Nobody Ever Writes to Me

Readers of the published letters between George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis are like members of a club to which access is provided by introduction. My own introduction came in Delhi from my Indian dentist, one of the best-read men I have met (and the only dentist of mine who has offered coffee after a session of treatment).

The contributors to this extraordinary correspondence first met at Eton, where Hart-Davis attended Lyttelton’s inspirational ‘English extra studies’ classes for senior boys. When they ran across each other thirty years later at a dinner party, Hart-Davis had become a successful publisher and Lyttelton, ten years retired, led a rusticated existence in Suffolk. ‘Nobody ever writes to me,’ Lyttelton complained, and his former pupil – ‘flushed with wine’ – promised to do so. The two men wrote to each other virtually every week for the next six years, starting in October 1955, the sequence only ending with the older man’s death in April 1962; the last letter, dictated by Lyttelton to his wife, was posted a week before he died. The correspondence was an Olympic feat by both men, albeit for different reasons. Hart-Davis at that time led a life of frantic and scarcely credible complexity. He ran a successful publishing house and frequently chaired committees and public meetings. During four of the six years he was editing the letters of Oscar Wilde, a task that would normally have demanded a full-time writer backed by researchers. He read with a gargantuan appetite, including the eightdetective stories a month which he reviewed for the magazine Time and Tide. He lunched and dined regularly with the great and the good, the roster including Arthur Ransome, Alistair Cooke, Eric Linklater, Osbert Lancaster, Edmund Blunden, Peter Fleming, Raymond Mortimer (‘met on a raft in the Mediterranean’), Joyce Grenfell, Rose Macaulay, J. B. Priestley, Max Beerbohm, Neville Cardus, Somerset Maugham, William Plomer, John Gielgud, T. S. Eliot . . . Whew! On top of all this he had a wife, two sons and a daughter, not to mention a former wife (Peggy Ashcroft) and – as eventually revealed in the letters – a mistress to whom he was devoted. The Hart-Davis element of the letters was largely a record of these non-stop endeavours, or ‘the diary I never kept’. His correspondent’s situation was very different. Lyttelton was for the most part simply at home with his wife, more often than not sitting in his summerhouse. Moreover, aged 72 when the letters started, he was twenty four years Hart Davis’s senior – in his own words ‘a senile and hidebound Victorian’. The age difference led to certain variations in approach. Where Hart-Davis revealed (by degrees) much that was personal, Lyttelton for the most part stayed firmly buttoned up. And yet Lyttelton contributed more than enough to sustain the younger man’s interest over six years, and may be said to have written the better letters. He had a gift for hitting the nail on the head. When Hart-Davis queried ‘Why are no great hymns written today?’ Lyttelton briskly responded, ‘The demand is less and the existing supplies are ample.’ When a Hart-Davis acquaintance was seriously ill, Lyttelton pondered: ‘What a rum thing the whole of man’s existence is – how, why, whence, whither – not one of the four questions ever answered.’ As for the quality of writing, here is Lyttelton (with some help from Keats) on his habit of reading Gibbon aloud to himself late every evening:

Like Prospero’s isle the room is full of noises – little, dry, gentle noises. Some matter-of-fact man of blunt or gross perceptions might say it was the ashes cooling in the grate, but I know better. It is the little creatures of the night, moths and crickets and spiderlings, a mouse or two perhaps and small gnats in a wailful choir, come out to listen to the Gibbonian music . . .

