Anthony Powell has a visitor

As longtime readers (or Twitter friends) will know, I turn frequently to Anthony Powell's A Writer's Notebook. Who could resist, when opening it to a random page yields such pleasures as--well, let's try it:

A man who looked as if he had been pressed for a long time between the pages of a book.

And once more for luck: this one was clearly banked by Powell as a possible future line of dialogue:

"Visiting her was like calling on Penelope when the suitors were about the house."

In contrast, Powell's journals are a disappointment. Oh, they're definitely books that the serious Powell fan should own and consult--and, thank Heinemann!, they do have indexes--but their very nature as the journals of an older man more or less retired in the country means we get far too much about wines vintages and chicken curries, and also a bit of the aging Tory grumpiness that the generosity of the novels almost entirely obscures.

That said, they're far from wholly unrewarding to the late evening, heading-for-bed browser. Here, for example, is a bit I just turned up on Evelyn Waugh, a writer and contemporary who can't help but serve, for readers as well as, one assumes, to some extent for Powell himself, as a dark shadow of Powell himself, more successful yet far less satisfied. On March 10, 1991, Powell writes about rereading a volume of Waugh's letters:

Interesting how little people know themselves. Evelyn, speaking of Swift (whom he had been reading about), says he has a sense of possessing much in common with Swift, but without Swift's "bossiness," something that did not trouble him at all. The best letters from the point of view of being amusing are those to Nancy Mitford, who, in general feebly deferential, had moments of rebellion. In point of fact Evelyn got more from Nancy about upper-class life than he would probably have cared to admit.

Three sentences, three solid observations about literary figures we care about.

The passage that's amused me most tonight, however, comes from June 10, 1992:

The baroque French clock in the library stopped; the grandfather has not struck for several years, so in a reckless moment I wrote to Mr Jackman (who presented me with the clock he made himself some years ago) to ask if he knew anyone who could mend these. Before he replied the clock in the library recovered. By that time it was too late to stop Mr Jackman. He is seventy, extremely tall, with a fairly large neatly cut grey beard, and a great talker, a characteristic to which he himself referred. He possesses thirty-five clocks, but has a friend (who mends clocks professionally) who has thirty-seven in his sitting room alone. I explained the situation. Mr Jackman examined the grandfather, said that if I wanted he would take the essential part to his friend, but he himself advised leaving it as it was, unless I thought the strike very important. I agreed, gave Mr Jackman a paperback set of Dance. He left the house, rather like a brief violent visit from the God of Clocks.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

One of the essential qualities of Nick Jenkins's narration in Dance--and, for that matter, of the conversation of the friends he's closest to--is the way that his mind ranges so easily from the quotidian to the symbolic or mythological: scenes present themselves to him and call up echoes of literature or mythology, or, as in the opening paragraph of the whole sequence, images of

the ancient world. . . . A fabulous past, infinitely removed, from life; and yet bringing with them memories of things real and imagined.

Such associations almost always feel natural, and they invest the ordinary with a light, pleasant drama and potency that, in its more staid, even fussy way, nonetheless somehow calls to mind the headlong rush of love-blind eros depicted by Iris Murdoch. Life is the dull daily detail, after all, yet the numinous somehow also exists; those places where it peeks through, or where, in thinking of a goofy handyman neighbor as the God of Clocks, we deliberately, if jokingly, invite it in, are moments we remember.

Improperly packed postcards

In Nancy Mitford's delightfully lightweight wartime espionage novel Pigeon Pie (1940), at one point her heroine writes to her paramour about their mutual friend Olga, who has in recent months taken on a deliberate air of mystery, built around artlessly dropped hints about her secret war work for "my Chief" as B.F.S., or Beautiful Female Spy:

I'm afraid I was rather rude to her but really I'm getting tired of Olga in the role of beautiful female spy--it's becoming a bore. I've just sent her a telegram saying "Proceed John o' Groats and away further instructions. F.69." Hope she proceeds, that's all.

When I read that passage today, I laughed, but it also made me remember to do something I'd forgotten: my mysterious Texan correspondent.

Longterm readers may remember earlier appearances of my correspondent: over the past couple of years, he (or she!) has sent anonymous postcards with memorable quotes from A Dance to the Music of Time (This one, dealing with the unforgettable Mopsy Pontner, is the best of the batch) or, another time, some interesting context for one of Mark Twain's autobiographical anecdotes. The correspondence has always been the best sort of surprise: irregular, varied, and utterly enjoyable.

What Mitford's spy nonsense reminded me of is that I am two postcards behind! Back in the late spring, I received a pair. One, if I recall correctly, featured a quote from Proust; the other--perhaps?--a quote from Maupassant. They arrived as we were in the midst of packing and dealing with all the stress and frustrations of moving and buying property, and they were an extremely welcome distraction.

But oh, packing. Packing a stuffed-full condo after fourteen years. Ninety boxes of books alone. The postcards . . . are somewhere. And until Mitford reminded me, I had forgotten that I had failed even to acknowledge receipt. So please, mysterious Texan correspondent, accept my apology and gratitude--and, if my delinquency hasn't soured you on this project, click through to the Annex for my new address. To quote Mitford, I hope he/she proceeds, that's all.

The early Nancy Mitford

What better way to emerge from the ghosts and gloom of October--and distract oneself through the drizzle and sleezing rain of the opening of November--than to dive into the frothy nonsense that is an early Nancy Mitford novel? While I've long been a fan of Mitford's best-known, most-respected novels, Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, until this week the only one of her early books I'd read was Wigs on the Green. It's funny, if slight, but it didn't lead me to her others--I suspect because Mitford herself was so dismissive of them, at least in her letters to Evelyn Waugh. In a letter of November 5, 1951, Mitford told Waugh that Hamish Hamilton had just come over to convince her to let him reprint Wigs and Christmas Pudding, and "I gave way, though I know unwisely." Three days later, she was on the topic again:

I'm in a great state about my early books. I think I told you Jamie came over specially to ask me for them to be reprinted, which softened me. Then I read them. Well Wigs on the G. which isn't too bad, I find, is a total impossibility. Too much has happened for jokes about the Nazis to be regarded as funny or as anything but the worst of taste. After all, it was written in 1934. I really couldn't quite have foreseen all that came after. So that is out. Xmas Pudding is pathetic, badly written, facetious & awful. I can't conceive why he wants it & the fact that he does has shaken my faith in his judgement.

Mitford's embarrassment likely contains at least an element of performance: throughout the correspondence with Waugh, you get the sense that she views herself as a distinctly inferior talent, which results in wide-ranging, mostly comic self-deprecation. But given that her only real complaint about Wigs is its inappropriateness, and that later in the month she calls Pigeon Pie, her fourth novel, "better than the others," I'm willing to take her assessment  of Christmas Pudding mostly at face value.

Waugh's response is entertaining:

You could write a most amusing & interesting and popular work in this way: Describe yourself in 1951 taking up Wigs on the Green and rereading it for the first time since its publication. Print 2/3 or half of the original text with constant interruptions from your 1951 self asking: "Why did I say that?" or saying "This still seems funny, why?" So in the easiest & most informal way possible you could write your reminiscences & the history of the deteriorating world and the improving authoress.

Don't you wish she'd run with that idea?

With more distance, both in person and in time, Christmas Pudding looks much, much better than Mitford would have you believe. It's arch and artificial and light, but it also has the pleasantly anarchic heedlessness of '30s English comic novels, the sense that the old things of the world have lost their attraction and the new ones are mostly meant to throw around and smash up. What in Waugh is sour and in Anthony Powell is a bit confused in Mitford is a source of simple entertainment: having no responsibilities and no reason to prefer one action over another, the Bright Young Things simply do--they party and propose and pilfer and play, and Mitford show us how silly they are as they do it all. Eighty years later, for a few hours at a time, it can be wonderfully entertaining.

Much of the fun comes in simple descriptions of characters, and their limitations. Take this discussion of an eligible bachelor who proposes to a couple of different women in the course of the novel:

"I gather that Michael made a mess of everything as usual. He had only to go about it with a little ordinary sense and she'd have been crazy about him by now. Really that young man, I've no patience at all with him; he behaves like a very unconvincing character in a book, not like a human being at all."

"Yes, doesn't he. The sort of book of which the reviewers would say, 'the characterization is weak; the central figure, Lord Lewes, never really coming to life at all; but there are some fine descriptive passages of Berkshire scenery.'"

