I need a pipe to recover from this…
There I was, happily reading The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters (between former schoolmaster George Lyttelton and publisher Rupert Hart-Davis) and enjoying all the literary gossip when suddenly my favourite of all names popped up: A.A. Milne. It was 1 February 1956 and Milne had died the day before. Lyttelton, remembering Milne vaguely from their overlapping years at Cambridge, wondered if his younger publishing friend has ever encountered Milne – as he seemed to encounter everyone else – while sharing his own memories of the author:
Did you know A.A. Milne? I met him twice at Cambridge half-a-century ago, but cannot remember his saying anything at all; he was extremely shy. I liked his Punch things, though of course the lighthearted “Rabbits” belong to a long dead world, and all our John Wains and Amises would bury them deep in the lumber-room whose door bears the fatal damnation “Escapist”.
If you weren’t around during 2012, you may not know of my love for the Rabbits, a group of young people whose adventures Milne chronicled over the years as they caroused, married, and reproduced. It is a deep and abiding love and if I ever go into publishing the first thing I will do is bring out a single volume collection of all the Rabbit stories. (Or, if you are in publishing already, feel free to steal this idea and save me a great deal of effort and expense.) This is how much I love them. Understandably, I was feeling quite well disposed towards Lyttelton after that (he being decidedly against the John Wains and Amises of the world, though that might not be clear in the above) and the book in general.
But then Hart-Davis replied:
I can’t say I knew A.A. Milne, though I met him sometimes at the house of his father-in-law, Martin de Selincourt, and saw him quite a lot at the Garrick. Not a likeable man, I should say. On top of great natural shyness he cultivated a deep grudge – against life, I suppose, though I can’t imagine why. The combination rendered him pretty well unapproachable…
Gone was my trust in Hart-Davis. To have found Milne unlikeable – particularly in later life when he was haunted by the success of his children’s books – was common enough but I had hoped Hart-Davis was more discerning than that. From there on I read with narrowed eyes, skeptical of his every judgement.
Apparently, I can be a little over sensitive when it comes to my literary heroes!
The Captive Reader 
How I loved this post, from the title onwards! How wonderful to have come across the mention – and then how awry it went!
I had ambitions to request every edition of Punch to the Bodleian and photocopy the Rabbits stories that weren’t included in the books (such things exist and it horrifies me that I can’t read them!) – but I learned that they were too big to be photocopied 😦 One day…
It went so awry! But it’s nice to know other people were thinking of him, albeit with mixed emotions.
How wrong to know there are Rabbits stories hidden away in the pages of Punch only! Does the Bodleian allow hand scanners if the pages won’t fit on the photocopier? That could work…
I am on volume three of these letters. I love the literary gossip, but do find the incessant discussion of whether some one is a “decent chap” or not irritating. I find reminding that both were establishment figures of the time and both were the products of public schools. The old boys network was strong in the fifties and both were men of their times. Their attitudes seem a little hypocritical when one realises that Hart-Davis had a love nest in Yorkshire where he enjoyed cosy weeks with his love, all with the approval of Lyttelton. They still regarded each other as “good sorts”.
I can’t say I was bothered by that, at least in this first volume. It seems pretty natural to want to know what people were like (especially for Lyttelton whose circle was much more limited than Hart-Davis’) and particularly to want to think well of the people whose work you admire. And with Hart-Davis and his wife being sort-of estranged but on very good terms the long-term relationship (with the woman he would later marry) takes on a rather different flavour. I do love that he alludes to it in one of his very first letters to Lyttelton. Definitely ready to overshare!
I should have mentioned his lover was a female worker from the publishing house, and not his wife.