Who says we should never complain? Consider the following. In October 1955 George Lyttleton, a retired Eton master, then seventy-two, was dining with, among others, his former student, the distinguished publisher and man of letters Rupert Hart-Davis. When Lyttleton grumbled that nobody wrote to him anymore, Hart-Davis gallantly promised to do so. Five days later he made good on the pledge; Lyttleton responded; and thus was launched, by a stray bleat of self-pity, a weekly correspondence that, when it ended with Lyttleton’s death in 1962, had generated about six hundred of the most delightful letters in English. These, edited by Hart-Davis, were published between 1978 and 1984, but the six volumes have since gone out of print. This selection is therefore overdue and more than welcome.

The main currency of exchange here is, not surprisingly, literary chatter. Although the two men share many tastes—both revere Carlyle and Beerbohm (“He was the perfect petit maître … adorning all he touched,” Hart-Davis sighs upon Sir Max’s death in 1956)—they also play off each other. For his part, Lyttleton assumes the role of rusticated codger, “full of Victorian prejudice.” “In ten years’ time,” he predicts, “I shall be left high and dry by modern literature, and in writing to me you will feel you have joined the spiritualists and are communicating with a ghost.” Counters Hart-Davis: “Your fear of senectitude and hardening of the literary arteries seems to me morbid.” Lyttleton lovingly tends his herd of bêtes noires, doting especially on D. H. Lawrence, F. R. Leavis (sometimes referred to as “the man L—v-s”), and, regrettably, like Mark Twain, “the woman Austen.” In response, Hart-Davis teases him for his masochistic persistence in reading writers he dislikes. Yet Lyttleton isn’t all crotchets; he also produces some cracking anecdotes:  

Old Maugham, talking to a girls’ school about the art of writing short stories, told them that the essential ingredients were religion, sex, mystery, high rank, non-literary language, and brevity. The schoolmistress next day told her young charges to try their hand at one according to this recipe. After a minute one raised her hand and said she had finished. The incredulous mistress told her to read it out, and she did: ‘My God!’, said the duchess, ‘I’m pregnant. I wonder who done it’.

Meanwhile Hart-Davis, in city pent, reports on the latest hurly-burly:

I asked J.B.P. [Priestley] about his unhappy trip to Australia, where he clearly put the natives’ backs up, as he inevitably does wherever he goes. ‘What did you say to upset them?’ I asked. ‘Nothing at all’, says he—and then, after a pause, ‘I did say that their big cities reminded me of Wolverhampton after a long dry spell—but nothing else’.

Having taken upon himself the Herculean task of editing Oscar Wilde’s letters, Hart-Davis also provides for Lyttleton a running account of the attendant thrills and irritations. “Vyvyan Holland [Wilde’s son] is trying to make me bowdlerise Oscar’s letters,” he groans at one point, and at another pillories an “incredibly addle-witted society woman” who in her memoirs had printed four Wilde letters:

Mrs. Beddington seemed to think that to have received a letter from Oscar would brand anyone as a pervert down the ages. I told her I had letters to 250 men and women, including Browning, Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, Irving, Ellen Terry, Whistler, Bernard Shaw, Ruskin etc etc, and she really couldn’t think them all queer.

By no means, however, does the correspondence entirely consist of bookish banter; what Hart-Davis says of Lyttleton’s letters, that they are “interspersed with so much else of shrewd comment on men and things,” holds equally true for his own. Some of this material—the talk of cricket, and of the quaint foibles of dons and beaks; the potshots at Winchester (“A common Wykehamist trait,” snipes Lyttleton, “is to suspect the sincerity of all non-Wykehamists”)—will appeal only to diehard Anglophiles. But most is of broader interest, and the pair can be counted on for amusing, cant-free observations about everything from religion and politics to food—“Do you agree,” Lyttleton asks, “with [George Saintsbury’s] dictum that whenever you are offered fried sole, whatever may be the alternatives, fried sole should be your choice?”—and even health. Thus Lyttleton again:

I have a pain in the chest—probably some form of dyspepsia. My family cheerfully suggest angina pectoris. How scored off they would feel if they turned out right! Was it not Walter de la Mare who said what splendid names for heroine and villain Lady Angina Pectoris and Sir Rheumatoid Arthritis would be?

Nor is sardonic humor the only note struck here, for real intimacy springs up between the two men. In the letters’ most startling moment, Hart-Davis, braced for opprobrium, comes clean to Lyttleton about his sexless marriage and love for another woman. To the former’s surprise, Lyttleton, elsewhere so prudish as to approve the Chatterley ban, expresses complete sympathy and is soon a valued confidant. For Lyttleton himself the rewards are richer still: the correspondence becomes a lifeline of sorts, Hart-Davis’s trusty dispatch the bright spot in his week. All of which makes the whole affair quite moving and—in balance with the rumpled erudition and offhand wit—elevates it past divertissement to the dignity of what we might call, to Lyttleton’s and Hart-Davis’s certain horror, something not unlike art.

That The Lyttleton Hart-Davis Letters are ripe for parody would never have occurred to me, but such proves to be the case. The Marsh Marlowe Letters, originally published in 1984, is a wicked spoof by the humorist Craig Brown, here operating under a facetious editorial pseudonym. With his keen eye for affect, Brown pounces on all the Etonians’ plummy little mannerisms: their clubbiness, mutual flattery, pedantic allusions, gratuitous Gallicisms, and Latin tags flaunted like designer labels. “Entre nous,” purrs Gerald Marsh (Brown’s caricature of Lyttleton), “which method do you employ for blowing your nose?” Replies Harvey Marlowe: “I blow my nose with a handkerchief. Et toi?” Concurs Marsh: “I, too, swear by the humble handkerchief: heaven forfend that I ever contemplate the usage of another. How eminently civilised we both are!” And so on. Whether Brown is motivated more by malice or affection I find curiously hard to judge. Regardless, The Marsh Marlowe Letters, like any good satire, at once deflates and enshrines its object.

Both these books are available from the superbly discerning mail-order outfit A Common Reader,[1] whose catalogs make better reading than most publishers’ lists and whose spirit of genial belles-lettres is substantially the same one exemplified by those two dear fossils, George Lyttleton and Rupert Hart-Davis.

Notes
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1. To order, call (800) 832–7323, or go to www.commonreader.com. Go back to the text.