'First of All a Student of Human Nature'

“Desmond MacCarthy, like Dr. Johnson, was first of all a student of human nature.” 

The best writers, the ones who compel us to read their work across a lifetime, whose thoughts become our own and who at last become teachers and companions, are those who work in two media: words and people. They love language the way a sculptor loves marble or bronze. In their hands, it resists and complies. They don’t necessarily love their fellow humans (think of Swift) but find them irresistibly interesting. Our contradictory nature and propensity for good and evil, when observed and reflected on, compels them to craft an artful accounting, thus completing the circle.

 

Above, Lord David Cecil is writing in his preface to MacCarthy’s Humanities (MacGibbon & Kee), published in 1953, a year after the critic’s death at age seventy-five. MacCarthy is the one figure associated with the Bloomsbury Group who remains readable. In the passage immediately preceding the excerpt cited above, Cecil writes:

 

“He is usually described as a literary critic. Indeed, he was one of the best that England ever produced. But the phrase does not portray him completely; for it implies one primarily interested in the art of literature . . .” Followed by: “Because he loved and appreciated  good writing, he particularly enjoyed studying men as they revealed themselves through the medium of books. But he was just as ready to study them directly in actual persons and events and just as equipped to record his observations in the form of a memoir or short story.”

A thought occurs to me: How can you respect and trust a critic who writes badly? It subverts every judgment he makes.

As a literary journalist, MacCarthy resembles V.S. Pritchett in his independence, non-alignment with universities, vivid prose, mingling of life and work in the profiles and reviews, and broad taste in books. None of MacCarthy’s books appears to be in print. Here’s a sampler that might encourage you to seek out his books:

 

“Sydney Smith 1771-1845” (Humanities):  “Like Voltaire he was intensely social  and only lived intensely when he was busy or in company; like the greater man he was an admirable friend. He could hardly have been more benevolent, but he was also kinder than the prophet of eighteenth century bourgeois morality. It did not make him chuckle to give pain, though he loved a scrap.”

 

“Conrad” (Portraits, 1931): “The length of his head from cine to crown struck me, and this was accentuated by a pointed greyish beard, which a backward carriage of his head on high shoulders projected forward. Black eyebrows, hooked nose, hunched shoulders gave him a more hawk-like look than even his photograph had suggested. His eyes were very bright and dark when he opened them wide, but unless lit  and expanded by enthusiasm or indignation, they remained half-hidden, and as though filmed in a kind of abstruse slumberous meditation.” [Written after meeting Conrad in 1922, two years before the novelist’s death at age sixty-six].”

 

“Trollope” (Portraits): “Johnson said that no man could be written down except by himself: he meant that no man can destroy his literary reputation except by writing badly. But a man can also, though it seldom happens, injure his fame by being exceptionally honest and unpretentious about his own work.”

 

“Henry James” (Portraits): “When I look up and see the long line of his books, the thought that it will grow no longer is not so distressing (he has expressed himself) as the thought that so many rare things in the world must now go without an appreciator, so many fine vibrations of life lose themselves in vacancy.”