Or this riff on Lady Bobbin's confused love of Merrie England:

Lady Bobbin was always most particular that the feast of Christmas should be kept by herself, her family and dependents at Compton Bobbin in what she was pleased to call "good old-fashioned style." In her mind, always rather a muddled organ, this entailed a fusion of the Christmas customs brought to his adopted country by late Prince COnsort with those which have been invented by the modern Roman Catholic school of Sussex Humorists in a desperate attempt to revive what they suppose to have been the merrieness of England as it was before she came to be ruled by sour Protestants. And this was odd, because Germans and Roman Catholics were ordinarily regarded by Lady Bobbin with wild abhorrence. Nothing, however, could deter her from being an ardent and convinced Merrie Englander. The maypole on the village green, or more usually, on account of pouring rain, in the village hall; nocturnal expeditions to the local Druid stones to see the sun rise over the Alter Stone, a feat which it was seldom obliging enough to perform; masques in the summer, madrigals in the winter and Morris dances all the year round were organized and led by Lady Bobbin with an energy which might well have been devoted to some better cause. This can be accounted for by the fact of her having a sort of idea that in Merrie England there had been much hunting, no motor cars and that her bugbear, socialism, was as yet unknown. All of which lent that imginary period every attribute, in her eyes, of perfection.

You can imagine Jim Dixon drinking straight from the bottle about ten words into that description. Later, we get a bit more detail on Lady Bobbin's holiday spirit:

Christmas Day itself was organized by Lady Bobbin with the thoroughness and attention to detail of a general leading his army into battle. Not one moment of its enjoyment was left to chance or to the ingenuity of her guests; these received on Christmas Eve their marching orders, orders which must be obeyed to the letter on pain of death. Even Lady Bobbin, however, superwoman though she might be, could not prevent the day from being marked by a good deal of crossness, much over-eating, and a series of startling incidents.

The battle opened, as it were, with the Christmas stockings. These, in thickest worsted, bought specially for the occasion, were handed to the guests just before bedtime on Christmas Eve, with instructions that they were to be hung up on their bedposts by means of huge safety pins, which were also distributed. Lady Bobbin and her confederate, Lord Leamington Spa, then allowed a certain time to elapse until, judging that Morpheus would have descended upon the household, they sallied forth together (he arrayed in a white wig, beard and eyebrows and red dressing-gown, she clasping a large basket full of suitable presents) upon a stealthy noctambulation, during the course of which every stocking was neatly filed.

As you might imagine, their prowling is not particularly welcome:

Forewarned though they were, the shadowy and terrifying appearance of Lord Leamington Spa fumbling about the foot of their beds in the light of a flickering candle gave most of them such a fearful start that all thoughts of sleep were banished for many hours to come.

Mitford also offers more than a few barbed aphorisms, most centered on marriage (a state she'd yet to experience at twenty-eight, when she wrote the novel, but which would, in her case, bear out her skepticism). There's the acid of

Oh, I don't expect to be her first husband, naturally.

And

The fact of being in love with somebody is a very good reason for not marrying them.

Then there's the question of money:

"If I had a girl I should say to her, 'Marry for love if you can, it won't last, but it is a very interesting experience and makes for a good beginning in life. Later on, when you marry for money, for heaven's sake let it be big money. There are no other reasons for marrying at all.'"

Mitford's best, most piercing line comes in the center of this reflection:

"Oh, dear," said Paul gloomily, "it really is rather disillusioning. When one's friends marry for money they are wretched, when they marry for love it is worse. What is the proper thing to marry for, I should like to know?"

To which his friend Amabelle replies,

The trouble is . . . that people seem to expect happiness in life. I can't imagine why, but they do.

I started this post with Mitford's epistolary friendship with Evelyn Waugh, and that exchange leads me back to them. In April of 1952 Waugh wrote to Nancy,

Just had a letter from a group of American school girls asking me the Secret of Happiness. Me. I wrote back sharply that they were not meant to be happy but if they thought they were, you were the one to consult.

Indeed. It doesn't get more perfect Evelyn, more perfect Nancy.

Simon Raven

A friend asked in an e-mail earlier this week whether I had read Simon Raven. The name was familiar, and I knew he was an English novelist, but that was about as far as I could get. But when my friend pointed out that there are those who plump for Raven over Anthony Powell--who say that Raven's roman-fleuve, Alms for Oblivion, is better than Powell's . . . well, I had to go check this out for myself.

I've grabbed the first novel in the sequence, The Rich Pay Late (1964), from the library, and it'll go to the top of my post–George R. R. Martin stack. Before that, however, I thought I'd take a quick trawl through the home shelves to figure out where I'd encountered Raven. I started with Powell's diaries and memoirs, but his only appearance there is as one of many who congratulated Powell on being named a Companion of Honor in the early days of 1988.

Raven does, however, turn up in Michael Barber's biography of Powell. Barber is describing the pervasively present absence of Nick Jenkins, Powell's narrator in A Dance to the Music of Time, and he brings in a "pungent" description by Raven of Jenkins's tone:

It's the tone of a gentleman's club, really, with a slight breath--not exactly of the slums creeping in--but a breath of corruption. It's a bit like sitting in, say, White's or Brooks's, and every now and then somebody opens the window and a rather nasty smell--not exactly of shit--well, yes, of shit, but also of corpses--comes into the room. And somebody makes a polite observation as to the nature, respectively, of shit and corpses and closes the window for the time being. That's how it strikes me.

Despite the tone of disapproval, Barber says that Raven admired Powell's novels--though from that account it's hard to escape the conclusion that he didn't get them. His example isn't wholly inaccurate, but it leaves out the breadth of Powell's range of subject and interest: the oddities that are simply oddities, not signs of corruption; the things done for love (often self-love) rather than power or status; the comedy of expressed individuality. Raven makes it sound like Powell seeks credit for exposing hypocrisy, while leaving the genteel world essentially intact. Far from it--rather, Powell is interested in making us see the complexity and strangeness that underlie even worlds (and people) we think we know well.

Barber goes on to draw what seems a useful distinction:

Raven is explicit. Powell is implicit. In Raven's fiction the source of the nasty smell--a steaming turd, a festering cadaver or whatever--is there on the carpet for all to see. In Powell's fiction we never really establish what it is or where it comes from, only that it stinks. Raven's characters simply ring for a servant to clear up the mess, following which they settle back in their armchairs as before. He is, for all his lurid effects, a cosy writer. Powell, most emphatically, is not. His characters will probably have to live with that smell whether the window is open or not because it may, after all, be the drains (but try telling that to the club secretary). "The world is never a very nice place," he said more than once. "Tony's far more melancholy and serious than I am," was Raven's comment.

Raven also turns up elsewhere in Barber's bio, and while neither of these instances is useful for comparison's sake, they're too irresistible to pass up. Of Violet Powell's ability to demolish the character of an absent person in conversation, Raven said, "Chop, chop, chop--until there was nothing left but a bit of gristle." And then Barber offers Raven's recollection of an excuse that Violet once told him Cyril Connolly had given for not being able to write: "He told her he couldn't write for a month after he'd come."

The Guardian's obituary for Raven was also written by Barber, and it's a joy, opening brilliantly:

The death of Simon Raven, at the age of 73 after suffering a stroke, is proof that the devil looks after his own. He ought, by rights, to have died of shame at 30, or of drink at 50.

Barber also described him as combining "elements of Flashman, Waugh's Captain Grimes and the Earl of Rochester."

The reference to Waugh made me think that even though they're of different generations surely Nancy Mitford would have encountered such a creature, or at least enjoyed gossiping about him. Initially I struck out in her letters, too, until I turned to the slim volume of her correspondence with bookseller Heywood Hill. Raven turns up there in a letter from Nancy of January 15, 1971. Having been asked by her neighbor, Mme. Suchard, to recommend some "light English books" for her nephew and godson of seventeen, "a lazy boy who is learning English," she had ordered some Penguins from the bookshop, which, on arrival, she dispatched to her neighbor.

The next day she loomed, saying, "These books--you know we are not very go-ahead in my family--could you very kindly see if they are really suitable for a young boy?" Well, two of them had disgusting naked women on the cover. I got away with them (as they were called things like Rose of Tibet) by saying the women were goddesses. The third had a picture of a boy dressed for cricket fondling a naked lady (my dear, lucky it was a lady, in view of the contents) & written on the cover "A novel of strange vices" which of course even Mme Suchard could translate. I simply grovelled--said I couldn't believe it of MY MOTHER's old bookshop, one of the most respectable in London.

