Men and Women of Letters

 What is, or was, a man or woman of letters? Does the phrase still have any meaning or value? These questions have been on my mind recently because I have been re-reading two biographies by my friend of more than fifty years, John Smart: Tarantula’s Web, John Hayward, T.S. Eliot and their Circle (Michael Russell, 2012) and Shores of Paradise, The Life of Sir John Squire: The Last man of Letters (Matador, 2021) Each book is about someone who in his day was certainly thought of as ‘a man of letters’; one of them has those words on his gravestone. But what does the phrase really signify? Who qualifies? Who doesn’t?

Originally, to be ‘a man of letters’ just meant you were literate. However, by the mid-eighteenth century it could be applied to – and adopted by – people such as Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose public persona was as a writer whose range included fiction, poetry, literary criticism (Preface to Shakespeare, 1765, in particular), travel writing, and of course lexicography. In an age in which the essay as a literary form was taken seriously, he was widely admired for the essays he published in his twice-weekly newsletter, The Rambler. He gave his readers to understand that literature could not only give pleasure but could also enhance one’s moral, intellectual and imaginative understanding of life. He was a writer who used his standing as an author and critic to advocate for, and comment on, literature as something essential for society and the individual.   

By the nineteenth century, ‘man of letters’ had become a widely recognised term, but with two not quite overlapping meanings. First, it was used to identify people who had established reputations particularly through literary journalism and publications aimed at a wider, educated but not academic audience. Second, and largely through a series of literary biographies launched in 1878 called simply English Men of Letters, it came to refer to any prominent writer within a range of fields – history, philosophy, poetry and fiction – ranging from Chaucer to Thackeray but including (at first) only one woman, George Eliot. 

The author of the George Eliot biography was Sir Leslie Stephen, who had contributed the opening book in the series, appropriately on Samuel Johnson. Stephen was a quintessentially Victorian man of letters and the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, to which he personally contributed over 370 biographical essays. To most people today, however, he is best remembered as the father of the artist Vanessa Bell and her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf. During the twentieth century, in addition to her formidable achievements as a novelist, Woolf championed the literary essay as collected, for instance, in her books The Common Reader (first and second series: 1925,1932).  A woman of letters? Without a doubt.

Virginia Woolf’s phrase, ‘common reader’, is significant. She addressed all those who had in common an interest in literature. Herself denied a university education by her father,  Woolf wrote for an audience outside the walls of the universities: an audience of people who enjoyed reading for pleasure but who took seriously books and what writers of the past and present had to say; these were people who recognised that literature mattered to them and who believed that literature matters, full stop. You did not have to have a degree in English Literature to qualify; in fact it might disqualify you.

You don’t hear the phrase ‘man of letters’ much these days and this is not just because of its gendered connotation. (Virginia Woolf dealt with that, forensically and passionately, in A Room of One’s Own.) As the twentieth century progressed, the term ‘man of letters’ suffered  because, by contrast with the more serious-sounding ‘literature’, the very word ‘letters’ seemed to imply some frivolous, mannered, dilettante; hence, ‘man of letters’ came to identify writers (essayists especially) tainted by association with the outdated tradition of ‘belles-lettres’.  How easily then do the subjects of the two biographies I have been re-reading wear the mantle of man of letters? JC Squire (1884-1958, familiarly known as Jack Squire) and John Hayward (1905-1965) were both clubbable figures easily identified in the London literary world. Both considered themselves to be men of letters (it was Hayward whose gravestone describes him thus) but they were not friends with each other and their spheres of influence were polar opposites. The one word on Squire’s gravestone was ‘Poet’. 

Squire had risen to prominence both as a poet and as a reviewer and journalist for The New Age and the New Statesman before and during the First World War. As a poet, he was always identified as a contributor to the Georgian Poetry anthologies; his greatest achievement as a man of letters was to found and edit the London Mercury, which became in the entre deux guerres period of the twenties and thirties a very successful and influential journal. He was knighted for his services to literature. The latter years of Squire’s life, frankly but sympathetically described in John Smart’s biography of him, make sad reading, but he was admired by many loyal friends. John Betjeman was one such; indeed, in several respects (as Smart suggests) he can be seen as Squire’s successor. Both men were clearly antagonistic towards, and despised by, the literary avantgarde; each of them had a strong and abiding affection for England and traditional English life and culture. Both were prominent conservationists (Squire had led a successful and very public campaign to ensure the landscape around that Stonehenge would be properly preserved and protected) and each of them embraced the new media of their day. Squire was an early and popular voice on the radio – he was the first person to provide live commentary on the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race – while Betjeman became famous for his idiosyncratic television documentaries. Embracing the opportunities offered by the new mass media greatly increased the public appeal of both Sir Jack and Sir John as writers.

