'They Require No Mortar'

“He is one of those writers for whom, if you care at all, you care immensely.”

This reader started in puberty as a serial monogamist, wedded briefly but intensely to Edgar Rice Burroughs, and turned in time into a guiltless polygamist. In junior-high school, sick at home with the flu, I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories. Fever fed pleasure. I’ve tried several times to recapture that bliss but the thrill is gone. Falling for a writer while an adolescent of any age is infatuation and like that first crush it will never come again. Literary promiscuity arrives only with maturity. The rapture of devotion to a single writer exclusively, with that degree of intensity, can never be replicated.

 

Above, Desmond MacCarthy is describing Walter Savage Landor, a writer I discovered in midlife and care for immensely. “His prose,” MacCarthy writes, “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, as [English literary critic] Sidney Colvin pointed out, are so hard and well-cut that they require no mortar.”

 

I share MacCarthy’s taste for Landor, one of those eccentrically wayward writers who will never earn a broad audience, turned out periodically by the English. Others who inspire similar loyalty include Henry Mayhew, Charles Doughty, Henry Green and MacCarthy himself. I would never proselytize such writers to other readers. They write for a small number and must be discovered independently. MacCarthy continues in excellent prose:

 

“Great splendour in emphasis and great composure in tone are the characteristics of this prose; and when the reader’s mood is one in which contemplation is a state of recognition rather than of wonder; when his imagination does not hunger after either realism or mystery, but is content to rest in what is presented to it with perfect clarity and dignity, then he will not complain that Landor’s pathos does not always move, that his invective does not often kill, that the famous characters in his [Literary] Conversations have little individuality, and that Landor himself is a man of thoughts rather than a thinking man.”

 

[You can find MacCarthy’s essay on Landor in Memories (1953) at Isaac Waisberg’s IWP Books.]