JAMES AGATE

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25276, 30 August 1947, Page 7

JAMES AGATE

AN APPRECIATION Readers of Agate’s “Ego” series will turn wistfully to Mr ALAN DENT’S farewell tribute in the “Manchester Guardian,” whose editorial note was recently reprinted here. “Death hath this also, that it openeth the gate to good fame and extinguiheeth envy. Extinctus amabitur idem.” (How Jimmy would have chuckled over an appreciation, that begins with a quotation involving both Bacon and Horace!) Now that he is dead, few will deny that he was the leading dramatic critic of our times. He was the chief of our crqft, and a warrior chief, and a working chief right up to the end. As a critic he was cogent never smooth, often belligerent, oiten capricious, too, but always forthright, and sound and consistent in his standards; angrily impatient of the slipshod, the gimcrack, the pretentious, full of words and notions and allusions and audacities, full of sound and fury too, but always signifying something. And he used everything he had to write about or around—even the most trivial and unpromising play, book, film, or essay topic—as an occasion for spilling the words and ideas with which his large mind so generously overflowed. For fifteen years, which seemed like five, I served my apprenticeship with him in the craft* of criticism, and never once in that time did I see him, when well and working, “dry up” for lack of anything to say. He was extravagant in all ways, and did not pretend to be anything else. He had a large amount of that self-knowledge which the Greeks called ultimate wisdom. He loved praise even more than most of us do, and would let you call him all the things he was—witty, immensely readable, discriminating, irresistible, provocative, Pepysian, Johnsonian, Hazlittean, and even Shavian—till the sun went down (or rose) and the wine bottle was empty. But if any commentator, or any mere flatterer, praised his writing style, the critic in him invariably ousted the inordinate vanity. His prose was lively and prickly, but not that of a great stylist. He knew this and admitted it honestly. He slaved all his life to express himself in a style comparable to that of his great models and ideals— Hazlitt, C. E. Montague, and the critic Shaw. He was genuinely satisfied with his writing only when it seemed to nim a passable approximation to one of these.

In his later life he turned to diarymaking—writing, naturally, far more loosely than in his criticism —and produced nine big volumes of the celebrated autobiography “Ego”—a kind of huge vat to catch all the overflow of the verbal energy that was in him or which he occasioned in his followers, friends, and enemies. Like Falstaff in more ways than one, he was not only witty in himself but the direct occasion of wit in his inferiors.

In his person as in his work he could be overbearing, browbeating, blunt, and then “incalculably he could do the nicest things” as someone once phrased it to me in a letter In, my secretarial time, I have called him many things to his face—a monster, a tun of saturated self, a “bletherin' blusterin’, blellum” just to tease and just to be Scots—but he easily forgave and was easy to forgive. He had, besides true and unexpected kindness, a formidable amount of charm (a valuable gift even when one trades on it), was full of delightful surprises and was never a bore (except about personal health, a subject on which Dr. Johnson himself was probably a bore). In fine, we are mourning a great character, undeniably a great dramatic critic, and possibly a great diarist. Only time can determine his status in the last faculty. How he would have beamed at my triple and considered application of the word “great”—a word he wisely taught me to use with the most critical discretion. He was at his consummate best—either writing or talking—on the subject of great acting and was almost unique in his profession in having seen some. The ruling passions of his life were for the stage, for informed and witty conversation, for the language and literature of France, for golf and hackney ponies, and for all that goes with urban living. He loved life dearly and “the vasty hall of death’’ cap seldom have had a more unwilling visitant.