Men of letters of the 20th century

The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters

From Wikipedia: ‘The Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters are a correspondence between two literary Englishmen, George Lyttelton (1883–1962) and Rupert Hart-Davis (1907–99), written between 1955 and Lyttelton's death, and published by Hart-Davis in six volumes between 1978 and 1984.’

A funny thing happened: we visited friends who live in Ireland, and whose house we haven’t been to for a long time. Our host returned a book to me, which he said he had borrowed 40 years ago – it was the first volume of the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis letters, which either you know all about or you are looking blank.

George Lyttelton was a retired Eton teacher, a member of a privileged family. One of his former pupils was Rupert Hart-Davis (equally privileged), who had gone into publishing and then after the war started his own eponymous imprint.

They met occasionally at the kind of events men of their kind meet at. And then in the mid-1950s Lyttelton happened to complain to Rupert that no-one ever wrote to him. (To me, btw, one is obviously Surname and the other First Name).

Rupert said he would write to his old teacher, and stuck to it, and they began a correspondence that lasted till Lyttelton’s death in 1962.

Lyttelton was living in retirement in Suffolk, Rupert was an extremely busy man of letters: running his company, writing and editing books, and also the ultimate committee man, being very active in the Royal Literary Fund, the London Library, The Literary Society, the Johnson Society. He was giving speeches and attending dinners, hosting visiting Americans, having small lunch parties at the Garrick Club.

choristers, Oxford 1921

But they obviously got on extremely well and both got a lot out of the correspondence – Rupert used it as a diary, Lyttelton perhaps had an eye to future publication. Both of them talk about books, and about authors and writers they know, and Eton people, and Oxford and Cambridge, and swap anecdotes and quotations.

I read the entire correspondence when first published, and when moving house recently and discarding books, got rid of the later vols because I no longer had the first (no memory of lending it to the friend!). So when it was returned, I fully intended to glance at it, skim a little, then donate to Oxfam. You can see what’s coming can’t you? I could not put it down, read all of it very quickly, had to immediately order second-hand copies of the other volumes and threw in a biog of RHD for good measure. Ah me. When am I going to get on to reading the Booker shortlist?

The books, and the men, are deeply infuriating to someone like me – if I were a few years older I could have been one of the O Level candidates from state schools that Lyttelton (who marks the exams) is intensely snooty about - they are, of course, not as good as Eton boys. I didn’t live in a big house, know everyone, have an easy path to higher education, get jobs via someone having a word in the right place – and both men are very rude about women who aren’t pretty enough for their exacting standards. They are shockingly entitled, privileged, snobbish, racist, misogynist. They simply assume that they are effortlessly superior to those not of their kind (and to almost all women). Yet somehow, I did enjoy the letters, though I’d be hard put to say why.

Eton boys, 1917

There are life details of the 1950s – Rupert does not reveal his wife’s first name till a long way into the exchanges (it is Comfort, unusually enough, though Wikipedia says she was Catherine Comfort, so chose this name over the not-unusual one) and then in 1958, 3 years in to the correspondence, there is quite the revelation about his personal affairs. This was one of the items I remembered best about the books, because of the strange insinuating way it came out, not because I was shocked.

Rupert splits his time between the family house in Henley and a flat above his publishing office in Soho in London. He also has a very basic (but beautiful-sounding) cottage in Yorkshire. His children are growing up and doing different things. Lyttleton has grownup children and grandchildren, all frequent visitors.

They discuss all this, and recommend books and poems to each other. Rupert enables Lyttelton to come to various literary events to their great delight, and also can send him books from his back catalogue – L is definitely the net gainer here, but Rupert is very sweet about his insistence that they have an equal partnership – and he enjoys seeing the letters as a diary.

Rupert was, plainly a very good and much-loved editor of books, and for example prepared a major collection Osar Wilde’s letters. That makes it all the more odd that this book has a strange lack. No editor ever gets footnotes right – they are either too much for this individual reader, or too little, that’s a personal thing depending on how much you know. (plus, more than 40 years since HD prepared the letters for publication, people’s knowledge has changed.) BUT – after the first two letters in each book, he does not include any greeting or farewell, he literally does not say who each letter is from. Now, when you are reading away you can more or less work it out, reasonably quickly – but not always. Usually the home address will tell you – but both of them travel, or write from ‘the summerhouse’, Keld, Hagley Hall, The Briary. (How dare he assume we know what those places are?) Most of the time there is a clear rhythm, back and forth, one from each, but obviously that occasionally gets out of line. It beats me that someone who was obviously a careful, thoughtful editor and publisher, producing something so personal, has collected 6 volumes of thousands of letters, almost none of which are labelled properly… So a resulting oddity is that their names scarcely appear in the book – apart from Lyttelton endearingly introducing a new subject with ‘I say, Rupert…’

The letters are full of old-person grump – I love Lyttelton serenely claiming that in 50 years it will be the Forsyte Saga that is read, while Mrs Dalloway will be forgotten. They don’t have any time for angry young men, Kingsley Amis isn’t funny, on and on in a wholly predictable manner. Their lives and privilege are being swept away by evil Labour governments, and there is no-one to do the housework – the fact that they can’t get staff obviously reflects badly on the workers, not on the employers.

And yet, and yet, when they avoid all that, it is fun to read their bitching, their incomprehensible (to me) cricket talk, their kindliness to one another. When I re-read them I realized that a few things had entered my head from the books and never left, 40 years ago.

They share a great love for a very obscure book, which I read as a result of this – another post forthcoming on that book (by Percy Lubbock) and more to say on the letters, and on Lyttelton’s son Humphrey.

The Oxford choristers 'probably' from Magdalen College, 1921, Swedish Heritage Board.

 The Eton boys photo, 1917, is from the Dutch National Archive.

(No, no idea why Northern European archives were the place to look.)