Yours Ever by Thomas Mallon Read Free Book Online

the whole truth about his subject, nearly ended Mitford’s relationship with Debo, now the duchess of Devonshire.
    With Diana there had long since been nothing left to sunder. Mitford disliked not being on communicative terms—“writers” or “speakers”—with almost anyone, but at the close of a letter to Muv would send love to relations “with the usual exceptions.” She was prepared to go to great lengths to avoid seeing the Mosleys during a 1959 visit to Paris, where not only Nancy but Diana’s family would be: “We envisage scenes as in corny French bedroom farces, the Mosleys popping out of one room, down an oubliette, [theTreuhafts] hiding in the stove, etc. As I pointed out to Nancy, just their chosen place for us anyway.”
    Nancy Mitford—the most brilliant and personally cruel of the sisters—remained the one whose approval Decca most desired, the only one for whom she could become a “doormat” time and again. Lady Redesdale once pointed out that Nancy’s letters “usually contain a skillfully hidden dagger pointed straight at one’s heart,” but compared to Decca’s, the letters collected in
Love from Nancy
come across as grating little performances, falsely shrewd and oddly fluttering, self-congratulatory even when self-critical. The contentment they proclaim, over even Nancy’s long and manifestly unfulfilling affair with a married French colonel, isn’t the least bit convincing. If Decca, so badly teased and knocked off balance by her oldest sister, had been interested in the last laugh, she could have had it.
    Her own letters are so full of comic set pieces, vivid narrative and wonderfully replicated speech (a whole page of parodic Southern palaver written out during a 1961 visit to the Durrs) that one wonders why Mitford never tried writing a novel. Fear of imitating Nancy, already so successful in the genre, may have been a factor; Decca even worried that the British title of her first memoir,
Hons and Rebels
, might cause the older sister, famous for her “U” and “non-U” speech distinctions, to “think it’s cashing in on her stuff.” One suspects, however, a more fundamental reason, namely, that the novel would have seemed too precious and artificial a form to such a lover of real-life rumpus and corrective action.
    Letter writing, by contrast, always retained its element of practical urgency, even as it allowed Mitford to roar and entertain and sketch verbal equivalents of the faces she liked to make at the lectern in front of flesh-and-blood crowds. If she sometimes overindulged tendencies toward the crude and the cute, these resulted only in small blots upon her contributions to a genre that was never—one has to remind oneself, Madame de Sévigné aside—designed for artistic perfection. Mitford’s letters are a smashing, buoyant accumulation; they ride what one hopes is not the last wave of a literary form soon to be as dead as one of her Flextoned corpses. During the fax’s brief moment between the post and e-mail, Mitfordcorresponded with Miss Manners over the etiquette governing the new machine and managed to adapt at least one old epistolary convention to the world’s new instantaneousness: “Yrs of 9:54 from Chatsworth just rec’d,” she informed Debo.
    Mitford preferred gadgets to greenery (“Nature, nature, how I hate yer”) and believed that keeping fit was only likely to prolong the miseries of whatever cancerous affliction got one in the end. Nursing homes would have been a marvelous subject for her, better than her late exploration of obstetrics; she described herself as going “from the Grave to the Cradle” with
The American Way of Birth
in 1992. She did, after a bad fall, give up drinking, but backslid from efforts to quit smoking, which included her husband’s attempt at aversion therapy: “Bob collected a ton of disgusting butts & ashes, & all I did was to breathe in deeply & say ‘HOW divine.’” Their marriage survived an affair of