The trajectory of John Hayward’s life as a man of letters was rather different. He knew from an early date exactly what he wanted to be: writing at the start of the Second World War, he explained, ‘When I was a little boy I used to play at being a man of letters. This engrossing game of make-believe kept me quiet for years on end.’ From childhood onwards he was severely handicapped by muscular dystrophy, but he never let this embitter him, unless his reputation for having a biting satirical wit betrayed his frustration at a life lived mainly in a wheelchair. By the time he left school (Gresham’s, where as editor of the school magazine, he was the first person to publish the poems of his younger contemporary, WH Auden) he was already being taken seriously as a scholarly editor of seventeenth and eighteenth century poets. He was commissioned by Nonesuch Press to edit the poems of Lord Rochester even before he had gone up to King’s College, Cambridge. While still an undergraduate he was being described as ‘charming, and brilliant and the most erudite bibliomane in King’s bar none.’ His Nonesuch edition of the poetry and selected prose of John Donne sealed his reputation as an editor; by the end of the Thirties,  when he was still only 35, his wide circle of Bloomsbury and Cambridge contacts and friends (of whom TS Eliot was to become the most significant) ensured he was well known both in Britain and abroad as an important reviewer and commentator on the London literary scene . 

Poetry editions and anthologies added further to Hayward’s visibility and reputation. From 1934-1938 he was chief London editor of the New York Sun, for which he wrote a regular column called ‘London Letter’. Full of literary news and gossip, as well as reviews of books, plays and exhibitions, this column had the breadth and informality that today one might associate with a blog or a podcast. After the war much of his literary attention was focused on editing a new journal, The Book Collector. For this, too, he wrote a regular column that became essential reading for anyone interested in the world of books, book collecting and literary life. He himself by this time was recognised as one of the most important authorities both on the history of the printed book and on the great private collections of books held in Britain but increasingly dispersed and sold (often to American universities) in the postwar period. Hayward and Squire were very different characters and John Smart places them firmly in the centre of their different London circles: Hayward’s (his spider’s web – ‘Tarantula’ was his nickname) the world of The Criterion, Faber & Faber and the salon of Lady Ottoline Morrell; Squire’s (the Squirarchy) the world of Edward Marsh, Harold Monro and the Georgian Poetry anthologies, of cricket and of his own magazine, The London Mercury. 

Coming back to both these biographies, as I have been doing ever since I learned with distress last summer that John Smart had died, has made me realise – more clearly than before – how valuable these two books are. Taken together, they map the landscapes of literary London in the first half of the twentieth century in a way that has not been done by anyone else. They reveal too, at once critically and sympathetically, just how deeply both Squire and Hayward cared about literature past and present, about reading and about the contribution of literature to the health of society. These, I am sure, are essential characteristics of men and women of letters writing at any time and in any country. Men and women of letters still exist (of course they do) and their participation in debates about literature and their encouragement of reading is as important as ever; these days, however, they simply travel under a different passport.

Lives of writers, and of their biographers, matter too. Re-reading both Tarantula’s Web and Shores of Paradise I have heard John’s voice alongside the voices of Hayward and Squire, whom he brought to life in a way many historians and biographers never quite manage with their subjects. John’s research was formidable, his knowledge of English poetry ditto, but his writing was always accessible and never pedantic. Sometimes (especially in his writing about Squire) I have heard John chuckling, too; his quiet amusement – his wry response to the vicissitudes of life and to the foibles of students, colleagues or friends –always at hand. He loved his family and his home, his books and his wine; he enjoyed company and was an excellent host but he loved, too, simply to be out walking with his dogs or watching birdlife on the Norfolk marshes. He was one of the least self-important people I have ever known, and I would say of John Smart that he was the kind of teacher whom alumni remember with affection and gratitude. As indeed do I. More than ever now, I admire him as the teacher and writer I knew for over fifty years – we met in Durham on the same PGCEd course in 1971 – and I shall always remember our friendship as one of the most important of my life.