And then there's the punchline:

Well, I couldn't be bothered to send back strange vices & I read it--too brilliant, screamingly funny & disgusting beyond belief. It's called Fielding Gray by S Raven--I do recommend it.

And that is why I knew and remembered Raven's name!

More to come on this front later, I expect.

Nicknames

Now that all the ghosts have packed up their coffins and departed for scarier climes until next October, n we can get back to the usual business of this blog--which, I have to admit, all too often means highlighting fairly trivial aspects of the literary culture of England.

Thus today's post, which comes out of Alathea Hayter's A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846 (1965). The book is exactly what the title promises: a day-by-day account, built from diaries and memoirs and letters and such, of what the lights of literary London were doing over the course of one month in the summer of 1846. It's full of names you know--the Carlyles, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (not yet) Browning, Wordsworth, Dickens--and the pleasures of dailiness, of discovering just how much a dedicated researcher can piece together about the occurrences, most of no consequence, of a few relatively ordinary days in the distant past.

I suspect this is a book about which there will be little waffling: either you find the above description enticing, and you have already gone to the Book Depository to order your copy, or you can't believe anyone would waste their time with such banality when there are good novels still unread. Longtime readers won't be surprised to learn that I'm in the former camp; this is one of those wonderfully rare books that feels like it was written just for me. I'm mere pages into it thus far, but Hayter has already charmed me utterly by the details she picks out of her detective work.

What I'll share today is a silly, funny bit about the prevalence of nicknames in the literary set in this time. Nicknames seem always to have been more prevalent in England than in the States, and Hayter explains that the 1840s were a high point:

The use of abbreviations for Christian names was common at all levels, up to the highest; the Empress Frederick's letters are sprinkled with the ludicrously familiar nicknames--Mossy and Fishy, Missy and Tutsiman--of her royal relations all over Europe. Everybody had nicknames. Forster was "Fuz" or "The Hippopotamus" or "The Beadle of the Universe"; Cruikshank was "Genial George"; Dickens was "The Inimitable" and his children had innumerable and ever-changing nicknames such as "Chickenstalker" or "Plornishmaroontigonter"; Mrs Procter was "Our Lady of Bitterness"; Macready was "Mac" or "The Eminent Tragedian" to his friends, "Sergeant Macready" or "The Bashaw" to his enemies. The use of nicknames for a socially successful figure like Richard Monckton Milnes was almost a status symbol; you might give yourself away by not recognizing him under references to "The Cool of the Evening" or "London Assurance" or "The Bird of Paradox"--or equally by continuing to use those particular nicknames when they had got too widespread and had begun to bore their originators.

"Our Lady of Bitterness" trips quite nicely off the tongue, but I think my favorite on that list has to be "The Cool of the Evening"--oh, the changes I would have to make to my public personality in order to be able to pull that one off!

I don't encounter a lot of nicknames in my daily life, but when I was working in bookstores, we had nicknames for many customers, my favorite being "Darkness at Noon," assigned to a particularly stormy-faced regular. And an old friend has a wonderful family history of nicknames: his mother and her siblings all have nicknames--only, while everyone knows everyone else's nickname, no one knows his or her own nickname, which seems like quite a feat.

All of which brings to mind the family that might be the world's champion nicknamers, the Mitfords. In addition to having a shared family language, the six Mitford sisters positively overflowed with nicknames: Deborah was "Debo," Diana was "Honks" or "Honkers," Jessica was "Decca," and on and on. And ending this post with the sisters seems appropriate, as Mitford fans have plenty to celebrate this fall: in addition to the new editions of Nancy's novels that Vintage has recently published, Deborah Mitford is about to publish a memoir and, even more exciting, has just released a volume of her letters with travel writer and raconteur Patrick Leigh Fermor. As Nancy would say, it's positively blissipots.

Delighting in the young Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford’s novels seem to have been designed specifically for a lovely summer night; they’re back-steps, cocktail-in-hand, end-of-work-week novels, light as air and wonderfully fun. I was pleased to learn recently that Vintage has returned a batch of them to print, to join The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, which they’ve long had available. The two Love novels are unquestionably better books: their voice is more distinct and individual, and both their comedy and their gentle satire feel more organic and natural than in the other books, which betray the distinct influences of the other comic writers of the period, in particular Wodehouse and Mitford’s good friend Evelyn Waugh. But to be reminiscent of those two is no sin, and fans of either would likely enjoy Mitford’s work.

Last night’s reading was Wigs on the Green (1935), Mitford’s third novel, and the only one never reprinted in her lifetime. It was left to languish for the sake of Mitford’s relationship with her sisters: its portrait of nascent British fascists struck a bit too close to home for Diana, soon to become Mrs. Oswald Mosley, and Unity, who would fall under Hitler’s spell and eventually attempt suicide rather than face the thought of war between England and Germany.

This many years later, the gentleness with which Mitford portrays the fascists takes a bit of getting used to: much like Wodehouse’s Roderick Spode, they are regarded as merely another offshoot of basic English eccentricity, very strange but without any hint of danger. Nancy herself, in a letter to Evelyn Waugh in 1951, wrote,

Too much has happened for jokes about Nazis to be regarded as funny or as anything but the worst of taste. After all, it waswritten in 1934, I really couldn’t quite have foreseen all that came after.

Fascists aside, however, the novel does offer plenty of charms.

It is built around a visit by a pair of very Wodehousian bachelors to a small village, in search of heiresses to woo--which offers much room for witty, drily 1930s dialogue about men and women, love and marriage, and fidelity (or its lack). My favorite exchange is this one, which finds one of those bachelors trying to talk Poppy, a woman he has fallen for, into leaving her husband for him:

”You can’t keep me,” said Poppy,” in the comfort to which I have been accustomed.”

“Same to you, my angel.”

“I dare say, but wives aren’t expected to keep their husbands.”

“I never could see why not. It seems so unfair.”

“Not at all. The least the chaps can do is provide for us financially when you consider that we women have all the trouble of pregnancy and so on.”

“Well, us boys have hang overs don’t we? Comes to the same thing in the end.”

That same bachelor, revealing even more clearly his feckless amorality, elsewhere offers his fellow fortune hunter this unforgettable piece of advice:

”There are times, my dear old boy, when love has got to take its proper place as an unethical and anti-social emotion.”

A line that could have come straight out of Waugh, no?

With that, I'll leave you to your weekend. May you spend it reading an author as delightful as Nancy Mitford.

"Those rather hit-or-miss days," or, Wodehouse in spats and letters

In Wednesday's post about the P. G. Wodehouse interview that's included in the newest volume of The Paris Review Interviews I mentioned in passing Wodehouse's expression of dismay at the disappearance of spats, but his whole disquisition on the topic is so good that it seems a shame not to share it, for it gives a great flavor of the light, yet thoughtful tone Wodehouse maintains throughout.

The exchange begins with a lament from Wodehouse about the changing times:

WODEHOUSE

. . . I suppose a typical member of the Drones Club now is someone with a job and very earnest about it. Those rather hit-or-miss days have passed away. . . .

INTERVIEWER

I suppose that world has gone the way of spats. You were very fond of spats, weren't you? Tell me a little about them.

WODEHOUSE

I don't know why spats went out! The actual name was spatter-dashers, and you fastened them over your ankles, you see, to prevent the spatter from dashing you. They certainly lent tone to your appearance, and they were awfully comfortable, especially when you wore them in cold weather. I've written articles, which were rather funny, about how I used to go about London. I would borrow my brother's frock coat and my uncle's hat, but my spats were always new and impeccable. The butler would open the door and take in my old topcoat and hat and sniff as if to say, Hardly the sort of thing we are accustomed to. And then he would look down at the spats and everything would be all right. It's a shame when things like spats go out.

In fact, as Orwell (among others) has pointed out, Bertie Wooster was out of date almost the instant he first appeared; in his sympathetic 1945 essay defending Wodehouse against the charge of treason for the German radio broadcasts he made from Berlin during the war, Orwell notes,

Conceived in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie really belongs to an epoch earlier than that. He is the "knut" of the pre-1914 period, celebrated in such songs as "Gilbert the Filbert" or "Reckless Reggie of the Regent's Palace". The kind of life that Wodehouse writes about by preference, the life of the "clubman" or "man about town", the elegant young man who lounges all the morning in Piccadilly with a cane under his arm and a carnation in his buttonhole, barely survived into the nineteen-twenties. . . . It is significant that Wodehouse could publish in 1936 a book entitled Young Men in Spats. For who was wearing spats at that date? They had gone out of fashion quite ten years earlier.

