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Neville Braybrooke

Wednesday 18 July 2001 00:00 BST
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Neville Patrick Bellairs Braybrooke, writer: born London 30 May 1923; married 1953 June Orr-Ewing (née Jolliffe, died 1994; one stepdaughter); died Newport, Isle of Wight 14 July 2001.

When Kensington's neighbours and still in our teens, Neville Braybrooke and I first met during the Second World War, it seemed certain that here was one of destiny's brightest and most favoured children.

Already precociously busy as editor of The Wind and the Rain, a literary quarterly founded with two schoolmates while still at Ampleforth, as a fluent and knowledgeable lecturer, and as a reviewer greatly in demand, he at once impressed me, as he did everyone else, with his intelligence, energy and force of character. In addition, he was a youth of whom it could be truthfully said that he was beautiful – so that with his tall, slim, graceful figure and Mediterranean good looks, he was often compared with Ivor Novello, then at the height of his fame as a matinée idol.

That he fell short of achieving all that was originally expected of him brought an inevitable disappointment to those closest to him. But he never himself showed any disappointment.

If on his literary journey Neville Braybrooke did not travel as far as many of his coevals who started out promising far less than he did, on his spiritual journey – he was a devout Catholic but one always liberal and tolerant – he travelled a far greater distance than most people ever succeed in doing. Like many truly good people, he possessed even into old age an extraordinary unworldliness and innocence, shared by his adored wife June (the novelist Isobel English, née Jolliffe, who died in 1994).

They seemed to be predestined victims of rogue builders, lodgers who defaulted on their rent, and people, often scarcely known to them or not known at all, who, by claiming to be down on their luck, extorted from the couple money that they could often ill afford.

It was typical of them that, owning two houses – one in Hampstead, north London, bought for two or three thousand soon after the war, and another on the Isle of Wight – they lived for many years in near poverty without resorting to the obvious expedient of selling one of them. When, after June's death, Neville was finally persuaded to sell the Hampstead house, it was for so handsome a sum that he was not merely freed of all financial worries for the rest of his life but was even able to instruct the Royal Literary Fund to discontinue its pension to him.

Before his marriage to June, Neville had been engaged for most of the Forties to my sister Elizabeth. She became his co-editor of The Wind and the Rain and the co-director of the small publishing firm Phoenix Press, both eventually occupying sleazy London premises in the Earls Court Road, at a rent of £1 per week. Their triumph with Phoenix House was to persuade Mahatma Gandhi to allow them to publish his Autobiography (subtitled "The Story of My Experiments with Truth") in 1949.

It was after their amicable separation and Neville's marriage to June that the previously headlong pace of his life began to become leisurely, even at times lethargic. This may well have been because Neville recognised, rightly, that hers was the superior literary talent and made his own subservient to it. Crippling migraines reduced her life to one of semi- invalidism. It was therefore he who, unselfishly and uncomplainingly, was often responsible for not merely tending to her but looking after the house.

It was now that he became a man of letters, as distinct from the dedicated writer that he had started out as being. From time to time he would produce a poem, article or review, from time to time a collection of literary oddities, garnered in the course of his extensive exploration of the byways of literature.

There appeared, widely spaced from each other, a single novel, The Idler (1961); a 1958 symposium for T.S. Eliot's 70th birthday; a book about the London parks (London Green, 1959); and an anthology, Seeds in the Wind (1989), of juvenilia by writers later to become famous.

The one major achievement was his scrupulous editing, at my invitation as literary executor, of The Letters of J.R. Ackerley (1975). He passed so many deadlines before delivering this book that its publisher, my cousin Colin Haycraft of Duckworth, and I were driven to exasperation. Even my remonstration "But, Neville, you're not yourself writing the letters!" failed to speed him up. But, when at last the book appeared, it was generally acknowledged that he had carried out his task in exemplary fashion.

When Neville Braybrooke died, he had all but completed his biography of Olivia Manning, of whom he and I were literary executors. With this too, he had passed deadline after deadline. But when it eventually comes to be published, its quality, like that of the editing of the Ackerley letters, will, I am sure, justify a wait of many years.

Neville and June Braybrooke always believed themselves to be the favoured recipients of weird coincidences and occult happenings. Once, when I visited them unannounced on a Sunday, Neville exclaimed, "What an amazing coincidence! I was just reading your theatre review in the Telegraph." Since I then wrote a theatre review for The Sunday Telegraph every week, the coincidence did not strike me as all that amazing.

On a later occasion, he widely claimed to have been visited, at a time of despondency, by the ghost of E.M. Forster. Quite why Forster should have chosen to visit a man and a house unknown to him instead of, say, his biographer and friend P.N. Furbank and King's College, Cambridge, was a question that I thought it kinder not to put.

Because, though shrewd judges of character, Neville and June were always such loyal and supportive friends, they won the confidence of a host of their fellow writers – among them Antonia White, Muriel Spark, Kay Dick, and their Isle of Wight neighbours David Gascoyne and Edward Upward.

When my sister and I last saw Neville Braybrooke, in intensive care, with the tube of a tracheotomy making him talk in an all but inaudible whisper, he was no longer the beautiful presence whom we had known in his youth. But from that pallid, swollen body slumped against the pillows there still seemed to glow the steady, unspectacular light of an abiding goodness.

Francis King

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