I came across five letters from John Jay Chapman, whom I’d never heard of, in a 1943 collection edited by W. Somerset Maugham.

To his wife, while he was without her, visiting friends the Vitis at their fancy Italian villa:
“I begin the day with breakfast in bed — as I know the Vitis don’t get up early and I feel as if this were more restful to the household, I am so unselfish in small matters. Also: — the second man-servant began talking about my bath as soon as I arrived yesterday, and whether I would like it wet or dry or hot or on toast, and that he would prepare it. He began again at dawn. Well, I did a very mean thing to that man. I took my bath and never told him about it till afterwards. But I can’t help feeling that by taking breakfast in bed I regained his respect and love.
“I am having some gold fringe put on my pants and I have assumed the title of Monsignore. It is amazing how easily gentility sits on me. I believe some people are just naturally swells — you know what I mean — and fit well in palaces and eat good food naturally and without effort. I remember the first royal palace I saw — seemed to me — gave me a feeling — just like the old homestead. I often think that Grandma Jones used to say, ‘the Chapmans were once Kings.’ Dear old Grandpa, with his old cotton socks, wouldn’t he be proud if he could see me he-hawing and chaw-chawing with Roman princes!”

To his great friend William James:
“Reading books is so injurious to the mind. I am thinking of you and of many other great intellects. That is the problem, how to get what is in the book out of it without reading it. A good but dangerous way is to live with it. Buy it and leave it on a table and talk about it. Then in three months — write about it. After this, information will begin to come in.”

To the headmaster of his son’s school:
“Do you really think that if I had any ideas on the parent and child question I’d waste them on you? But just now I am taking a loaf and trying to forget the whole subject. Is the education of the young the whole of life? I hate the young — I’m worn out with them. They absorb you and suck you dry and are vampires and selfish brutes at best. Give me some good old rumsoaked club men — who can’t be improved and make no moral claims — and let me play checkers with them and look out of the club window and think about what I’ll have for dinner.”

And on Harvard president Charles Eliot:
“Read the essays of Eliot. He’s the very highest type of a most limited and inspiring pork-chopism. My God, he is hopeful — calls his book American Contributions to Civilization — thinks we don’t understand small parks and drainage — but will learn and are doing nicely. Has a chapter on ‘the pleasures of life.’ It’s all one size. Every word in this work is the same size. The Puritans — the war — the problems of labor and capital — education — all excite the same emotion — i.e. that of a woodchuck eating a carrot.”

Because there is nothing I like better than a good letter, I instantly sent away for The Selected Writings of John Jay Chapman, edited by Jacques Barzun. To my great interest and somewhat to my surprise, I learned that Chapman contained depths that you might not suspect from his witty and buoyant letters — I’ll leave those interested to discover those depths — and that his historical and critical writing, despite being more formal in tone, share his unusual quality of seeming to write just what he thinks in the most direct and unselfconscious way possible. (Barzun’s seventeen-page Introduction to the Selected Writings makes a terrific case for why Chapman was important as a writer, as a moralist, and as a constructive critic of American culture.) I liked what I read in the Writings well enough that I then sought out and purchased the Life and Letters, which contains as many letters of his as have been published, so far as I know.

The Life and Letters will answer almost every question you have about Chapman, so it’s important if you want to learn about his life and what he was like in person. Unfortunately, it suffers from an overly eulogistic approach, having been written not long after Chapman’s death in 1933 by a man who had been a casual but consistent friend. The author is too quick to pass over what he does not understand (which is much) and to explain away what he worries the reader might disapprove of. This makes reading between the lines an important aid to understanding. Edmund Wilson’s more balanced appreciation of Chapman, in an essay written at about the same time, helps correct some of author Howe’s faults, but I don’t recommend it to readers new to Chapman, because Wilson makes some strong judgments that could be misleading.

Meanwhile the letters, exclusive of the hundreds of other letters that are still gathering dust in Harvard’s Houghton Library ninety years later, are here, and are a terrific introduction to a unique man and a great and important thinker — and feeler! — of whom Wilson said in 1938, “hardly one reader in a million has heard of even the name of John Jay Chapman.” ( )

John Jay Chapman, 1862-1933, American author. Chapman was known as a brilliant writer and talker. One review says the letters are extraordinarily like his talk--"penetrating, profound, humorous, indiscreet." The editor and compiler, Mark deWolfe Howe, was a biographer of some renown. The letters include a good deal of biography written by Howe. ( )