The premise of Dear Howard initially appears unpromising. This is a collection of letters from David Batterham, a (semi-)functioning alcoholic itinerant bookseller, written to his friend, the painter Howard Hodgkin (who never troubled to respond). They were presumably found on Hodgkin’s death last year and have now been presented in a pleasing pocket-size hardback. There are regular gaps of years between letters; several passages are, due to drink, square bracketed as illegible or “a bit shaky”. Most worrying of all is the admission made in the author’s note that the books he specialises in are those “one can enjoy without having to read… no poetry, history or literature”.
It’s therefore doubly pleasing that the letters should be so resolutely charming and well written, the impact of the book as a whole at once very moving and hugely funny. Batterham is a wonderfully rakish figure, describing himself early on as dressed in “my 1964 Jaeger sale jacket with a hole in the elbow and the buttons no longer meeting the buttonholes; my Oxfam shop white lambswool sweater, back to front because of the wine stains and holes burned by Gauloises debris, and my Cheltenham rotter’s trousers”.
Batterham is constantly trying to give up drinking, constantly failing. He boasts often of having passed days, weeks, even months without wine, but then – usually in Paris – succumbs. Some of the most brilliant passages are those written after having one too many. In Venice, following a lunch that “got very out of hand”, he is woken from a post-prandial slumber “by a distraught girl with palpitations and a man in her bedroom. I took her to supper, which she couldn’t eat, and now she has passed out in my room, and I am here in this 100ft square oriental lounge drinking beer at 50p a glass. I have to fetch it myself as the waiters are so scathing.”
The book is a travelogue, but it’s also a journey into history. The career that (just about) supported Batterham has been altered unrecognisably by Amazon, the bookshops that he describes lining the streets of Lisbon, Madrid, Paris and Rome have largely disappeared or become postmodern shrines, the books within them mere fetish objects. The medium itself suits this elegiac note: letter writing is dying out; the emails that have replaced them are ugly, utilitarian things. Although Hodgkin never responded, he must have treasured these rambunctious, cosmopolitan missives winging in from all corners of Europe.
Towards the end of the book, there’s a letter, written three days after the millennium, in which Batterham describes going with Seamus Heaney and his wife to the Dorset church where Thomas Hardy spent the eve of the previous century. They stand in the rain under a yew tree and read Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush. It’s a beautiful, quiet moment amid all the boozing and cavorting. And while he may not buy poetry books, Batterham himself is a remarkably fine stylist. He meets an aged American in Tangier who name-drops until the “names drift about like dried leaves”; he finds some 1930s fashion plates depicting “rotters in suits, often with cigarettes hanging from limp wrists or grim lips”; a man at a “Gatsbyish” party in New York who doesn’t know anyone stalks “briskly among the tables, looking this way and that as if on a crowded beach trying not to admit that he couldn’t find his towel”. It’s lovely writing in a memorable, cherishable book.
• Dear Howard: Tales Told in Letters by David Batterham is published by Redstone Press (£12.95). To order a copy for £11.14 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
