BOOKS

Laughter in the same room

Philip Hensher

THE LETIERS OF NANCY MITFORD AND EVELYN WAUGH edited by Charlotte Mosley Hodder & Stoughton, £25, pp. 531 Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford were superlatively skilled novelists, but what they both possessed to a very high degree was an altogether rarer quality. They had an extraordinary gift for intimacy. To any- one who knew them this might seem a sur- prising assertion; this collection of letters between the two of them is full of tales of strangers rebuffed, of the impertinent assumption of friendship by people imme- diately cast into the outer darkness. I do not suppose the intimate side of Mitford was glimpsed by Lady Meyer, who committed the sin of asking 'Is that Nancy Mitford?' on the telephone; Lord Noel- Buxton and Nancy Spain, turning up at Piers Court, had to endure not only being shown the door by Waugh, but being pilloried for months in the press.

But these intrusions are, in many ways, quite understandable, given the particular quality with which Waugh and Mitford both imbued their writing. Few writers have ever been so successful at pitching their ground entirely on the private joke, or in sharing that joke with the reader without compromising either the hilarity or the inti- macy of the laughter. Mitford's childhood was, famously, spent in an atmosphere of elaborate 'teases', nicknames and bizarre practical jokes, many of which persisted into adult life; a lady of blameless character and respectability, for instance, might find herself constantly referred to as `Debo's wife' — oh, it's too complicated to go into. It was a characteristic shared by all Mit- ford's family — is it too much to hope that some enterprising radio producer might persuade the Duchess of Devonshire to record her 'imitation of the Newbury Mummers' referred to by Nancy in 1949? What is unusual in 'Mitford is that she has the gift of transforming a private joke between sisters into a joke shared between writer and reader. She's been a constantly underrated novelist, but at her best, in Love in a Cold Climate, she strikes a note of informality and closeness entirely origi- nal, inimitable and irresistible.

Waugh didn't have that background of family joking, but what he had in abun- dance was a taste for the elaborate and recondite practical joke. Nancy reports a story of her friend the old Comtesse Costa de Beauregard, who, at the end of her life, only had one thing to confess, daily, to her priest, Tai ete odieuse avec les invites.' Waugh, too, was vile to guests, though, in his case, I would guess it was Nancy he used as confessor. There are dozens of tales of his orchestrated humiliations: what they all have in common is a sense that here is a joke of such eccentricity that other people — most people — won't understand it at all. The audience for the jokes in both Waugh's life and in his books greatly relished being admitted to a private world of absurd fantasy, from which most people were excluded by their philistinism or dim-wittedness. This is not altogether an illusion. Susan Mary Patten reports a visit she made to Waugh immediately after going to the Coronation. At dinner, where only the family were present, Laura Waugh wore a ball-gown and Evelyn white tie and decorations; the children were starched within an inch of their lives. After dinner, Mrs Patten was called upon to make a speech describing the ceremony. 'I shall never know,' a baffled Mrs Patten reported years later, 'what the point of all this was.' She didn't get the joke; alas, as in many cases, we readers, we intimates of Waugh, most emphatically do.

It isn't easy to excuse the many intru- sions on their privacy Waugh and Mitford both endured from their readers, though not everyone so persecuted would have gone as far as Waugh and had a card print- 'Commuting on the M 25's changed you, Happy.' ed which simply read, `Mr Evelyn Waugh greatly regrets that he cannot do what you so kindly suggest.' But it's important to recognise that one of the reasons that they were both so persecuted is that their writ- ing constantly beguiles and flirts with the reader, admitting him to a private world of secret jokes and amusements to such an extent that he is convinced that he actually knows the author. It's hard to think of any other writers it is so difficult to know how to refer to: 'Evelyn' and 'Nancy' seem absurdly impertinent; 'Waugh' and 'Mit- ford', on the other hand, seem utterly false to the intimate experience of reading them, the sense of being let in on a joke which other people (Americans, Angry Young Men, Picasso) aren't going to understand.

Their correspondence is splendidly full of these private jokes, which Charlotte Mosley has done an excellent job in explaining, I never knew before, for instance, what the 'some nice Woodley' who is constantly being recommended in Nancy's novels referred to. The best jokes, though, don't need much elucidation Waugh reporting having lent Belchamber

to Randolph [Churchil], who was so much moved that he said he could never commit adultery again — at any rate not with the same innocent delight.

Or the old Marquis who asked Mitford

did I know Emily Bronte, because he had so enjoyed her book on the vie de château in England?

And many of their idle targets are still very much with us, and will wince; how cruel and unfair to refer to poor Princess Margaret as 'the Royal pigmy'. The heart- lessness of the jokes sometimes raises an eyebrow, even when one sees that the heartlessness is the point:

Did you know Pat Russell? She has written complaining that in Austria she was raped by a Cossack and got syphilis This is hard cheese as she is a Liz [lesbian]. I wrote and told her about Dora Morris and the Ameri- can major to cheer her up. Allies are like that.

The word 'complaining', I must say, is terri- bly funny, but here it is rather difficult to share in the joke.

All in all, one is inclined to agree with the reported exchange between Cyril Con- nolly and Jane Watson, the wife of the director of the Wallace Collection: She said, 'But Nancy is so kind underneath,' and S[martyboots] replied, 'But so unkind on top' and that Baroness Budberg who was there said 'and she only likes well dressed people'.

Mitford and Waugh were clearly desper- ately fond of each other, but their intimacy resided largely in this trading of unkind- nesses, the sharing of gossip and jokes. In many ways, they kept each other at a dis- tance; it is somehow telling that there is no photograph of them together. Mitford was someone who found love so difficult that one suspects she preferred it that way; all through her life she fell in love with men she knew she could not have. Even Gaston Palewski, so touted in these letters as the great love of her life, was profoundly unattainable, and there, largely, to be talked up in her books; I wonder if she looms as large in his biography as he in hers. As for Waugh, his emotional life was, and remains, an almost complete mystery. In these richly engaging letters, we see, perhaps, the most they wanted to be capa- ble of.

They've been very well edited by Char- lotte Mosley, and make a handsome vol- ume. Some of them have already appeared in the volumes of Waugh's and Mitford's collected letters, but a surprising number — four fifths of Mitford's, nearly half of Waugh's — haven't been published before. There are a fair number of gaps in the correspondence, and it wouldn't be surpris- ing to see more letters surfacing over the years. Many people, I know, can't stick the Mitford-Waugh-Brideshead generation industry, and when it comes to the U and non-U controversy about the correctness or not of saying 'mirror' and looking-glass' and so on, which took the nation by storm in 1956, I must admit to sharing the general sense of tedium. Waugh, however, had the last word: '0 the horrors of U. In this morning's Times the entire Burmese cabi- net have adopted this damnable prefix.' As Nancy was fond of cajoling, Do admit.

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