by John Updike
An Englishman of Connolly’s class had to pursue literary ambition through social mists much thicker than any on this side of the Atlantic. One’s schoolmates, slightly reshuffled, had become the rising elite, and there were, all around, maddening examples of gentlemen—that is, men supported by unearned income. Logan Pearsall Smith, the Anglicized Philadelphian who employed the young Connolly as a secretary, led a thoroughly aesthetic life thanks to what he called “the unfailing fountain of my little annuity.” Connolly in his diary exhorted himself about the need to have a steady thousand pounds a year, or, better yet, three thousand pounds. His financial reality consisted of grudging doles from relatives, eight pounds a week from Pearsall Smith, and what he earned doing proofreading and unsigned reviews for Desmond MacCarthy at the New Statesman. This last sum went up to ten pounds a week when, in 1927, he became a regular contributor of signed reviews. In his journal he wrote this “advice to a reviewer”: “So you wish to take up reviewing—but this is no easy matter. To begin with, you must be sure that writing is your vocation, next you must be convinced that reviewing is not writing, hence the conclusion that your vocation is not reviewing. Well, once you feel that, you can start.” At the same time, Connolly had a decided taste and aptitude for the literary seethe—the old-boy snake pit of London literary life. “Desire for literary intrigue, power, influence, struggle,” he noted in one of his self-accountings. If Eton turned out to be all politics, then literature must be also. Enemies of Promise, indeed, deals less with works than with reputations, to whose rise and fall it shows a sensitivity almost morbid. The portrait of the artist as a young man which emerges from these journals enhances one’s admiration for the stubborn creative resolves of Lawrence and Joyce, who disdained the London critical establishment and in willful isolation composed their fierce provincial novels. Nottingham and Dublin pressed upon these two authors as no body of material apparently did on Connolly; nor did he have the savage humor or the uncanny empathy that enabled, respectively, his peers Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green to put worlds onto paper. The outer world interested Connolly as the means to his own comfort—a not entirely ignoble preoccupation but one more likely to produce philosophy than fiction.
After 1930, when he married Jean Bakewell, a young American with some money and a cheerful habit of “easy surrender,” the journals pick up pace and interest and become less anxiously narcissistic. Jean’s Americanness, so surprising to Connolly’s friends, may have helped release him from what he called his “inferiorities and persecutions from Yeoman’s Row.” She was outside the English class system, mercifully, as was Europe. The couple had met in Paris and spent all the time they could on the Continent; for years Connolly had been complaining about England’s stuffiness and ugliness in his journals. “England is a problem—parts of it so beautiful—a few people in it so intelligent and quite a good many extraordinarily nice—yet I can’t ever manage to fit into it.… I hate colonels and I hate the people who make fun of them.”
While married to Jean, he wrote his one novel, The Rock Pool (1936). A downbeat comedy of raffish expatriates in a Riviera town, it suggests the early novels of Waugh and Aldous Huxley yet has a spontaneous candor, a poetic sensuality, and a vulnerable air all its own. A few years later, Connolly wrote his one book-length critical work, Enemies of Promise, which became in its last third an essay in autobiography. On the wave of nostalgia and depression that followed his marriage’s breakup in 1940, he assembled that curious scrapbook, The Unquiet Grave, like Eliot’s Four Quartets a testament of solace for wartime London. The mild creative surge that produced these three disparate, odd, yet haunting works has to be associated with Jean, who shared his fondness for southern Europe, late nights, and pet lemurs. “Without your help, advice, love, and enthusiasm I am a mutilated person, a genius without a cause,” he wrote her, seeking a reconciliation. He persisted in both the infidelities that had driven her back to America and in his attempts at reviving the marriage; they were not divorced until after the war. Henceforth he was to be a London pundit and character merely, though a foremost one, and one who brought to his reviewing and journalism considerable diligence and an ineradicable verve and fineness of mind. Connolly, who died in 1974, had become an interesting person, and remains one. All three of the books named above are in print in this country, recently reissued in paperback by Persea Books, which has also now published in hardcover The Selected Essays of Cyril Connolly, edited and with an introduction by Peter Quennell.