Reading Orwell's essay again made me wonder what Wodehouse himself thought of it, whether his appreciation for the support would be diminished by the fact that Orwell's defense consisted largely of establishing that Wodehouse was so ignorant of reality as to be essentially blameless when it unexpectedly intruded. Robert McCrum, in his biography of Wodehouse, reports the essay was actually in part the result of a correspondence the two men struck up following a group lunch in Paris*, and that at the time the essay was published, Wodehouse was grateful, writing to Orwell,

I don't think I have ever read a better bit of criticism. You were absolutely right in everything you said about my work. It was uncanny.

A bit more digging, however, led me to the P. G. Wodehouse Books site, which quotes from a letter Wodehouse sent around the same time to his friend Bill Townend, wherein he complains about Orwell's mention of Wodehouse's line from the radio talks about how German officers near his house were always "dropping in for a bath or a party":

From Orwell's article, you would think I had invited the blighters to come and scour their damned bodies in my bathroom. What actually happened was that at the end of the second week of occupation, the house next door became full of German Labour Corps workers and they seemed to have got me muddled up with Tennyson's Sir Walter Vivian. The gentleman who "all of a summer's day gave his broad lawns until the set of sun to the people." I suppose to a man fond of German Labour Corps workers, and liking to hear them singing in the bath, the conditions would have been ideal, but they didn't suit me. I chafed, and a fat lot of good chafing did me. They came again next day and brought their friends.

Even the staunchest Wodehouse apologist is unlikely to have much sympathy for his account of the suffering brought on by the horrors of German singing, considering what others went through; at the same time, the letter itself sounds so Wodehousian--so unexpectedly close in tone to some of his characters--that it's hard not to be in some degree charmed nonetheless.

One last note before I leave Wodehouse behind for a while. That passage led me to wonder whether his letters might be worth reading--whether they were, as for so many writers, a place for rehearsing what would later turn up in his fiction. Well, if Nancy Mitford is to be trusted--and on the subject of comedy, I think she surely is--the answer is no: she closed a letter to Evelyn Waugh** in 1953 with this postscript about Wodehouse's just-published Performing Flea: A Self-Portrait in Letters:

Have you read the P G Wodehouse letters? He never seems to stay in one place more than a week. Not a joke in the whole lot -- as far as I've read.

Anyone out there read them and disagree strongly enough to make a case for my giving them a try?

Five postscripts

This is the point where, back in an earlier century, I would have turned the letter on its side and begun writing across what was already there. Fortunately for your sanity, technology has saved you from having to read the enormity that would be the result of such a technique employed in my hideous handwriting.

1 In writing about So I Have Thought of You, the new collection of Penelope Fitzgerald's letters, I can't believe that I forgot to mention why a good portion of the letters from the first half or so of her life are missing: they were in her houseboat, Grace, when it sank in the Thames. Fans of her Booker Prize-winning Offshore (1979), a novel about an eccentric community of houseboat owners struggling to survive on the muddy banks of the Thames, may not be surprised--at least until they learn that this was the second time Grace sank. Once, for most of us, would have been enough.

2 Maud Newton and I corresponded off and on over several weeks recently about the possible fate of Iris Murdoch's letters, with me worrying that Murdoch's innate secretiveness surely meant that she was a burner of letters. But it took Jenny Davidson to suggest that the answer might be on my bookshelves: demonstrating yet again that she's a scholar while I'm just a dilettante, she pointed out that Peter Conradi, in his Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001), probably at least mentions whether he had recourse to her letters. The resulting list tidbits about the topic, which I fired off in an e-mail to Jenny and Maud, is now part of a post at Maud's site. Short answer: there was probably some serious burning.

3 To close my post Wednesday about Sybille Bedford' s A Legacy, I drew on some praise for the book that Nancy Mitford included in a letter to Evelyn Waugh. Waugh, on the other hand, though he "read it straight through with intense pleasure," disagrees with me about its second half being the richer portion:

For the first half--up to the marriage of Jules & Melanie--I was in full agreement '"one of the best novels I ever read" as you say. After that I found a slight falling off, as though the writer had suddenly taken a stiff dose of Henry James, particularly in the long talks between Sarah & Caroline. Also I think it was clumsy to have any of the narrative in the first person. The daughter relates things she cannot possibly ever have known as though she were an eye witness. But these are small blemishes. What a brilliant plot!

Later in the letter, he, ponders, tongue in cheek, on the identity of the book's author:

I wondered for a time who this brilliant "Mrs Bedford" could be. A cosmopolitan military man, plainly, with knowledge of parliamentary government, and popular journalism, a dislike for Prussians, a liking for Jews, a belief that everyone speaks French in the home . . .

4 In her introduction to the 1999 Counterpoint edition of A Legacy, Bedford notes that the book was less than a success on publication, though Waugh gave it a strong review in the Spectator. "Such reception as it had was mostly bewildered or hostile or both." Even her publisher was less than fully committed to the book, though for extra-literary reasons:

George Weidenfeld was in the midst of troubles of his own--wives and Cyril Connolly--he gave me lunch at the Ritz on a bad day for him and was openly sad.

From Jeremy Lewis's Cyril Connolly: A Life (1997) we learn that this was the period when Weidenfeld, his marriage having collapsed, was busy diving into an affair with Connolly's wife, Barbara Skelton.

It began, Skelton claims, when Connolly himself told her that, as he had fallen for Lucien Freud's wife, Caroline Blackwood (who wanted nothing to do with him), he wouldn't mind her finding "a rival attraction of her own . . . provided he was a gentleman." It didn't take long: accidentally brushing hands at the theatre, Weidenfeld and Skelton "were suddenly aware of an intense and mutual physical attraction"; things proceeded apace, with childishness, misbehavior, and hideous scenes on all sides. Evelyn Waugh, rarely inclined to be generous about another's troubles, complained that

Connolly's cuckolding is a great bore. I dined with him and he went on and on.

Connolly's mother, on the other hand, was more vitriolically understanding, opening her argument with the unintentionally ridiculous line,

I think it is the last straw that it should it be your publisher. . . . I think a lioness would have repaid you more [than Barbara has]--animals have not spite and deliberate cruelty. . . . [P]ut her out of your mind and leave her to her present keeper.

Divorce ensued, followed by a quick marriage between Skelton and Weidenfeld that the bridegroom described as "a dismal affair, more like a wake than a wedding." The marriage itself was as brief and unpleasant as the affair had been long and passionate:

Life as a publisher's wife proved entirely uncongenial to Barbara. She claimed that she hated being woken every morning to the rustle of newspapers, was bored by Wiedenfeld's business talk and tireless ambition, and refused to play the part of the compliant, charming publishing hostess, despite his begging her to "Gush! Gush! You must be more gushing!"

It's not hard to see why Anthony Powell fixed on Skelton as the model for Pamela Widmerpool, isn't it? Skelton wrote two volumes of memoir, which I'm beginning to think I need to read.

5 This final item doesn't quite qualify as a true postscript, as I haven't really written about Cyril Connolly in recent weeks, but as he's a topic that's perpetually bubbling under the surface in these parts, you can consider it a postscript to I've Been Reading Lately in general. From his journal for 1931, a few lines for a city summer:

London now completely summer. Trees, tawdriness spreading west from Tottenham Court Road, evening pavements crowded with aimless sex. V. Woolf asked Elizabeth what unnatural vice was--"I mean what do they do?"

And that's all for tonight, for I find myself once again, as Connolly jotted down elsewhere in his journal, "Proust-ridden." The Prisoner calls.

Sybille Bedford's A Legacy

Sybille Bedford's A Legacy (1956) tells the story of three German families in the years leading up to World War I: two neighboring landed families from the Catholic South and a Jewish manufacturing family from Berlin. Narrated by a woman whose mother was the product of one of the marriages that over the years intertwined the families, the book relates their very different ways of being in--and, despite their wealth and connections, largely being at the mercy of--the rapidly changing Germany of the turn of the twentieth century. Bedford describes one of the Catholic families, the Feldens, thus:

[T]hey were neither backwoodsmen nor courtiers, but country gentlemen of cultured, if not general, interests. They drank hock and claret, but they also drank and knew how to make their own wine. They dabbled in the natural sciences; they enjoyed and contributed to those branches of the arts that increase the amenities of linving--domestic archietecture, instrument-making, horticulture. They were bored by the abstract, bored by letters, and their acceptance of thought was confined to acceptance of thought about things. They liked new theories of acoustics, but turned from ones of government with suspicion and distaste. They played music like craftsmen, and made objects like artists.

