THERE IS, plainly, a certain small, very select area of literary journalism and book reviewing which is too good and too relevant to be forgotten, or merely buried away in the mummy life of yellowing newspaper and magazine files. Equally obviously, there is a vast, shapeless mass of it which is dated from the time it appears, and is/ was never meant to be anything more than that. The right book carefully hand picked by or for precisely the right critic, a good topic and adequate space to develop it, are essential to produce something weightier than weekly or monthly ephemera, however professionally written. A generation ago, V.S. Pritchett in the New Statesman created a special type of review essay which became an established genre of its own, and almost inevitably the best of these pieces flowed later into book form.
Derek Mahon, besides his acknowledged quality as a poet, is a fine critic and an excellent literary journalist. Not all, or even many, poets are for instance, Hugh McDiarmid, who incidentally is one of Mahon's subjects in this book, often wrote abominably when he turned to prose, and seemingly without discipline or revision. Auden's literary journalism is usually lively and wide ranging and MacNeice's is almost always worth reading, even though Mahon finds his prose style rather flat. Mahon is a worthy successor to these, and the book reviews, articles and miscellaneous pieces he includes here have been carefully chosen. (Many of them, by the way, first appeared in this paper).
Fittingly enough, the first four deal with MacNeice, whom he knew personally (though not well) and with whom he seems still to have a rather ambivalent relationship. It is interesting to notice how his stance shifts, though slowly, from the first essay, which was written in 1974 when MacNeice's poetic reputation was still in the balance. By the time he has come to review Michael Longley's Selected Poems of MacNeice of 1988, Mahon is much more positive, though I still detect some reservations. Eight years have intervened since then, and surely by now his standing must have been consolidated - though Americans, in my experience anyway, have been slow to accept the high estimation of MacNeice's poetry which places him almost on a level with Yeats.
Meanwhile, I am glad to see that Mahon is critical of the present tendency to appropriate him almost solely for the North: as he points out, "he thought of himself as, in effect, a Connachtman in exile". There is, beyond argument, a strong Ulster element in MacNeice, but he was also an English public school product, an adoptive Londoner, and an Irish Protestant in the widest sense (on the few occasions I met him face to face, I remember thinking that he looked the archetype of the "horse Protestant" you used to see in the RDS). Certainly he is an utterly different animal from John Hewitt, an authentic Ulsterman who rather liked playing the role of the knobbly, inbred, almost curmudgeonly provincial writer. Hewitt gets a minichapter to himself, aptly, headed "An Honest Ulsterman".
Since Mahon has fluent French, he seemed the obvious candidate to hit it off with Samuel Beckett, yet when they finally met in Paris they got no farther than pub conversation and Mahon was not invited back to the famous flat. He admires Beckett's poetry, or at least some of it, a specialised taste in which not many of us can or -will follow him. When writing of Beckett's predecessor at Portora Royal School, Oscar Wilde, he has" no time for the traditional image of the urbane, essentially superficial society wit and climber, author of "amusing" plays. Though he found the Ellmann biography slightly disappointing compared with his monumental book on Joyce, he acclaims it for showing Wilde as complex, deep, courageously radical in many of his views and public stances - "not some sort of highbrow Noel Coward, but in reality a subversive, indeed a revolutionary figure."
Since Wilde became virtually a poete maudit in his last, Parisian years, the track should lead almost inevitably back to Baudelaire; but as it turns out, Mahon has only a limited sympathy with him and refuses to place him quite in the first rank as a poet. Somehow, Baudelaire is either deified by his commentators (see the famous essay by Proust, who thought him the greatest poet of the 19th century) or put down as a secondrater; it is either too much or too little. Mahon sees him as one sided and incomplete there is too much missing" - and finds his work "deeply egocentric". Les Fleurs du Mal was always a silly title, and its more florid shock pieces and very "literary" sense of moral self abasement have dated; but Baudelaire was surely the father, or grandfather, of the modem poetry of urban loneliness and disillusionment, he significantly enlarged the erotic vocabulary of literature, and his (profoundly Catholic) sense of sin and redemption, despair and grace, is still much more relevant than most people like to admit.
Other pieces deal with figures as disparate as Rilke, Raymond Chandler, Wyndham Lewis, Cyril Connolly, Sartre, Camus, Robert Graves, Ford Madox Ford, Celine, Yves Bonnefoy, Simone Weil, Eluard (Mahon is predictably strong on modern French literature). There are sympathetic reviews of contemporaries such as Eavan Boland and Michael Longley, a good deal about the novels of Brian Moore, and some excellent "colour" pieces including a flashback to his days in TCD when, with another drunken student he crashed the Trinity Ball. Terence Brown, apart from some unobtrusive editing, contributes abriefish, no nonsense introduction. Open the book just about anywhere, and you will find yourself reading on and then going back to the beginning.