Edward Marsh Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Angus Wilson

Critical Essay by Angus Wilson

SOURCE: “Man of Letters,” in The Spectator, No. 6833, June 12, 1959, p. 861.

In the following essay, Wilson provides a quick overview of Marsh's accomplishments.

I knew Sir Edward Marsh only at the very end of his life. He was by this time an impoverished, rather lonely old man whose memory was failing. Yet it was not at all difficult to see the man he had been, for he was one of the old, who, believing only in this life, treated each new moment with all the vitality and interest at his command; and this interest was always so complete and genuine that there could be no patronage of him as ‘plucky’ or ‘gallant’—although he undoubtedly was both—far less as ‘clinging to life.’ He wanted always to live in the present and he gave his reminiscences of Lawrence or Gaudier-Brzeska, for which I was very eager, and more still...
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