by William Boyd
For Waugh was obsessed with Connolly: fascinated and irritated by him; alternately admiring and contemptuous; secretly envious and publicly derisive. These are a set of contrasting reactions easily understood by Connolly fans (amongst whom I count myself among the most ardent) because you cannot read Cyril Connolly for very long without wanting to acquire—and then develop—a relationship with the personality of the man himself. This is rarely the case with readers and writers. Everyone is curious (I’m deeply curious about the character of Evelyn Waugh, for example) but the dislocation between the mind that creates and the man who suffers (in T. S. Eliot’s phrase) is usually happily observed. My admiration of Waugh’s novels is not diluted by his rebarbative personality. But with Connolly there is a marked difference and the difference is that the artist and the man are so conjoined and intermingled that you cannot savour the one without the other and vice versa. Connolly famously declared that it was the “true function” of a writer to try and produce a masterpiece “and that no other task is of any consequence.” Whatever the veracity of this claim (dubious), there’s no doubt that one of the great frustrations of his life was that he himself so conspicuously failed to live up to his own stern injunction. Yet the more one reads and the more one learns about him perhaps the fairest conclusion to arrive at is that Cyril Connolly’s greatest memorial—his particular masterpiece—is precisely that conjunction of life and work: that both how he lived (1903-74) and what work he produced form a unique and lasting whole. To invert the old saying: in Connolly’s case we cannot see the trees for the wood. It’s the wood—whole and entire—that interests us and not so much the individual oaks and elms.
This may seem harsh but, while almost everything Connolly wrote was stylish and intelligent, informed and passionate, there is no one book, or sequence of writings, that one can hold up as unequivocally excellent or fully achieved. The famous parodies are clever but finally lightweight and ephemeral; the millions of words of literary criticism and journalism suffer from the built-in obsolescence that undermines all journalism, however fine. Enemies of Promise, that precocious memoir, is good—but patchy. The Unquiet Grave is maddeningly flawed—pretentious, self-serving, arch—as well as achingly honest and true. The Rock Pool (Connolly’s one novel) is an interesting failure—and so on. Yet the sum of his uneven parts adds up to something formidable. He’s a writer for all seasons, for all readers. Waugh sneered at his amateur psycho-analysing. “We love only once,” Connolly wrote, “and on how that first great love affair shapes itself depends the pattern of our lives.” “Nonsense,” Waugh mocked in the margin. But there was never a truer comment made about his own life and situation and perhaps it pained him to see Connolly hitting a personal nail so squarely on the head.
Thus one’s reading and relish of Connolly’s work is shaped and conditioned by what one knows of the man himself to a degree not shared by any other writers. More will be derived, for example, from reading the prefaces to the monthly issues of Horizon (which magazine he edited from 1940-49) if you know about the history of Horizon, Connolly’s editorial lifestyle, his love affairs, the animosities and gossip that surrounded that period of London cultural life. The Rock Pool — self-conscious, straining for effect—becomes far less unwieldy once you know the background to its composition and who the thinly disguised characters are based on, and so forth.
This is not to denigrate or diminish Connolly’s skill as a writer and literary journalist. I first came across his work during the late sixties and early seventies when he was writing a weekly book review for the Sunday Times. At school and university I read Connolly’s weekly review religiously, whatever the subject, with—at that time—no insider knowledge about the man. What stimulated me was, I think, his enthusiasm. This was no dry, jaded don routinely turning out his 800 words, no embittered hack assailing grander reputations for the sake of a weekend’s frisson. Though I now know the drudgery of the weekly review caused him intense pain it never seemed to come through in the writing. He could pick and choose, of course, and the books he wrote about reflected his passions—French literature, the classics, the Augustans, the great Modernists—and his passion was contagious. From the reviews I moved on to The Unquiet Grave and was completely captivated by it. This “word cycle,” a loosely yoked collection of pensées, lengthy quotations, reflections on literature and autobiography, in many ways earns all of Waugh’s strictures—snobbish, fey, posturing, self-pitying—yet I can think of few better evocations of intellectual melancholy, if I can put it that way, of the dissatisfactions inherent in a life nurtured by and charged with European culture: of individual human insufficiency confronted by the great artistic ideals and achievements. Connolly is no Montaigne, he has none of his calm, resigned sagacity (though Montaigne is one of the presiding spirits of the book), but Connolly captures something ineffably present in the human spirit. And as he roves through world literature trying to pin down these emotions he does so with a candour and a kind of gloomy relish that are very easy to identify with (particularly when you are young: it is a perfect book for the young, would-be littérateur). We have all felt like this, have reached to art for solace and found only more despair, but only Connolly could be so unashamedly candid about it and make a virtue of his inadequacy.