The Feldens are lovably eccentric: for example, one of the sons, Julius, keeps chimpanzees that he treats like people. The family leads a charmingly bucolic countryside life that would seem farfetched if it didn't jibe so well with what Patrick Leigh Fermor discovered on his mid-1930s trek through that area. But that life of near-Edenic plenty and ease has done little to fit them--Julius in particular--for life elsewhere, where one must find new activities and occupations, and when love draws Julius to Berlin, he is unmoored and to some extent never quite recovers.

The other southern family, the Bernins, is more politically active, its members staffing government departments and holding cabinet positions, while the Berlin family, the Merzes, is almost entirely contained within its large townhouse, which is stuffed with spinster aunts and ungrateful uncles and autocratic grandparents. The events of the outside world reach them in confused fashion; then that blurry information is endlessly talked round and suspected to the point of negation. This scene, where the patriarch, some cousins, assorted other family members, and the butler discuss the extravagant gambling debts run up by the eldest son, Eduard, shows the mix of obliviousness, confusion, and petty cruelty that reigns in the house; it also serves well to demonstrate Bedford's light touch with comic dialogue:

"Whist, I suppose."

"Not whist, papa."

"Well, some fool game. Good money out of the window. Daresay it's in the family. Look at your uncle Emil. Wake up, Emil!" His brother-in-law, who was fifteen years younger and neither deaf nor napping, looked up. "Edu's lost more at the tables than you ever had a chance to spit at."

"Poor Sarah," said Emil, who was a nice man.

"Sarah is a rich woman," said Cousin Markwald, who was neither.

"Well, she forked it out. How much did you say it was?" said Grandpapa who knew, but wished to hear again.

Friedrich named a figure.

"Round," said Grandpapa.

"Has poor Edu been losing again?" said Grandmama. "He's always such bad luck. I'm sure they swindle him."

"Him," said Cousin Markwald.

"The results do not point to that conclusion, sir."

"Well, yes, mama, I think the money-lenders take him in. It's hardly conceivable otherwise; no-one could stake so much in cold blood."

"I never heard of anyone staking in cold blood," said Emil.

"Money-lenders?" said Grandmama. "What would the poor boy want to borrow money for?"

"Has my son been to the money-lenders?" said the old gentleman, really stung. "I'm going to cut him off. Who does the fool think he is, a Goy?"

"Everybody goes to them nowadays, papa," said Friedrich.

"It does sound degenerate of us," said Emil.

Bedford makes that sort of comedy seem effortless. She's just as skilled at showing how the refusal of each of these families to engage fully with reality and its problems not only dooms them to loss and decline but also, when ramified through a whole society, ultimately aids the rise of the Nazi horror.

But the novel really comes to life when Bedford begins to focus more clearly on Sarah, Eduard's long-suffering wife. Early on, when Sarah--who, unlike her in-laws, always lives in the world as it is, rather than as she'd have it be--is beginning to come to terms with the fact that she's married a wastrel, Bedford offers this capsule description:

She was a woman who had to know herself just in all her dealings. She liked few people, had never loved and liked at the same time for long; she could not afford not to like herself. Dignity and consience were her shell and her recourse. She had presence, she was instructed, she judged, she was too tall; men treaterd her as she appeared to them, and never, once, had she been spoken to in the way Julius spoke to Tzara, his chimpanzee. Nor was there anyone from whom this could have been entirely acceptable: she sought rectititude, success, character; looks, wit and mind, and had never found them united in one person. Without looks she could not be moved, looks and a civilized facade; mind she was long resigned tofinding only among those of her acquaintance who were slovenly and self-interested, or slovenly and indifferent; and at that period of her life she was quite alone.

Sarah's natural toughness, her cold facade, are drawn so convincingly, made so familiar and comprehensible--and, importantly, sympathetic--that when we learn, in a passage I quoted from yesterday, that she has fallen in what Bedford describes as "late love," the very revelation is moving. When we find (and here those of you who might be thinking of reading A Legacy should probably stop reading; the scenes on which I'm basing the rest of this post are best encountered in context), perhaps not unexpectedly, that the object of her love is fickle and flighty and probably unworthy, we ache for her--yet at the same time, Bedford draws that love so well that we understand.

The object of Sarah's love is revealed to us at a dinner party. She turns out to be a married woman named Caroline, who arrives decidedly late, spraying apologies to the assembled:

"How can you ever forgive me? That endless Brahms--you know the way that never stops. And then of course no cabs, there's a blizzard--"

She whirls through the party, "hugging silence, sometimes bubbling to the surface in a splash of talk," at one point managing an amusing exchange with Sarah's brother-in-law and friend Julius:

"Dinner parties," Julius told her, "so unnecesary. Large ones. So many people eating together. The after-dinner faces--it is so unbecoming to the women."

"How like Lord Byron."

"The poet?" said Julius with the recklessness of someone trying a very long shot.

She smiled at him, all on the surface now. "Lord Byron, the poet."

But later, when the crowd has thinned, Sarah corners her:

"My dear."

"And I wanted to say, I don't see how you can forgive me for tonight. It was unpardonable. But you know--"

"My dear--it was not Brahms this afternoon, it was Schumann. I know: because I was there."

"No? What a lark." She smiled at Sarah with her eyes. "Darling, then you're able to say that you saw me."

"Please, please my dear, be careful. Oh I beg you."

"I might. A little. To please you--to throw something to the gods."

"And were you supposed to have changed into this dress in the cab?"

Her look turned inward again as if to meet a memory.

"Should you even talk so much about going alone in cabs?"

"Not alone."

"I am frightened."

"I am happy." The face became drawn; then her eyes met Sarah's fully, she very lightly touched her hand with her hand. "Sarah--I am so happy. The world--"

"It does not make you invisible. Nor invulnerable."

"But it does," said Caroline, "it does, it does."

My god, that recklessness, that life, that glow--can't you see it? Haven't we all fallen for it at some point, despite knowing better? I get chills every time I read that scene, and what follows in the remaining 150+ pages, as relationships, marriages, families come and go, is worthy of that shiver.

A Legacy is a brilliant book; I'm with Nancy Mitford, who wrote to Evelyn Waugh that it "all seemed perfect to me."

"I'm jolly near being mad," or, Letters Week, Part III!

Continuing with Letters Week here at I've Been Reading Lately, today we turn to two of my favorite writers of chatty, catty, caustic letters: Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. I've drawn many a time before from the collection of their letters that Nancy's niece Charlotte Mosley edited back in 1996, but it's a nearly inexhaustible volume--fans of either writer should unquestionably have this book at hand.

No real organization or plan today: just a grab-bag of good stuff, gleanings from my most recent perusal of the correspondence.

First, an exchange that, while being a bit too minor to qualify for my Consigned to the Flames series, at least reminds us of the difficulties confronting those who undertake the relatively thankless task of editing literary letters. We begin with a request in a letter from Evelyn to Nancy, dated September 29, 1952

I believe you keep my letters. A month or so ago I wrote a nasty one about Clarissa [Churchill]. Will you be very kind & burn it?

Nancy, looking ahead, speaks for us all in her response the next day:

What a very rum request. I specially treasure your nasty letters, posterity will love them so.

But as a writer of the occasional scathing letter herself, she understands, and instantly gives in, continuing with, "However just as you say."

Next, a lament from Nancy that will be familiar to all the writers out there, opening a letter of November 25, 1951:

I've been struggling with my article all the afternoon--must relax (Oh I loathe work--do you think I'm rich enough now to stop?)

It seems right to move from that into a chiding from Evelyn, dated March 31st of that year, to a casual complaint from Nancy about having to revise the manuscript of her novel The Blessing:

Now none of this. No complaints about headaches. Revision is just as important as any other part of writing and must be done con amore.

