Life and letters | 28 July 2012

With few exceptions, literary journalists moulder in the grave and are soon forgotten. They may get some sort of posthumous life if they are made the subject of other books. John Gross rescued a few from oblivion in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. Otherwise it is usually only those who were also poets, novelists or social commentators such as Matthew Arnold, who are not soon forgotten. When I was young, the Sunday papers were dominated by Connolly, Mortimer, Toynbee, Nicolson and Davenport. I delighted in them all, and equally in V. S. Pritchett in the New Statesman. All of course were excoriated by F. R. Leavis in stern puritanical Cambridge. Fair enough: to academics engaged in ‘close reading’ or, later, in ‘theory’, the literary journalist has always been a flâneur or dilettante. Nevertheless, all those I have mentioned wrote well, and were influential in their day. Pritchett was of course a master of the short story and so his work survives. But the others? Where are the Snows of yesteryear?

Desmond MacCarthy belonged to an earlier generation. Born in 1877, he died in 1952, just about when I was starting to read the Sundays and the weeklies. He had been a distinguished theatre critic as well as a reviewer and literary journalist, this last the term he applied to himself. There can’t be many left who read him regularly. It was a surprise to come the other day on a collection of his pieces published in 1984 — I suppose I reviewed it somewhere. The surprise was only slightly diminished when I saw the first chapter was a memoir of MacCarthy by Lord David Cecil, whom I knew to be his son-in-law. So I suppose Cecil persuaded someone at Constable to publish the book.