Reading Note: DD
With In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, I’ve got a new book to add to the Mitford shelf. (Deborah Devonshire is the youngest of the Mitford sisters.) Patrick Leigh Fermor was one of the last century’s great travel writers, more of an explorer really. I haven’t bothered to find out, just yet, how the two became friends, but then I didn’t much bother to think before buying this book — rather pricily, as it happens, as it’s the English (and, so far, sole) edition, flown in along with the sole.
It will probably take me a while to read Fermor’s half of the correspondence. My interest in exotic locales is less than nil. Aside from a few great cities and their environs, I couldn’t be less interested in travel. But their subject-matter doesn’t explain my keen interest in the dowager duchess’s letters, which carry good-humored disingenuousness to new heights. Here we find her grace (a self-avowed philistine incapable of reading anything more difficult than Beatrix Potter) trying to begin a new book:
The first sentence is very trying, you’ll admit. Famous Authors (that fraudulent thing in America which explains how to be one) says write ‘the’ on a bit of paper (well what else could it be on) & then put down some more words. I ask you. Then I thought ‘well,’ as all interviewees begin. No good. And ‘like,’ and ‘it came to pass.’ No good either. So I looked a few ghoul vols. no help. I think it will be ‘if,’ like Kipling, but the nub of the ensuing sentence is Dutch to nearly everyone…
It’s going to go like this: ‘If you ever live in the same place for a long time you become hefted to your hill like an old sheep.’
For all the teasing, though, there are occasional passages of very high luster, such as this friendly epitaph for JFK, to whom the duchess was related by marriage (his sister married her brother-in-law). She just returned from the president’s funeral when she wrote it:
Oh dear I do feel so sad about J Kennedy, but really the fantastic luck was knowing him at all, such an extraordinary person, so funny, so touching, clever, brave & sort of good, & such marvellous company.