In Tarantula’s Web, I came across this in the Acknowledgements: ‘Adrian Barlow is the godfather of this book. He first gave me the idea of writing about John Hayward and using the papers at King’s that had been embargoed until 2000.’  And after that book was published, John rang me about a possible subject for his next biography. ‘I’m thinking of JC Squire – what do you think? he asked, slightly nervous when he heard me burst out laughing. 'I think it’s an excellent idea,’ I replied, ‘especially as at this very moment my feet are resting on an almost complete set of The London Mercury someone has just bequeathed to me. Would you like them?’ John generously mentioned this too in the Acknowledgements of Shores of Paradise. I cannot adequately express how glad I am that our friendship led to the writing of two such books.

© Adrian Barlow, 2025

Illustrations: (i) the two books by John Smart under discussion; (ii) the title page of Virginia Woolf’s book, The Common Reader (second series). The Epigraph reads: “... I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be generally decided all claim to poetical honours.” Dr. Johnson, Life of Gray; (iii) Sir John Squire; The Book Collector - the yellow-covered copy is Volume 1, No. 1; (iv) John Smart’s biography of John Hayward, Tarantula’s Web.

I have also written about John Smart in two previous posts:

Tarantula: John Hayward, Man of Letters

At the Biographers’ Club Prize Dinner

Solomon Eagle: re-reading Defoe in the time of Coronavirus

In which I resolve to spend this period of enforced isolation writing letters by hand, re-reading Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and re-starting my blog.

You’d think that self-isolation and social distancing offer plenty of opportunities for reading and writing. And so, of course, they do. I have made a list of the friends and others to whom I owe long-overdue letters, and have even made a start at writing them, by hand and using a fountain pen. The last study day I conducted before such events were proscribed was on Seamus Heaney; my audience of students (people, like me, at risk from Covid-19 by virtue of our age) especially enjoyed his poem The Conway Stewart with its loving description of the ‘Three gold bands in the clip-on screw-top’ and the ‘spatulate, thin / Pump-action lever’ in the pen’s ‘mottled barrel’. The poem recalls how Heaney’s parents bought him a fountain pen to take to boarding school, the pen with which he would write his first letter home –

     my longhand

‘Dear’

To them, next day.

No poet I have ever come across has written more movingly about the life of a bewildered child at boarding school.

I have made a list of the books I want to read or reread, starting with Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722). It isn’t a journal at all: he himself was only six when the Great Plague devastated the population of London:

1665 - No-one left alive

1666 - London burnt to fiddlesticks

(as I learned in my first term at my own boarding school). Defoe’s first-person narrator claims to have reconstructed his ‘journal’ from notes he made at the time in his ‘memorandums’, together with extracts from oral accounts, public documents, official records and other sources, but really it is as much a work of fiction – an event ‘witnessed’ by a man who never existed – as Peter Ackroyd’s 1985 novel of the Plague and its aftermath, Hawksmoor. Still, Defoe’s account resonates strongly: it is all about self-isolating, social distancing – people walking down the centre of the Whitechapel Road to avoid getting too close to those standing on the pavements – and the difficulties of shopping:

People used all possible precaution. When any one bought a joint of meat in the market they would not take it off the butcher’s hand, but took it off the hooks themselves. On the other hand, the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The buyer carried always small money to make up any odd sum, that they might take no change. (p.88)

The strange ways in which Londoners started to behave during the Plague, and Defoe’s comments about them: the book is worth reading for these alone. The Guardian Review used to run a quirky weekly column, Ten of the Best….’ and Solomon Eagle topped the list of ‘Ten of the Best Religious Zealots in Literature’, even though he gets only a glancing mention by Defoe:

I suppose the world has heard of the famous Solomon Eagle, an enthusiast. He, though not affected at all but in his head, went about denouncing of judgement upon the city in a frightful manner, sometimes quite naked, and with a pan of burning charcoal on his head. What he said, or pretended, indeed I could not learn. (p.116)

By one of those odd coincidences that gladden the heart, I discovered on the very day I read about him in Defoe, that ‘Solomon Eagle’ was the pen name adopted by the poet and literary editor JC Squire, when he was book reviewer for The New Statesman before and during the First World War. In his heyday, Squire was possibly the most influential bookman in London: among his greatest claims to fame, he founded and edited the new London Mercury from 1919 to 1934. Although he fell spectacularly out of favour with writers such as TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and out of fashion altogether by the 1940s, he was a formidable, fascinating figure who is today all but forgotten. So it’s good to report that the writer John Smart, a specialist on London literary life (his biography of John Hayward is a key work on the subject) is completing a biography of Squire. A reassessment of this contradictory and complicated man is certainly overdue.

