'The Amber of His Style'

Isaac Waisberg at IWP Books has digitalized three volumes of Desmond MacCarthy’s essays and reviews -- Portraits (1931), Criticism (1932), Memories (1953) – with a promise of more to come. MacCarthy’s reputation in the U.S. is almost sub-atomic. Devotees of Bloomsbury think of hm as a hanger-on, an outer planet orbiting the Woolf-sun, which is a shame because MacCarthy (1877-1952) is an acute critic who might be thought of as a literary anecdotalist, mingling the lives and works of his subjects. He writes like an enthusiastic reader, not an academic, and his ultimate interest is the muddle of human nature – why people behave so bafflingly or, on occasion, so charmingly. Here, from Memories, is an excerpt from MacCarthy’s essay on one of his friends, Max Beerbohm: 

“His conversation, like his prose, is full of slight surprises. As a talker he belongs to more leisurely days, when the tempo of conversation permitted people to express themselves, and hosts did not prefer emphatic jawing guests, who shift their topic every moment. The art of conversation has passed away. In London to tell a story well is now impossible, for it may take more than two minutes; Oscar Wilde would be voted a bore, and neighbours at dinner would begin talking to each other after his third sentence.”

 

Note the shift from specific to general, suggesting that in 1946, when MacCarthy is writing, traditional English tolerance for eccentricity is already waning.  MacCarthy, like Beerbohm, was a gifted conversationalist. When he died six years later at age seventy-five, Beerbohm broadcast a brief, touching remembrance of his old friend on the BBC. In “Sir Desmond MacCarthy” (Mainly on the Air, 1946; rev. 1957), Beerbohm recounts the time Virginia Woolf hired a stenographer to surreptitiously record MacCarthy’s inspired, eloquent conversation. When transcribed, however, “the typescript was a disappointment. Without the inflections of the voice, without the accompanying gestures and changes of facial expression, how could it have been otherwise?”

 

MacCarthy writes with a comparable intimacy about writers dead before he was born. Take his 1942 tribute to Walter Savage Landor, another forgotten figure cherished by some of us:

 

“He is one of those writers for whom, if you care at all, you care immensely. His prose, apart from its content, gives me more pleasure than that of almost any other writer. The Landorian period is built up of chiseled statements, without conjunctions or transitions; the blocks . . .  are so hard and well-cut that they require no mortar.”

 

And here, a few paragraphs later, MacCarthy demonstrates his gift for aphorism: “He wrote many a page that was as lifeless as it was flawless. The amber of his style also embalmed mere flies and straws. Like several others who have mastered a manner of pronounced aesthetic quality, he sometimes ceased to observe its unfitness to the matter in hand; yet how frequently, both in prose and verse, Landor triumphed in the controlled expression of tenderness and solemnity!” 

 

MacCarthy’s prose is often so vivid, so unexpectedly and tastefully thrilling, that even familiar judgments sound novel and definitive. Here he is, also from Memories, on Kipling:

 

“Kipling has been the most wide-flung combustion in the sky of English letters since Byron and Dickens. . . . Kipling is a writer whose phrases must be allowed to soak a moment in the mind before they expand, like those little Japanese pellets which blossom into flower only when they have lain awhile on the surface of a cup of water. Yet with all his ostentatious word-craft, he remained a favourite author of thousands upon thousands of readers who are ordinarily impatient of that kind of writing.”

 

Something similar might be said of MacCarthy. It’s likely you have never read his work or even heard his name, so you can thank Isaac Waisberg for the generous introduction.