Baldwin, 'Colin Haycraft 1929-1994: Maverick Publisher',

  Bryn Mawr
  Classical Review 96.1.10

  Stoddard Martin (ed.), Colin Haycraft 1929-1994: Maverick
  Publisher.  London: Duckworth, 1995. Pp. 152.
  14.95. ISBN 0 7156 2681 7.

  Reviewed by Barry Baldwin -- The University of Calgary

Any classicist outside the United Kingdom who wonders what
interest a volume celebrating the life and mourning the death of
a (well nicknamed in the title) maverick English publisher might
comport for them should turn at once to the Appendix (pp.
127-49). There they will find Colin Haycraft's presidential
address to the Classical Association of Great Britain, delivered
on April 6, 1994, only (as it sadly turned out) five months
before his sudden death at the age of 65, having just got past
the dangerous sixty-third year as described by Augustus
(apud Aulus Gellius 15. 7) and the sixty-fourth one more
famously commemorated by the Beatles. This speech, deceptively
entitled 'On Not Knowing Greek, or Latin either', constitutes the
best defence of traditional classical philology and its role
within humane letters as a whole that I have read for a long
time, perhaps ever. Stress 'traditional': not a word (except
dismissive) will be found on the Scylla and Charybdis of our
times, computers and literary theories. In a breathtaking display
of lightly worn erudition, clear old-fashioned English prose,
elegant wit, and (where warranted) bare-knuckled pugnacity,
Haycraft invites us along on an intellectual Baedeker. How can
any survivor of the usual after-dinner presidential patter,
crambe repetita as bad as the meal that went before, not
warm to a speaker who begins by dubbing himself (in Greek) 'an
ape in purple' and quoting the opening of Housman's 'The Name and
Nature of Poetry': 'First, then, I thank those who have appointed
me, for this token of their good will; secondly, I condemn their
judgement and deplore their choice.' Then we zoom (the original
audience--of which, alas, I was not one--must have wondered what
had hit them) along a dual carriageway of Haycraftian
reminiscence and opinion, frequently convergent parallel lines,
hurtling (this long sentence is deliberately crafted to give
readers a taste of what is in store) from his army days
(dismissed with the Ciceronian tag cedant arma togae) to
the Roman custom of deponting sexagenarians to Gray's 'soppy' Ode
on Spring to Johnson's contempt for cucumbers to defending the
elder Pliny on ostriches to Gaisford on the 'considerable
emoluments' that await the classicist to Horace on his publishers
who (Haycraft speaking as one) shine notho lumine to
Virginia Woolf's essay 'On Not Knowing Greek' (Woolf,
incidentally, was half-sister of Gerald Duckworth, founder of the
firm directed by Haycraft) to the lament 'Not to know Latin is to
be forever a shy guest at the feast of the world's culture' in
Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Ezra
Pound's defence of Latin (a compliment at once ruthlessly
withdrawn with the parenthetical 'How did he know?') to a
reminder that the name of Horace's favourite girl friend Cinara
means artichoke (not even Fraenkel noticed this) to Oliphant
Smeaton's commentary on Gibbon to a startling observation (made
at some length) that our tag memento mori makes no sense,
or rather not the sense intended, and so on and so forth (had I
but space enough and more...) to a triumphantly mendacious ending
taken with acknowledgement from Sir Leslie Stephen's Clark
Lectures on English literature and society in the 18th century
(published by Duckworth in 1904): 'I hope I have not said
anything original.'

This is not (alas) the place to describe at length the
fascinating life of Colin Haycraft, one somewhat reminiscent of
that of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. A father murdered
(apparently by mistake) by a sepoy in the Indian army; two
children lost to tragic accidents; marriage to the distinguished
novelist Alice Thomas Ellis; some hectic boardroom tussles at
Duckworth--in the last such episode, worthy of a Dallas
scriptwriter, Haycraft was fired and given two hours to clear his
desk, the locks being changed to keep him out thereafter, but
having marshalled his forces he was back in command less than two
weeks later after an extraordinary meeting known in London
publishing circles as the Boardroom Coup.