What I most want to do during these weeks of enforced inactivity is not only to read more and to write more letters, however. I want to return to writing this blog, which I began in August 2011 and which stuttered to a halt after 113 posts in 2018. The stutter developed not because I had grown tired of blogging, but because I was focusing more and more on writing about stained glass; eventually the effort of researching and completing two books* on that subject absorbed all my energy. After the second one was published early last year, I tried a few times to start again but struggled to produce even a stutter. Meanwhile, writing and speaking about stained glass have continued to take up much of my time.

Now, though, seems the moment to try again, always remembering Beaumarchais’ admonition: ‘La difficulté de réussir ne fait qu’ajouter à la nécessité d’entreprendre’  (The difficulty of succeeding only adds to the necessity of undertaking). As before, I shall aim to range across books, writers and readers, with occasional digressions onto people and places, even stained glass perhaps. Already I think I know one book I shall be writing about soon: Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting, just published and very well reviewed. I have only started to read it; but I’ve also skimmed through the bibliography at the back. To my astonishment, Imagism and After: a Study of the Poetry of Richard Aldington, is listed there – my MA thesis, deposited in Durham University Library in 1975 where, I had always assumed, it had lain unread and gathering dust ever since. Evidently not, but you’ll have to wait until I have read and written about this book centred on Mecklenburgh Square, on the edge of Bloomsbury, to learn why not.

Adrian Barlow

27 March 2020

* Kempe: the Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe (2018)

   Espying Heaven: the Stained Glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Artists (2019)

Illustrations: 

(i) 'Solomon Eagle’ drawing by EM Ward (1848); Wellcome Institute, reproduced under Creative Commons licence. 

(ii) The London Mercury: cover. This journal was cherished as much for the quality of its typography and illustrations as for its content.

The Second Mrs T.S. Eliot

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’s play, The Second Mrs Tanqueray, is about a young woman ‘with a past’ whose marriage to a much older widower has complicated and ultimately disastrous consequences. By contrast, Valerie Fletcher, who became the second Mrs T.S. Eliot, was a woman with no past at all. Her life only ever had one focus: Eliot himself. Although she was thirty-eight years younger, her marriage to him was (as far as she at least was
 concerned) blissfully uncomplicated, and its consequences for Eliot’s posthumous reputation have been the opposite of disastrous – though not everyone, I know, agrees.

A friend recently handed me a photograph (c.1943) showing a squad of lacrosse players from Queen Anne’s School, Caversham. Did I recognize the girl on the right at the end of the back row? my friend asked. The girl was Valerie Fletcher. ‘She was never much of a looker, was she?’ added my friend. Actually, some people thought she was a looker: when Groucho Marx met her, in 1961, he described her as ‘a good-looking, middle-aged blonde whose eyes seemed to light up with adoration every time she looked at her husband’.

In many ways, Valerie Fletcher’s marriage to T.S. Eliot in January 1957 was even more extraordinary than Marilyn Monroe’s to Arthur Miller the previous year. At least Monroe and Miller had met, plausibly enough, in Hollywood; by contrast, the story of the lacrosse-playing teenager and the Nobel Prizewinning poet defied all probability.

Eliot died in 1965; Valerie outlived him by forty seven years. The Guardian obituary of her maintained that as a schoolgirl she had told her headmistress her ambition was to become Eliot’s secretary; the Queen Anne’s Society News (2012-2013), took the story a step further and reported that while still at school, Valerie had confidently announced she would marry him. The most specific account, however, comes in Tarantula, John Smart’s biography of Eliot’s close friend, John Hayward. Eliot had shared a London flat with Hayward for eleven years, up until the day before he married Valerie – to the astonishment of everyone except Valerie herself:

Valerie Fletcher had been listening intently in an English lesson to a gramophone record of John Gielgud reading ‘Journey of the Magi’. She was bowled over. At the end of the lesson she went up to her teacher, Miss Bartholomew, and asked, ‘Who wrote that poem?’ Miss Bartholomew told her that it was T.S. Eliot. ‘I shall marry that man,” her pupil said immediately. After a moment’s pause, she mused, ‘But how shall I meet him?’ Without thinking anything of it, Miss Bartholomew replied, ‘You could become his secretary, I suppose.’