Mr. Quennell, whom Connolly knew at Balliol, figures in his journals as an especially respected friend, “my only contemporary interesting in himself and not because I choose to make him so.” Yet the old friend has done a rather casual job of extracting this volume from Connolly’s three miscellaneous collections—The Condemned Playground (1945), Ideas and Places (1953), and Previous Convictions (1963). There is no index. Most of the pieces bear no dateline, so that only stray internal evidences offer to orient us within four decades of composition, and a word like “beatnik” jumps up from an essay on “The Grand Tour” with the impudence of an anachronism. The allotment of three hundred seven pages seems rather meagre for a posthumous omnibus, with too pronounced a tilt away from Connolly’s book reviews. The literary articles included are either general statements or else deal with major writers. I would have enjoyed a bit less caviar and a bit more bread and butter, in the form of Connolly’s treatment of the minor and ephemeral works that necessarily come a constant reviewer’s way—the feeblest works sometimes provoke the freest flights. Instead, there is a long section devoted to “Satires & Parodies.” Though Connolly’s parody of Huxley, “Told in Gath,” is an anthology standard, his burlesque of Ian Fleming, “Bond Strikes Camp,” seems grotesquely overextended, and the two “Felicity” pieces are parodying I don’t quite know what; the writer’s frustrated impulse to make fiction seems vented in these flights, and they overcarry the satiric point. And it would have been interesting to know, of the travel pieces, where they appeared, since they vary significantly in tone and were doubtless produced, like most travel pieces, for a market.
What can one say, critically, about a critic without seeming hypercritical? Cyril Connolly, at least in this selection, is no Edmund Wilson, burrowing with implacable brow through shelves of books in our behalf, nor a T. S. Eliot, offhandedly overturning reputations and bestowing a phrase that a thousand assistant professors can feed upon. Connolly lacked the trenchancy, the will to penetrate, that distinguished these two more determined minds. Novels honestly pained and bored him; no wonder he wrote only one. “The reviewing of novels is the white man’s grave of journalism; it corresponds, in letters, to building bridges in some impossible tropical climate. The work is grueling, unhealthy, and ill-paid, and for each scant clearing made wearily among the springing vegetation the jungle overnight encroaches twice as far.” He proposed a closed season—“no new novels to be published for three years, their sale forbidden like that of plovers’ eggs.” He advocated that no one under thirty should be allowed to write one, that “words like Daddy, love, marriage, baby, birth, death, mother, buses, shops” all be banned, plus “all novels dealing with more than one generation or with any period before 1918 or with brilliant impoverished children in rectories.” The typical English novel “consists either of arranged emotional autobiography or a carefully detached description of stupid people to show that the author is too clever to be clever.” Whereas “the typical 100 percent American novel has almost invariably a group hero, and is usually a monument of wasted energy, sentimentality striving after realism, and an admirable talent for description being thrown away on life that is quite unworthy to be described.” The giants of modern literature pained him little less: Virginia Woolf, the journals aver, wrote lush and cliché-ridden prose and “does not care for human beings”; Proust, we read in Enemies of Promise, was “often repetitive and feeble” and “a reactionary writer”; and Joyce, it is said in Selected Essays, “fed his queen bee of a mind with inferior
jelly” and produced massive works “fundamentally uninteresting.” Connolly further says of Joyce, “His life is one of the saddest and one of the emptiest except in so far as it was filled by the joys of artistic creation.” He condemns Oscar Wilde on an opposite count: “Perhaps what emerges from his letters is his fatal indifference to the real demands of a talent. No one talked more about art and artists or worked less.”
