Miscellaneous - This Day That Age

dated June 15, 1952: Sir Desmond MacCarthy

Sir Desmond MacCarthy, the dramatic and literary critic, who passed away on June 7, was known to a wide public as a regular and urbane contributor first to the New Statesman, then to the Sunday Times and latterly as a broadcaster. An obituary report in The Times said that he was at his best and most individual in writing on the theatre. Excerpts from the report published in The Hindu: "MacCarthy's early work in the Speaker on the plays of Bernard Shaw were models of genre. He brought to the practice of the art of reviewing a very wide range of reading, sensitive judgment, and a perpetual curiosity about new writing. Cleverness and fashion never deceived him and he never grew unsympathetic towards innovation. He treated each book with perceptive interest, searching for good qualities but clearly indicating weakness, and he judged the whole against the liberal background of humane letters in which he had been bred.

"Born in 1878, he was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge. The possession of some money of his own enabled him to support over a number of years the trials of freelance journalism; he entered into relative security only in 1913, when Clifford Sharp appointed him dramatic critic of the New Statesman. The quality of his work as what at the time was called an "impressionist" critic of the drama was such that when, more than 20 years later, he published a selection of his notices in volume form, MacCarthy had little reason to regret his early judgments. After the war of 1914-18 he was engaged for a time in more varied journalism than he had so far attempted... Apart from a visit to Ireland, during the "troubles" for the Manchester Guardian, MacCarthy made few excursions into the drama of real life...

``MacCarthy's was a wide and carefully cultivated knowledge of literature, though as a critic he was most penetrating and gave the greatest pleasure when he was able to approach his subject by way of his own observation of the actual human being... Few men of letters, powerful in their day as critics, have won so many friends or made less enemies. He was knighted last year."

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