Nicholas Mosley, novelist – obituary

Nicholas Mosley, the writer, 7th Baronet and 3rd Lord Ravensdale, who has died aged 93, spent his life coming to terms with the legacies left him by his father, the Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley.

The most striking of these was the variance in their personalities. Nicholas was a stammering liberal intellectual worried by the weakness of his flesh, his father a buccaneering demagogue with an easy conscience. Where his father had the highest of profiles, for 40 years Mosley’s ambitious novels went unrecognised, and when they began to have success this was often overshadowed by interest in his background.

The idea of escape from the trap of one’s own character was central to Mosley’s writing. The book that belatedly brought him public acclaim was Hopeful Monsters, which tells of the love between a German Jew and a British scientist working on the atom bomb. Winner of the Whitbread Prize in 1990, it took its title from a biological term denoting mutations that can prompt change in a species.

It formed part of Mosley’s weighty late series of novels, Catastrophe Practice, and examined the human condition against a vast canvas of much of the history of the 20th century. The critic A N Wilson went so far as to call Hopeful Monsters “the best English novel to have been written since the Second World War”.

Ideas were important to Mosley, particularly the notion of whether one could by effort make good from evil, and whether one could see patterns in the chaos of one’s life. Indeed he resigned as a judge of the Booker Prize in 1990 in protest at what he perceived as the failure to address such issues in the short-listed books favoured by the other judges. His aim as a writer was “to see how life worked”.

Nicholas Mosley was born in London on June 25 1923. His mother Cynthia was a daughter of Lord Curzon, the statesman and Viceroy of India. While pregnant she had been greatly upset by one of her husband’s many infidelities and Nicholas was born a sickly baby. He was left in the care of a doctor who prescribed sherry whey and a wet nurse who kept a crate of gin bottles under her bed.

Growing up in Buckinghamshire, he saw even less than was customary of his parents, both of whom were Labour MPs, and was largely brought up by a family retainer, Nanny Hyslop. Yet he regarded his childhood as unclouded as could be expected when one had a father who enjoyed walking naked in the rose garden and might silence the barking of a family dog by loosing off a shotgun.

By the age of seven, Nicholas had acquired a lifelong stammer that he later believed was a reflex protection against a family capacity for verbal aggression. He was later sent to be treated by Lionel Logue, whose work with George VI was depicted in The King’s Speech, but he had little effect on Mosley’s diction.

Nicholas’s mother died when he was nine, from peritonitis rather than, as was gossiped, because of his father’s unkindness. Cimmie Mosley’s two sisters, Irene Curzon and Baba Metcalfe (wife of “Fruity Metcalfe”, later best man to the Duke of Windsor), acted as surrogate mothers to the Mosley children. Baba (referred to in Chips Channon’s diaries as “Baba Blackshirt”) also acted as surrogate wife to “Tom” Mosley, with whom she had an affair.

Both she and her sister blamed another of Mosley’s mistresses, the former Diana Mitford, for the death of their sister, and tried to keep her away from Mosley. Baba would spend the first half of the summer holidays with him, Diana Guinness (as she was) the second.

Nicholas grew up thinking that such behaviour seemed perfectly normal, and he preserved few memories of his mother. He remembered a little better his father marching at the head of his Blackshirts. Oswald Mosley later married Diana Guinness at the home of Joseph Goebbeis. He kept the marriage secret from his children for two years.

Nicholas went to Eton, which he gratefully remembered as so sophisticated that even when his father was interned in 1940 and locked up in Holloway prison “none of my friends turned a hair”.

On leaving school in 1942 he joined the Rifle Brigade, though his stammer made giving orders an ordeal. He served as a platoon commander in the North Africa and Italian campaigns, accompanied everywhere by a vast trunk of books to read (carried by his soldier servant). Initially he was ambivalent about the war, influenced partly by his father’s belief that it could not profit Britain to become involved.

As a solution to his dilemma, he hoped to be taken prisoner and regarded as the turning point in his life his realisation that, having indeed been captured in a German raid, he ought to try to escape. He was on the point of being killed when his pursuer was shot dead by a counter-attack.

Mosley was subsequently awarded the MC in 1944 for leading the storming of a  heavily fortified farmhouse at Casa Spinello, north of Florence.

After the war he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford, and in 1947 married his first wife, Rosemary Salmond, a painter and daughter of a marshal of the RAF. His maternal great-grandfather was a Chicago property tycoon, Levi Leiter, and cushioned by a sizeable income from a trust Mosley was able to devote himself to writing.

