LETTERS FROM OXFORD: HUGH TREVOR-ROPER TO BERNARD BERENSON
Edited by Richard
Davenport-Hines,
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £ 20

Thanks to telephones and e-mails, the art of letter writing is dead. Hardly anybody writes letters anymore. Earlier generations, perhaps because of the absence of a special technology, were avid letter writers. This was as true of the West as of India and other parts of the world. Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was Regius professor of history at Oxford from 1957 to 1980, revelled in letter writing.

This book, excellently edited and annotated by Richard Davenport-Hines (the annotations are a model for all future editors), brings together what Trevor-Roper wrote to the art historian Bernard Berenson between 1947 till the latter’s death in 1960. Berenson, or BB as he was known to his friends, lived in a villa I Tatti in the outskirts of Florence. BB, perhaps because he was in self-imposed exile, was eager for news of the world outside, especially news from the groves of academia. He extracted from Trevor-Roper, when the two first met, a promise that the latter would write to him regularly. The promise was more than kept, as this volume testifies.

In academic circles, Trevor-Roper was famous for his coruscating prose and his rapier-like polemic. Both these features are evident in these letters which are beautifully written with a pen that was dipped in vitriol. Very few escape with words of praise and recommendation. The historian, A.L. Rowse, was dismissed as a “scholar toady’’ who had “for years been assiduously licking the boots of both the Macmillans and the Cavendish family.’’ A.J.P. Taylor “is not capable of gravity’’. Lucy Sutherland is described as a dull, competent woman who has no interest in any historical subject outside the English East India Company but “has a profound interest in power’’. These comments are worth quoting because all three historians were candidates for the Regius professorship which the then prime minister, Harold Macmillan, bestowed on Trevor-Roper.

Trevor-Roper’s delicious malice was, however, not restricted only to his rivals. An unnamed professor of theology is described as someone who last changed his clothes in 1935. C.S. Lewis, whose candidature to the professorship of poetry Trevor-Roper opposed, was given the following character sketch: “a man who combines the face and figure of a hog-reeve with the mind and thought of a Desert father of the 5th century, a powerful mind warped by erudite philistinism.’’

Malice predominates, as does gossip, but the letters are also full of literary allusions and accounts of Trevor-Roper’s travels.

The letters are highly enjoyable for their sheer brilliance and frivolity. But one wonders about the time Trevor-Roper devoted to writing these epistles. The letters occasionally speak of the history of the 17th century English Revolution that Trevor-Roper was writing. The book never got written. Except for an early book on Archbishop Laud, Trevor-Roper only wrote elegant and profound essays. What if he hadn’t spent so much time writing letters? History’s loss is letter writing’s gain.