'A Perpetual Fountain of Fun'

“It was not only in the best company he uttered his best things. He was a perpetual fountain of fun; an improvisatore, who raised upon some shrewd comment wild edifices of exaggeration. His talk ascended from rational wit to buffoonery; yet his towerings never daunted others. He did not compete; he overflowed.” 

Even the best conversation is ephemera, in the literary sense. Without Boswell or Eckermann, the most gifted talker is no Johnson or Goethe. All we can do is commit to memory a few scraps of conversation and repeat it later as our own. The passage above is taken from  Desmond MacCarthy’s essay about Sydney Smith (1771-1845) collected in Humanities (1954). Smith’s Collected Works amount to five volumes of “sermons, essays, and political and ecclesiastical pamphlets,” in Guy Davenport’s words, but give little sense of Smith’s wit and lovability. This is the sad reality of a man whose bests mots are uttered rather than written.    

 

“Sometimes the company could take away with them a quick retort or comment; sometimes only a confused recollection of an evening when they had laughed themselves tired. Contemporary memoirs are full of gasping attempts to record such delighted occasions. The wit of course was portable.”

 

I first encountered Smith thanks to Davenport. In 1980 he reviewed Alan Bell’s biography Sydney Smith, which he later collected in Every Force Evolves a Form (North Point Press, 1987). Smith co-founded the Edinburgh Review where, Davenport writes, “his delicious sense of humor was whetted into an instrument that still holds up as one of the sharpest tongues in the history of wit. British humor is at its best with the ridiculous, and Smith was a master of glorious nonsense.”

 

What a treat it is to celebrate a writer who is himself a grand celebrator. Smith and MacCarthy (1877-1952) in our anemic literary age are figures who require perpetual reanimation. Both are entertainers in the most sophisticated,least trivial sense. Watch how MacCarthy closes his Smith essay:

 

“It is the first thirty years of a man’s life that make him what he becomes: Sydney Smith belonged to the eighteenth century. He detested and ridiculed ‘Enthusiasm’ without understanding it. Like many of the great wits, like Voltaire himself, he was a champion of bourgeois sense and rational philistinism. 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 that prophet of eighteenth century bourgeois morality. It did not make him chuckle to give pain, though he loved a scrap. He was good-natured – in fact an English Voltaire. Not such a good writer – Heavens no! But still he could say with truth, ‘I never wrote anything very dull in my life.’”

 

The same, of course, is true of MacCarthy.

 

[Isaac Waisberg and his IWP Books have digitally published six of MacCarthy’s essay collections. He seems forgotten in the U.S., if he was ever known, and is a charmingly learned  improvisatore. Isaac is a public library with good taste and a conscience, and deserves our gratitude.]