. . . It was at this time, with the affairs of the publishing firm that bore his name lurching from one crisis to another, that Hart-Davis began work on his justly celebrated biography of the novelist Hugh Massingberd Twinkie, author of Droop, Dahlias and In My Window Box. The work was congenial to him. As he wrote to his great friend and fellow-Etonian (they shared the distinction of being the only two Lower Boys ever to have been ‘up’ to Silas ‘Corks’ McGarrigle for extra Greek five terms running) Sir Jasper Beamish, ‘I am having the most glorious time with dear old Hugh and have really found out some fascinating stuff, I think. Did you know, for example, that the old boy collected fabric samples, and had a superstitious fear of beetles? And that the woman to whom Sad Lilacs is dedicated was not his cousin but his aunt by marriage? It will all make a wonderful book when the time comes.’
Although Rupert Hart-Davis Limited published some works of genuine merit – one might instance Sylvester Dull’s Ezra Pound and Campanology or Myrtle Loosestrife’s sadly neglected novel Gosh What Larks – their proprietor’s disdain for commercial solvency was, alas, to prove its undoing, and in 1956 the firm was taken over by the more sober-minded concern of Tender & Mainprice.
Something of Hart-Davis’s inner disquiet at this period may be detected in the passionate letter he wrote to his long-serving secretary, Miss Eleanor Frisky, whom he later married, while she was away from the office recovering from toothache: ‘The MCC prospects are, as you say, fairly encouraging, and if Compton can only keep his place he may inject some backbone into what has hitherto been a jolly flabby lot. These Tender & Mainprice chaps are the limit, by the way. Always moaning about money, which, as you know, I simply can’t be got to care about. And then at the board luncheon the chairman absolutely ate his asparagus with a fork!’
As might be expected from such a versatile editor, biographer, reviewer and compiler, the extent of Hart-Davis’s literary knowledge was formidable. Notwithstanding a natural courtesy, his opinions were always vigorously expressed. He considered Ulysses, for example, to be ‘jolly rot’ and Samuel Beckett to be ‘an absolute rotter’. Pride of place in this demonology was reserved for The Wasteland. ‘Quite the worst gardening book I’ve ever come across,’ he complained to Beamish. ‘Lots of jolly good stuff at the start about watering your roots with spring rain but after that I simply couldn’t make head or tail of it.’
Retiring to the North Yorkshire dales in the mid-1960s, he received news of the conferral of a knighthood. ‘Dear Rupert,’ his friend ‘Boffles’ Abercrombie, who had the ear of the court, enquired. ‘Do you fancy a gong? Just say the word and I’ll wangle it with HM.’ Immensely proud of this decoration, which he rightly adjudged a tribute to his years of unstinting service to the publishing industry, Hart-Davis enjoyed a long and productive retirement, editing the letters of the little-known Victorian rondelier poet Esme Dymme, and compiling an eight-volume collection of . . .