It's White Fang or Nothing!

One of the great pleasures of Deborah Mitford's charming and funny new memoir, Wait for Me!, is its portrait of David Mitford, Baron Redesdale, whom Mitford fans long ago came to know in the guise of Uncle Matthew in Nancy's The Pursuit of Love. Deborah acknowledges that in many ways her father really was like Matthew, but she paints him in a much gentler light:

Nancy made him sound terrifying but there was nearly, though not always, a comic undercurrent not apparent to outsiders. I adored him. He was an original, with a total disregard of the banal or boring.

In other words, exactly the sort of character best met in the pages of a novel or memoir--and for all Deborah's attempts to show her father's lighter side, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that, yes, he was essentially terrifying. If he was more bluster than anything, well, that's still an awfully large quantity of bluster to live with on a daily basis.

But in a memoir? Oh, there he's vastly entertaining. As when he went to the dentist in his mid-thirties,

and asked him to take out all his teeth. The dentist refused, saying it was dangerous. "All right then," said Farve impatiently. "I'll go to someone who will." An hour or so later there was not a tooth left in his head. Thereafter "my good dentures" chewed up Muv's excellent food.

Or his inordinate "horror of anything sticky":

I once asked him what his idea of hell was. "Honey on my bowler hat," was the answer.

Or this exchange about his brother-in-law, Denis Farrer, the Old Dean:

Fare was once talking to an acquaintance about the Farrers and said, "The only trouble with the Old Dean is that he married a ghastly woman." "Oh?" said the acquaintance. "I thought she was your sister?" "Yes, she is. A poisonous creature."

Or his brutal manners when Nancy brought home friends:

[M]y father waited for a pause in the conversation and said loudly to my mother at the other end of the table, "Have these people no homes of their own?"

The anecdote that made me laugh the loudest, however, also happens to be the most suitable for this blog: it's about books, and, specifically, about one of my old favorites, Thomas Hardy. According to Deborah, her father read only one book in his life, White Fang, "which he enjoyed so much he vowed never to read another." Learning this soon after their marriage shocked Mrs. Mitford, and she came up with a plan:

She persuaded him to listen to her reading aloud some classics, starting with Thomas Hardy. She chose Tess of the d'Urbervilles with its descriptions of farm and heath land, which she thought he would enjoy. When she got to the sad part, my father started crying. "Oh, darling, don't cry, it's only a story." "WHAT," said my father, his sorrow turning to rage, "do you mean to say the damn feller made it up?"

Which makes one wonder: Is it possible that David had misunderstood the nature of White Fang?

I suspect that Hardy--who was alive and well at that time--of all people would have enjoyed knowing that Tess was selected because of its depiction of the humble activities of rural life. The dismissal of it all as made-up, and thus pointless, however? I expect he would have replied with the self-righteous asperity of this passage from his explanatory note to the first edition of Jude the Obscure:

I would ask that any too genteel reader, who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St Jerome's: If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come than that the truth be concealed.

"It is truly ghoulish of me not to have written ages ago," Or, The letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Deborah Mitford

I've spent the past two days dipping into In Tearing Haste, the new collection of letters between travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor and Mitford sister Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire, and it's been a real treat.

My love of books of letters is nearly indiscriminate, but as most collections consist of the correspondence of a single writer, they tend to offer nearly as many frustrations as satisfactions: I find myself regularly wanting to know what the writer's interlocutors are writing, what words he or she is responding to. The solution, so rarely available, is this sort of dual edition, one that presents a lifetime's exchanges between a single pair of correspondents. Debo and Paddy have been friends since the 1950s, and it's a lot of fun to watch them toss ideas and stories and jokes and impressions back and forth over the decades.

As editor Charlotte Mosley (who has for more than twenty years now admirably fulfilled her charge of keeper of the Mitford legacy) explains in her introduction, the two couldn't be more different in their approach to letter-writing:

Unless Paddy was making a plan or asking a quick question--in which case he would scribble a few lines headed "In unbelievable haste" or "With one foot in the stirrup"--his letters are sustained pieces of writing, as detailed and beautifully wrought as his books. With the eye of a painter, the pen of a poet and a composer's ear for language and dialogue, in his letters he often sounds like a musician practising scales before launching into a full-blown symphony. . . . In complete contrast, Debo's letters are breezy and spontaneous. Dashed off almost in telegraphese at times, they are sharp, idiosyncratic and funny. Where Paddy is dazzlingly erudite, widely read and a polyglot, Debo is defiantly (at times disingenuously) a non-reader, puncturing any intellectualising or use of a foreign word with, "Ah, oui", or "quelle horrible surprise."