This honesty, try as he might to disguise it, surfaces again and again in his writings and I think is what makes him perennially modern. Connolly is always confessing his failures one way or another and like all great confessors (Rousseau and Boswell spring to mind as real Connolly precursors and fellow-spirits) we are both appalled by what they tell us and at the same time drawn to them. We’re all human—all too human—but not all of us will admit to it in print. The vicarious thrill and recognition we take in confessional writings is one of the great literary pleasures and is nowhere more evident than in Connolly’s London Journal. Here we have the essence of the young Cyril, just up from Oxford, out of pocket, out of love, fretting and dissatisfied. I think the London Journal deserves its place alongside The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise as representing the best of Connolly. One regrets that this fragment is all we have (it seems Connolly was more of a notebook-jotter than a journal keeper). On the evidence of these few pages he could have been our modern Boswell—and how wonderful it would have been to have Connolly’s journal intime to set alongside Virginia Woolf’s diaries—fascinating, yet highly contrived and self-conscious, written, unlike Connolly’s, with both eyes firmly fixed on posterity.
Connolly earns my further affection by being the great self-appointed anti-Bloomsbury figure. He drew up the battle lines himself early in life, placing himself in Chelsea (“that leafy tranquil cultivated spielraum … where I worked and wandered”) precisely to counter what he saw as the desiccated fastidiousness, the preciosity, the snobism and the cliquishness of Bloomsbury. Chelsea, by contrast, was more open to Europe, more grubby, sexier, more rackety, more worldly and hedonistic. It was not simply a question of the new generation rejecting the values of the older, he saw instead a real opposition: of contrasting lifestyles, of political and cultural values, of attitudes to art. And it was an opposition that he maintained all his life: there was always in his life not just a love of European culture (especially that of France and Spain) but also a love of beauty, of women, of alcohol and food, of sea and sunbathing, of idleness and travel. Connolly is one of the great evokers of place and of pleasure: whether he is talking about a meal of a rough red wine and steak-frites, or wandering through Lisbon or Rome looking at architecture, one feels through his words the physical relish he takes in the experience. He makes you want to do the same things and derive the same intense enjoyment as he does. When he writes that he wants to live in France, somewhere in a magic circle embracing the Dordogne, Quercy, the Aveyron and the Gers, in a “golden classical house, three storeys high with oeil de boeuf windows looking out over water … [with] a terrace for winter, a great tree for summer and a lawn for games; a wooded hill behind and a river below, then a sheltere
d garden indulgent to fig and nectarine …” you respond, instinctively, “How true, that’s exactly where I want to live and how I want to live as well.” In a curious way he is both a great and dangerous role model: most of us share, to one degree or another, Connolly’s prodigious appetites, both venal and exalted, and most of us share, to one degree or another, Connolly’s failings, both petty and debilitating. This small, podgy, balding, pug-faced, funny, gossipy, lazy, clever, cowardly, hedonistic, fractious, difficult man somehow manages to enshrine in his work and life everything that we aspire to, and that intellectually ennobles us, and all that is weak and worst in us as well.
