The vanishing man of letters

Part One

ALL the twenty-first century instruments agree that in this cybernetic age that quaint Victorian artefact, that wily old literary bird, the Man of Letters, has virtually joined the inept dodo and misfortunate great auk, along with the woolly mammoth and the muffin-man, in the categories of extinction. No cyberfigure he.

Indeed, it is as long as forty years ago that Evelyn Waugh bore premature witness to the Man of Letters' dignified exodus. Writing, in his unfinished autobiographical fragment, A Little Learning (1964), of his father, Arthur Waugh, he described him as a Man of Letters, belonging to 'a category like the Maiden aunt's, that is now almost extinct'.

But what, it may after so long a lapse of time be reasonably inquired, precisely was a 'Man of Letters'? Originally, the term simply denoted a scholar; then, gradually, it came to be applied to authors in general. In its ultimate, and more restrictive sense, the Man of Letters is to be defined as one who lives and dies by literature-the bearded figure comfortably ensconced at his desk in the bow-window looking out over the lawn and the rhododendrons. The antidote, of course, to the solipsistic gloom of the bookman as prisoner, seated alone at the desk's dead wood is, apart from publication and acclaim, a break away to the company of his like-minded cohort, to secure which there arose such institutions as the informal Rhymers' Club, at Fleet Street's ale and sawdust Cheshire Cheese, and the more formal wining-and-dining calibre clubs, such as the Sette of Odd Volumes, meeting monthly at, usually, Limner's Restaurant.

It was the accepted duty of the Man of Letters to contribute to the cultural atmosphere of his time, to carry a flag. Tragically, he did not nurture a single-stranded interest, but was required to exhibit commitment in more than one area-essays, criticism, reviews, novels, poetry, biographies. And there should be an output, a product, not just self-absorbing and self-absorbent meditation.

Robustness was not an essential ingredient, although the Man of Letters frequently lived to rustication and ripe old age. But there were traps along the way. Solitariness was one; others were angst and alcohol. As he faces his own personal decline, the Man of Letters' worst sorrow is to leave his treasured books; he paces his shelves and says goodbye to his old friends.

The Man of Letters survives today only in pale imitation-in parts of Academia, where, however, specialization has taken away the breadth and depth of the old-time archetype.

A typical example of the classic species was Richard Le Gallienne (1866-1947), who hailed from my home-town, Liverpool. Originally destined for the world of commerce, he started off apprenticed to accountancy in a dreary 'penitentiary of the mathematics'. Kicking over the clerk's high stool, he nested briefly in a 'Literary Loft', a book and flower filled room which he and his Mildred, the pretty young waitress who had served him at the city cafe where he lunched and whom he was to marry, rented on the top storey of a dingy office pile in the city. Soon he was to move on to London and celebrity, becoming John Lane of the Bodley Head's reader, 'Logroller', book columnist of the Star newspaper, and a literary lion of the metropolis of the Nineties. He became especially famed for the length and luxuriance of his hair, and when he wrote a pamphlet entitled If I Were God by Richard Le Gallienne, a wag riposted, 'If I were Richard Le Gallienne, by God, I'd get my hair cut!'

Mildred died. Richard had not during their two and a half years of married life proved either a faithful or a flawless husband. Widowed, and with a little child, he felt violent pangs of transient remorse, and hymned his dead wife in vintage Nineties poet's minor melody:

   She's somewhere in the sunlight strong,
   Her tears are in the failing rain,
   She calls me in the wind's soft song,
   And with the flowers she comes again.

   Yon bird is but her messenger,
   The moon is but her silver car;
   Yea! sun and moon are sent by her,
   And every wistful waiting star.

Richard was to marry twice more, but his continual drinking and womanising turned his personal life into a shambles. Even so, he somehow contrived to publish forty-odd volumes of poems, essays, criticism, and novels.

In 1901, he paid an extended visit to the New World, which drew the following tongue-in-cheek lament from Max Beerbohm:

   O witched by American bars,
   Pan whistles you home on his pipes.
   We love you for loving the stars,
   But what can you see in the stripes?

In 1902, Richard returned to America. He was never to live in England again. For the next forty-five twilit years of eclipse, he was to carry on, a true Man of Letters, indomitably writing--in Nassau, Paris, and Menton. It was there, during the Second World War, that he and his third wife, both now old and frail and frequently hungry, were offered tempting easements if he would only agree to broadcast for the Germans. Though exiled for nearly half a century, he steadfastly refused. He died aged eighty-one and was buried close by Aubrey Beardsley in the beautiful hill-top cemetery at Menton.