TLS, mentioning Evelyn Waugh

Single sheet of Bond paper (20 x 25cm), typed on both sides with corrections in Powell’s hand; printed with Powell’s Chantry address to the upper edge; dated 7 December 1978, and with the following 23 lines referring to several his memoirs, Infants and Messengers of Day, as well as ‘Varda’ (Dorothy) and Evelyn Waugh; contemporary vertical and horizontal folds; tears to right hand edge now repaired with archival tape; a slightly later date of 2/4/79 and a tick in blue pen to the upper right hand corner; very good. 

A lovely example of a letter written by Anthony Powell to an admirer, a Mrs Hoyle, during the winter of 1978, shortly after his second volume of memoirs had been released. In it, he refers to Dorothy Varda, the Bloomsbury secondhand bookseller and artist who served as an important muse and early romantic partner to the young Powell, and was famously the real-life inspiration for the glamorous and tempestuous character Mrs Mendoza in his 1936 novel, Agents and Patients. “It would indeed have been Varda whom you met at Michel Salaman’s”, he writes, “[she] died of an overdose a few years after the war. It looked rather as if it was an accident - she had woken up in the night and taken some sleeping pills - but no one was sure one way or the other”. 

Powell goes on to discuss Evelyn Waugh, and a passage apparently recounted to him by the recipient of this letter. “I was much taken by your story about his dishing out of the pudding”, he claims, “That side of him was far his nicest, and it was the greatest pity that he became so preoccupied with a grotesque picture of himself as a nobleman of the old school…you were very lucky to see a side of him which was in a way much more typical than the less agreeable aspect that so many people now remember”. 

A fascinating letter by the English author best known for his Dance to the Music of Time series.  

SKU: 1800187