I think this explains both the fascination and repulsion that Waugh felt. Physically and temperamentally they were not far apart: both small, egotistical, selfish, stout and unhandsome. Waugh took the opposite route to Connolly and studiously and desperately reinvented himself as a parodic Tory squire cum reactionary man of letters. It is a facile oversimplification, but Waugh decided to live a lie while Connolly remained true to himself—however flawed or inadequate that self happened to be. Both men were consumed with self-loathing: both of them, Waugh said, were “always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating.” Waugh became the rich and acclaimed novelist, with a large family, living in a country house; Connolly was always indigent, the hard-up journalist scraping a living but, somehow, seeming to attract a succession of beautiful women prepared to put up with him. Waugh’s life appears superficially the more successful and achieved and yet, for all his endless moaning, Connolly seems far and away the happier man. The secret, I think, was in his resolute secularity and worldliness: he did not seek solace in spirituality (as Waugh did), instead he took both simple and intelligent pleasure in what the world offered, whether it came in the shape of a building, a marsupial, the company of friends, a fine claret, a train journey, a cigar, a sunny terrace, a beautiful woman, a good book, a Georgian teapot or a painting. That relish of life and its potential joys (and the sense of their fragility and transience) permeates his work and gives it its enduring value—and, I suspect, for I never met him, permeated the man as well. There is a wonderful passage in the London Journal that, I believe, sums up the essence of the Cyril Connolly appeal. It was written in 1929. Unhappy in love, paranoid, fed up with London and duplicitous friends, the young Cyril Connolly flees to Paris for consolation and takes a room at the Hôtel de la Louisiane on the Left Bank:
Hôtel de la Louisiane
… I have a room for 400 francs a month and at last I will be living within my own and other people’s income. I am tired of acquaintances and tired of friends unless they’re intelligent, tired also of extrovert unbookish life. Me for good talk, wet evenings, intimacy, vins rouges en carafe, reading, relative solitude, street worship, exploration of the least known arrondissements, shopgazing, alley sloping, café crawling, Seine loafing, and plenty of writing from the table by this my window where I can watch the streets light up … I am for the intricacy of Europe, the discreet and many folded strata of the old world, the past, the North, the world of ideas. I am for the Hôtel de la Louisiane.
Yes, yes! you cry spontaneously, when you read this. So am I. I’m for all this too. I’m for the life of the Hôtel de la Louisiane. And this, in the end, also explains why we are for Cyril Connolly.
2000
Keeping a Journal
4 November 1977. 9.30 a.m. The painter Keith Vaughan, dying of cancer, opens his journal and prepares to record the moment of his death: “The capsules have been taken with some whisky,” Vaughan writes and keeps on writing, quietly waiting for oblivion to arrive. “I don’t quite believe anything has happened though the bottle is empty. At the moment I feel very much alive… I cannot believe I have committed suicide since nothing has happened.” Vaughan writes on for a few more lines and then the editor adds, “At this point the words lapse into illegibility and stop.”
In December 1945, Edmund Wilson opens his journal to log the beginning of a love affair: “I loved her body which I had first seen in a bathing suit—taller than my usual physical type—there was nothing about it that displeased me—her breasts were low, firm and white, perfect in their kind, very pink outstanding nipples, no hair, no halo round them, slim pretty tapering legs, feet with high insteps and toes that curled down and out.”
On 1 May 1792, Gilbert White, a country curate, opens his journal to observe that, “Grass grows very fast. Honeysuckles very fragrant and most beautiful objects! Columbines make a figure. My white thorn, which hangs over the earth house, is now one sheet of bloom, and has pendulous boughs down to the ground.”
On 21 June 1918, Katherine Mansfield opens her journal to ask, “What is the matter with today? It is thin, white, as lace curtains are white, full of ugly noises (e.g. people opening the drawers of a cheap chest and trying to shut them again). All food seems stodgy and indigestible—no drink is hot enough. One looks hideous, hideous in the glass—bald as an egg—one feels swollen—and all one’s clothes are tight. And everything is dusty, gritty—the cigarette ash crumbles and falls—the marigolds spill their petals over the dressing table. In a house nearby someone is trying to tune a cheap cheap piano.”
Four journal entries by four compulsive journal-keepers, each journal functioning for its author in a different way, satisfying different needs. Why did these people feel the urge to write these observations down? What is the strange allure of the journal? What does it do to your life?
