The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh

"Not so much, because she wasn’t remotely frightened of him. She did say that after Waugh would leave, having stayed with her in Paris, it was like an air raid was over. But the only time he really slapped her down was when she was frivolous about religion. Glorious, glorious gossip. You had two of the best novelists of the 20th century writing to each other on absolutely equal terms about their friends, the people they met, and their lives in London and Paris. It is very high performance art, and they were performing for each other because each was the other’s best audience. They teased each other. Waugh was always sending Mitford up for her passion for the French, which he had no time for. Probably not. Nancy Mitford said of him that he’s the man behind the iron mask. She didn’t feel that she knew who he really was, and very few people did. His second wife did – a much more resilient figure than how she is often portrayed – and possibly his priest. There’s only one thing you can do really, which is to read everything you can lay your hands on. The luck with Waugh is that there is an enormous quantity of letters – thousands of them – and his diaries. And I interviewed people who had known him well, his children and also his contemporaries. It’s like developing a photograph gradually. I spent eight years writing my biography. You live with it very intensely, and get quite close. That’s a very good question. I find it interesting to try and discover the man or woman behind the work. The great luck of writing about novelists is that writing is how they communicate. I couldn’t possibly write about a painter or a musician, but a writer is constantly communicating themselves not only through their work but through their correspondence. And stylistically, Waugh is in a class of his own. With each line of dialogue, you know exactly who the character is. He paid a high price for his genius. But for us, and for posterity, it’s worth it."