Poor Desmond MacCarthy—so gifted, so charming, so full of promise—never quite came off. To be considered promising when young is at best a mixed blessing. Edith Whar ton claimed that, as a young woman of her day, one of her greatest benefits was in never having been considered promising at all: it gave her time to develop in her own way and outside the pressure of expectation. Des mond MacCarthy never lived outside that pressure, and applied a good bit of it on him self. His aim, the assumption others made about him, was that he would one day create some masterpiece of literature—perhaps a richly complex novel or a key work of im perishable criticism—that would both make his mark and redeem his promise. He never did it; never, in fact, even came close.

Desmond MacCarthy stands in what is by now almost a tradition in England of literary flops. Just before him there was J. C. Squire, his predecessor as literary editor of The New Statesman, and following him were Cyril Connolly and Kenneth Tynan. Each in his day came down from Oxbridge laden with talent and marked for early success. Each knew what was expected of him. MacCarthy and Connolly came near to making a success of failure. Connolly even wrote books about his inability to write books. (In one of his dog gerel poems, Edmund Wilson wrote: “Cyril Connolly / Behaves rather fonnily: / Wheth er folks are at peace or fighting, /