LETTERS: In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh FermorEdited by Charlotte Mosley John Murray, 390pp, £25
THIS IS A Grand Marnier soufflé of a book, lightly exhilarating and perfectly delicious. Yes, there really are still a few people who write letters to each other, by hand, on paper.
In Tearing Hasteis a collection of delightfully gossipy Platonic love letters, dating from 1954 almost to the present, between Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, the youngest of the six beautiful Mitford sisters, and Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, of legendary handsomeness, wartime bravery and perennial literary stylishness. Most of his letters, belying the book's title, seem to have been written with the exquisite artistry that gained him the reputation of the foremost travel writer in English of the 20th century; hers with the girlish joie de vivre she has somehow retained from the Mitfords' Oxfordshire nursery. Both Debo and Paddy, as they address each other, write letters as intimately revealing as diaries.
The duchess at the age of 88 and Leigh Fermor at 93 continue to correspond. They have allowed access to about 600 of their letters for publication. It was a good idea to do so, as they were able to help Charlotte Mosley to introduce and edit them, ensuring the accuracy of the footnotes. Some of the numerous dramatis personaeare only nicknamed in the texts. For example, they call the Queen Mother "Cake", because of her sweet tooth. Mosley is an ideal editor.
Being the daughter of Diana Mosley, née Mitford, she understands the idiosyncrasies of her aunt and her friends. Mosley knows at first hand how much the duchess has done to restore and enliven Chatsworth, the Devonshires' ancestral home in Derbyshire, and Lismore Castle, their ancient home from home in Co Waterford.
THE EDITOR APPRECIATES THAT DEBO and Paddy are both apolitical, generously upbeat extroverts but complementarily unlike as writers. Leigh Fermor regards letters as an art form. Two of his books, A Time to Keep Silence, about monastic seclusion, and Three Letters from the Andes, about mountaineering, were written, ostensibly, as letters to the author's wife, Joan, with awareness of possible publication.
"In complete contrast," as Mosley writes, "Debo's letters are breezy and spontaneous . . . Where Paddy is dazzlingly erudite, widely read and a polyglot, Debo is defiantly (at times disingenuously) a non-reader, puncturing any intellectuality or use of a foreign word with 'Ah oui,' or 'quelle horrible surprise.'" Actually, she has published 10 books herself.
Debo and Paddy have a great capacity for wide-ranging, long-lasting friendships on all levels of society. Here is a rich assortment of vividly depicted people and places, memorially fixed for as long as people read good books and admiringly wonder at what Paddy repeatedly declares are "tons of love".
Debo fondly remembers President Kennedy and other friends, and also tells Paddy quite a lot he didn't know about the ailments of sheep. He writes in a letter on paper purloined from Windsor Castle after dinner with the Queen: "Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, where have you been?" and recalls an extraordinarily amicable reunion with Major-General Heinrich Kreipe, whom he and comrades heroically abducted from Crete during the Nazi occupation.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author