'One of the Most Sensitive of Men'

“Writing was always to him a task and rather a terror. And that is perhaps the reason why he wrote so splendidly well. He had always to do his very best.” 

High praise from one master of prose to another. When the literary critic Desmond MacCarthy died in 1952 at age seventy-five, Max Beerbohm broadcast a brief, touching remembrance of his old friend on the BBC, “Sir Desmond MacCarthy” (Mainly on the Air, 1946; rev. 1957). I heard an echo of Beerbohm’s eulogy while reading MacCarthy’s “The World of Henry James,” published in 1931 in The Saturday Review:

 

“In conversation he could not help giving his best, the stereotyped and perfunctory being abhorrent to him. Each talk was thus a fresh adventure, an opportunity of discovering for himself what he thought about books and human beings.”

 

MacCarthy knew James for the final fifteen years of his life, and is recounting the walks he took with the novelist and his conversational style:   

 

“At such moments the working of his mind used to fascinate me, as though I were watching an hydraulic engine through a window, its great, smooth wheel and shining piston moving with ponderous ease through a vitrious dusk. The confounding thing was that the great machine could be set in motion by putting a penny in the slot. And, alas! one often had only coppers in one’s pocket!”

 

How often in a lifetime do we encounter and engage a fascinating mind? And how often are such minds creators of fiction? Most of us squander the gift of consciousness in unworthy ways. James is the most fully satisfying of the great novelists in English because he comes closest to creating a convincingly discrete world, one in which we can walk around and get to know the inhabitants. How well do we remember even marginal figures like Mrs. Assingham, May Bartram and the character Graham Greene described as “the sainted Ralph” [Touchett]? MacCarthy writes of James:    

 

“He himself was clearly one of the most sensitive of men. The importance to him of urbanity, money, privacy, lay in the fact that they were salves. His art was a refuge to him as well as the purpose of his life. The brutality and rushing confusion of the world, where the dead are forgotten, old ties cynically snapped, old associations disregarded, where one generation tramples down the other, where the passions are blind, and men and women are satisfied with loves and friendships which are short, common, and empty, horrified him.”

 

I delayed reading MacCarthy because I pigeonholed him among the creeps, snobs and bores of Bloomsbury. How many critics write with a sensitivity that rivals James’ own?:

 

“While we read his books only the great dome of civilization is above our heads—never the sky, and under our feet its parti-colored mosaic—never the earth. All that those two words ‘sky’ and ‘earth’ stand for in metaphor, is absent.”