But as anyone who has read any of Waugh's travel writing knows, Waugh is no stranger to the form of the complaint--the more specifically and absurdly articulated the better. In a letter sent from La Baule, France, on August 18, 1949, he begins by reclaiming a word, "ineffable," that is all too often left to chillmasters like M. R. James, and he only gets better from there:

I am in a town of ineffable horror. You might have warned me. There i a strip of sand, a row of hotels and sand-dunes & pines at the back. This is the worst of the many hotels. I came here with my boy Auberon in an aeroplane on Monday to join your great new friend Pamela. I came to the hotel and was told she was too ill to see me & that there was no room for me in the hotel. I assumed adultery but investigations there seem to prove that there was no politician or journalist concealed in her room. The rooms are too small for one. Mine has a "bathroom"--a sandy trough behind a curtain, a broken bidet & no lulu which is all one really needs. The public lulus are balkan.

I love the way the very English second-person "one" in that next-to-last sentence half-dodges the real problem: that the rooms are too small for him.

Evelyn seems to have particularly enjoyed appraising and diagnosing Nancy's emotional state from afar, a practice of which she was apparently surprisingly tolerant. In this letter of January 27, 1952, for example, he succinctly (and amusingly) links her to her sister Deborah, known in the family as Honks:

I have long recognized your euphoria as a pathological condition as morbid as Honks's melancholy. You each choose minor exterior conditions to explain yours states--oddly enough the same one--France.

Perhaps what made Evelyn's appraisals--and even occasional lectures--tolerable was that he was also willing to turn a relatively exacting eye on himself on occasion, as in this letter of December 5, 1949, in which you can still, sixty years later, feel the throb of his hangover:

I have been an invalid for a week recuperating from a brief visit to London. I get so painfully drunk whenever I go there. (Champagne, the shortest road out of Welfaria) and nowadays it is not a matter of a headache and an aspirin but of complete collapse, with some clear indications of incipient lunacy. I think I am jolly near being mad & need very careful treatment if I am to survive another decade without the strait straight? jacket.

While we're on the subject of melancholy, here's Nancy with an only half-joking lament from September 21, 1949--which also takes care of today's obligatory Cyril Connolly reference:

I am appalled to find that in this week's Horizon there is not one single article I can understand. It's not a question of "I don't quite see what you're getting at" I simply do not understand it, it's like a foreign language. (Except for one fragment which is too sad to read--yes & why is everything always sad fragments now? You might say of modern books sadly fragmented instead of well documented.) What does it mean--ought I to commit suicide? I don't dare ask Cyril he is so touchy & he might think I imply a reproach.

Finally, I'll close with a straight-up joke. Evelyn had written to Nancy an aside about an old woman who refused to use the WC--West City--postal code because of the unpleasant associations of those initials. On November 23, 1955, Nancy with the verve of the true comedian, fired back a response--and a one-up:

Even Winston always puts in the Spencer to avoid W. C. I always think it's rather common of him--his American blood no doubt. But even I wouldn't care for the initials of an old neighbour of ours V. D.

Well played, Nancy, well played.

A Connolly Coda

{Cyril Connolly, photographed by Janet Stone, from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery}

I thought I was done with Cyril Connolly for a while, but I couldn't very well not share this anecdote from a letter that Nancy Mitford sent Evelyn Waugh on April 13, 1946:

Dined at the Embassy on Thurs: Stephen Spender -- I suppose you hate him. He told me an awfully funny story about when Cyril was living with Jean and Diana Witherby & caught them both out having affairs with other people & said to Steve, almost in tears, "It is hard, here have I been absolutely faithful to 2 women for a year, they've both been unfaithful to me."

What Mitford politely doesn't point out is that it would have been an even more impressive story had the two ladies been stepping out on Cyril with each other.

Just in case the addition of that betrayal to the rest of Connolly's history of dismal relationships makes you start to feel too sorry for him, it's worth noting Mitford's reaction years later when Connolly's second wife leaves him:

Poor widowed Smartyboots -- rather sad, isn't it, when he so loves to be the one that chucks.

Mitford's opinion, assuming it is well-founded, does rather deflate Connolly's hysterical rant in The Unquiet Grave about the primal joy women take in discarding their men. As so often in life, and especially in marriages to which one is not a party, the situation is more complicated than it might at first seem--which is, after all, one of the lessons novels are always trying to teach us.

"No doubt Cyril was an exceptionally lazy man."

The headline is from a review Anthony Powell wrote of Cyril Connolly's posthumously published journals, seemingly a good opening to an odds-and-end post to close Cyril Connolly week. Powell opens his review by writing,

On one thing everyone was agreed--schoolmasters and dons, patrons and fellow competitors, friends and enemies--Cyril Connolly was not in the least like anyone else.

George Orwell, meanwhile, in a review of The Unquiet Grave that focuses on the author's struggle between sympathy for socialism and a fear that it would render obsolete his own position and the individual artistic achievements he so prizes, claims one can draw a portrait of the author from simply reading the book:

"Palinurus" is the easily penetrable pseudonym of a well-known literary critic, but even without knowing his identity one could infer that the writer of this book is about 40, is inclined to stoutness, has lived much in Continental Europe, and has never done any real work.

Even the prospect of Connolly working was enough to trouble Evelyn Waugh, at least jokingly; in a letter to Nancy Mitford on April 8, 1951, he wrote of Connolly (whose Mitford-assigned nickname was Boots):

Boots said: "I am going to become a waiter at a fashionable restaurant so as to humiliate & reproach my friends for their ingratitude." He saw a worried look, I suppose on my face & said: "Ah, I see now I have touched even your cold heart." So I said: "Well no Cyril it isn't quite that. I was thinking of your fingernails in the soup."

Perhaps his fingernails were the source of the problem in a terrible lunch he once suffered through with Edith Wharton. Unlikely, I know, but as Powell points out, the bald notation of the event in Connolly's journal leaves us begging for more detail:

Connolly said the luncheon had aged him ten years.

If, as we might more reasonably infer, Wharton found Connolly uncongenial, she was by far not the only one--anyone who reads memoirs of biographies from the period is bound to come across descriptions of rows and sundered friendships, for, as Powell points out,

He had an utter disregard of other people's well-being and convenience, and often abominable manners.

Which makes the behavior of his second wife, Barbara Skelton, as described in a letter by Nancy Mitford, if not excusable then at least a bit more understandable:

Heywood writes that Boots' wife marks him for tidiness, lovingness etc & if less than 6/10 she turns him into Shepherd Market where he spends the night.

If he could be that unpleasant, why pay attention at all? For his friends, the boorish self-absorption was balanced by his reliable intelligence and flashes of charm, while for us there is the simple fun of watching, from a safe remove, such a complicated and often silly character wander through a rich literary scene. But even that would make him only a period curiosity, were his prose not such a pleasure, brimming with personality, and his opinions so strong and subjective. He was an enthusiast, and his criticism seems largely to be a wander through the bookshelves that held him entranced for a lifetime. Earlier this week I quoted Sven Birkerts on Connolly's enthusiasm; Powell also picked up on that characteristic, raising it to the level of a foundational critical position:

One of the things Connolly understands very well--and many contemporary critics fail completely to grasp--is that, as Rilke remarked, it is no good approaching a work of art in any spirit but sympathy. It is perfectly easy to make fun of Shakespeare or the Sistine Chapel if you apply only that treatment.

There is little in Connolly's shambles of a personal life that one is tempted to imitate, but when it comes to literature one could do worse than to set his critical approach as a model, and root one's own efforts in that same rich soil of sympathy.

"Are you shrieking yet?"

The last two letters I featured in Monday's post about letters were drawn from The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (1996). Though they didn't begin corresponding regularly until Waugh was posted to Europe during the war, he and Mitford first became friends amidst the social whirl of young 1920s London that Waugh skewered so brilliantly in Vile Bodies.

In fact, in a scene Waugh could have written, Nancy Mitford was an eyewitness to the breakup of the Waugh's marriage: Evelyn decamped to the country in 1929 to write, and in anticipation of his absence he and his wife, who was also named Evelyn and was known by the couple's friends as She-Evelyn, invited Nancy to stay with her in their London apartment. He-Evelyn's absence apparently weighed more heavily on his wife than was expected, and before his return She-Evelyn had left him for John Heygate. Nancy, aghast, broke off her friendship with She-Evelyn, while remaining friends with He-Evelyn for the rest of his life.



