Donald Davie's critical arguments are often happily reminis-cential, and his reminiscences are often happily argumentative, so the difference in kind between these two admirable books doesn't make for any great difference of temper. The critical essays which make up Dissentient Voice: Enlightenment and Christian Dissent are an act of making good; they fulfil the promise and they repair the deficiencies of Davie's earlier book on Dissent and culture, A Gathered Church. The recollections gathered as These the Companions are an act of making permanent, with such permanence as time has; they fulfil a promise often made and often kept in Davie's poems but which these days asks, too, for the expatiating element of prose: the exercise of 'the faculty of pious memory'.
There is no reason to question the sincerity of the foreword's concluding insistence: 'For certainly I'm not writing to vindicate myself, if only because in this book I am not the principal character. You must bear with the first person singular only so as to have me introduce you to persons and places and ambiences that have a singularity and a value such as I won't claim for myself.' The trouble is that this is an insistence. The swell and throb of the title, These the Companions (as against, say, Charles Tomlinson's recent recollections, Some Americans), are evidence, not just that Davie will over-forgive Ezra Pound almost anything ('Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven / these the companions'), but also that he needed to underline the self-abnegation. Sincerity, like patriotism (which Davie has too), is not enough. Moving as these recollections often are, in their evocation of places (the West Riding, the Arctic Circle, Cambridge or California) and of people (Douglas Brown, Yvor Winters, an early love, fellow-sailors), his touch in this prose is less secure than in either the kind of prose which he has most practised or the poems which figure within the book as at once asides and nubs. You may say, and believe, that you 'are not the principal character', but you can't help sounding like it when you use such a locution as 'when I and Sean White took him to Dublin Castle'….
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