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The Bookshop At 10 Curzon Street: Letters Between Nancy Mitford And Heywood Hill 1952-73Editions
ReviewNancy Mitford’s name is a byword for a particularly English kind of wit – mischievous, ironic, self-deprecating, class-conscious – that shines through her novels and biographies, and through her already published letters and other people’s diaries. She belonged to the rarefied world of Waugh, Powell, Lees-Milne, Acton, Connolly… the same old team who fill hundreds of yards of bookshelves already, who were only ever interested in themselves and their own set. What could be the excuse for this slim volume? Heywood Hill started up his bookshop in Mayfair in 1936. Between 1943, when he was called up, and 1945, it was run by Nancy Mitford. She had a stake in the shop until 1948, when she sold out to him (“doing business with friends is impossible… do let’s have a divorce.”). This collection is neatly edited by John Saumarez-Smith, who has run the shop for the last 30 years or so. Nancy Mitford’s wit does not need proving, but the letters reveal her steady affection for the shop and Heywood, and for books themselves. As you would expect, they are filled with stories about people. Heywood is just as good at telling them as Nancy. There is a hilarious exchange in 1952 about a French friend of Nancy’s whom they refer to as Hysterico. She has arranged for Heywood to put him up for a few days in London while he works on a translation of a novel by Walter Baxter. Heywood collects him from the train after a rough channel crossing where Hysterico “was proud of himself because he had not been sick. He said that everyone else was prostrate. He must have helped to make them so because, as far as I can make out, he and ‘a beautiful English pederast’ (I think he only guessed that) had gone round offering bananas to sick persons.” There is plenty of tittle-tattle about once-famous people, but the real value of the book is the insight it gives into this unique, magical, and (over more than half a century) quietly influential bookshop - review by Johnny de Falbe |
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