He was a minor character living the literary life

THE word “impresario” brings to mind images of Sol Hurok, Sergei Diaghilev, maybe even P.T. Barnum: human dynamos propelled by their enthusiasm for opera, ballet or other forms of entertainment and blessed with talents for organizing, salesmanship and showmanship. What doesn’t immediately spring to mind is an image of that engaging and erudite, sensible if somewhat impractical English gentleman, Rupert Hart-Davis.

Whether or not “impresario” is the best word to describe him, Hart-Davis (1907-1999) was an interesting, rather delightful character both in himself and for the light that his 30-odd year career in publishing sheds on the world of books and literature in the middle third of the 20th century.

From boyhood on, Hart-Davis was someone who simply loved to read. (If one didn’t know better, one might naively imagine this to be true of most publishers.) “His early reading,” according to biographer Philip Ziegler, “was not notably sophisticated; like any self-respecting ten year old ... he devoured ... any adventure story that came along, but he rapidly reached the conclusion that reading was neither a pastime nor a duty but a necessity of life; one read, as one breathed or ate, because otherwise existence would become impossible.”

As an adult, Hart-Davis’ tastes, though eclectic, were not impeccable. He knew and loved many of the great literary classics but was oddly blind to the charms of Jane Austen, and at the outset of his career, he’d read nothing of Proust nor other modern masterpieces such as Kafka’s “The Trial.” Although he appreciated controversial writers, he was not a publisher dedicated to bringing the world the works of cutting-edge writers, like Sylvia Beach did with James Joyce.

“Rupert was a man of strong likes and dislikes and the dislikes were more easily defined ...” Ziegler writes. “It is relatively easy to compile a list of the sorts of book Rupert was unlikely to publish. For financial reasons if for no other [because his firm was too small to afford large advances] he would have to eschew the expensive, ready-made best-seller.... He recoiled from anything that seemed to him vulgar or obscene. He felt, for instance, that ‘Lolita’s’ ‘literary value was negligible and its pornographic level high.... I think it should not appear.’ ”

Yet he was impressed by Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” despite its obscenities. He thought well of Radclyffe Hall’s banned lesbian novel, “The Well of Loneliness,” admired Joyce’s “Ulysses,” had no patience for “Finnegans Wake” (few do) and brusquely dismissed Samuel Beckett’s work as “unreadable rubbish.”

Hart-Davis was, Ziegler writes, “a guardian of the flame, not one who lit the fire. In the eighteenth century he probably would have rejected ‘Tristram Shandy,’ in the nineteenth he might have looked with scepticism on much of the poetry of Robert Browning. Yet the fact that he was unadventurous in no way impaired his passionate defence of the highest literary standards.”

Both at his eponymous publishing house and previously at such firms as Jonathan Cape and Heinemann’s, he was deeply committed to publishing books that he felt truly mattered, whatever the cost, the most notable case being Leon Edel’s magisterial multivolume biography of Henry James. Hart-Davis himself wrote a biography of the once-important literary figure Hugh Walpole, as well as a memoir and a few other books, but the writings that may have brought him the most fame were the immensely civilized, entertaining and surprisingly revelatory volumes of epistles he exchanged with his old Eton schoolmaster George Lyttelton.

The author of many outstanding lives -- including volumes on Lord Mountbatten, King William IV and Harold Wilson -- Ziegler is a superb biographer. He is thoroughly familiar with the milieu he evokes, able to limn minor characters and situations in a few deft, bold strokes. He tells Hart-Davis’ story with engaging wit, discerning intelligence and enormous flair.

One of the many intriguing aspects of Hart-Davis’ life was his almost Oedipal attachment to his mother and hatred of his father (Hart-Davis felt sure the charming, flighty man wasn’t his biological father anyway). His mother was so fixated on her only son that she was jealous when he wanted to visit a school chum during vacation.

Although Hart-Davis was happily heterosexual (he was almost always smitten with one woman or another and married four times, the first to actress Peggy Ashcroft), he was sympathetic to homosexuals. Indeed, his magnificent editing of Oscar Wilde’s letters over so many years helped restore Wilde’s reputation and literary status.

Hart-Davis wasn’t a genius, a great man, a mover, a shaker or even a celebrity. Nor was he notably dissipated, eccentric or weird. Yet his life was in its own way rich and strange. If these days biographies and memoirs are taking on some of the functions once reserved for novels, what the likable hero of this engaging book calls to mind are the protagonists of certain 19th century novels -- Henry Esmond, David Copperfield, Pip in “Great Expectations” -- rather than the heroes of history.

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Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.