It would be quite unfair to conclude that Valerie was a manipulative young gold-digger setting out to entice a foolish, fond old man. Lyndall Gordon in T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life – to my mind, by far the best study of Eliot’s life and poetry – says simply that ‘Eliot came to recognize in his secretary the absolute dedication of an ideal heir’. In an interview quoted by Gordon, Valerie herself explained the life-defining impact of hearing ‘Journey of the Magi’:

It just hit me. The whole feeling of Tom in it – and the impression I formed then – was borne out right throughout marriage and everything. After that I tried to find out everything I could about him. It was something very sympathetic.

‘Throughout marriage and everything’ – for Valerie, marriage was to be eight years of devoted happiness, as it was for the poet too: Lyndall Gordon speaks of  ‘the idyllic nature of his attachment’. Afterwards, ‘everything’ included the nearly fifty years she lived on as his widow and literary executor.

The first most people knew about Valerie in this new role was her publication in 1971 of  

The Waste Land

A FACSIMILE AND TRANSCRIPT

OF THE ORIGINAL DRAFTS

INCLUDING THE ANNOTATIONS

OF EZRA POUND

Edited by Valerie Eliot

The ‘lost’ manuscript of this poem, as originally edited by Ezra Pound and annotated by Eliot, Pound and Eliot’s first wife, Vivien, had only resurfaced in 1968 when the New York Public Library announced it had been discovered among a collection of privately purchased papers. Valerie’s Facsimile and Transcript was itself a ground-breaking work of bibliography: the reader could see on the left-hand pages Eliot’s hand-written or typed sheets and on the right could read the same text now type-set and with all the annotations, erasures and overwritings ingeniously transcribed typographically and colour-coded. It showed that Pound had been far more influential in shaping the most famous Modernist poem of the twentieth century than many people had recently wanted to believe, and that his editorial judgment had saved the poem.  Eliot himself had acknowledged this by dedicating the poem to ‘Il miglior fabbro’. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Valerie’s book helped rehabilitate Pound’s reputation. Put simply, it was (and is) a master class in responsible editing and exegesis: without it, I wonder whether Helen Gardner’s virtuoso work, The Composition of Four Quartets, which refined the approach Valerie had previously taken with The Waste Land, would even have been published.

No longer now the gawky, sporty schoolgirl with a crush, nor the adoring blonde on the arm of an elderly husband, Valerie Eliot had proved she should be taken seriously as a scholar and as Eliot’s literary executor. I have every admiration for what she achieved with The Waste Land – and every sympathy with the way she defended Eliot’s posthumous reputation later.  Others may disagree. But her own best memorial should be her definitive edition of The Waste Land. Let Lyndall Gordon, comparing Valerie’s edition with Helen Gardner’s work on The Composition of Four Quartets, explain why:

Both are lasting works of scholarship […. ] In Mrs Eliot’s introduction and Helen Gardner’s chapters on the growth and sources of the Quartets, facts are selective and direct the reader towards the work. It is to be hoped that scholars of the twenty-first century will follow their lead in discerning the simplicity at the heart of Eliot’s apparent difficulty.

Adrian Barlow

[Illustration: ‘The Scarlet Runners’ – Queen Anne’s School, Caversham, Lacrosse players c.1943 (private collection)

[Notes: Groucho Marx’s description of Valerie is quoted by Lyndall Gordon in T.S. Eliot, an Imperfect Life (1998), p. 517. From the same source comes the extract from Valerie’s 1988 Times interview, p.497-8, as does the description of Eliot’s recognizing in Valerie ‘the absolute dedication of an ideal heir’. The quotation with which I end this post will be found on p.679.

John Smart’s account in Tarantula (p.263) of Valerie’s reaction to hearing ‘Journey of the Magi’ is based on an interview he conducted with Dorothy Bartholomew (1913-2011), the teacher who transformed Valerie’s life simply by putting a record on the gramophone.

For an additional account of Valerie’s marriage to Eliot and her subsequent life as his literary executor, I recommend the Independent obituary (14 November 2012); while for a different perspective on Valerie Eliot, see Karen Christensen, ‘Dear Mrs Eliot’, Guardian 29 January 2005.

I have written previously about Eliot, in T.S. Eliot and the Turning Year. 2015 being the 50^th anniversary of his death, I hope to write about him again, more than once in the remaining six months.