What else did the two men write about? Not science and technology, certainly. (‘Science is a closed book to me,’ Hart-Davis declared firmly.) Not politics, because they agreed so utterly on the paths of righteousness. Both men opened their first letters with ruminations on cricket, foreshadowing more of the same. Both had a healthy interest in food, and included menus of all meals eaten out. They agreed about the importance of rice pudding with rhubarb, but differed over vegetables. ‘I can just tolerate your liking for sprouts,’ Lyttelton wrote. ‘But if you said you didn’t like the broad bean the matter would take a graver turn.’ Other topics popped up in catholic and unpredictable fashion: the nature of genius, obituaries, original sin, men crying, the impotence of George Moore, the transliteration of Russian names, leprosy, crossword puzzles, life after death, whether humility was a necessary ingredient of greatness, smells (Lyttelton liked ‘sacks in a coal-cart, especially after rain’), the opening sentence of the detective story Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles (a discussion that rambled across six letters). However the cornerstone of the correspondence was literature. Both men were passionate on the subject, and the breadth of their reading was prodigious. They quoted endlessly, often from memory (‘as one might say, poured from a vessel full of holes’, Lyttelton qualified), and set each other little tests of knowledge. Once, Hart-Davis quoted a 1913 passage from the American judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Lyttelton batted back the correct identification. Given the discrepancy between their ages, they agreed to a remarkable extent. They both revelled in Carlyle and Johnson but were moreambivalent about Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens. Stevenson, Max Beerbohm and A. E. Housman met with joint approval. Another touchstone, for George Lyttelton in particular, was Earlham, childhood memoirs by Percy Lubbock, whose name forty years after his death has largely been forgotten. They both frowned on D. H. Lawrence, though Hart-Davis defended the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Lyttelton was against (‘It was wrong to write the book and it is wrong to print it’). Other, occasional mild disagreements occurred. For five years Lyttelton badgered his friend to read Richard Llewellyn’s novel How Green Was My Valley, but was himself chary of Scott’s Redgauntlet, until Hart-Davis put him right. Both men read Ian Fleming, whom Lyttelton described as ‘bad and at the same time compellingly readable’. Hart-Davis was more amenable to younger authors (needing to explain that Rumer Godden was a woman), though Lyttelton touchingly tried – against all his instincts – not to be ‘a square’. He read Lawrence Durrell’s Justine and disliked it, and was equally out of sorts with the plays Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer. Lucky Jim received the description ‘the earnest record of trivial people doing and saying trivial things’. Still he persisted, and not only with books. In London he went to see a horror film and fell asleep. Rock bottom in mystification was reached with the Cliff Richard movie Expresso Bongo. Recurring pleasures in the letters are the bon mots and jokes, especially from Hart-Davis. He reported on ‘the overworked law student who confused arson with incest and set fire to his sister’, and ‘the Frenchman who, asked if a gentleman must know Latin and Greek, said “No, but he must have forgotten them”’. He relayed Sarah Bernhardt’s opinion of the Ten Commandments: ‘Zey are too many.’ Lyttelton responded with howlers culled from his literature examination work: one pupil converted old Gaunt’s ‘England this dear dear land’ into ‘England this very expensive land’; another had Lady Macbeth threatening to ‘pluck my nibble from his boneless gums’. In time social historians will discover their own rewards in this treasure-trove. From the era of word-processing it seems quaint to find both men writing with pens (Lyttelton avoiding ‘the beastly biro’ whenever possible). Long passages from literature were written out in longhand, not photocopied, and pleasure derived from the process. Neither man owned a TV. In 1959 Hart-Davis described the precise composition of a Wimpy cheeseburger eaten at a Lyons Corner House. In 1960 he bought a car with a heater, and the following year made his first journey on the M1. Lyttelton prophetically commented, ‘Man will very soon choke himself with his own inventions.’ So delightful are these two well-mannered, civilized correspondents that one wonders whether they can possibly have an Achilles heel? Well yes, perhaps. Rereading the letters this year, I was struck by a blimpishness that had seemed less discordant twenty years earlier. The pair inhabited a closed world, though Hart-Davis was perhaps being tongue-in-cheek when he observed of Harold Macmillan, ‘The new PM I greet with unqualified approval: Eton, Balliol, the Brigade of Guards and a publisher’ (his own c.v. was identical). Many of the footnotes in the published letters relate to former Eton schoolmasters, and people outside the charmed and anointed circle received a different shade of consideration from those inside. Hart-Davis was affronted when a London cabby tried to converse with him (though it has to be admitted some London cabbies are crashing bores). Women were a particular problem. They were mainly secretaries or tea-makers or widows needing consolation. ‘When I was a boy,’ Lyttelton recalled, ‘only about six masters were married and their wives knew their place.’ Ever curious, he wondered whether ‘a woman goes any faster when she runs than she does walking’, and he aired a dislike of ‘ugly women’. Hart-Davis concurred, though ‘occasionally compassion breaks momentarily through my distaste’. If women were on the periphery, foreigners were not allowed inside the circle at all. Hart-Davis travelled abroad rarely, and then always on publishing business, and Lyttelton not at all. Slighting references to foreigners abound. Hart-Davis found Australia ‘that repellent continent’. Lyttelton ‘cannot ever take Americans quite seriously’. New Zealanders and the Chinese all looked the same to him. Even Britishness was not enough. ‘The Scotch are tiresome people, aren’t they?’ Hart-Davis lamented. Hart-Davis’s character was a complex one. ‘Because . . . I am good at getting on with people,’ he wrote in his very first letter, ‘it is assumed that I must like it [publishing], which frankly I do less and less’, a comment which prefigured his status as a virtual recluse later in life. About twice a year he got away with his mistress to the Yorkshire dales, to a one-up, one-down cottage on top of a hill inaccessible to cars, where he slept ten hours a night, read, walked and recharged his batteries after the impossible London existence. From the cottage his normal, serviceable prose almost took wing; he wrote of curlews and primroses, fetching water in buckets from a spring, above all of the silence; then, inevitably, the hateful return, stopping the pendulum of the grandfather clock, closing the cottage door, driving crestfallen to London. Not originally intended for publication, the Lyttelton Hart-Davis letters were eventually published by John Murray and have over the years accumulated a band of enthusiastic devotees. The regularity and frequency of this double-sided exchange means the experience of reading the six volumes is as near as one can hope to get, on the page, to eavesdropping on a conversation of the highest quality. Will the correspondence still be read a hundred years after it was written, as an early reviewer suggested? We shall have to see. As I reread the books at home, a 24-year-old picked one up and asked what it contained. ‘The letters of two men who wrote to each other every week for six years,’ I replied. His baffled response – ‘Why?’ – might have served for an entire texting generation.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 20 © David Spiller 2008