Desmond MacCarthy

Background

Desmond Charles Otto MacCarthy was born on May 20, 1877 in Plymouth, England, United Kingdom, into the family of Charles Desmond, subagent to the Bank of England, and Louise Joanne Wilhelmine (von Chevallerie) MacCarthy.

Education

Desmond received his education at Eton College. After finishing his studying at Eton, MacCarthy was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group, though not of its inner circle. Unable to attend his final examinations due to illness, he left Cambridge with an aegrotat degree in history in 1897. Later he received an honorary doctor of literature degree from Cambridge University.

Career

Desmond MacCarthy began his career as a freelance journalist. He wrote for various periodicals, including Speaker and New Quarterly, before joining the staff of the New Statesman in 1913. MacCarthy remained a full-time contributor to the New Statesman for more than fifteen years, signing his column “Affable Hawk”, a pseudonym reportedly well suited to both his character and his physical appearance.

During the First World War MacCarthy served in a Red Cross unit assigned to the French Army, and he chronicled his wartime experiences in sketches later included in Memories. After the war he became literary editor of the New Statesman and wrote theater reviews before serving as co-editor of Life and Letters in the late 1920s. In 1928 he also succeeded Sir Edmund Gosse in writing a weekly literary column for the London Sunday Times. In later life MacCarthy’s gifts as a conversationalist were utilized in a series of BBC-Radio broadcasts on literary topics.

Beginning with his highly regarded 1931 volume of biographical sketches, Portraits, MacCarthy’s journalistic works have been collected and republished in book form, including such volumes as Criticism, 1935’s Experience, 1953’s Humanities, and Memories, also published in 1953. Among his biographical portraits, those of Herbert Henry Asquith and Henry James are considered notable examples of MacCarthy’s ability to identify and express the essential character of his subject. He wrote on a variety of literary subjects and is especially noted for his critiques of the works of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and Anton Chekhov. The author died on June 7, 1952. He is buried with his wife at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge.

Achievements

• Desmond MacCarthy was one of the most influential literary critics in England during the first half of the twentieth century. Considered a master prose stylist, he was also highly esteemed for the broad learning and tolerant personal philosophy displayed in his reviews and essays.
  
  In 1951 the author was knighted for his contributions to literature and the theater.

Works

More photos

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  • The Court Theatre 1907
  • Humanities 1953
  • Memories 1953
  • Drama 1940
  • Portraits 1931

Views

Believing that literary criticism “must be in great part a Natural History of Authors,” MacCarthy was most revealing when his approach was biographical rather than purely literary. He was open to original visions of reality in literature and helped promote unknown or new authors (including the then-obscure Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov).

Quotations: "The whole of art is an appeal to a reality which is not without us but in our minds."

Membership

Charles was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the intellectual secret society, from 1896. He was also the president of PEN president an 1945 and a fellow of Royal Society of Literature. MacCarthy was also associated with the Bloomsbury group.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Though [MacCarthy’s] approach is philosophic it would be a mistake to burden him with any particular doctrine. ... He is neither a teacher nor an inspirer. What he does give us (besides much incidental pleasure) is an improved equipment: ‘to help the reader to watch himself is part of the function of criticism as I understand it' he writes, and after reading him we are better fitted to cope with literature generally, and also with non-literature, sometimes called life. He educates us by the only efficient method — the indirect — and to be in his company is to acquire civilization.” - E. M. Forster

Connections

In 1906 Desmond MacCarthy married Mollie Warre-Cornish, the daughter of Francis Warre Warre-Cornish. They had two sons, Michael and Dermod, and a daughter, Rachel.

Father:

Charles Desmond MacCarthy

Mother:

Louise Joanne Wilhelmine (von Chevallerie) MacCarthy

Spouse:

Mary Warre-Cornish

Mary Warre-Cornish was a British writer; known for her involvement in the "Bloomsbury Group", and commonly called Molly.

Daughter:

Rachel Gascoyne-Cecil

Son:

Michael MacCarthy

Son:

Dermod MacCarthy

Dermod de la Chevallerie MacCarthy was a British-born paediatrician, notable for establishing a paediatric unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and conducting research into common disturbances in childhood and growth in deprived children.

Friend:

Roger Fry

Roger Eliot Fry was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism.

Friend:

Bertrand Russell

Friend:

Thoby Stephen

Julian Thoby Stephen, known as the Goth, was the brother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, both prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group, and of Adrian Stephen.