His early novels, such as Spaces of the Dark (1951) and Corruption (1957) were bleak and pessimistic studies of isolated individuals, written in dense, overblown prose that owed a debt to William Faulkner. They did not attract a wide readership.

Mosley was increasingly attracted to Christianity and in 1950 he came under the influence of Father Raymond Raynes, Superior of the Anglican Community of the Resurrection. From 1958 to 1960, Mosley edited a theological magazine, Prism.

His writing came to be characterised by a constant evolution of style that sought appropriate forms to express his intellectual exploration. His later novels therefore abandoned the self-consciously literary for the determinedly experimental.

The narratives became fragmented, told in simple sentences and clipped, almost cinematic dialogue. Indeed the best of these novels of his middle period, Accident (1964), was well filmed by Joseph Losey from Harold Pinter’s screenplay, with Dirk Bogarde as the don who has to make choices about responsibility. At Mosley’s request Pinter wrote in a cameo role for him.

In 1966 Mosley inherited the Ravensdale title (which had been one of Curzon’s) from his aunt Irene. He took his seat as a Liberal and served briefly on the Lords’s Arts Committee before deciding he had little aptitude for politics and obtaining Leave of Absence from the House.

Having written several screenplays, including that for The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), Mosley began to concentrate on biography. He had written that of Father Raynes and followed it in 1976 with that of his wife’s uncle, the soldier poet Julian Grenfell.

This study, an examination – and rejection – of the values and morality of the Edwardian upper class, acted as a prelude to perhaps his best work, two rightly acclaimed volumes about his father, Rules of the Game (1982) and Beyond the Pale (1983).

Mosley had finally broken with his father in 1959 after witnessing a racist rant by him on the hustings in North Kensington. Although his father subsequently cut him out of his will – “You are not my sort of person” –  there was time for reconciliation before his father’s death in 1980. Mosley thereby succeeded to his father’s baronetcy.

A week before his death, Mosley had appointed him his biographer. His subsequent study of his father engendered a public row with his capricious stepmother over the inclusion of love letters between Mosley and his two wives. 

Diana Mosley called him “a second-rate son hating a brilliant father”. Although Mosley admired her devotion to Oswald, the breach between them was never satisfactorily healed thereafter. The book also caused a lengthy rift with his half-brother Max, the Formula 1 supremo.

But Nicholas’s loyally affectionate portrait in Rules of the Game of Oswald Mosley as a perfectly sane father capable of hateful ideas struck most critics as an exercise neither in repudiation nor in rehabilitation, but as an act of scrupulous understanding of the most complex of men. He came to think that his father was a “rhetoric junkie”, rather than interested in power, reflecting that if that was the case he could have become Labour leader just by “staying in the party and telling a few lies”.

As Nicholas Mosley confessed at painful length in his autobiography, Efforts at Truth (1995), he had inherited his father’s own philandering impulses. He led a complicated private life characterised by vacillation rather than by the amorous energy that marked his father’s conquests, though on one occasion in the 1950s the cavorting pair ran into each other (accompanied by other people’s wives) in a night club in London. He spent much of the early 1970s in psychoanalysis.

Speaking of his own infidelities, but with reference to his father, he observed: “Children become aware of family troubles anyway. But they can learn: either these things can become crippling, or not all that important in time, if confronted.”

Mosley’s later books included the novels God’s Hazard (2009), which re-imagined the Almighty as a good rather than stern father, and Metamorphosis (2014), which debated how the human race might evolve. A further memoir, Paradoxes of Peace (2009), examined at length his attempts in his first marriage to reconcile his spiritual and physical desires.

A likeable man, Mosley was tall and distinguished-looking, despite having broken much of one side of his body in a car crash in 1970, an event that forced him to walk with a stick. “It’s very fashionable now to say one has had a terrible life,” he reflected in 2009, “but I’ve had rather a good one.” He reviewed books for The Daily Telegraph.

Nicholas Mosley was twice married. His marriage to Rosemary Salmond was dissolved in 1974 and she died in 1991. He married secondly, in 1974, Verity Bailey. She survives, along with their son and stepson, and two sons and a daughter from the first marriage. 

His eldest son, Shaun, died in 2009, and Shaun’s eldest son Daniel inherits the titles.

Nicholas Mosley, born June 25 1923, died February 28 2017