On the evidence of these Selected Essays, what did Connolly approve of? Travel, food, France, lemurs, the Latin elegists, Surrealism, and the rococo. The essay “Living with Lemurs” is one of the most delightful: “Their plaintive cry, their eyes of melting brown under long black lashes … a terrier’s head on a furlined Pharaoh’s body … If the ribs or armpits are tickled they are compelled to purr, to abandon any other posture and to start licking whatever lies in front of them.” “The Elegiac Temperament” treats Tibullus tenderly and Propertius as a soulmate: “He was a weary and precocious adolescent in a tired world.” The essays on the Greek and Roman classics, on Surrealism (“the greatest artistic commotion of the twentieth century and one of the few enlargements of sensibility in the last thirty years which stand to the credit of humanity”) and the rococo conspicuously display Connolly’s two strengths as a critic: his surprising erudition and his energy of response and phrasing. He was especially enthusiastic about those artistic topics that took him out of England into the general European experience. “The rococo was an explosive affirmation of the private life, an escape from Versailles.… In fact, the whole of Europe needed liberation from heroics and the rococo is an art sponsored by leading personalities … which caught on immediately with the humblest of their subjects and united all in a masquerade of gaiety and pleasure terminated (as is every European aesthetic movement) by an internecine war.” To a dazzling inventory of rococo masterpieces he characteristically adds the personal, elegiac note: “Even as I write some facade is crumbling; a ceiling flakes, paneling is being stripped, plasterwork crushed, chimneypieces torn out, a Chippendale looking-glass cracks and innumerable pieces of china are thumbed and shattered.… So hurry, before the last cartouche, the fading arabesque, the final cul-de-lampe goes the way of Sans-Souci and Schönbornslust, Belle-Vue and Bruchsal.” This reluctant critic’s sudden bursts of specific information should not surprise us; as a schoolboy Connolly won the Harrow History Prize, a national cramming contest, and he worked up his successful scholarship exam for Balliol on a subject, medieval history, not offered at Eton. In Enemies of Promise he recalled, “I had an excellent memory, I could learn by heart easily, gut a book in an hour and a half of arguments, allusions and quotations, like a Danube fisherman removing caviare from the smoking sturgeon.”
He had a rococo, even at times surreal, gift for the unexpected image. Startling similes dot his critical prose and keep us charmed:
When success permits them, both writers and painters prefer to barricade themselves deep in bourgeois country, like those birds which we admire for their color and song but which have divided our woods into well-defined gangster pitches of wormy territory.
Edmund Wilson seems to have returned to the conception of the artist as an isolated wounded figure, as different from the social realist as is a huge lightning-stricken oak from a Government conifer plantation.
Kitchener’s Island, the perfect garden, Assuan Dam, the largest and loveliest of waterworks … they are relics of our art and altruism for which we receive scant credit. One day they will go the way of the lines of Suez or El Alamein or of the Edwardian novels and proconsular memoirs which sleep like papyri behind the locked grilles of the hotel library.
[John William Mackail’s] Christian attitude to paganism, that it was consciously pathetic and incomplete, like an animal that wishes it could talk, infected everything which he translated with a morbid distress.
His language at times can be too figurative, as when he writes of “the lilt of transience which is the breath of readability” or of Joyce as “this literary anti-Pope, this last great Mammoth out of whose tusks so many smaller egoists have carved their self-important ivory towers.” But his profusion, and those sudden, almost madcap evocations to which his prose could rouse itself, enliven his criticism and lend great color and warmth to his remarkable travel pieces. Eight of these open Mr. Quennell’s selection, and the best of them—about Bordeaux, the Dordogne Valley, and Switzerland, all regions that cater assiduously to the inner man—are studies in rapture and hymns to civilized hedonism:
Latour, Lafite, Margaux, Cantenac; each vineyard marked out by an army of knotted green bushes whose powdery clusters dangle among the pebbles, whose wine gives out the most delicate of civilized aromas; fragrant, light, and cavernous as myrtle-berries from an Etruscan tomb, the incomparable bouquet du vieux Médoc, offspring of sunshine and hard work, parent of warmth, wit, and understanding.
