Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters - Content of The Correspondence

Content of The Correspondence

The letters are bookish, revealing a shared delight in, and encyclopaedic knowledge of, the English language and its texts. Neither man made claim to expertise in music or the visual arts, where their tastes were conventional; their forte was literature. To admirers of the letters, not least of the pleasures of reading them is being spurred to go and read a poem, a play or a book quoted with approval and delight by one or other of the correspondents. Another diversion is spotting their allusions:

• "Writing in your summer house in January! Please go indoors at once and try no more alfresco composition until the swallow dares. We have aconites and many snowdrops in flower: can Spring be far behind? Yes, it bloody well can, as we shall doubtless see".

• "I am once again writing in my club – and rather slowly, as I must hear why a stoutish man is urging a still stouter one to have a local and not general anaesthetic. I itch to tell the speaker to be more lucid and set my mind at rest on the precise nature and geography of the contemplated operation. I only think, and cannot be absolutely certain, that the trouble calling for the knife is a boil on the gluteus maximus, but it may be that distressing and almost universal complaint. ('Poor Alfred, he's got 'em again,' as Tennyson's doctor said when he read Maud.)"

• "You are hereby absolved from struggling with Finnegans Wake. When an American professor was sent for a review a book called A Key to F.W., he sent it back, saying 'What F.W. needs is not a key but a lock'."

• "I love re-reading. Each night from 10.30 to 12 I read Gibbon out loud. I read slowly, richly, not to say juicily; and like Prospero's isle the room is full of noises – little, dry, gentle noises. Some matter-of-fact man of blunt or gross perceptions might say it was the ashes cooling in the grate, but I know better. It is the little creatures of the night, moths and crickets and spiderlings, a mouse or two perhaps and small gnats in a wailful choir, come out to listen to the Gibbonian music – 'Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; .' – what sentient being, however humble, could resist that?"