In his his 1991 Autobiography, Kingsley Amis recalled “a small group of posh chaps,” the literary critics who exercised undue sway over London writers of the 1950s: “They were second-generation Blooms-buryites, I suppose, junior and dilute modernists . . . men of small original output and uncertain taste, owing their position to other things than knowledge or merit. Connolly, the best known, seemed to me the least deserving.”
Nor were others much fonder of Cyril Connolly. Within five days of their wedding, his second wife Barbara Skelton felt “very restive and dissatisfied, saddled with a slothful whale of a husband who spends his time soaking in the bath and then . . . studies the racing form.” This was a man who stole his friends’ books and was given to moaning about those of his dead friends who didn’t bequeath him any of their money or real estate The London wit Molly MacCarthy described him as “mean with his own money and perpetually extravagant with everyone else’s.”
Connolly does have his defenders — his new biographer Clive Fisher, for one, whose Cyril Connolly: The Life and Times of England’s Most Controversial Literary Critic (St. Martin’s, 466 pages, $ 27.95) is the first full-scale account of his life. Kenneth Tyrian once wrote of Connolly, ” It is hard to explain his influence to anyone who has not felt the impact of his personality.” Such appraisals are often the sign of a reputation unduly inflated — but they point to the reasons he is still an interesting figure: Whatever can be said of his merits, Connolly’s influence was undeniable, and it was exercised at the very heart of English letters.
Connolly attended boarding school with George Orwell — who at age 12 told Connolly, with a lugubriousness beyond his years, “Of course, you realize, Connolly, that whoever wins this [First World] war we shall emerge a second- rate nation.” He went through Oxford with Evelyn Waugh (where the two shared a crush on the same male friend), and adventured widey in sex, drink, and books — least widely in books, for Fisher tells us he gained only “scant acquaintance with Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Keats, Hardy or Dickens.” Most decisive was Connolly’s early job as amanuensis to the cranky American epigrammatist Logan Pearsall Smith, decisive because it is as a crafter of epigrams that Connolly is best remembered. To Connolly we owe “The reward of art is-not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.” And: “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.” And, most fatuously, “Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.”
In 1939, Connolly founded Horizon with the dissolute millionaire Peter Watson; it was for more than a decade the most important literary magazine in the English-speaking world. Here Cormoily discovered s such young writers as Angus Wilson and Julian Maclaren-Ross. Even if posterity has treated his discoveries as indifferent talents no one in those days excelled Connolly’s reputation as a literary sage. Ezra Pound called him the only person he would trust to make a selection of his poems. By the time Connolly died in 1974, one magazine editor could say he symbolized the “very notion of literature.”
These are charitable’ estimates of one who, for all his gifts as a wit and impresario, never, strictly speaking, wrote a book. His 1936 comic novel The Rock Pool, with its inch-wide margins and its 160 words per page, is better thought of as a padded vignette. Then there is Enemies of Promise, three longish essays in search of a cohesive premise, the closest thing to one being the insight that modernist writers can be divided into those who use big words (“Mandarin”) and those who do not (“Vernacular”). Of The Unquiet Grave, the collection of French and English quotations and diary extracts that Connolly pompously called a “word-cycle” and published under the name “Palinurus,” one can do little better than note that Connolly himself feared it would be read as “a collection of extracts chosen with ‘outremer’ snobbery and masquerading as a book.”
That snobbery was a source of the moral obtuseness that certain of his contemporaries (and such astute later critics as Samuel’ Hynes) saw in his work. He was so insulated that even World War II failed to make an impression on him — unlike Waugh, forexample, who saw the war as a test of character and opined that its importance to literary men was obvious, as noe of its hidden values “would be to show us finally that we were not men of action.” Connolly, to put it kindly, was always fighting the last war. The Rock Pool is a novel of the gay twenties written ten years after Waugh”s Vile Bodies adn seven years into a globa depression, by which time Britain”s literary set were all Marxists. Connolly caught up with literary Marxism only in the late 1930’s, when its chief British practitioners, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, were already on their way to (respectively) Christianity and Buddhism.