The austerities and embarrassments of travel also entertained Connolly. In one brief sketch, a tourist’s-eye version of an abortive revolution in Greece, we taste something Olympian, both in the gusto of the descriptions of boredom (“Sleeping late to shorten the day, one went to the window and found the Acropolis and the Parthenon blocking the horizon. A thing of beauty, that is a joy once or twice, and afterward a standing reproach”) and in the calm humor with which violence is described: “The machine guns began again. The street, in normal times so straight and dull, became an enormous affair of shadows and relief, of embrasures and exposed spaces. The kiosk at the corner seemed as far away as it would to a baby who could just walk, or to a very lame old man.” Such sharp photographs of sensation are like something in Hemingway, but without the tense and consciously heroic surface. Inside the hotel, as an armored car roved outside, “all was cheerfulness and commotion; everyone felt important and with a reason for living.” When the trouble had blown over, the onlookers, “while secretly admitting the futility of the eyewitness, the meaninglessness and stupidity of all that had happened, knew also that they had tasted the intoxication and the prestige of action, and were soon rearranging the events of the day on a scale, and in an order, more worthy of the emotions which had been generated by them.” The cadences are Gibbon’s, and along such grand lines of illusionless gaiety, of dispassionate and scrupulous witness, Connolly’s gifts might have extended themselves, if the times had been more propitious, and his purposes more fixed.
Among the Masters
THE MYTH MAKERS, by V. S. Pritchett. 190 pp. Random House, 1979.
Nineteen essays—book reviews revised into less timely and more harmonious shape—gaze upon as many major fictionists, ranging from Stendhal and George Sand to Solzhenitsyn and Gabriel García Márquez, with not an Englishman or an American among them. Mr. Pritchett shows a marvellous acquaintance with literature as both a body of works and a branch of professional activity, and he walks among the mighty spirits with the benign authority of an investigating angel, taking puckish notes. Of the Tolstoys’ marriage he writes, “Like the Lawrences and the Carlyles, the Tolstoys were the professionals of marriage; they knew they were not in it for their good or happiness, that the relationship was an appointed ordeal, an obsession undertaken by dedicated heavyweights.” Of Dostoevsky’s characters: “Life stories of endless complexity hang shamelessly out of the mouths of his characters, like dogs’ tongues, as they run by.” Great compression and wit attend these observations; e.g., “A scene of Oriental luxury was indispensable to the Romantics: the looting of Egypt was Napoleon’s great gift to literature.” Mr. Pritchett’s ease in the ballrooms of history is absolute. He greets each master by the hand and, while seeming to make small talk, elicits from all the essence of their personalities; for García Márquez, he sees, “life is ephemeral but dignified by fatality,” and the nineteenth-century Spaniard Perez Galdos is complimented, “The fact is that Galdos accepts human nature without resentment.” Criticism this humane, precise, and unpedantic freshens the classics like a morning breeze.
To the Arctic
CHEKHOV: A Spiri
t Set Free, by V. S. Pritchett. 222 pp. Random House, 1988.
In this terse yet tender book Sir Victor leads the reader through Chekhov’s fiction, in chronological order, allowing the biography to be background music. Glints of confident opinion highlight his rapid survey: “The danger [of a collected edition]—as we know from Henry James’s revisions—lay in the temptation to elaborate, but Chekhov was a cutter, sensitive to the musicality of simple language.” But the critic’s voice is subordinate to the tale-teller’s, as the marvellous stories and plays are recapitulated in a tone of delight and wonder. Two impressions emerge: the extent to which Chekhov’s brilliant literary activity was mingled, in his forty-four busy years, with medical practice, good works, family concerns, and impulsive travel; and the poignant paradox that as his health got worse his art got even better, producing “The Bishop,” “In the Ravine,” “The Lady with a Dog,” “The Darling,” Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard in his last five, Yalta-bound years. The acceptingness at the heart of his humanity and his limpid realism seemed to widen as his body wasted: he let himself fall in love with Olga Knipper and, a few weeks from his death, talked of joining an expedition to the Arctic! A Spirit Set Free is this invigorating study’s subtitle; Chekhov’s declared “holy of holies” was “love and absolute freedom—freedom from force and falsehood.”