Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were possibly the funniest letter writers of their generation, and they kept up a regular correspondence from the time Mitford left England to live in Paris after World War II until Waugh’s death in 1966. I had always wondered why their correspondence had never been published in its entirety, for it would surely have made one of the most amusing collections ever put together.
Now the correspondence has been published at last, superbly edited by Charlotte Mosley. If one reads between the lines of her Introduction, the delay seems to have been due to the fact that a very large proportion of the material was potentially libelous: 80 percent of Mitford’s letters to Waugh, and 40 percent of his to her, were not even included in the writers’ individual collected letters. Now, more than thirty years after the correspondence came to an end, the vast majority of the letter writers’ contemporaries are dead, and publication in full is finally possible.
Waugh wrote of his father that he “had no itch to get to the truth of a story, frankly preferring its most picturesque form.” It was a preference demonstrably inherited by himself, and shared by Nancy Mitford; the two would distort the mildest bit of gossip with wild exaggerations until it metamorphosed into baroque fantasy. “Think of those two skinny creatures [Peter] Quennell & his moll, slapping one another all night as I am told they do,” Waugh wrote to Mitford. “Gruesome.”