Nicholas Mosley

Writer

Born: June 25, 1923;

Died: February 28, 2017

NICHOLAS Mosley, who has died aged 93, was a writer whose complex experimental novels received critical acclaim, if not a wide readership; his life was inevitably overshadowed by the notoriety of his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader.

Mosley addressed “Tom” Mosley’s complicated personality and legacy in two fine biographies: Rules of the Game (1982), which dealt with his parents’ relationship, his father’s philandering, and his mother’s early death; and the following year’s Beyond the Pale, which tackled Mosley’s move towards fascism and later status as a political pariah.

His novelist’s instincts were equally unsparing in his autobiography, Efforts at Truth (1994), which dealt with his spiritual and psychological struggles, and the tension between writing and “real life”. He concluded that: “children can survive human monstrosities so long as those that love them do not make out that monstrosities are other than they are: and then how wise children may become! And when this has been passed on, then one can die.”

Mosley’s finest, and most accessible, novel was Hopeful Monsters (1990), which won the Whitbread prize and was described by AN Wilson as “quite simply, the best English novel to have been written since the Second World War”. The best-known, however, was Accident (1964), brilliantly filmed by Jospeh Losey, with a script by Harold Pinter and Dirk Bogarde in the leading role.

Impossible Object (1968), a formally audacious account of a writer in a love triangle that (may have) blurred fantasy and “reality”, was short-listed for the first Booker prize. It too became an interesting film, by John Frankenheimer, with Alan Bates starring, though it is the director’s least well-known picture and hardly got a release at all (repackaged as Story of a Love Story, it sank again).

Mosley had another moment in the spotlight courtesy of the Booker Prize in 1990, when he was one of the judges, and did not care for any of the books selected by his four colleagues. He resigned after none of his selections made the short-list, and publicly bemoaned the lack of ideas in contemporary novels. Mosley’s favoured choice was Allan Massie’s The Sins of the Fathers; the eventual winner was The Famished Road by Ben Okri.

Nicholas Mosley was born on June 25 1923, the second child of Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Bt, and Lady Cynthia (“Cimmie”), daughter of George Curzon, who had stints as Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary, and became the first Marquess Curzon of Kedleston in 1921. Though this title (and the earldom) became extinct on his death, his eldest daughter Irene inherited the barony of Ravensdale; on her death in 1966, Nicholas inherited that title, though he seldom used it.

“Almost immediately I became very ill,” he noted of his early years, though his parents were not around to see this, since they were in the habit of spending August in Venice. The remedy prescribed was sherry; his nanny reassured his mother in a letter that “he has had nearly a whole bottle this week, little tippler. He loves it.” His godparents included Nancy Astor, Violet Bonham Carter and Prince George, Duke of Kent.

Nicholas grew up at first in Smith Square, near Parliament. His father, who had begun his political career as a Tory MP aged 22, defected to become first a Liberal, then an Independent, then a member of the Independent Labour Party. After he won Smethwick as the Labour candidate in 1926 (campaigning in a Rolls-Royce against a Tory who was a coal miner), the family moved to Denham in Buckinghamshire.

In 1929, Cimmie was herself elected as Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent and, when her husband formed the New Party in 1931, joined him (though both lost their seats in that year’s General Election). Cimmie Mosley was not keen on her husband’s drift towards fascism but, in the event, died of peritonitis in 1933 before he was fully committed to the cause. Nicholas was nine.

He was educated at Eton, where he was friendly with Humphrey Lyttleton (who entrusted him with his jazz 78s when he went off to war). He learned of his father’s second marriage to Diana Guinness (née Mitford), at Joseph Goebbels’ house, only after reading about it in the newspaper.

Nicholas Mosley, though he disapproved of his father’s politics, had some sympathy for his attempts to keep Britain out of a war with Germany. But after his father and step-mother’s imprisonment in 1940, he signed up to the Rifle Brigade, seeing action as a captain in Africa and then Italy between 1942 and 1945, and winning the Military Cross for an assault on a farmhouse during which he was briefly captured before shooting his way out.

He had a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read philosophy and met the 18-year-old Rosemary Salmond; he dropped out of university after a year and married her in 1947. They spent an extended honeymoon in the West Indies, where Mosley wrote his first novel, Spaces of the Dark, published in 1951.

They then settled in north Wales, where Mosley bought a farm for £5,000 with an inheritance, though they kept a flat in Chelsea. In London, he drank in the French pub and the Colony Room and conducted a series of affairs.

But he also became involved with the Community of the Resurrection, an Anglo-Catholic movement led by Fr Raymond Raynes, whose biography he wrote in 1961, and was, for two years, editor of Prism, a “holy magazine”. He then visited Africa, partying with King Freddie of Buganda (a pal from the Colony Room) and writing it up as African Switchback (1958).

Other novels included Assassins (1966) and Natalie Natalia (1971), but his proposed five-volume sequence on, inter alia, science and evolution, which began with Catastrophe Practice (1979) and ended with Hopeful Monsters proved too experimental for most publishers. At last Secker & Warburg agreed to take it, if he would also produce a biography of his father.

After years of estrangement, they met shortly before Oswald Mosley’s death, when he agreed to give over his papers and authorize the book. Though both volumes met with praise from critics, they were badly received by Diana Mosley and her son (Nicholas’s half-brother) Max. Nicholas inherited his father’s baronetcy in 1980.

Mosley also produced a biography of the poet Julian Grenfell, a relative of his first wife’s (1976), and an account of Trotsky’s assassination (1972). He and Rosemary, who had three sons and a daughter, were divorced in 1974; she died in 1991. He married secondly, in 1974, Verity Bailey, with whom he had a son. His eldest son, Shaun, died in 2009; his other children and second wife survive him. Shaun’s son Daniel succeeds as Lord Ravensdale and as the 8th baronet.

ANDREW MCKIE