Letters of Evelyn Waugh

"Yes! And he did. The thing about Evelyn Waugh is that you must take everything with a pinch of salt. Because there is this kind of parallel universe in which he lives. The pleasure of reading his letters is to see somebody at work on constructing a personality, on constructing a self. Which isn’t necessarily his true self. Do we ever get to the true self in Waugh? I think we don’t. I don’t think he necessarily knew where it was himself. What you get instead is this apparently tweedy, peevish, reactionary figure – but underneath it amazingly perceptive and very funny. There’s a sort of Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll quality about Waugh’s world in the letters. He always wants to turn a perfectly ordinary situation into something absurd. There’s a wonderful description of some soldiers doing war-time exercises in a park belonging to somebody called Lord Glasgow. And Lord Glasgow goes to the loo, pulls the chain, there’s a terrific explosion and all the windows of the castle blow out. Of course it probably never happened like that. But this is a moment from Decline and Fall , or Vile Bodies , or something like that. All the time, in his letters, he’s reaching after these absurdities. “The pleasure of reading his letters is to see somebody at work on constructing a personality, on constructing a self.” He’s also enjoyably sharp, and acid and acerbic with his correspondents. Even those he loves, he bites them a lot of the time. The letters to Nancy Mitford or Diana Cooper – yes they are very amusing and they rattle on terrifically, but all of the time you are conscious of moments when he snaps. And the correspondents themselves clearly realised that they were playing with fire, that this was a loose cannon – and as such all the more fascinating. You can tell up to a point. I think the excuse for drinking was to release things, to oil the flow of discourse. But there isn’t anything fuddled about the letters. Apart from anything else, he is – and has always been thought to be – one of the great 20th century English stylists. In the quality of the English, the syntax, the crispness which is such a distinctive aspect of Decline and Fall . The way he can control a paragraph. The way he can build up to a comic climax in a paragraph, or in a single sentence. He never really wrote a bad sentence. And this is also true in the letters. I think it probably has to be, alas. The occasion for writing letters has in so many cases gone. Nowadays, we still write condolence letters (although some people send condolence emails). We send letters to publications – we write out our objections to things. But the idea of actually sustaining a written correspondence with someone has almost died the death. Which is a great pity. I myself have maintained a written correspondence with my brother, who lives in Italy, for 40 years. Of course, when we write our letters there is just the faintest idea – probably more with me than with him, to do him justice – that these letters will be published. Or we are aware of a gentle reader over our shoulder. But at the same time, they contain all sorts of private jokes and family references that nobody will ever know what one might be referring to. And that is the other joy about these correspondences. Editing letters is actually sleuthing. Figuring out what on earth “x” is in so and so a letter – who they were, what the person is referring to them as, what the nickname is. Waugh uses a lot of nicknames for various figures, like “Boots” for Cyril Connolly or “Honks” for Diana Cooper. It’s very difficult to explain. I think that a different process goes on between brain and hand in the visual quality that a letter assumes. An email does not assume the same visual quality. In a letter, your handwriting might grow bigger, the spaces between the lines might grow bigger, there are crossings out, there are spelling mistakes. On the computer, we have spellcheck and all these things. The letter remains a physical thing. An email is not, really. In the end it is in the ether. Yes it does. Of course, you can burn letters. In my own family, one of the most infuriating things was when my grandmother died, she had all my grandfather’s letters from the trenches – he was killed a few weeks before the Great War ended – but when my aunt emptied them out of my grandmother’s bureau, on them was “Please burn” and she put them on the fire. So you can, alas, destroy a correspondence. But miraculously, so many thousands of letters survive. I kept all my father’s letters, written to my mother during the war, and they are rather good. But will my nephews hang onto them? I don’t know. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think it will probably come to that. And this is why certain writers, like Wendy Cope recently, have given their collected emails to a library. The process has started. Yes, I suppose that is the new thing. But I think the letter as a physical phenomenon is not doomed. There may come a time when the world goes “pop”, electronically, and we have to start again with our hands, and with sticks of charcoal on leaves, and make papyrus all over again. It may not be wholly dead. Yes, it is in a way. I love emails, I love being able to send emails, but there’s nothing like the pleasure of writing a letter."