The Captive Reader

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh edited by Charlotte Mosley is a doorstopper of a book.  And the five-hundred plus pages (first published in 1996 but since reissued as a Penguin Classic) become even more daunting when you realise they cover less than thirty years of correspondence between the two novelists.  But rarely are any of the pages wasted.  Mitford and Waugh write to entertain one another and, it must be said, show off.  They want to share the best gossip, make the cleverest comment, and score points in the ongoing competition that is their friendship.  The results are fabulous.

Approximately the same age (Waugh was born in 1903, Mitford in 1904), the collection begins during the Second World War.  They had become friends during the 1920s when both were dashing about London as “Bright Young Things” and the friendship had endured.  It flourished though at a distance.  As Charlotte Mosley, the book’s editor (and Mitford’s niece by marriage), states:

Concealing their feelings behind a barrage of banter, they found it easier to conduct a friendship on paper rather than in person.  When they did meet, Evelyn’s bad temper and Nancy’s sharp tongue – qualities which enhance their correspondence – often led to quarrels.

It is easy to imagine.

Waugh is plagued by a hatred for mankind but is generally sort-of kind to Mitford.  There are very few people he admits to loving and even those, like Mitford’s sister Debo, future Duchess of Devonshire, are not immune from his criticisms:

I saw Debo at the ball & took up a great deal of her time.  She was in fine looks but lacking in elegance.  The same dress she wore at her own party last year and all her friends look like recently demobilized G.I.s.  Should not a girl with her beauty, wit and high position make a bit more of herself?  (6 August 1947)

And if he really didn’t like you, watch out.  He bullied Cecil Beaton all through their school days and continued loathing him all his life.  Hamish Hamilton, poor man, was also the target of Waugh’s ire – but for absolutely no reason, as Waugh admits: “Why do I dislike him?  I don’t know him at all & he has done me no injury, but I wish him boiled in oil” (25 May 1950).  Randolph Churchill is continually derided but, to be honest, Randolph always deserves at least a bit of it.  He was quite a mess of a human being.  However, he also provides some excellent comic highlights for Waugh’s wartime letters, when the two men worked closely together:

In the hope of keeping him quiet for a few hours Freddy & I have bet Randolph £20 that he cannot read the whole Bible in a fortnight.  It would have been worth it at the price.  Unhappily it has not had the result we hoped.  He has never read any of it before and is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud ‘I say I bet you didn’t know this came in the Bible “bring down my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave”’ or merely slapping his side & chortling ‘God, isn’t God a shit!’ (12 November 1944)

And, speaking of a book he’d been reading:

The last [book] I had was an attempt to whitewash Bryan Guinness called Belchamber which I enjoyed enormously.  I lent it to Randolph who was so much moved that he said he could never commit adultery again – at any rate not with the same innocent delight. (25 December 1944)

Oh Randolph.

Waugh is also not terribly keen on his children (of which he had six living – a danger of Catholicism) and constantly complained about them in his letters to Mitford.  Mitford, having suffered several miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy that necessitated a hysterectomy, would have loved children of her own but generally cloaked her sadness in her letters to Waugh with blithe dismissals:

Don’t be depressed about your children.  Childhood is a hateful age – no trailing clouds of glory – & children are generally either prigs or gangsters & always dull & generally ugly. (7 January 1946)

The letters cover the most productive years of both authors careers and cover their great successes:  both Brideshead Revisited and The Pursuit of Love were released in 1945.  And it is around this time that they pick very different paths.  Mitford, long estranged from her husband and in love with a French colonel, moves to France and begins to make a delightful life for herself:

I wish you were here.  The food is utterly delicious, all cooked in butter, & such meat that has never seen a Frigidaire, I’d forgotten the taste.  I go for huge walks, see beautiful dream houses to buy & have seldom been more contented.  Only I must write another book, to support life, & can’t think of one.  Trollope’s Autobiography is too much to bear – how could he write all those hours every day?  (21 August 1946)

Waugh, on the other hand, remains in bleak post-war England becoming more and more cantankerous as the years go by:

I’m bored here by lack of company.  If only country neighbours would talk like Jane Austen’s characters about gossip & hobbies.  Instead they all want to know about Molotov & de Gaulle. (16 October 1946)

The geographical separation was probably a very good thing for their relationship.  They are able to gossip continually about mutual friends (especially Diana and Duff Cooper and the extended members of Mitford’s family) and, in Waugh’s case at least, provide critical feedback on the other’s writings.  What they don’t do much of is share their souls or even updates on the meaningful things going on in their own lives.  Mitford keeps her hurt over her French colonel’s disinterest in commitment to herself and Waugh just becomes a misanthrope who wants to complain about everything:

Jolly decent of you to write.  No, I am not at all busy – just senile.  Since we last met (when?) I have become an old man, not diseased but enfeebled.  I read my letters & work at The Times crossword & never set foot out of doors.  I was mildly ill in Menton in February & so spoiled Laura’s hols.  I am making up for it by taking her to Spain in October.  I don’t like the food & can’t speak the lingo & don’t much look forward to it, especially as I must write an article at the end. (6 August 1964)

Yes, he’s a funny misanthrope but such a contrast from Mitford.  She manages to remain optimistic, to find happiness in a new dress she can’t afford or something terribly Parisian she’s just encountered or a ridiculous thing a member of her family has just done (so many to choose from).  She manages to continue living and taking pleasure in that long after Waugh has given up.  It does not come as much of a surprise then when the letters end with his death in 1966, age 62.

This was my first encounter with Waugh and I can’t say it did anything to make me warm to him.  But Mitford, on the other hand, her I love even more than before.  She could write devastatingly cruel things with incredible wit but these letters show what lay on the other side of that: the warmth and optimism that sustained her.

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