Books in Brief: The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, edited by Charlotte Mosely (Houghton Mifflin, 527 pp., $40)

THE correspondence between Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh was conducted with one paramount aim: to amuse. They wrote as actors mount the stage: however low their personal fortunes might fall, the show goes on. In this self-conscious way, their friendship flourished at a distance; in person it was another matter. She was a cosmopolitan aristocrat with pronounced socialist sympathies. Waugh, playing reactionary to her fashionable worldliness, enjoyed calling her a Communist and threatened to unleash Sen. McCarthy on her. True, their epistolary performances often make it difficult to draw the line between theatrics and reality, but that’s more than half the fun. Just as interesting are the letters in which the mask slips. When Miss Mitford chides Mr. Waugh for sucking up to the papist aristocracy in Brideshead Revisited, he bluntly lets her have it: “We are all very lower class to God and our cleverness and secondhand scholarship bore him hideously.” Amen.

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The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, edited by Charlotte Mosely (Houghton Mifflin, 527 pp., $40)

THE correspondence between Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh was conducted with one paramount aim: to amuse. They wrote as actors mount the stage: however low their personal fortunes might fall, the show goes on. In this self-conscious way, their friendship flourished at a distance; in person it was another matter. She was a cosmopolitan aristocrat with pronounced socialist sympathies. Waugh, playing reactionary to her fashionable worldliness, enjoyed calling her a Communist and threatened to unleash Sen. McCarthy on her. True, their epistolary performances often make it difficult to draw the line between theatrics and reality, but that’s more than half the fun. Just as interesting are the letters in which the mask slips. When Miss Mitford chides Mr. Waugh for sucking up to the papist aristocracy in Brideshead Revisited, he bluntly lets her have it: “We are all very lower class to God and our cleverness and secondhand scholarship bore him hideously.” Amen.