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During my early years as a bookseller, much of each day’s business depended on the post: not just brown envelopes enclosing cheques or less welcome envelopes with publishers’ bills, but orders and gossipy letters from customers and friends. In a minor way I kept up several correspondences, more often with those who lived abroad because I was very unlikely then to contact them by telephone. When Helene Hanff published her 84 Charing Cross Road, we cannot have been the only booksellers who reacted by saying that we had hundreds of such letters in our files. Although I’ve managed to keep some of the most interesting ones, it never occurred to me to suggest that our customers should keep my replies. In fact it would have been extremely presumptuous.

How fortunate, then, that I have been able to edit two two-way correspondences about the bookshop: first, the letters exchanged between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill, and more recently, those between Heywood and myself from 1966 to 1974. In both cases, the enjoyment comes from the striking of sparks: it would be less than half as effective if only one side had been preserved.

This is perfectly illustrated by two collections of the letters of the novelist and short-story writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. The first, Letters, edited by her literary executor William Maxwell (himself a novelist and editor a

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During my early years as a bookseller, much of each day’s business depended on the post: not just brown envelopes enclosing cheques or less welcome envelopes with publishers’ bills, but orders and gossipy letters from customers and friends. In a minor way I kept up several correspondences, more often with those who lived abroad because I was very unlikely then to contact them by telephone. When Helene Hanff published her 84 Charing Cross Road, we cannot have been the only booksellers who reacted by saying that we had hundreds of such letters in our files. Although I’ve managed to keep some of the most interesting ones, it never occurred to me to suggest that our customers should keep my replies. In fact it would have been extremely presumptuous.

How fortunate, then, that I have been able to edit two two-way correspondences about the bookshop: first, the letters exchanged between Nancy Mitford and Heywood Hill, and more recently, those between Heywood and myself from 1966 to 1974. In both cases, the enjoyment comes from the striking of sparks: it would be less than half as effective if only one side had been preserved. This is perfectly illustrated by two collections of the letters of the novelist and short-story writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. The first, Letters, edited by her literary executor William Maxwell (himself a novelist and editor at the New Yorker), was published in 1982; the second, The Element of Lavishness, was the forty-year correspondence, ended by her death in 1978, between these two, which appeared from the small Washington firm Counterpoint in 2001. Both contain delights on every page but the exchange is the more memorable because of the added attraction of overheard conversation. In September 1965 a young friend of Maxwell
had been going through her old letters . . . and suddenly said impatiently, ‘Oh, why don’t people write letters like that any more!’ and handed [it] to her father . . . He turned over the page to look at the signature and it was ‘H. James’ . . . in a much more agile manner than I would have expected . . . so it must have been before the period of stylistic inflation. Anyway, it was lovely, half-legible, full of corrections, sensible, written in a club writing-room, in obvious haste.
To which S.T.W. replied,
‘Why don’t people write letters like this any more?’ They do, of course. You and I do. But somehow the old ones gather a patina, ‘come together’ like a soup on the second day. I am reading Constable’s letters to his wife: they are so direct, so plumb in the middle of Mr and Mrs Constable, that it makes one’s heart stand still.
Their correspondence started when Maxwell became S.T.W.’s editor at the New Yorker. They remained on formal terms, Miss Warner and Mr Maxwell, for many years and did not meet as friends until 1951. But they admired one another’s work from an early stage and, parted by the Atlantic, they always had time to digest a letter’s contents before sitting down to a suitable reply. From my own experience I would guess that they took great care over these letters not because they had publication in mind, but because in both cases they were speaking as natural writers responding to everyday life. Here is S.T.W. on her Siamese cat:
Poor Niou has just had his first affair of the heart, and of course it was a tragedy. As a rule he flies from strange men, cursing under his breath, and keeping very low to the ground. Yesterday an electrician came; a grave mackintoshed man, but to Niou all that was romantic and lovely. He gazed at him, he rubbed against him, he lay in ecstasy on the tool-bag. The electrician felt much the same, and gave him little washers to play with. He said he would have to come again today to finish off properly. Niou awaited him in dreamy transport and practising his best and most amorous squint . . .
As the relationship warmed, they started to make admissions that might have been difficult for them to make to each other in person but which came fluently to them as writers. Thus in April 1958 Maxwell wrote:
I have often thought that we were meant for each other – you to write to me and I to read you – and this carries with it what a loving parent bestows on a child – the color and shape of his eyes, the texture of his hair, the stamp of his characteristic expressions . . . Every sentence I have read of yours gave me immediate intense pleasure . . . the intense pleasure of appreciating a personal style.
Two years later S.T.W. dedicated one of her books to him and he told her that this fulfilled his ultimate and most pleasing ambition. He thanked her with such charm and elegance that in her next letter you can almost hear her purring. Of course, they corresponded on literary subjects because they enjoyed many of the same writers. But there is a great deal more than critical commentary, because they shared a deep interest in la condition humaine (S.T.W. had strong views on how best to approach the work of Balzac). Her subjects ranged from the making of blackcurrant jelly (‘a deep vicious mauve, the exact shade I used to see on high-class fallen women’) to a tartan-covered bedroom in a Teesdale hotel, where the only non-tartans were the flannelette sheets and a picture of the Good Shepherd (‘it was only on our second day that I realized he was not Burns in a rather florid negligée’). She could turn the evolution of the lawnmower into something poetic, lighting up the mundane with an extraordinary phrase. By contrast, Maxwell excelled in narrative. In November 1965 he described the famous New York blackout in such vivid detail that you feel you have been there yourself; he achieved the same effect in writing about a 1951 mini-hurricane in Connecticut. And the skilful editor of the collection, Michael Steinman, weaves these colourful threads together to make a brilliant literary tapestry. In 1975, in a postscript to a letter about money, Maxwell mentioned the increasing price of the Oxford Chekhov for which he had placed a standing order at Heywood Hill. This had an amusing sequel ten years later when I was planning to give a party for the shop’s customers in New York. We had earned a suitable sum of money from Christie’s by introducing business to them, and thought that it could be spent on something relatively frivolous. We searched our files (no computers to help out) and came up with a list of about seventy-five names, nearly all of which I could put to a face. William Maxwell’s name was little known then in England as none of his novels was in print here, but we sent him an invitation which he accepted. Many years later I saw a photograph of him and recognized him as the unknown guest at the party. He had stood at one side of the room and observed the junketings from a safe distance. At one point I was being tugged limb from limb by several eminent hostesses and I caught his eye. I would like to think that he winked, but that was the closest we came to acquaintance. If there was an anthology of letter-writers of the twentieth century, I wouldn’t hesitate to nominate William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner for inclusion.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 10 © John Saumarez Smith 2006


About the contributor

John Saumarez Smith has been looking at letters from his early years at Heywood Hill, from which he has assembled The Spy in the Bookshop, published in 2006.

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