Header overlay

. . . to National Treasure

Three summers ago Hugh Massingberd told me he had written a dramatic version of James Lees-Milne’s diaries, and hoped to produce it at the Jermyn Street Theatre. In a somewhat quixotic way I volunteered that Heywood Hill should fill the theatre for the second performance and buy all the available tickets (which were issued under the blanket name of the Duke of Devonshire). Although we had invited many people who had known Jim well, the result was not a total success: they felt uneasy at seeing an actor, albeit a complete professional, playing the part of their old friend, and Moray Watson himself thought he must be doing something wholly wrong.

During the same month Larry McMurtry, novelist and bookseller extraordinary, wrote a brilliant article in the New York Review of Books claiming the Lees-Milne diaries for literature. For anyone who had not known Larry’s remarkable range of reading, or seen his huge private library of Anglophile subjects, this might have seemed an odd pairing: the West Texan cowboy-turned-man-of-letters enthusing about a refined, élitist aesthete from the English gentry. But the article carried considerable conviction and, although the diaries have still not found an American publisher, his essay may well have influenced the amazing rise in price of the early diary volumes ever since.

To get the diaries’ full flavour, Larry had read them from their beginning in 1942 to the date they had reached at that point (1984). This is a luxury I have not yet given myself. When Ancestral Voices was first to be published in 1975, Chatto & Windus knew that it was ‘Heywood Hill’s sort of book’. I asked for the earliest possible proof copy and signed up a large number of customers for the finished book. In my innocence I told Helen Lady Dashwood (‘Hellbags’) that the diaries covered the period when Jim lived at West Wycombe, and she ordered an early copy. A few days after it was published, she appeared in th

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

Three summers ago Hugh Massingberd told me he had written a dramatic version of James Lees-Milne’s diaries, and hoped to produce it at the Jermyn Street Theatre. In a somewhat quixotic way I volunteered that Heywood Hill should fill the theatre for the second performance and buy all the available tickets (which were issued under the blanket name of the Duke of Devonshire). Although we had invited many people who had known Jim well, the result was not a total success: they felt uneasy at seeing an actor, albeit a complete professional, playing the part of their old friend, and Moray Watson himself thought he must be doing something wholly wrong.

During the same month Larry McMurtry, novelist and bookseller extraordinary, wrote a brilliant article in the New York Review of Books claiming the Lees-Milne diaries for literature. For anyone who had not known Larry’s remarkable range of reading, or seen his huge private library of Anglophile subjects, this might have seemed an odd pairing: the West Texan cowboy-turned-man-of-letters enthusing about a refined, élitist aesthete from the English gentry. But the article carried considerable conviction and, although the diaries have still not found an American publisher, his essay may well have influenced the amazing rise in price of the early diary volumes ever since. To get the diaries’ full flavour, Larry had read them from their beginning in 1942 to the date they had reached at that point (1984). This is a luxury I have not yet given myself. When Ancestral Voices was first to be published in 1975, Chatto & Windus knew that it was ‘Heywood Hill’s sort of book’. I asked for the earliest possible proof copy and signed up a large number of customers for the finished book. In my innocence I told Helen Lady Dashwood (‘Hellbags’) that the diaries covered the period when Jim lived at West Wycombe, and she ordered an early copy. A few days after it was published, she appeared in the shop carrying her copy as if with tongs, and asked for it to be credited to her account: she ‘could not have this book in her house’. In contrast, I have since read the diaries as paper-bound proof copies or, more recently, as typescripts which I have been asked to proofread; never as a literary sequence, in the way that I might read Pepys or Parson Woodforde. I had known Jim as a shop customer, one of Heywood’s oldest friends, since 1965. He’d inscribed Ancestral Voices to me as ‘the great salesman’ and I remember feeling a little disappointed that he had made no mention in Through Wood and Dale of a party thrown in Bath soon after the publication of his William Beckford. Jim had invited me, and I was given a bed in his flat in Lansdowne Crescent after dinner. He and Alvilde left for Badminton and I made my independent way back to London the next morning. If I’d been keeping a diary myself, I would certainly have mentioned the Beckford exhibition, to which Jim had contributed, and probably recorded that I wanted to leave a good impression on my first visit. His account of October 1976 makes no mention of the party or the exhibition: in Jim’s life at the time, never less than socially full, they had been a non-event. That single memory prompted me to take down Through Wood and Dale and check some of the contemporary details. Within five minutes I was totally hooked. I followed the story of the Beckford book from the time it had been commissioned, through his doubts over its originality, to the launch in Salisbury the following May. Ancestral Voices, the most explicit of all his diaries, had just been published. Part of him regretted his lack of editing, part of him could not help being gratified by the enthusiastic reviews and letters from friends such as John Betjeman and Patrick Kinross. When comparing the more obviously introspective diaries of Roger Hinks, he wondered why his, ‘which are trivia, tosh compared to his, have been published’; three days later ‘I am feeling low, as if life were ebbing out of me . . .’ Page after page, the reader follows his ups and downs, his frailties and complications, his self-deprecating humanity that never settled into conformism. This autumn, the twelfth and final volume of the diaries, The Milk of Paradise, has been published, prompting congratulations from a friend that I have continued to remain unscathed by Jim’s sharp pen. Now I wonder why I should have escaped. I suspect it was mainly because of his affection for the bookshop, for an institution which he had known from the month when it first opened its doors; where his books were appreciated, his friends encountered, and his high standards, literary and social, maintained. Some years after his The Last Stuarts appeared in 1983, he told me that he had planned to publish it in the mid-’70s, but that it had been turned down. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid I had a hand in that. Chatto asked me to write a reader’s report and I advised them that it needed tightening.’ ‘Oh dear, you must have been right. I looked at it much later and I did do some more work on it, but I was awfully depressed by their rejection.’ Jim knew that I didn’t think much of his novels and, when he submitted to John Murray a fictional version of the months he spent after leaving the army and preceding the period covered in Ancestral Voices, he was anxious that I shouldn’t act as publisher’s reader. He was right to be apprehensive: the fictional reworking was just as unconvincing as his novels and has never seen the light of day. Another Self falls somewhere between fact and fiction. In 1970 it was published and reviewed as autobiography. Jim didn’t admit to it being non vero but, in a unique visit to Heywood Hill during that same year, his brother described it to me as ‘a tissue of lies’. Could Jim have had his tongue in his cheek in choosing Another Self as its title? During the last year of his life he left his flat in Bath and asked me to help with selling most of his working library. He described this process in an ironic introduction to the ‘tribute’ catalogue we had promised him. He felt real pain in parting with so many books at once, especially those with personal associations. He didn’t feel he was a genuine bibliophile (‘never rich enough’), but choosing what had to go was both difficult and melancholy and, when it came to the books being packed into cartons, he asked if I’d mind if he went into another room. Later that day I remember another sad sight. We had had lunch in Bath and he went ahead to fetch his Morris Minor from a multi-storey car park. Not surprisingly, he lost his way and I saw him across the length of Level 3 looking utterly forlorn, a stranger from an older, more civilized world.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 8 © John Saumarez Smith 2005

 

About the contributor

John Saumarez Smith has been buying and selling old and new books at Heywood Hill for forty years.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.