Critic's charm
George Clive
Introduced by David Cecil The Man and his Writings Desmond MacCarthy: (Constable £9.95)
There are five collections of Desmond MacCarthy's writings, and rione of them is in print. This book is therefore extremely welcome, for it is possi- .le to be familiar with Desmond MacCar- r's name and attributes without actually 11. avIng read a word that he wrote. Yet dur- his heyday he would have influenced the literary views of a larger section of the educated public than any one else; he suc- ceeded Edmund Gosse as leading critic of the Sunday Times in 1929, and remained there until his death in 1952.
Lord David Cecil made friends with Des- Thond MacCarthy in the late Twenties; soon afte rwards he married MacCarthy s daUghter Rachel; so he is uniquely well placed to produce a memorial to a man he zabvtously found deeply sympathetic. In a
°-Page introduction he gives a picture of sorneone who felt that in spite of his success as a critic he had never fulfilled himself, whose studies of Byron and Tolstoy re- Mauled unwritten, and who said in a mo- ment of depression, want to understand life a little before I leave it. I no longer ex- Peet to contribute something of this understanding to the world.' This collection of articles shows how un- Just afill. , was this estimate of his own evements. They are written in a clear, su° rt-sentenced style which makes it easy to etviredit Lord David's view that Desmond a acCarthY was as good a conversationalist sts anY he had known; easy, also, to under- as latterly such a success as a and roadcaster. The pieces on Henry James u Chekhov are exceptional, the first par- dicularlY so for its wealth of Jamesian anec- t,u°te. His dislike of squalor was so great had at surroundings to be tolerable to him po Prliossib sitivelyility. to proclaim its utter im- "I can stand," he once said to While we were waiting for our hostess in ari rst-°111ex1 "a great deal of gold." 'This sort of ceptionally gilt and splendid drawing °rY Is the gilt on a serious study of Henry James; but many of us, like James himself, can stand a great deal of gold. The portrait of Asquith is extremely interesting and equally informed with personal knowledge; worthy to be set beside Churchill's treat- ment of him in Great Contemporaries.
Towards the end of the book comes a piece called 'Shooting with Wilfrid Blunt'. It starts, `Wilfrid Blunt was about the last host who ever asked me down for a day's shooting. By the age of 251 had become the sort of young man no-one could possibly associate with sport; and I was not sorry. Why he continued to ask me to shoot at Newbuildings, since I was so poor a shot, I cannot guess — unless I was right when I sometimes suspected that that was a qualification in his eyes.' The piece that follows is the funniest in the book.
Lord David rightly points out what a constructive critic Desmond MacCarthy was. However, he also says that if MacCar- thy truly disliked anything he was too honest not to say so, and gives as an exam- ple an article on Gertrude Stein in which MacCarthy attacks a writer who to this day is more deferred to than read. Throughout this book, MacCarthy never seems concern- ed to be fashionable, and always concerned to say what he feels; thus he is particularly good on those writers like Kipling, Tenny- son and Swinburne who must have been largely out of fashion with the cognoscenti when he was writing. (He is surprisingly dismissive of Kipling's poetry however), In a short article, MacCarthy gives his , impressions of the first and last nights of the Great War. Both are hauntingly im- pressive accounts of scenes often described, but never better than here. Lord David says, rather discreetly, that Desmond Mac- Carthy worked 'in the Admiralty' during this war. He did in fact work in the famous Room 40, and it would be nice to think that somewhere among the MacCarthy papers there was an account of that experience, if only a portrait of Room 40's boss, 'Blinker' Hall. Part of the charm of this book is that it leaves the reader, or this reader at least, wanting more; I feel sure that some of Des- mond MacCarthy's broadcast talks would bear reprinting.
From one point of view — and it is clear that Desmond MacCarthy shared it — his was one of the classic stories of a literary man falling victim to a rich selection of the Enemies of Promise. After schooldays (Eton) and university (Cambridge), both of which he greatly enjoyed, he had a deserved and continuing social success. This, together with financial worries and a habit of procrastination, helped to produce an absence of great works. Yet I find it easier to agree with Lord David that 'the form his achievement took was the form most suitable for Desmond's talent'. There is no sense here of an unwritten masterpiece; rather the reality of supremely well done criticism and description and reminiscence. And for that we, with the innumerable readers he had in his lifetime, should be grateful.
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