Rupert Hart-Davis

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Rupert Hart-Davis
Born(1907-08-28)28 August 1907
Died8 December 1999(1999-12-08) (aged 92)
Spouses
​
​
(m. 1929; div. 1933)​
Catherine Comfort Borden-Turner
​
​
(m. 1933, divorced)​
Ruth Simon Ware
​
​
(m. 1964; died 1967)​
June Williams
​
(m. 1968)​
Children3, including Duff and Adam
RelativesDeirdre Hart-Davis (sister)
Duff Cooper (uncle)
Alfred Cooper (grandfather)

Sir Rupert Charles Hart-Davis (28 August 1907 – 8 December 1999) was an English publisher and editor. He founded the publishing company Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd. As a biographer, he is remembered for his Hugh Walpole (1952), as an editor, for his Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962), and, as both editor and part-author, for the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters.

Working at a publishing firm before the

Second World War
, Hart-Davis began to forge literary relationships that would be important later in his career. Founding his publishing company in 1946, Hart-Davis was praised for the quality of the firm's publications and production; but he refused to cater to public tastes, and the firm eventually lost money. After relinquishing control of the firm, Hart-Davis concentrated on writing and editing, producing collections of letters and other works which brought him the sobriquet "the king of editors".

Biography

Early years

Hart-Davis was born in Kensington, London. He was legally the son of Richard Hart-Davis, a stockbroker, and his wife Sybil née Cooper, but by the time of his conception the couple were estranged, though still living together, and Sybil Hart-Davis had many lovers at that time. Hart-Davis believed the most likely candidate for his natural father to be a Yorkshire banker called Gervase Beckett.[1] As a child, Rupert Hart-Davis and his sister Deirdre Hart-Davis were drawn by Augustus John and painted by William Nicholson (1912).[2]

Hart-Davis was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, though he found university life not to his taste and left after less than a year.[1]

Hart-Davis decided to become an actor, and he studied at

William Heinemann Ltd. as an office boy and assistant to the managing director Charley Evans. He spent two years with Heinemann and a year as manager of the Book Society. During this period, he built up good relationships with a number of authors and was able to negotiate a directorship for himself at Jonathan Cape Ltd.[3]

In his seven years with Cape, Hart-Davis recruited a successful group of authors ranging from the poets

George Lyttelton that Cape had been "one of the tightest-fisted old bastards I've ever encountered".[4] The second partner, Wren Howard, was "even tighter" than Cape,[4]
and neither of them liked fraternising with authors, which they left to Hart-Davis.

In World War II Hart-Davis volunteered for military service as a private soldier, but was soon commissioned into the Coldstream Guards. He did not see active service, never being stationed more than 25 miles from London.[5]

Independent publisher

Main article: Publications by Rupert Hart-Davis

After the war, Hart-Davis was unable to obtain satisfactory terms from Jonathan Cape to return to the company, and in 1946 he struck out on his own, founding Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd, in partnership with David Garnett and Teddy Young and with financial backing from Eric Linklater, Arthur Ransome, H. E. Bates, Geoffrey Keynes, and Celia and Peter Fleming. His own literary tastes dictated which books were accepted and which were rejected. Frequently he turned down commercial successes because he thought little of the works' literary merit. He later said, "I usually found that the sales of the books I published were in inverse ratio to my opinion of them. That's why I established some sort of reputation without making any money."[6]

In 1946 paper was still rationed; the firm used Garnett's ex-serviceman's ration, but as only one ex-serviceman's ration could be used per firm it could not use that of Hart-Davis. However, the firm was given the allocation at cost of a Glasgow bookseller and occasional pre-war publisher, Alan Jackson. The partners decided to start initially with reprints of dead authors, as if a new book became a best-seller the firm would not have paper for a reprint and the author might leave. They made an exception for Stephen Potter's Gamesmanship which was a short book, collected every ream of paper they could buy and printed 25,000 copies. Likewise 25,000 copies of Eric Linklater's Sealskin Trousers (five short stories) were printed.[7]

The firm had best-sellers such as Gamesmanship and

Arnold Goodman an agreement was reached to replace the offending sentences, but the firm had the "hideously expensive" job of removing and replacing seven leaves from 7,580 copies.[11]

By the mid-fifties, Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd could no longer sustain an independent existence and in 1956 it was absorbed into the

Harcourt Brace in 1961, who sold it to the Granada Group in 1963, when Hart-Davis retired from publishing, though remaining as non-executive chairman until 1968.[1] Granada merged Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd with sister imprint MacGibbon & Kee in 1972 to form Hart-Davis, MacGibbon
.

The Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd logo was a woodcut of a fox, with a background of oak leaves. The company was based at No. 36 Soho Square, London W1. Reprint series published over the years were the Reynard Library of great English writers and the Mariners Library of nautical books.

Author

As Hugh Walpole's literary executor, and being unable to find a potential biographer who would tackle the job to his satisfaction, Hart-Davis proposed to Walpole's publishers, Macmillan, that he should write the biography himself, to which Harold Macmillan replied that he couldn't think of a better person to do it.[13] When Hugh Walpole was published in 1952, it was praised as "among the half dozen best biographies of the century".[14] It has been reissued several times.

The 6 volumes of the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters

Hart-Davis wrote no more books until after his retirement from publishing, but between 1955 and 1962, he wrote about a quarter of a million words to his old schoolmaster

George Lyttelton, which, together with Lyttelton's similar contribution, made up the six volumes of the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters, published between 1978 and 1984 after Lyttelton's death. Although he spent much of his life researching old letters, Hart-Davis destroyed the originals of the letters after his edited versions of them had been printed.[15] He was equally unscholarly about his uncle Duff Cooper's diaries, whose frankness shocked him so much that he wanted to destroy them.[16]

In retirement, Hart-Davis wrote three volumes of autobiography entitled The Arms of Time (1979), The Power of Chance (1991) and, Halfway to Heaven (1998). The first, a particularly cherished project, was a memoir of his beloved mother Sybil, who died young, to her son's desolation.[8]

Editor

Hart-Davis was described by The Times as "the king of editors".[8] He edited volumes of the letters of the playwright Oscar Wilde, the writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm, and the writer George Moore, as well as the diaries of the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the autobiography of Arthur Ransome. A Beggar in Purple, his commonplace book, was published in 1983. Praise from the Past, a collection of tributes to writers, was published in 1996.

His Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, compiled over the same period as Hart-Davis's correspondence with George Lyttelton, was described in a review of the latter as "a mammoth undertaking whose difficulties and challenges are documented in great detail in the letters, giving a satisfying portrayal of what dedication in literary scholarship looks like from the inside".[17] Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, wrote, "It was his decision fifty years ago to publish the first edition of Oscar Wilde's letters which helped to put my grandfather back into the position which he lost in 1895 as one of the most charismatic and fascinating figures in English literary history."[18]

In his last memoir, Hart-Davis listed the books he had edited as: The Second Omnibus Book (Heinemann) 1930; Then and Now (Cape) 1935; The Essential

Reggie Turner (RHD Ltd) 1964; More Theatres by Max Beerbohm (RHD Ltd) 1969; Last Theatres by Max Beerbohm (RHD Ltd) 1970; A Peep into the Past by Max Beerbohm (Heinemann) 1972; A Catalogue of the Caricatures of Max Beerbohm (Macmillan) 1972 ; The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome (Cape) 1976; Electric Delights by William Plomer (Cape) 1978; Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde (Oxford) 1979; Two Men of Letters (Michael Joseph) 1979; Siegfried Sassoon: Diaries 1920–1922 3 vols. (Faber) 1981–85; War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon (Faber) 1983; More Letters of Oscar Wilde (Murray) 1985; Siegfried Sassoon: Letters to Max Beerbohm (Faber) 1986; Letters of Max Beerbohm (Murray) 1986.[19]

Ancestry and personal life

Hart-Davis was a great-great-great-grandson of

Dora Jordan. Their youngest daughter, Lady Elizabeth Fitzclarence, later Countess of Erroll, had daughters including Lady Agnes Hay. Lady Agnes married James Duff, 5th Earl Fife, and among their children was Lady Agnes Duff, who married Sir Alfred Cooper. Their children included Sybil Cooper, mother of Rupert Hart-Davis.[20]

While still an actor, Hart-Davis met the young Peggy Ashcroft whom he married in 1929. The marriage was short-lived, ending in divorce in 1933, though the two remained warm friends until Ashcroft's death more than sixty years later.

