Nicholas Mosley (1923–2017)

When you fall in love you don't want to get what you want, or how could you be in love with it?

Do we love out of narcissism? Masochism? Do we truly desire the one for whom we claim we would willingly lay down our life, or is there a more selfish motive at work? Why do we continually place ourselves in vulnerable positions, time and time again—and is not loving one of the most vulnerable of all positions?—despite the lacerations, the recollections, and the bodily wounds that would have it show more otherwise?

There are so many myths and stories about love, about desire; from oral histories to legends, from folktales to tragedies, from songs to visual art—love is the most aestheticized topic, and, because of this, is the "impossible object," as Nicholas Mosley phrases it. As a fetishized, internalized, and always externalized force, love is something from which we can never make any concrete sense no matter how hard we try. And yet try and try we do.

Why is there this compulsion, then? And why is another book about love, like Mosley's Impossible Object, a warranted undertaking? As with all questions concerning love, there are no easy answers to these questions, nor are there to many others that arise when thinking about the complex matrices involving love, desire, sex, and both physical and psychological violence.

What is difficult, though, is to speak of love outside the realm of cliché and the many mythopoetic images that come to mind when we talk about love. Mosley is able to invent a language all his own here, one that is truly a feat in that it combines immense technical skill in the art of poetics: relying on repetition, recurring images (the narrator, or one of the narrators, is rather obsessed with Nietzsche's ides of recurrence), and motifs and redolent rhythms that meander out and then return back with such ease into prose that is a gem to the ears if read aloud. There is nothing sentimental about love here whatsoever: this is humanity and all of our stories laid bare, rough as if left exposed on a rock in the heat of an unblinking day with carrion circling overhead as if in some Greek myth.

No review can do this book justice: in fact, this has to be the finest book I've read in years, hands down. I was floored over and over again, and not only do I feel as lacerated as we all do when opening ourselves up to the idea of loving again, after immense loss or pain or anguish, but I also readily look forward with enthusiasm to another encounter with Mosley's work very, very soon. An impeccable, impeccable novel. show less

Just finished [Julian Grenfell] in its Persephone edition: not so much a biography of the World War One ‘poet’ as a long series of personal letters between members of a family who collectively slaughtered thousands of pheasants and wild animals (including tigers and elephants) before themselves walking into the gunfire at Ypres. No spoilers here – Grenfell’s death is listed by date in the title of the book and - unless you are hoping he was kicked to death by a marauding bull show more elephant - logic has to point you to a death in the trenches. Indeed, the author tells us that Julian 'loved war' and even wrote to his doting mother from France... 'Isn't it luck for me to have been born so as to be just the right age and just in the right place?'

The death of a son is a terrible blow for any mother and yet Ettie Grenfell was not ‘any’ mother. Not content with ‘her unrivalled position in the Edwardian worlds of wit and fashion’, she had always insisted on first place in her sons’ affections while, at the same time, indulging in a series of ‘open affinities’ with their male contemporaries, most of whom also died in the war. And yet even after the loss of a second son Ettie refused to succumb to grief. Deciding that ‘life is a series of farewells’, she instead used their deaths ‘to provide the context of her living’ and even to ‘accentuate her brio’.

What brio? I ask myself. For, her sexual availability aside, Ettie Grenfell had nothing to offer the world and, along with Julian Grenfell, no staying power in history. So why an ill-written 400 page biography of such an odious pair? And why, given the fact that I disliked almost everyone in the book, did I slog through it to the bitter end? show less

This is an obsessive short novel that opens with an accident. The narrator, Stephen Jervis - a don at Oxford, has come upon two of his students, Anna and William, who have just crashed their car. The story flashes back to the moment when Anna has just met Stephen, as he has become her Philosophy tutor. As a tutor in Philosophy Stephen seems conflicted. In order to hide from his emotions he focuses on his work. "The consolations of work are that you come from it tired at the end of a long show more day. A robot, with men working inside you. They pull levers; switch. You watch and move. At the end you have something to look forward to. You go home. To rest. The mechanism sleeps. The men open doors, windows. Look out into the air."(p 18)

In the first meeting with Anna he gives her a brief introduction to the nature of philosophy and how much she must learn about it - existence and persons. What makes a person an enduring entity? What is the real substance of existence and what is an "accident." In his discussion with her it comes to the point where "Now we've got a choice. Before it was Just accident."(p 31)
With this introductory moment we have the theme of the novel. There is the real and the accidents of our existence. These will be played out through the lives of Stephen and his wife Rosalind, lives that include infidelity and the games that Stephen plays with the lives of others; both his student Anna and, in London, Francesca. As he thinks about the events leading up to the accident he wonders: "At what point did the course of events go wrong?" He thinks, "An accident is different from reality."(p 61) But what is reality? Is it the truth or an accident? The novel provides questions, not answers.

The culmination of his affairs comes in the relation of various incidents to the accident of the title, one that is on more physical grounds and one where, another one of Stephen's students, a young man he really doesn't like, William, is killed. What role does Stephen play in all of this? Should he feel guilt or is he even guilty? During the course of the book Anna has exercised quite an influence not only on William, but on Stephen and his colleague, Charlie. And at the close of what has been a demonstration and a defense of free will, worrying about the questions of guilt versus responsibility, Stephen (and Charlie) are left to determine their own conduct. Mosley writes in a style that commands attention. It is allusive, controlled, and with ideas that are implicit. For those who love novels of ideas and their relation to human emotions this is a perfect short novel. show less

This is not a book I would normally have acquired were it not for the fact that the author was briefly my father's commanding officer during the war in Italy. So I naturally read it with my antennae out initially wholly for anything which related to my father. (I found nothing.) I also read it with my father's opinion in mind of Mosley's relationship with his father, the British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley. By and large, it confirmed his view, that Nicholas Mosley was embarrassed by his show more father - though in reading the book, I get the impression, possibly wrongly, that this was more for the difficult position that his father's politics put Nicholas Mosley in, rather than any disapproval by him of those politics.

Nicholas Mosley comes over as an uncertain young man, somewhat withdrawn perhaps because of his troubled relationship with his father. He seems to lack confidence in his own abilities, especially when placed in a position of command; but he seems to have muddled through. My father never had anything negative to say about his abilities as a commander, though he possibly wasn't in that position for long enough for any firm impression to have been made.

The book is more forthcoming on how Mosley's war experiences and his reaction to them began to shape his post-war career. show less