I didn’t think I was interested in Barbara Cartland, but it turns out I am. This new biography by Matthew Sweet, by turns revelatory, hilarious, gripping, astonishing and moving, kept me engrossed from first to last, and persuaded me that someone I had always dismissed as a kitsch figure of fun actually had the most extraordinary life. The Great Dictator – a pun on Cartland’s writing method that also contains a revealing truth about her tyrannical personality – is my book of the year so far by a mile.
Cartland, who died in 2000 at the age of 98, became a pantomime character in her later years, her eyes famously described by Clive James as looking like “the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff”. She was mocked (posthumously) by Little Britain as Dame Sally Markham, desperately padding out her novels to get them up to minimum length. But the former description does not credit Cartland with enough self-awareness – her look was distinctive, crafted and memorable – and Little Britain undersold her Stakhanovite work ethic. Cartland’s book tally ended at 723 and her sales are surpassed (according to Sweet) only by Agatha Christie and Shakespeare. She cranked out at least 6,000 words a day – a novel a fortnight, and 23 in 1976 alone – for decades. But although her work is commonly dismissed as trash, Sweet has an unironic devotion, and acknowledges the “women on Valium because they’re having such a rotten time in real life” for whom Cartland’s novels were “their escape”.
Sweet is far from uncritical, but he is fundamentally sympathetic to Cartland, and shows how the many hand grenades fate threw at her shaped the woman she became. This starts with the suicide of her grandfather when she was a toddler, an event that at a stroke changed her life from one of affluence and comfort to a kind of poverty-with-pretensions: the suicide “was the engine of Barbara’s life.” Later on there are other family tragedies and regrettable decisions aplenty, in which the two World Wars play a significant role, and Barbara is several times down to her last few pounds. The answer to setbacks is always work, whether as a gossip-columnist, charity pageant impresario, agony aunt, local counsellor or, of course, romantic novelist.
But what none of this really capture is quite how entertaining this book is. Tragedy is not the motif, quite the opposite. The Great Dictator is strewn with extraordinary characters, captured in deft pen-portraits, tangential but part of the delicious texture of the book. I have never highlighted so many passages in a book, and this review could easily have been three times as long, to squeeze in all the best quotations. I will instead just offer this one exemplary paragraph:
“Pingo [Langrishe, who Barbara nearly married in 1920] found a wife five years later – Joan Grigg, nineteen-year-old daughter of Major ‘Batty’ Grigg, Rolls Royce salesman of Park Lane. [When war] broke out again in 1939 he lied about his age and went back into uniform. His granddaughter… remembers his as a dry old man who travelled with Angostura bitters for his 11.30am pink gin, and ruined her bathtimes by telling her that girls who didn’t eat their kidneys would fall down the plughole. When his marriage soured, Joan declined to divorce him and lose the title Lady Langrishe. Pingo lived in a Suffolk farmhouse with his mistress, Betty Capil, a demonstrative, turban-wearing woman whose chain smoking sometimes led to house fires.”
There is much more where that came from, with other walk-ons including “Lord de Clifforde, road safety campaigner and ardent British Fascist” and “Comyns Beaumont – a singular man who thought that volcanoes and typhoons were caused by comets and… that the Crucifixion took place just outside Edinburgh”.
Unlike Cartland perhaps, Sweet is a subtle writer. The sections where he researches in Barbara’s home, untouched since her death, are beautifully handled, with a detective novel quality in his opening drawers and cupboards to discover hordes of letters and diaries. He captures how the 1920s – Cartland’s heyday and the most riveting chapters – were characterised by a kind of mass psychosis, in those who had emerged damaged from the war, and those who were too young to fight and made reckless by a determination to prove themselves in other ways. Countless people in the book are killed in cars or planes, and several men who immediately threaten (and sometimes commit) suicide when their marriage proposals are rejected. It’s obvious the obsessive seeking out of danger represented a generational madness: it’s Vile Bodies, but real life, and Barbara sits in the middle of the chaos, writing away.
Cartland has had three previous biographers, all during her lifetime, and Sweet sets out how in each case Barbara “seduced or nobbled” them. He revels in the freedom of his subject being dead, the gift of unfettered access to family documents, and narrates with a radio-presenter’s eye for striking visual imagery and a novelist’s sense of pacing and the shock-reveal. Sweet is a fan – I don’t suppose he’s read all the books, but has clearly read a good number – but is clear-eyed in assessing, for example, how Cartland was largely to blame for the difficult relationship with her daughter Raine (later to be Princess Diana’s evil stepmother), how her blatant plagiarism of Georgette Heyer nearly derailed her career, or how Cartland’s desire to portray herself positively in media coverage led to obfuscation and straightforward untruths.
I heartily recommend this book. I can’t remember the last biography I enjoyed as much, or one which so totally transformed my prior impression of the subject. You too may think you are not interested in Barbara Cartland’s life but trust me, you are.
- The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99)
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