VI not V2
Sir: Your Literary Editor may be, as Shakespeare had one of Henry Vs soldiers say of his sovereign before Agincourt, 'but a man, as I am: the violet smells to him as it doth to me'. Yes. But what the typescript of my review of Portrait of a Marriage (Spectator, 22 September), after a short sentence he regrettably chose to remove, emphasising how 'Vita typically and insuf- ferably described as a "dreary slut" the housemaid scrubbing Mrs Keppel's Gros- venor Street doorstep', proceeded clearly to state was, 'She was an odious snob all her life . . .', going on to cite matters concerning her which even Spectator read- ers much younger than Elizabeth Longford or myself must have noticed could refer only to Vita and Harold Nicolson.
Imagine, therefore, my surprise, not to say shock, horror and vexation to see that, in your magazine's columns she had been arbitrarily and nonsensically changed to Violet who, though herself certainly a snobbish mythomaniac fond in certain company of falsely claiming her mother's amant en titre et affiche, King Edward VII, as her father, nevertheless never pretended that her hand in marriage had ever been sought by a Manners or a Lascelles. I realise that the songs Nigel Nicolson's mother taught him must have sounded 'all Greek' to puritan ears in Doughty Street, where the only permissible vice seems to be conspicuous expenditure on greedy guzzling. All the more reason, surely, to beware Homeric nods and to stick to a reviewer's script.
Alastair Forbes
1837 Chateau d'Oex, Switzerland
Previous page