The contrasting styles, which could be dizzying, instead are charming; reading the book, you quickly settle into the rhythm of the correspondence, feeling, because of Patrick's lush descriptions, more as if you're sitting with Deborah receiving these reports and dashing off answers than as if you're trekking the world with Patrick.

The best bit from Fermor that I've encountered so far is a letter describing some of the people he met while in Africa working on the film The Roots of Heaven, for which he wrote the screenplay. His description of director John Huston, which jibes with what others tended to say about him, is concise and memorable, even chilling:

John Huston. Wildly bogus, charming, complicated, boastful and ham. I like him very much and don't trust him a yard. He has to be kept under pretty strict control; he would trample on one if he saw the faintest flicker of a flinch, and does so when he does see it. This entails keeping on the offensive quite a lot, i. e. diagnosing his weak points and, when occasion arises, hitting hard and often. This establishes an equivocal and amusing kind of truce and makes life quite fun, a rather dangerous game which both sides divine by an amused look in each other's eyes: thin-ice work & figure skating. He sings "Johnny, I Hardly Knew You" beautifully.

In a few short lines, he makes you want to stay far away from that man--even as you realize how great a character he would make in a novel.

Fermor's sketches of actors Trevor Howard and Erroll Flynn are also nicely turned:

Trevor Howard. Have you ever seen him?--sorry, of course you have. I only asked because I'm so ignorant in such matters. He is playing the lead--Morel, the elephant defender--and seems to me wonderful. A very nice man, but as with nearly all actors, there is something missing: --'A bit of a bore' doesn't quite cover it, somehow. It's something missing somewhere else, which I have yet to put my finger on. He drinks like Hell, starting at breakfast, and goes through his part in a sort of miraculous trance.

Errol Flynn. All the above strictures about actors do not apply here. He poses as the most tremendous bounder--glories in being a cad--but is intelligent, perceptive, and, in a freak way, immensely likeable. We are rather chums, to my bewilderment. Sex rules his life, and very indiscreet and criticisable and amusing he is about it.

Deborah's pen portraits, on the other hand, tend to be more like this:

I've been to dinner at the White Ho[use] twice. Jackie Kennedy was there. she is a queer fish. Her face is one of the oddest I ever saw. It is put together in a very wild way.

But, like her sisters, she also has a great eye for amusing oddities; elsewhere in the letter I've just quoted, she writes,

A rich lady said to me she needed a secretary who understood her "nervouswise." The lingo is very nice indeed but takes a bit of learning.

In another letter, from May of 1974, Deborah writes,

I had a jolly day with a burly team of woodmen, who were doing some clearing. We got to some thick ivy & stuff & I said look out, there might be some birds' nests in that. The foreman said "Oh of course you have that commitment as well." Do admit.

Not that Patrick's letters, polished though they are, are all seriousness and culture; the tale of the woodmen and the birds makes a nice pair with this bit from one of his letters of a few years later, sent from his home in Greece:

We've got two owls here, very close to the house, who hoot like anything just beyond the sort of arched gallery where we dine. I'm very jealous of Joan [his wife], because she's an ace at imitating them through clenched palms, as I bet you can too. I can't do it, like being unable to whistle, because of two front teeth being too far apart, I suppose. Anyway, when Joan breaks into their dialogue, there is an amazed or embarrassed silence, then bit by bit they answer, until an enthusiastic three-sided exchange begins, which it is hard to break off.

{Photos by rocketlass.}

There's much, much more in the book--including some of what Patrick calls "terrible gossip column stuff," which no real Mitford fan can deny being interested in. For now, though, I'll leave you with a bit of properly autumnal description, from an October 2006 letter sent by Patrick from Greece:

The olive harvest has begun. Ladders are propped among the branches of each tree and olives come pattering down on to coloured rugs and tarpaulin, with lots of children and dogs skipping about, and pillars of pale blue smoke from the sawn-off branches floating up into the autumn sky.

And now, speaking of olives, time to go put a few of them into their natural habitat . . .

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.