The Captive Reader

I’ve lost track of the number of times I have seen The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters recommended.  If you enjoy literary correspondence, it is invariably on your to-read list.  So, after being reminded of it once again in Browsings by Michael Dirda, I picked up volume one (published in 1978) to make the acquaintance of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis.

In the autumn of 1955, Hart-Davis, a publisher and editor, met his old Eton schoolmaster Lyttleton at a dinner party.  When Lyttelton, retired and in his early 70s, complained no one wrote to him anymore Hart-Davis took up the challenge.  Their correspondence continued until Lyttleton’s death in the early 1960s and filled six volumes (edited and published by Hart-Davis, naturally).  While they discuss their families and other interests (cricket.  So, so much cricket), the focus of their letters is literature which suits me perfectly.

The letters in this first volume are from 1955 and 1956 but little modern literature is discussed.  Both men had middlebrow and rather sentimental tastes: Hart-Davis was Hugh Walpole’s literary executor and biographer, there is much praise of Kipling, and the contemporary distaste for Galsworthy is lamented, particularly by Lyttelton:

Is Angus Wilson a good man?  I see he reduces The Forsyte Saga to dust and ashes in last week’s New Statesman.  How jealous they all were, and still are, of Galsworthy’s immense vogue.  And the line they take is always so lofty that they miss the main point – that so many of his characters do strike the ordinary reader as being live men and women, and one reads on wanting to know how they got out of their difficulties, and usually satisfied with the way they do it, and with G’s comments, and elucidations, and undertones throughout.  And I’ll eat my hat if “Indian Summer of a Forsyte” is not a beautiful and moving bit of writing.  But what frightful contempt our highbrow critics pour on that view.  (8 March 1956)

Through his publishing work, Hart-Davis was well-connected to the literary world while Lyttelton remained resolutely outside but deeply fascinated by it.  He often asked Hart-Davis’ opinions of certain literary figures, like the question above about Angus Wilson or his query after A.A. Milne’s death.  The correspondence must have been an exciting addition to his relatively quiet life.  However, Hart-Davis tried to make it clear from the earliest letters that he too had something to gain from the letter-based friendship with a man he said had the gifts of “a mixture of psychiatrist and father-confessor”:

Don’t think for a moment that this delightful correspondence is solely for your benefit: it is pure self-indulgence.  You are the diary I have never kept, the excuse I have so long wanted for forming words on paper unconnected with duty or business. (6 November 1955)

They are at their best when discussing certain books or just describing their love of books.  Lyttelton was particularly delighted whenever Hart-Davis sent him parcels of well-selected books from London – one of the definite benefits of having a friend in publishing:

The breakfast table this morning had that best of all objects – far better even than a dish of salmon kedgeree, or a headline in The Times saying the atom bomb had been abolished, or that the price of coal was down – viz a fat little parcel of books.  And the content of those books!  Exactly the sort of literature I love – comments wide and deep on men and things and books by a wise man who knows how to write.  Life has, at all events at 73, no greater pleasure than that.  (9 May 1956)

And it is up to Lyttelton, as the elder, to provide his opinions on the foolishness of youth.  He complains about a young writer’s idiotic but absolute confidence (“Why has he not learnt that a little real humility sharpens the perceptions wonderfully and has other good effects too.  What a strong tendency there is today to lay down the law about what one may or must, and may not and must not, admire.”)  and chastises those who don’t know how to properly spend their holidays:

It is all to the good that you are having a good laze.  Curiously few people are sensible about holidays; if not walking, they go sightseeing and to picture-gallery after p.g. of all fatiguing activities.  Many play golf, and the odd effect of that pursuit is that they return to work manifestly stupider than they were.  (18 May 1956)

Hart-Davis remains a little less opinionated and a little less interesting because of it.  He seems to have had a fascinating family life, though it is not discussed deeply.  His adored mother had died when he was young (he later wrote a book about her), his uncle was Duff Cooper (he goes to visit the widowed Diana Cooper in France and meets a predictably cosmopolitan array of visitors at her home), and he took holidays with his long-time companion (whom he later married) while he and his wife remained on good terms and stayed married until the children grew up.

In the end, it’s not a spectacular correspondence.  Neither man was a brilliant writer and neither offered much of themselves in their letters.  And there is too much talk of cricket (any cricket is too much).  But it remains mildly interesting and I could see myself picking up the next volume.