Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford “like all writers, put entertainment first and exaggerated for effect,” says WSJ reviewer Florence King 4/29, reviewing The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (Houghton Mifflin, $40).
The reviewer exaggerates for effect, but the point’s made. In a letter Mitford had tweaked Waugh about his Catholicism, comparing the resurrection of the body to “finding your motor car after a party” and marveling at how mourners say of the departed, “‘She must be in heaven now’ — as though she’d caught the 4:45.”
Waugh called this “a fatuous intrusion” into a world she knew nothing of.
Clever, though.