From World War II until Evelyn's death in 1966, that friendship depended almost entirely on correspondence, rarely taking any other form. As Nancy's niece Charlotte Mosley, editor of the letters, explains in her preface,

[T]hey 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.

But in writing to their idealized epistolary versions of one another they got along swimmingly, trafficking in perpetual jabbing banter. Complaints from Waugh--

IMPORTANT PICASSOS indeed! Talk about my becoming nicer! You couldn't write an obscene phrase like that except to offend.

--crossed in the mail with extravagant exaggerations from Mitford--

I know you can't tell the difference between Lloyd George & Stalin, but other people can.

--in hundreds of splendidly entertaining letters, full of cattiness, name-dropping, casual literary criticism, and mordant commentary on British and French society at mid-century.

Their correspondence includes one of my favorite letters of all time,* sent by Waugh to Mitford on July 27, 1952, in response to her question,

What do you do with all the people who want interviews, with fan letters & with fans in the flesh? Just a barrage of nos?

When he received Mitford's letter, Waugh was obviously feeling of a systematic turn of mind, for he replied in detail:

I am not greatly troubled by fans nowadays. Less than one a day on the average. No sour grapes when I say they were an infernal nuisance. I divide them into
(a) Humble expressions of admiration. To these a post-card saying "I am delighted to learn that you enjoyed my book. E. W."
(b) Impudent criticism. No answer.
(c) Bores who wish to tell me about themselves. Post-card saying "Thank you for interesting letter. E. W."
(d) Technical criticism, eg. One has made a character go to Salisbury from Paddington. Post-card: "Many thanks for your valuable suggestion. E. W."
(e) Humble aspirations of would-be writers. If attractive a letter of discouragement. If unattractive a post-card.
(f) Requests from University Clubs for a lecture. Printed refusal.
(g) Requests from Catholic Clubs for lecture. Acceptance.
(h) American students of "Creative Writing" who are writing theses about one & want one, virtually, to write their theses for them. Printed refusal.
(i) Tourists who invite themselves to one's house. Printed refusal.
(j) Manuscript sent for advice. Return without comment.
I also have some post-cards with my photograph on them which I send to nuns.
In case of very impudent letters from married women I write to the husband warning him that his wife is attempting to enter into correspondence with strange men.
Oh, and of course
(k) Autograph collectors: no answer.
(l) Indians & Germans asking for free copies of one's books: no answer.
(m) Very rich Americans: polite letter. They are capable of buying 100 copies for Christmas presents.
I think that more or less covers the field.
Love,
E

In her reply, Mitford, after an initial lament, sharply picked up on the most important question presented by Waugh's list:

You are heavenly. Bref, however, I note that you do answer, even if only with insults. I was rather hoping you would say you don't bother to.

How do you know if Americans are rich? I suppose you assume they all are.

They were perfectly suited as correspondents, and their collected letters provide readers near endless amusement with which to while away many a snowy winter afternoon--and offer aspiring wits many a line ripe for stealing.

*Another of my very favorite letters similarly incorporates an entertaining list: in the midst of an ordinary letter she sent me recently, my friend Maggie broke off unexpectedly from whatever subject she'd been on and instead began listing hilariously apt names for non-existent Harry Potter characters. She came up with twenty-two of them--but, alas, before I could transcribe them, one of our cats vomited extravagantly on the letter, rendering it untouchable. Such are the felne dangers that perpetually stalk nondigital media.

Dear snooping posterity,

{Photo by rocketlass of our niece writing postcards.}

Lest you get the wrong impression from my post the other night in which I quoted Virginia Woolf writing that "the Victorian age killed the art of letter writing with kindness," I thought I should tonight state very clearly my firmly held belief that there can never be too many letters! Never! I want the letters of all my favorite authors published in multiple, handsome volumes! With rich annotations! And while we're at it, let's make them fully searchable on the Internet!

That said, a volume of selected letters is a splendid thing as well, and in a just world great glory would accrue to those patient scholars who winnow down the corpus of correspondence to meet the requirements of both the marketplace and bookbinding technology. Tempting though some of the complete sets may be--I'm looking at you, Lord Byron--a stack of Selecteds around one's laptop exudes a powerful joy of its own, because by dipping in almost at random, one can pluck such gems as this, from a letter Gustave Flaubert sent to Louise Colet on Easter of 1853:

The impression that my travel notes made upon you has prompted me, dear Muse, into strange reflections on the hearts of men and women. Decidedly, they are not the same, whatever people say.

On our side there is candour, if not delicacy; we are in the wrong even so, for this candour is a kind of hard-heartedness. If I had omitted my impressions of women, then you would not have found anything to cause you distress! Women keep everything to themselves. They never confide in your unequivocally. The most they can manage is to set you guessing, and, when they tell you things, it comes with such quantities of sauce that the meat disappears beneath it. But if we allow ourselves two or three delinquent little ejaculations, even though our hearts are not really in it, they start moaning and groaning!

Or this, from a letter Barbara Pym sent to Philip Larkin on September 14, 1964:

Our library has been made slightly more interesting--in a macabre way--by a rather peculiar young man joining the staff. He doesn't come in till 10:35 most mornings and is given to cryptic utterances which one can only half hear. I don't have much to do with him myself but hear all this from the other staff. I find it is pleasanter to observe these things rather than actually participate in them.

As a nod to friends who have recently wrestled with book proofs, I'll pass along this opening to a letter sent by the aforementioned Lord Byron to his publisher John Murray:

Dear Sir--I have received & return by this post under cover--the first proof of "Don Juan."--Before the second can arrive it is probably that I may have left Venice--and the length of my absence is so uncertain--that you had better proceed to the publication without boring me with more proofs--I sent by the last post an addition--and a new copy of "Julia's letter," perceiving or supposing the former one in Winter did not arrive.--Mr. Hobhouse is at it again about indelicacy--there is no indelicacy--if he wants that, let him read Swift--his great Idol--but his imagination must be a dunghill with a Viper's nest in the middle--to engender such a supposition about this poem.--For my part I think you are all crazed.

The next time a deadline looms, you might consider seeing if you can put over that closing line.

Staying with the publishing theme, here's Jessica Mitford, getting right to the point in a letter to a literary agent friend in 1990:

Thanks SO much for yr letter, what a pleasure to get it. PUBLISHING: Too ghastly here, too, as I'm sure you know.

Here's a more circumspect passage from a letter E. B. White sent his editor on May 24, 1952, after first seeing the jacket design for Charlotte's Web:

Thanks for the dummy cuts and the jacket design. I like everything. The group on the jacket is charming. My only complaint is that the goose looks, for some reason, a bit snakelike. Perhaps this is because its beak is open, or perhaps because the eye is round like a snake's. You sound so rushed that I presume you don't want to make any revisions, and I would be satisfied have the jacket go as is, if it seems right to you. But no goose-lover in this house is satisfied.

The web effect is OK for the purposes of jacket design but that type of rather mussy Charles Addams attic web is not right for the illustrations. I'm sure that Garth realizes that. Charlotte weaves quite an orderly, symmetrical web.

Closing this batch of publishing correspondence is Herman Melville, who, in writing to his editor about Moby-Dick, not unsurprisingly brings the spooky:

It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ship's cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.

I've only just begun to flip through the new collection of Noel Coward's letters, but I've already found great pleasures, like this installment, sent from New Jersey in November of 1926, of his weekly letters to his doting mother:

The play, dear, has all the earmarks of being a failure! Gladys and Jack and I sat grandly in a box on the First Night and watched it falling flatter and flatter. And I must admit we got bad giggles! They were all expecting something very dirty indeed after the English Censor banning it and they were bitterly disappointed.

Francine Larrimore was very good an A. E. Matthews, too, tho' he forgot most of his lines.

Speaking of parenting, Lord Chesterfield's cynical letters to his son always reward a browse; here's an entertaining bit from a particularly long one, sent on January 8, 1750:

There are people who indulge themselves in a sort of lying, which they reckon innocent, and which in one sense is so; for it hurts nobody but themselves. This sort of lying is the spurious offspring of vanity, begotten upon folly: these people deal in the marvellous; they have seen some things that never existed; they have seen other things which they never really saw, though they did exist, only because they were thought worth seeing. Has anything remarkable been said or done in any place, or in any company, they immediately present and declare themselves eye or ear witnesses of it. They have done feats themselves, unattempted, or at least unperformed by others. Thy are always the heroes of their own fables; and think that they gain consideration, or at least present attention, by it. Whereas, in truth, all they get is ridicule and contempt, not without a good degree of distrust: for one must naturally conclude, that he who will tell any lie from idle vanity, will not scruple telling a greater for interest. Had I really seen anything so very extraordinary as to be almost incredible, I would keep it to myself, rather than by telling it give anybody room to doubt, for one minute, of my veracity.