The full story of Colin Haycraft is recounted in this elegant
libellus by a variety of contributors, ranging from Hugh
Lloyd-Jones on the classical side to the philosopher Alasdair
MacIntyre to the puckish and indomitable historian A. L. Rowse to
the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, and so on. The texts are enlivened
by a sequence of gorgeous photographs, proving mainly if not
exclusively that Haycraft knew how to organise memorable
symposia. In one, we glimpse a lady editor with large wine glass
in fetching pyjamas, worthy of Abfab. In another,
Haycraft, suitably attired in cut-back frock coat of cream and
gold brocade, is reading aloud from Gibbon's autobiography the
historian's feelings on completing his Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire to a garden party held on June 27, 1987, the
bicentenary of this great moment: 'I wrote the last lines of the
last page in a summerhouse in my garden. After laying down my
pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of
acacias.' This was not just a frivolity, rather a union of
otium and negotium -- as Haycraft reminded the
audience in his presidential address, the Roman word for business
was a denial of leisure. Gibbon's two works were Haycraft's
favourite books in English. When he was serving his
apprenticeship in the publishing world, he was assigned the
unenviable task of abridging the Decline and Fall.
Characteristically, he remarked: 'We had to omit the decline.'
Haycraft's other beloved English book was the Dictionary
of Samuel Johnson, on which he wrote a typically learned and
elegant essay in the London 'Observer' to celebrate the Longman
facsimile edition 235 years after the original publication. Many
people regretted that Haycraft did not write much. When chided
for this, he issued a memorable riposte: 'Who needs a pregnant
midwife?' It is a shame that a translation of Erasmus,
commissioned by Penguin Books, never materialised. On the other
hand, since he liked to affect misogyny to tease over-solemn
feminists, it is especially nice to learn (p. 53) that he wrote
the prefaces to Natural Baby Food and The Sayings of Dr
Johnson under the pseudonym of Brenda O'Casey. I happen to
know from some correspondence (the point is not mentioned in the
volume) that he was doing something on John Locke and the
Classics just before his death.

But (something the profession would do well to ponder), not
publishing needn't mean not writing. Haycraft could have become a
don. He learned his classics well, first at Wellington, then at
Queen's College, Oxford, where he had lectures and tutelage from
the likes of Anthony Andrewes, Guy Chilver, Eduard Fraenkel, and
John Griffith, taking a double First in Mods and Greats. However,
he chose another path.

As with his multifarious ways of keeping Gibbon's memory green,
Haycraft lived his classics. A male friend recalls (p. 23) that
he described an undergraduate girl friend as ore longo, lunis
exiguis (this application of lunis to fingernails is
hard to parallel); we are not told her reaction to this
compliment. For cognate delight, there is the account (p. 36) of
Haycraft discoursing in Latin over tea and baked beans on toast
in a London cafe. The death of a son, Joshua, was mourned by him
in Greek verse, while we are frequently told (pp. 60, 83, 99)
that he was forever composing Greek and Latin epigrams, sometimes
in his bath (shades of his beloved elder Pliny), often with bawdy
results. Alas, no specimen is reproduced here. Perhaps they are
all lost. Should any be extant, his successors at the House of
Duck could give us fresh delights by publishing them in a
collection of modern classical verse. This would suit a firm
that, thanks to Haycraft, brought out John Sparrow's anthology
of Renaissance Latin Verse and Carol Kidwell's Marullus.
Colin Haycraft, in fact, transformed a publishing house whose
former quiet ways had been the object of some affectionate satire
in Anthony Powell's early novel What's Become of Waring?
into a classical powerhouse that reflected his own dynamism. In
his contribution (p. 70), Lloyd-Jones lists his own favourites
from the astonishing array of big names and seminal works that
Haycraft brought out in his classical list. Its distinguished
batting order includes Averil Cameron, Kenneth Dover, George
Forrest, Jasper Griffin, Tony Honore, Mary Lefkowitz, Hugh
Lloyd-Jones, Fergus Millar, Richard Sorabji, and John Sparrow. I
would also herald two particular favourites of mine: Leofranc
Holford-Strevens on Aulus Gellius and Carol Kidwell on Marullus.
There is enough for some future Photius to compile an anatile
Bibliotheca. Except to cricketers, the sign of the duck is
a welcome one, a beacon of light and hope for humane studies and
cultivated taste. For classicists in particular (the duck's range
is, of course, far broader), already grateful for its salvation
of the Bristol Classical Press series, it is high time to
transfer the old double-edged compliment, 'Sir Basil Blackwell,
to whom we all owe so much', from Broad Street to the Old Piano
factory.

In these days, when too many classicists despond over their
profession, talk only of crisis and/or seek to inject new life
through the quack remedies of trendy theories (I think I shall
vomit if I see another piece of gobbledegook about Bakhtin and
the ancient novel), the life and example of Colin Haycraft stand
as an encouraging reminder of what real classics is all about.
And real publishing, too. At the end of his 1976 catalogue,
Haycraft subjoined this splendid remark: 'Duckworth is a firm
whose editors employ accountants, not vice versa .'

Given his love of Latin verse, Samuel Johnson, and the eighteenth
century in general, I can think of no better way of rounding off
this little tributory notice than by quoting the first stanza
(the whole thing would have been ideal, but is too long) of
Johnson's address to Cave in the Gentleman's Magazine,
March 1738, p. 156: Urbane, nullis fesse laboribus, / Urbane,
nullis victe calumniis, / Cui fronte sertum in erudita / Perpetuo
viret et virebit. In response to a parody of these sentiments
in the London Magazine (April 1738, p. 196), an anonymous
writer rose to the bait and writing as 'Briton' (which suits
Haycraft, aggressively proud of his own Englishness) imitated the
Latin original (GM, May 1738, p. 268) thus: 'Hail Urban!
Indefatigable man, / Unwearied yet by all thy useful toil! / Whom
no base calumny can put to foil. / But still the laurel on thy
learned brow / Flourishes fair, and shall for ever grow.'