In November 1933, he married Catherine Comfort Borden-Turner (1910–1970), daughter of George Douglas Turner and Mary Borden, who lived in America.[21][22][23] They had a daughter in 1935, Bridget, who went on to marry David Trustram Eve, 2nd Baron Silsoe, in 1963, and two sons, Duff in 1936, and the TV presenter Adam in 1943. The second marriage became dysfunctional, although husband and wife remained on good terms and stayed together until their children were grown up, when Hart-Davis and Comfort divorced. In 1964, he married Ruth Simon Ware, with whom he had had a long-term relationship. After her death in 1967, he married June Williams in 1968, who outlived him. She died in 2017.[24]

After the war and until his retirement, Hart-Davis lived during the week in a flat above his publishing business in

Marske in North Yorkshire, where he died at the age of 92.[1]

Public service and honours

From 1957 to 1969, Hart-Davis was chairman of the London Library. During this period, a financial crisis arose when Westminster City Council decided that the library should no longer qualify for a charitable exemption from local property tax. Hart-Davis organised fund-raising on a grand scale, including an auction, with E. M. Forster offering the manuscript of A Passage to India, and T. S. Eliot, a duplicate manuscript of The Waste Land.[3] Hart-Davis was also secretary of The Literary Society and a member of A. P. Herbert's committee on censorship.[25]

Public honours included honorary doctorates from the universities of

Reading
and a knighthood in 1967 for services to literature.

Twenty-two books were dedicated to him between 1936 and 1998, including works by H. E. Bates, Edmund Blunden, C. Day-Lewis, Ray Bradbury, Lady Diana Cooper, Eric Linklater, Compton Mackenzie, Books Do Furnish a Room by Anthony Powell[26] and Leon Edel.[27] Merlin Holland's Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters (2003) was dedicated "To the memory of Rupert Hart-Davis, with love and gratitude."

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d Norwich, John Julius, "Davis, Sir Rupert Charles Hart- (1907–1999)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Retrieved 29 November 2008
  2. ^ "Rupert and Deirdre Hart-Davis as Children (also known as Children of Mr. and Mrs. Hart-Davis)". The Athenaeum. Archived from the original on 22 January 2018. Retrieved 21 January 2018.
  3. ^ a b c The Times obituary, 9 December 1999
  4. ^ a b Hart-Davis, Volume 4, letter of 20 February 1960
  5. ^ Ziegler, p. 117
  6. ^ Ziegler, p. 138
  7. ^ Hart-Davis (1998), p. 6f
  8. ^ a b c The Times, 29 November 1979, p. 15
  9. ^ Ziegler, p. 148
  10. ^ Ziegler, p. 144
  11. ^ Hart-Davis (1998), p. 38
  12. ^ "Mr Bernstein buys book firm" in The Times, 11 September 1963, p. 10.
  13. ^ Hart-Davis, Volume 2, letter of 12 January 1957
  14. ^ Lehmann, J. I. M. Stewart's chapter on biography
  15. ^ Ziegler, p. 269
  16. ^ Norwich, introduction, p. ix
  17. The Independent on Sunday
    , 30 September 2001, p. 17.
  18. ^ Holland, p. x
  19. ^ Hart-Davis (1998) unnumbered introductory page following title page
  20. ^ Theroff, Paul: Theroff Files (j1d.txt), listing descendants of King James VI & I of England and Scotland.
  21. ^ Catalogue of the Rupert Hart-Davis Papers, Durham University URL= https://reed.dur.ac.uk/xtf/view?docId=ark/32150_s2k0698751b.xml
  22. ^ Debrett's Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage and Companionage, Debrett's Ltd, 1971, p. 2206
  23. ^ Who Was Who 1996-2000, St Martin's Press, 1996, p. 252
  24. ^ Obituary, telegraph.co.uk. Accessed 11 January 2023.
  25. ^ Hart-Davis, Volume 4, letter of 20 December 1958
  26. ^ Jay, Mike. (2013) "Who Were the Dedicatees of Powell’s Works?" The Anthony Powell Society Newsletter.50 (spring): 9-10.
  27. ^ Hart-Davis (1998), p. 157

References

External links
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