Note that Lord Chesterfield, as is his wont, is not objecting to lying, per se, but to lying for no reason.

I'll close with some top-shelf cruel wit, from some masters of the art. First, a few lines from Nancy Mitford, writing from Paris to Evelyn Waugh on August 20, 1952:

Here we are obsessed by the fate of Sire Jacques Drumont, an English millionaire who has been murdered with his wife & small child while camping out. Though all are very sorry for Sire Jacques, & Lady Ann his wife, it is rather hoped that this will cure English millionaires of their mania for camping, they are a bore & start forest fires everywhere.

Finally, there's this comment from Waugh to Mitford from April 8, 1951:

Everyone I met in London was in debt & despair & either much too fat or much too thin.

Note to today's writers: put down those iPhones and write more letters! I'll want to read them when you're dead and I'm old!

Baby, it's cold outside

{Photos by rocketlass.}

I woke this morning to find Chicago, not unexpectedly, beset by one-degree temperatures and howling winds. I shouldn't be surprised and annoyed anew every winter--this absurdity, after all, is but a small price to pay for the right to swelter gloriously in the brutal humidity of late August, and I should calmly accept its recurrence.

Looking for solidarity, I betook myself to E. B. White's letters, on the assumption that at some point in his decades in Maine he must have sent off a note to a friend in a warmer clime complaining--with his usual balance, pith, and gentle irony--about the winter. Alas, no such letter appears in The Letters of E. B. White. But White did write well about a Maine winter for the New Yorker in 1971, a piece called "The Winter of the Great Snows." I realize that a Chicago winter, however unpleasant, has nothing on a Maine winter, but nevertheless I felt a sense of a burden shared when I read the following passage:

[This winter] has been more a time of simple survival, to see if a man can stay alive in the cold. The snows arrived early, before the ground froze. Storm followed storm, each depositing its load and rousing the plowman in the night. And then the cold set in, steady and hard. The ponds froze, then the saltwater coves and harbors, then the bay itself. As far as I know, the ground, despite the deep cold, remains unfrozen: snow is a buffer against the frost, an almost perfect insulating material. A fellow recently reported driving a stake into a snow bank, and when the point of the stake reached ground level it kept right on going. I haven't tested this. . . . But I would have to have a pretty long stake, so remote is the ground.

Later, White writes about the transformation wrought on his farm by the accumulated snow, especially its effect on the farm's non-human denizens; my favorite detail is this:

On several occasions this winter, we had to shovel a path for the geese, to make it possible for them to get from their pen in the barn to their favorite loitering spot in the barn cellar. Imagine a man's shoveling a path for a goose! So the goose can loiter!

In the course of my search for words on winter, I happened across a couple of other fun passages, which I suppose I might as well share despite their having nothing to do with the subject--it being silly to even consider doing anything so rash as leaving the house today. At one point in my search, frustrated by White, I turned to The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (1996), where I found this hilarious aside from a letter Waugh wrote in December of 1949:

I was too drunk in London to get my hair cut. It is so long it tickles. I can't face going back. What am I to do?

As someone who shaves his head with a razor, the concept of the drunken haircut is a harrowing one.

Finally, I'll close with Lord Byron, writing from Italy in January of 1821:

The weather still so humid and impracticable, that London, in its most oppressive fogs, were a summer-bower to this mist and sirocco, which now has lasted (but with one day's interval), chequered with snow or heavy rain only, since the 30th of December, 1820. It is so far lucky that I have a literary turn;--but it is very tiresome not to be able to stir out, in comfort, on any horse but Pegasus, for so many days.

Thinking about the harshness of Italian winters, I think I can comfortably speak for all Chicagoans today: suck it up, Byron.

Baroque asperity

Whenever I read Ivy Compton-Burnett I find myself remembering some lines from one of Barbara Pym's letters, which I quoted last year when I first wrote about Compton-Burnett:

The influence of Miss Compton-Burnett is very powerful once it takes a hold, isn’t it? For a time there seems to be no point in writing any other way, indeed, there seems not to be any other way, but I have found that it passes (like so much in this life) and I have now got back to my own way, such as it is. But purified and strengthened, as after a rich spiritual experience, or a shattering love affair.

What stays most firmly in the mind is Compton-Burnett's precise language, which she deploys to create a tone of stunning astringency. One of her tendencies that I find particularly infectious is her habit of ending her characters' pointed exchanges with a clarifying aside, often delivered as a corrective of sorts by the character who's gotten the worst of the discussion. Take the following scene from Manservant and Maidservant (1947), for example. Sarah, the eldest daughter, has just been discovered with grateful tears in her eyes that were brought on by overheard words of praise from her siblings. The family nurse, two younger brothers (Avery and Marcus), and the unfeeling patriarch, Horace, discuss the discovery:

"Why does Sarah cry?" said Avery.

"She was touched by what she heard," said Nurse, blinking her own eyelids.

"What is touched?"

"Her heart was touched," said Nurse.

"There is no need to elaborate the matter," said Horace, sharply. "There is no occasion to pity anyone, because she hears a pleasant word of herself."

"She doesn't always," said Avery.

"It is when people don't, that they are made to cry when they do," said Marcus.

The adverb, "sharply," attached to Horace's comment reminds of how often, and how well, Compton-Burnett uses adverbial phrases--a trait she shares with Pym, though their use of them could hardly be more different. Compton-Burnett, needing adverbs to help anchor her lengthy stretches of dialogue--words are spoken "in an indulgent tone," "half to himself," "with grim comprehension"--employs them almost as much as markers of the speaker's intentions as of actuality: this is the way the speaker, arching an eyebrow and looking around, wants his words to be taken. Pym, on the other hand, seems most often to rely on the adverbs that the listener would be likely to supply; in her world of timid church ladies and ineffectual curates, the way a remark is taken tends to have far more weight that the intentions behind its utterance.

The adverbial phrases are actually themselves characteristic of a larger trait, perhaps the one I most admire in Compton-Burnett's writing: she seems never to let a joke rest with its first effect. Rather, one gets the sense that she meticulously worked and reworked her scenes, pushing and prodding every exchange to see if she could squeeze out one more barbed line--and thus expose one more facet of her characters' relationships. It reminds me of what football commentators refer to as "a good second effort," that extra push a strong running back will deliver after first being rebuffed. It may only gain him one or two additional yards, but those yards can be crucial. (I can't believe I'm comparing Ivy Compton-Burnett to football, but there you are.)

I'll give you two brief examples. In the first, the childrens' new tutor, Gideon, tells his widowed mother, Gertrude, about his employer, whom she declares an intention to meet.

"Why do you want to meet the man?" said Gideon, who did not know that his mother wanted to meet any man within twenty years of her own age, and was willing to meet any one outside this limit.

"I do not want to meet him," said Gertrude, who hardly knew it herself.

It would have been a good joke had it ended with the revelation of his mother's catholic interest in men; it becomes sublime with the addition of her lack of self-knowledge.

Something similar happens in this scene, wherein Sarah reads to her seven-year-old brother, Avery, who has been severely chastised for mild misbehavior:

Sarah was seated on Avery's bed, reading from the Book of Job, not from any sense of fitness, but because it was her brother's choice. He lay with a convalescent air, his face responding as the words confirmed his memory.

To close, I'll return to Barbara Pym, but this time by way of Nancy Mitford. I would have expected Mitford to be a fan of Compton-Burnett, whose portraits of isolated families of precocious children and eccentric, tyrannical parents would have, I thought, appealed to any of the Mitfords But no: as she confessed in a letter to her friend Heywood Hill, "I wish I could get on with Miss Compton-Burnett, but it's my blind spot." She was always interested in gossip, however, so Hill later wrote to her about Compton-Burnett's last days:

She'd shrunk but still had her darting brain. She died in her home which she'd been frightened of not doing--and she still had a maid. Anne reminded me how Ivy had once said to her about some woman, "Well--she still had a maid to the end."

Influence, it turns out, can be read both ways: Barbara Pym may have lamented falling under the spell of Compton-Burnett, but can you imagine a more Barbara Pym line than that one?