'I Cannot Distil a Review From This New Book Yet'

Think of the many writers to whom Desmond MacCarthy’s experience would seem to fit, and not fit: 

“It is curious: while I am reading Mr. [X] I feel wiser than I have ever felt before, but when I try to impart that wisdom to someone else I cannot lay my hands on anything transferable. It is as though I had been tipped in fairy gold.”

 

The passage is drawn from a seven-page review later collected in Criticism (1932). If you asked me to briefly impart the wisdom of, say, Aristotle or Dr. Johnson, I could do it, however haltingly and incompletely. How many writers are as elusive – not vague, not histrionically obscure -- as MacCarthy suggests? Paul Valéry comes to mind, among accomplished writers, and Paul Celan, but usually we think of such “untransferability” as a failure to respect the reader. Much of modern poetry is like that.

 

Nominally, MacCarthy is writing a review of George Santayana’s Soliloquies in England, published in 1922, annus mirabilis, the year of Ulysses and The Waste Land. Santayana is a philosopher, yes, a thinker, but he is, first of all, a writer, one of the master stylists in the language, a true pleasure to read. He wrote not very good poetry but the best of his prose was poetic; that is, precise yet evocative, musically true, clear as an unclouded sky. That, I think, helps us understand MacCarthy’s experience. Santayana’s words are seldom strident and he is not dedicated to persuading us of anything. He was temperamentally removed from intellectual combat, one of nature’s true spectators. Take this from the “War Shrines” chapter in Soliloquies in England:

“Death is the background of life much as empty space is that of the stars; it is a deeper thing always lying behind, like the black sky behind the blue. In the realm of existence death is indeed nothing; only a word for something negative and merely notional—the fact that each life has limits in time and is absent beyond them. But in the realm of truth, as things are eternally, life is a little luminous meteor in an infinite abyss of nothingness, a rocket fired on a dark night; and to see life, and to value it, from the point of view of death is to see and to value it truly.”

 

This from a man who would characterize himself as an atheist and materialist. As usual, Santayana’s prose is richly metaphoric but precise. He often thinks in metaphors. MacCarthy’s review is an act of critical humility. Read slowly his admission:

 

“I am not going to review his new book, Soliloquies in England; I am going to live with it. It has been already for some weeks about my bed and about my path, but I cannot distil a review from this new book yet. Of course I can tell you what the book is about; it is about Dickens and death and friendship, the English character and the Latin mind, religion and the Greeks, modern philosophers and Mr. Santayana himself, and his critics, and the Church of Rome, and Spanish drama and the war and youth and imagination, and skylarks and myths and English architecture, and the English Church and the Comic Spirit, and Socrates and German philosophy, and Liberalism and snobbery and culture and sanctity and mysticism and manners and solitude and Queen Mab and liberty (classic and romantic), and the subliminal self and the unconscious Censor and the poet and carnivals and – this list does not exhaust all its topics. In my opinion Mr. Santayana is the greatest of living critics.”

 

[You can find MacCarthy’s Criticism at Isaac Waisberg’s IWP Books.]