Learned Discourse in the Pre-Screen Age
Today’s dispatch? The letters of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis, two names that might as well be scrawled on the back of a dusty pub coaster for all the recognition they get in our lobotomized age.
Lyttelton’s name flickered faintly in my mind, like a half-remembered tavern sign, but I hadn’t a clue why anyone would bother printing his private scribblings with a friend. My first guess? Maybe they were a pair of buttoned-up Anglican conservatives, penning coded love notes in a clandestine romp that would’ve made the vicar blush.
Wrong.
These weren’t star-crossed gay lovers or political firebrands. They were just men of letters: Lyttelton, an Eton professor steeped in classics and English lit, and Hart-Davis, a publisher with ink in his veins.
In these letters, they scratch out their thoughts in mid-twentieth-century England, back when erudite gents with a knack for words were as common as pigeons in Trafalgar Square.
Politics? They gave it a wide berth, proving Russell Kirk’s point that only the quarter-educated bother with that circus. Religion? Not their bag. Marriage? Lyttelton was content with his wife, while Hart-Davis juggled.
These two were the kind of blokes you’d kill to share a pint with. Their letters crackle with wit sharp enough to slice through the fog of our current idiocy.
Lyttelton, with a gimlet eye, notes that every great womanizer—Casanova, John Wilkes, H.G. Wells—was dog-ugly. Hart-Davis tosses off gems about Max Beerbohm and P.G. Wodehouse. He skewers Lady Chatterley’s Lover, not for its naughty bits, but for being a snooze, which is a literary crime far worse than obscenity. And who knew that King George V dragged himself to the opera once a year, picking La Bohème because it was the shortest?
My only bone to pick is Hart-Davis calling George Gissing’s work “dull.” That stings. Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is a quiet masterpiece, a book that hums with the ache of a world already slipping away.
I would’ve loved to have shared a few drinks with them. Hell, I’d settle for the booth next to theirs, straining to catch their quips through those thick British accents.
In an era when conversation has been reduced to emoji grunts and TikTok spasms, these letters are a middle finger to our cultural rot. They remind us of a time when minds met without screens, when ideas weren’t pre-chewed by algorithms. Lyttelton and Hart-Davis weren’t just writing letters; they were building a bulwark against the creeping banality that’s now our daily bread. We’d do well to take a page from their book: find a bar, order a proper drink, and let the words flow like they used to, before the world traded wit for Wi-Fi.