It is a tired, old complaint that no one writes letters any more. Sadly, it is a justified tired, old complaint. Certainly we communicate to a level of speed, frequency and volubility that would not have been thought possible even a decade ago. Homes, offices, restaurants, concert halls, even the streets are loud as a tropical rainforest with the squawks and warbles of cellphones. Anyone nowadays fleeing the calls of creditors, would-be debtors, spurned lovers or the mammy, would need to hide on the dark side of the moon, or the dark side of Howth Head, which must be the only two places left in the vicinity of Earth still unreachable by mobile.
What is being communicated? There may be Ciceros of cyberspace, there may be Hazlitts of the e-mail, but for the rest of us, modern methods of exchanging information are peculiarly soulless. In the early days of computerisation in this newspaper, when suddenly we found that we could contact via the computer screen a colleague sitting on the other side of a desk, some enlightened authority would flash a message a couple of times each day to all staff exhorting us to SPEAK TO EACH OTHER! One took the point.
The trouble with e-mails is that they are perilously easy to write. Open that screen and suddenly the tongue is loosed, as it were. People whom we would otherwise have the greatest awkwardness in approaching - bosses, bank managers, that smasher in accounts - can be addressed with all the assurance of a snake-oil salesman. Yet when one takes the time to look at the messages one has written before pressing the "send" button, how flat they are, how fleeting the sentiments, how glib the style. Why was it different in the days of pen and ink, or even the typewriter? Somehow, words graven on paper have a weight, one might even say a monumentality, that is lacking in the missives we send out into the ether, which evanesce as quickly and thoroughly as ether itself.
Or is this plaint merely one of the signs of increasing age?
There have been great collections of letters; one thinks at once of the published correspondence of Flaubert, Proust, Henry James - perhaps the finest letter-writer of all - of the superb epistolary duelling matches between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson. The Lyttelton-Hart-Davis letters occupy a lower shelf than those majestic volumes, but they represent a not inconsiderable literary achievement all the same.
The Hon George William Lyttelton was the second son of the fifth Lord Lyttelton and, more interestingly, perhaps, father of the trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton; the latter fact was a source of some surprise but of unfailing pride to Lyttelton pΦre. He was a teacher of classics at Eton, where his uncle was headmaster. In 1945 he retired to his much-loved home at Grundisburgh in Suffolk, where he supplemented his pension by the thankless task of setting and correcting O-level examination papers. He seems to have been a jolly old boy; Humph's memories of his dad, quoted in the editor's introduction, are "mostly light-hearted if not actually frivolous" - he recalls the "serious talk" he had from him at puberty: "Eschew evil!" the pater boomed, "and then gave me a heavy paternal bang on the shoulder and left the room, humming to himself".
Rupert Hart-Davis was the son of a stockbroker who was married to the sister of Duff Cooper, MP, minister, ambassador and husband of the famously beautiful Diana Cooper nΘe Manners, the model for Mrs Stitch in Evelyn Waugh's pre-war comic novels. As if that much geneaology were not enough, Rupert in fact suspected that his real father was Gervase Beckett, a banker and MP. Ah, those well-bred flappers . . . Rupert tried his hand at acting, then went into publishing, working for Heinemann and Cape, and then set up his own imprint. His was a successful literary house, no small achievement even in his day; one of his authors described him as "a publisher of outstanding genius with the heart of a horse-coper". He died in 1999, aged 92.
At Eton, young Rupert Hart-Davis had been a pupil of George Lyttelton's, and retained fond memories of him. The two subsequently met on a few occasions, and at a dinner party in 1955, Lyttelton complained that he was bored in Suffolk, where "nobody even writes to me". Hart-Davis on the instant said that he would write to him. And he did. The two corresponded from then until 1962, when Lyttelton died. In 1978, the publisher John Murray issued the first volume of the Lyttelton-Hart-Davis letters, to instant critical and popular success. A further five volumes followed. Now Roger Hudson, the original editor of all six volumes, has brought out a selection.
The tone of the letters is nicely captured in the six epigraphs chosen by Hudson, including Dr Johnson's observation that "there is no transaction which offers stronger temptation to sophistication and fallacy than epistolary intercourse", and Sydney Smith's less orotund quip: "Correspondences are like small-clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up". That is neatly put, but hardly applicable in the case of these two tireless men of letters.
What we have here is a portrait of middle- to upper middle-class life in England in the years after the war and into the hedonistic 1960s, a decade neither man much cared for, even though one of them only lived through the first couple of years of it. However, despite his deprecation of the times - sleazy bars, plummeting academic standards, galloping Americanisation - Hart-Davis was called and appeared as a witness for the defence in the Lady Chatterley court case, surely one of the defining events of English cultural life in the last century. It formed the only area of serious disagreement between the correspondents: Lyttelton thoroughly disapproved - "It was wrong to write the book, and it is wrong to print it" - not least out of disgust at the high-minded talk of freedom of expression and so on by the publisher, Alan Lane, which was, Lyttelton believed, a hypocritical cover for the fact that Lane's Penguin Books stood to make a fortune out of the paperback edition of Chatterley.
For the most part, however, both men cheerfully ignore the great world-historical events of their time. Like all Englishmen of their class, there was a strong streak of the schoolboy in both of them. A favourite subject is food, and whenever they have been out to lunch or dinner they never fail to give a loving description of the tuck: "We had mince and egg with rice pudding at lunch today - both first rate!" What on Earth, one wonders, is mince and egg . . .? They like to gossip, too, and there are some choice, if slightly dated, titbits scattered through these pages. They are enthusiastic and eclectic readers. Their tastes are broad, liberal-ish, and definite. They loathe Lolita, but admire The Hostage - "very Irish, very fast, very gay" - cannot see the point of most of Jane Austen, somewhat surprisingly, and love Shakespeare's poetry but hate the plays - Lyttelton: "I don't believe he cared twopence about his plots or characters; he did care about words, and had the most overwhelming command of them that ever was".
Indeed, more than class, more than taste, more than their particular brand of patriotic Englishness, it is the love of words that most closely binds these two men in friendship. Commenting on Wodehouse, Lyttelton states their credo: "The simple truth is that we share an intense delight in seeing language perfectly handled, no matter what the subject".
The compression lent by the selection process gives to this volume a certain narrative tension. We discover half-way through that Hart-Davis has a lover of long standing, Ruth Simon - well, his wife was called Comfort - about whom, once he has confessed, he has much to say in the letters. Lyttelton is indulgent, and the tact and kindness of his responses to the lovers' confidences is admirable; as age and illness encroach on him, however, one seems to catch a note of melancholy envy on the part of the older man, a note of which Hart-Davis seems oblivious. But then, people in love are notoriously insensitive to the pains of others.
This is a wonderful book, brimming with wit, gossip, elegant aperτus, and lit throughout by the glow of mutual fondness. Jokes abound; here are two. "Apparently President Kennedy is a great one for the girls, and during the election his opponents said that if he got to the White House they only hoped he would do for fornication what Eisenhower did for golf." Visiting a girls' school, Somerset Maugham pronounced that the essential ingredients of a short story are religion, sex, mystery, high rank, non-literary language and brevity. Next day the schoolmistress set her charges to write an essay according to this recipe. "After a minute one 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.' "
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times