The MacCarthys

BOOK REVIEWS were alleviated by small grants from the Arts Council and the stringent economies instituted by Arnold Goodman and Michael Astor. In 1972 they launched another appeal which in a year produced £593,000. As chairman of the managing committee, Astor secured the services of the shrewd Lewis Golden to control the Library's finances, but alienated Gillam and the staff. Gillam was gradually forced out and replaced by his assistant, Douglas Matthews, who presently serves as Librarian. The venerable LL carries on past its 150th anniversary with the "same mysterious air of mid-Victorian confidence, its open shelves witnessing the same patrician trust as when the Library was used exclusively by country gentlemen and ladies," and, of course, by literary figures such as Samuel Butler, E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells. John Galsworthy , Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and T. E. Lawrence. And John Wells has rendered a grand service in recounting its history and vicissitudes with such panache and fine prose. J. O. Baylen, Emeritus _____________________ Eastbourne, England The MacCarthys Hugh and Mirabel Cecil. Clever Hearts: Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, A Biography. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1990. Distributed by Trafalgar Square. North Pomfret, Vermont. 320 pp. £18.95 $39.95 FOR YEARS Desmond MacCarthy (1877-1952) was perhaps the most prestigious critic, lecturer, and broadcaster in England, but now is almost forgotten, his writings largely neglected, generally unread and seldom cited by scholars. This has not always been the case, for in his heyday his perceptive articles, signed "Affable Hawk" in the "Books in General" column of the New Statesman, were widely read and frequently quoted, as were his later weekly contributions to the Sunday Times, where he succeeded Sir Edmund Gosse as chief literary critic. He also left his imprint on English literature as editor of Life and Letters, which featured stories, poems and articles by many celebrated authors, as well as lesser-knowns whose talent he encouraged before they became established . MacCarthy never thought much of his journalistic achievements, for being learned in British and Continental literature he aspired to be the author of a great creative work—to write a novel to rival Tolstoy or his beloved Meredith—but his native indolence, as well as his lack of self-discipline, foiled his attempt to equal the masters and the work was 517 ELT : VOLUME 35:4 1992 abandoned. Journalism was the source of all of his fewer than a dozen published books, starting in 1907 with a history of The Court Theatre, 1904-7. A number of Desmond's articles on Transition authors were among those collected in Portraits I (1931), the only volume published of a projected series reprinting critical articles on a number of literary personalities, many of whom were personally known to him. He seems to have been aware of his shortcomings, for in the revealing preface to Portraits, dedicated to "Desmond MacCarthy Aet. 22," he spoke of the younger man having "to live by literary journalism ... an agreeable profession" and went on to say that he had "slipped" into being a critic, finding that the "work was easy" and that "to imbibe literature at your leisure" was delightful. His present neglect may be due to the fact that he was an extraordinarily courteous reviewer, approaching each assignment with learned judgement and common sense, writing without malice, thus avoiding intellectual maelstroms of the type which gained dubious fame for some of his contemporaries and successors. His faded image also may be partially due, as the authors of this book note, to the fact that "the art of the literary journalist is of its nature ephemeral." Even more neglected is Molly MacCarthy (1881-1953), the former Mary Warre-Cornish, an author in her own right who published A Pier and a Band (a novel of her native Devonshire), two volumes of historical portraits, a book of sketches, and a memoir, A Nineteenth Century Childhood, which as recently as 1985 was reissued with an introduction by Lord David Cecil, the MacCarthy's son-in-law. Clever Hearts, a dual biography documenting the lives of the MacCarthys (by their grandson Hugh Cecil and his wife Mirabel), is not so much written as compiled...