsing into the Big Bad.

And yeah, I know the LGBT “movement” is for bisexuals too! But I don’t define myself as a bisexual. In fact, I don’t define myself sexually at all. I’m drawn to people, I crush on people. If I don’t crush on someone then I don’t want to be physical with him/her. It's that simple. I suspect that’s why Internet dating has never really worked out for me – In order to crush, you need a specific context and that context has to include physical impressions like the way someone smells…

I suspect Diana had the first orgasms of her life with Mosley, and after that – imprinted duckling! – she would follow him anywhere.

The book’s other interesting factoid is that Diana was on the outer periphery of the Bloomsbury set and became close friends with Carrington. That was a really unlikely friendship.

###



Also watched several episodes of Ken Burns’ Roosevelt saga. Teddy Roosevelt was mad as a hatter! Definitely, the most interesting POTUS ever to occupy the White House. Reminded me so much of my first husband, Max’s father, Bill! In fact, even looked like Bill in the photos taken when he was young.

Teddy really was the original libertarian. He had no interest in the redistribution of wealth, but he wanted one-percenters to play by the same set of rules imposed upon the ninety-nine percenters, which is more-or-less my own basic political stance.

FDR comes across as a far more Machiavellian figure, schooled in concealment from an early age from having to hide his inner self from an overbearing mother. (I may wander over to St. James Episcopal Church today to piss on Sara Delano’s grave – it’s only a mile or so from where I live.) Also he had no physical charisma whatsoever, even before his polio.

The real heroine of the FDR story is Eleanor, of course.

I don’t understand why Eleanor was always considered to be so plain. As a young woman, I think she was quite fetching. She was incredibly intelligent, and had the misfortune to be raised in her own version of the House of the Usher. The daughter of Teddy’s dipsomaniac brother Elliott, she was raised by her horrifying maternal grandmother – a Livingston descendent – in a town called Tivoli about 30 miles north from here. I should take advantage of this splendid weather and drive up there this week to see if any remnants of her girlhood still linger. It bemuses me to imagine that from her lonely bedroom window in that dreary, dilapidated mansion by the river, Eleanor saw the same trees catch on autumn fire that I am seeing now.