It’s hard to come to any conclusive answer, to explain why a journal is something you have to keep. The simple reason is that the journal is all things to all men and women, a kind of literary text that is famously hard to define, and whose raison d’etre has rarely anything to do with fame or notoriety, narrative excitement or exoticism. There are many sorts of journals: journals written with both eyes fixed firmly on posterity and others that were never designed to be read by anyone else but the writer. There are journals content to tabulate the banal and humdrum details of ordinary lives and journals meant expressly to function as a witness to momentous events of history. There are journals that act as erotic stimulants or a psychoanalytic crutch and there are journals designed simply to function as an aide-memoire, perhaps as a rough draft for a later, more polished account of a life, and so on. But buried within these varying ambitions and motivations is a common factor which unites all these endeavours—the aspiration to be honest, to tell the truth. The implication being that in the privacy of this personal record things will be un-censored, things will be said and observations made that couldn’t or wouldn’t be uttered in a more public forum. Hence the adjective “intimate” so often appended to the noun “journal.” The idea of secret diaries, of intimate journals somehow goes to the core of this literary form: there is a default-setting of intimacy—of confession—in the private record of a life that not only encourages the writing of journals but also explains their fascination to the reader.
In the case of Keith Vaughan this intimacy reaches unparalleled levels of candour. I can’t think of any other writer who has ever been writing deliberately at the very moment of his death, trying to record the last moments of conscious life. This in itself is enough to make Vaughan’s journal unique but it is typical of his tone of adamantine honesty throughout: his is the most unsparingly, harrowingly honest of the dozens of journals I have read over the years. I had the opportunity once to see the manuscript and the sight of that final page with the words tailing off into weakening squiggles freezes the soul. It is as if the terminal downward slash of the pen scarring the page (as his hand went limp and slid away) symbolizes the fall into the void that Vaughan longed for and had at that moment entered. And I wonder if there is something even more symbolic in that image that brings us closer to the root of the compulsion, the potent need that some of us feel to keep a journal. Vaughan’s marks on the page and their sudden cessation seem to me to sum up what is taking place in journal-keeping in a fundamental way: we keep a journal because we want to leave a trace o
f some kind. Like the prisoner who scratches the passing days on his cell wall, or the adolescent who carves initials into the trunk of a tree, or even an animal depositing his spoor, the act of writing a journal seems to say: I was here—here is some record of my journey.
My own serious journal-keeping has two distinct phases. The first began when I was nineteen, in 1971. I kept an almost daily journal for two years and then suddenly stopped, for reasons I now can’t recall—the journal gives no clue. I took it up again ten years later in 1981, and have kept it going steadily (though not daily) ever since. So, approximately half my life has now been set down in journal-form, but what’s interesting to me is that the two journals have quite different intentions. The first was motivated by a drive for total candour: it’s an urge common to many journal-keepers, that impulsion to set down on paper exactly what was going on in your life with no shame, prudery or cover-up. The second journal is of the aide-memoire variety: in 1981 my first novel had just been published and I thought it would be intriguing simply to record the everyday details, the ups and downs, the checks and frustrations, successes and failures of my writing life as time went by—and the second novel was published and then the third and then the fourth, the fifth and the sixth, should I ever reach those numbers. And so it has gone on over the last twenty-two years: it’s now a document of close to 2,000 pages and of abiding interest to its author. I refer back to it constantly.
But a couple of years ago I decided to reread the journal I had kept between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one. It was a disturbing experience, like encountering a total stranger, a doppelgánger who had lived my life, but whom I barely recognized. The account I would give now of the factual events of those years would be essentially the same but the psychological and intellectual content seem to belong to somebody else. The journal is full of the usual undergraduate pretensions and musings and faithfully recalls the torrid roller-coaster that was my emotional life at the time. But there was also a kind of pitiless self-examination of almost everything I did that I could not remember ever undertaking. And I was very hard on myself—often insulting myself crudely and ruthlessly in the second person (and not very imaginatively: “you bloody fool,” “you stupid cretin,” sort of thing). Clearly, I had been much unhappier then than I thought, much more troubled and insecure. Yet if I had been asked before I reread the journal what I had been like in my late teens I would have said carefree, easy-going, relatively content.