'The human craving to believe in something is pathetic, when not tragic; and always, at the same time, comic.' The life of Sir Oswald Mosley was pathetic, tragic and comic, and his son's humane deliberated biography is itself a notable contribution to 'The Literature of Fascism' which T.S. Eliot was judging with that sentence in 1928. In 1928 Oswald Mosley was still an up-and-coming Labour MP. It was the year after Eliot had made manifest that the something which satisfied his own craving to believe was Christianity. Mosley as Fascist soon came to crave this craving in others; he could always tap it, but he could never satisfy it for long, since the drugging or hypnoidal power would necessarily wear off and then the faithfully addicted would need a new fix of their idées fixes. What Mosley gives (to apply Eliot's fearful evocation of history, in the immediate aftermath of the great mowing-down in 1914-1918) he gives with such supple confusions that the giving famishes the craving. To famish a craving is to incite a cycle of short-lived satisfaction and life-long insatiability.

LRB 1 December 1983 | PDF Download