Word: mitfords
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...think Charles might have had a little more glamour," Waugh's friend Nancy Mitford delicately complained to him when he sent her an advance copy of the book. Mitford saw the point of making the narrator "dim," but asked, "Would Julia and her brother and her sister all be in love with him if he was?" Irons asked himself the same question when he was assigned the role. "Is this character going to bore the audience terribly?" he wondered. "He certainly bores the pants...
...faith never wavered, but neither did it save him from dipsomaniacal binges. He asked Author Nancy Mitford, a favorite correspondent: "Did I ever come to visit you again after my first sober afternoon. If so, I presume I owe you flowers." As he ruefully described the times he was "d.d." (disgustingly drunk) in his letters, Waugh made himself one of his better comic characters: "I got to my train d.d. and it was the Cheltenham Flier full of respectable stockbrokers . . . and I walked down the train picking up all the mens hats and looking inside and saying: 'People...
...industrious." His letters to her, though, radiate warmth; he called her "my poppet" and "Whiskers" and confessed that their long separations during his service in World War II sometimes left him "near to tears." Similarly, he often abused his growing brood of six children to his friends. To Nancy Mitford: "All my children are here for the holidays-merry, affectionate, madly boring-except Harriet who has such an aversion to me that she screams when she catches sight of me a hundred yards away." But his letters to the youngsters tell the story of a doting papa. He comforted them...