Orwell, the very image of the engaged intellectual, was deeply offended by The Rock Pool, which in 1936 complains about the plight of European Jewry — but on in Biblical times — and dwells on dancing and drinking on the Riviera at the very moment when the Rivera was being overrun by hungry refugees from the Spanish Civil War. The book, Orwell said, was dated before it was published: “The awful thraldom of money is upon everyone, and there are only three immediately obvious escapes. One is religion, annother is unending woork, the third is the kind of sluttish antinomianism — lying in bed till four in the afternoon, drinking Pernond — that Mr. Connolly seems to admire.” Connolly would come to agree, but only once the war was over, writing, in a 1946 postscript to the book: “Nothing ‘dates’ us soo much as an ignorance of the horrors in store.”
If all Connolly could be accused of was laggardness in the fight against facscism, criticism of his criticism would be misdirected. But the problem was more general. At a certain level, Connolly didn’t believe in anything, and he lacked the courage of his lack of convictions. Reading him is not to follow a big spirit on a long moral journey, but to spend an afternoon in the front room with a chatty companion. Connolly liked it that way: As a novel reviewer, he generally chose second-rate novels by first=time writers. ” It would have been a simple matter for him to review more significant work,” writes Fisher, “to chart the progress of peers and contemporaires like [Graham] Greene, [Henry] Green, [Anthony] Powell or [Peter] Quennell. [But] Connolly was happy confining himself to the trite and irredeemable because he saw that restriction as giving him the license to be flippant and extravagant.” Nonetheless, Fisher tells us, “his comments about writers who had become established were incisive.” Not very deep praise.
It’s hardly surprising that Connolly was given to venting that most insincere of literary boasts: that he was “grateful” (particularly after Waugh published Decline and Fall at age 24) not to have had a big early success that would have hardened him into a caricature of himself. Insincere because without an early success, he panicked. Almost immediately, he behaved as if time were running out on him. He began taking up the momentary enthusiasms of his younger contemporaries, casting madly about for the latest school to which he could belong as an exemplar. This is clearly what Waugh meant when he derided Enemies of Promise: “Mr. Connolly sees recent literary history, not in terms of various people employing and exploring their talents, but as a series of’movements’ sappings, bombings and encirclements, of party racketeering and jerrymandering [sic].”
To describe Connolly as “reactive rather than creative,” as Fisher does, is almost too generous: Connolly was imitative. It is, not surprisingly, his parodies that, among his non-epigrammatic work, retain the best claim on our attention. (He did a hilarious job on Aldous Huxley called “Told in Gath.”) If there is next to nothing about Connolly’s actual criticism in Fisher’s account, it is because, however felicitous the writing and however quick the wit, it does not today hold up as original thinking. There is a swim-with-the- tide aspect to it, an element of the joiner, as Connolly constantly pronounces on the death of literature but never meets a living modernist he doesn’t like. Typical of his timing was his famous reconsideration of A. E. Housman in the pages of the New Statesman — as soon as the poet was safely dead. His rare attacks on contemporaries were confined either to those on whose puppy-doggish loyalty he could bank, like Spender, or those who were too aloof to care, like Waugh (who wrote, after one effort, “I thought your review of Men at Arms excellent. It is a pity you called ‘Apthorpe’ ‘Atwater’ throughout . . . because it will make your readers think you did not give full attention to the book”). Connolly was capable of applauding Eliot for revolutionizing modern poetry, then applauding William Carlos Williams for his sentiment that Eliot had ruined modern poetry. Never out of a changed mind or out of reconsideration, but seemingly out of sheer complaisance.
As Hemingway wrote to Connolly, “Cyril, we were born into almost the worst fucking time there has ever been. And yet we have had almost as much fun as anyone ever had.” A problem for both of them. There remains a significance to Cormoily, although not as a critic. Better to restore him to the image he had of himself: part-wit, part-aphorist, but chiefly a signpost of failure to writers who would come after. What the Oxford don Maurice Bowra said of Connolly as an undergraduate could be said to the end of his life: “This is Connolly. Coming man. Hasn’t come yet.”
By Christopher Caldwell
