The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh.

Davis, Robert Murray

Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh. Charlotte Mosley, ed. Boston. Houghton Mifflin. 1996 (released 1997). xxiv + 527 pages + 16 plates. $40. ISBN 0-395-74015-0.

The three hundred letters from Nancy Mitford and the two hundred from Evelyn Waugh (80 percent newly published in the first case, 40 percent in the second) contain a good deal of wit and very few commas. As long-married couples come to resemble each other, these two correspondents came to sound very much alike: critical, catty, and very funny about a circle of acquaintances who in any serious scale of values mattered largely to one other and were probably far less interesting than Waugh and Mitford made them seem.

The two did have their differences. According to Charlotte Mosley, Waugh affected a love of America (not obvious in his other writings) in order to tease Mitford; she had a genuine love of the French and of Picasso which he consistently and genuinely deplored. Waugh was far more knowledgeable and serious about religion than Mitford, and he bore even petty annoyances, to say nothing of fools, far less easily than she. He was not always tolerant of her views, especially her Labour sympathies, or she of his flashes of anger. He encapsulated the relationship best in two adjoining sentences: "You cannot conceive how much I despise you. I long to see you."

Except for students of a rather narrow and, because of death and waning energy, diminishing segment of English social history from the 1940s to the 1960s, these letters are most valuable for their insight into the lives of two professional writers. In their sense of themselves as writers, however, the two were far from equal. Both began to write more or less by accident, but Waugh developed high and - to casual readers who regard him primarily as a comic writer with a casual, natural style - surprisingly severe standards not only for himself but for other writers. He sought Mitford's reaction to his work, was gratified by approval, accepted what he thought reasonable criticism, and smarted at what he considered incomprehension. She asked him for advice on everything from point of view to the direction of her career.

Some of it, like the title for The Pursuit of Love, her first successful novel, she took. But many of his sayings were too hard, as when he told her in some detail how to rewrite that novel after its publication because "the difference (one of 1000 differences) between a real writer & a journalist [is] that she cares to go on improving after the reviews are out & her friends have read it & there is nothing whatever to be gained by the extra work." Entirely unrepentant, she accepted the lesser role.

In this as in other areas, including tastes in books and friends, she could sometimes be persuaded but never bullied. Their tough-mindedness, as much as the fact that each was the other's most amusing correspondent, accounts for their epistolary friendship - though, as Charlotte Mosely points out in her brief but very useful introduction, they could remain friends only if they spent little time in each other's actual company.

The editorial apparatus, as unobtrusive as possible for these highly allusive exchanges, is useful for students of the two writers or of the period, but the letters can most profitably be read for their wit and for the self-portraits of two improbable and highly entertaining characters.

Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma