“Enemies of Promise was first published in 1938,” Cyril Connolly’s 1948 Introduction begins, “as a didactic enquiry into the problem of how to write a book which lasts ten years.” Yet the question of literary longevity is raised and almost instantly dropped; that this particular book has now “lasted” more than four decades is hardly the answer. And I am not sure it has lasted, at least in the form it claims, i.e., as an essay about certain ideas. It hangs on instead as a curiosity, which does not mean it is wholly obsolete; it is only peculiar. Even in organization there is peculiarity: a trinity that does not immediately cohere. The first section divides prose style into Mandarin (a term Connolly takes credit for coining in this context) and vernacular; surely this issue is with us as bemusedly as ever. The second section—“The Charlock’s Shade,” which so fed my gripes and twinges—now looks to be not so much about failure as about success and its distractions. The third part, finally, is a memoir of Connolly’s childhood in a boarding school for the rich called St. Wulfric’s, and afterward at Eton. In my zealously partial reading long ago, though I was attracted by Connolly’s definitions of Mandarin and vernacular diction, it appears I never took in the autobiographical segment at all; and what drew me to “The Charlock’s Shade” (or so it now strikes me) was three lone sentences, as follows:
Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting as a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope.
Sloth in writers is always a symptom of an acute inner conflict, especially that laziness which renders them incapable of doing the thing which they are most looking forward to.
Perfectionists are notoriously lazy and all true artistic indolence is deeply neurotic; a pain not a pleasure.
Here, and only here, was the poisonous wisdom that served my travail. All the rest supposed a sophistication and advancement that meant nothing to a writer who had barely begun, and Connolly’s classifications of dangers hardly applied. To succeed as a writer, he admonished, beware of journalism, politics, “escapism,” sex, and success itself. Journalism: never write “a review that cannot be reprinted, i.e. that is not of some length and on a subject of permanent value.” Politics: once the writer “has a moment of conviction that his future is bound up with the working classes . . . his behaviour will inevitably alter”—in other words, he will be much improved. “Escapism”: drink, drugs, talk, daydreaming, religion, sloth. Sex: hazards of homosexuality, domesticity, babies, wives. And, aha, success: here the peril lies in getting taken up by the upper crust, according to E. M. Forster’s dictum as cited by Connolly: “To be aristocratic in Art one must avoid polite society.” But how could any of these cautionary alarms have mattered to a writer who had for years gone altogether unnoticed? Speaking for myself: I never thought about politics. Journalism was something less than a snare, since no one would offer me so much as a five-hundred-word review. I was in no danger of becoming a fad or a celebrity. I didn’t drink or shoot up. I confined religion to philosophical reading, and daydreaming to a diary. I had no baby and no wife. (Connolly, though he mentions Virginia Woolf among the Mandarins, has an ineradicable difficulty in positing a writer who is not male. This is a pity, because the writer’s husband is a worthy, perplexing, and often tragic subject.) Even talk was no drain; what went up into air for others, I mainly put down in letters to literary friends—letters, those vessels of calculated permanence. Then what in Connolly could possibly appeal to the untried and the buried? In his infinite catalogues of “promise” and its risks, only the terrors of perfectionism and the pain of sure decline had the least psychological concurrence. For the sake of this pins-in-the-ribs pair, Connolly stuck.
He begins now to unstick. “It was Edmund Wilson who remarked that [Enemies of Promise] was not a very well-written book,” Connolly confesses. Wilson was right. Connolly is a ragged writer, unraveling his rags behind him as he goes, and capable of awful sentences. If Wilson recoiled from some of them, it might have been in part on account of Connolly’s description of Wilson’s own Axel’s Castle, which, we are reminded, “includes essays on Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Proust, Joyce and Gertrude Stein. His summing up,” Connolly continues in a typically unpunctuated long breath, “is against them, in so far as it is against their cult of the individual which he feels they have carried to such lengths as to exhaust it for a long time to come but it is a summing up which also states everything that can be said in their favour when allowance for what I have termed ‘inflation’ is made.” (Observe that the style is neither Mandarin nor vernacular, but Rattling Boxcars.)
Patches of this sort might unglue any essayist, but there is something beyond mere prose at stake. Did Connolly notice that his so-called enemies of promise were in reality the appurtenances of certain already-achieved successes? The warning that journalism threatens art applies, after all, only to fairly established writers long familiar with the practice of getting paid for writing. “He is apt to have a private income, he renews himself by travel,” Connolly says of the homosexual writer, assuming long-standing privilege and money. A successful wife, he remarks, not only is “intelligent and unselfish enough to understand and respect the working of the unfriendly cycle of the creative imagination,” but “will recognize that there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” And of course: “Of all the enemies of literature, success is the most insidious.”
Does failure ever appear at all in Enemies of Promise—the word or the idea? Once. “Failure is a poison like success. Where a choice is offered, prefer the alkaline,” and that is all. Such sentiments burn rather than salve. And even while cautioning against the “especial intimacies” of the fashionable, Connolly has a good word for them: “It must be remembered that in fashionable society can be found warmhearted people of delicate sensibility who form permanent friendships with artists which afford them ease and encouragement for the rest of their lives and provide them with sanctuary.” And in defense of the seductions of wealth not one’s own: “It is because we envy [social success] more than other success that we denounce it so often,” Connolly explains. He himself does not denounce the ingratiation of writers with the rich so much as their ingratiation with one another:
There is a kind of behaviour which is particularly dangerous on the moving staircase—the attempt to ascend it in groups of four or five who lend a hand to each other and dislodge other climbers from the steps. It is natural that writers should make friends with their contemporaries of talent and express a mutual admiration but it leads inevitably to a succession of services rendered and however much the writers who help each other may deserve it, if they too frequently proclaim their gratitude they will arouse the envy of those who stand on their own feet, who succeed without collaboration. Words like “log-rolling” and “back-scratching” are soon whispered and the death-watch ticks the louder.
The death-watch? If there is any warning being rattled in all this, surely it must compete with the complicit wink of the sound counselor. A denunciation, one might say, that has the look of a paragraph in a handbook on the wherewithal of success. And a wherewithal that, at a particular rung of society, is affable enough: the comfortable network of class and school associations.
It is the moment for bluntness. Enemies of Promise is an essay—according to the usual English conventions of the early part of the twentieth century— about class and modishness. It has almost no other subject important to Connolly. There are digressions on, say, age, that are nearly worthwhile— more worthwhile when the apergu is not Connolly’s own (though the syntax is): “Butler said an author should write only for people between twenty and thirty as nobody read or changed their opinions after that.” There is much recognizable humanity in this, whereas Connolly, attempting to generalize in his own voice, manages mainly a self-indulgent turn: “The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than
himself who think him stupid is severe.” Or: “It would seem that genius is of two kinds, one of which blazes up in youth and dies down, while the other matures, like Milton’s or Goethe’s. . . . The artist has to decide on the nature of his own or he may find himself exhausted by the sprint of youth and unfitted for the marathon of middle age.” As if one could choose to be Milton or Goethe merely by deciding, as Connolly advises, to “become a stayer.” Modishness dominates: the notion of likely styles in will, the short-length will and the longer-range.
Modishness rules especially in the politics. Writing in 1948 (the famous year of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four), Connolly suggests that he has “retained all the engagingly simple left-wing militancy [of 1938] since it breathes the air of the period.” True enough: ten years after its composition, Connolly is offering us Enemies of Promise frankly as a period piece. But the point of the exercise, we are bound to remember, is that ten years after its composition he is also offering it as a successful instance of “how to write a book which lasts ten years.” Are we to conclude, then, that the more a book is dated, the longer its chances of survival? A remarkable hypothesis. No, it won’t wash, this period-piece candor: Connolly had no wish to revise or update or tone down the “left-wing militancy” (less “engaging,” forty-five years later, and in an age of left-linked terrorism, than he might have supposed); perhaps it was only “artistic indolence.” Or perhaps it was because of an intuition about his own character and its style: a certain seamlessness, the absence of self-contradiction. Connolly is always on the side of his own class, never more so than in his expression of “left-wing militancy.” It is not that Connolly, in 1938, is mistaken when he declares that “today the forces of life and progress are ranging on one side, those of reaction and death on the other,” or that “fascism is the enemy of art,” or that “we are not dealing with an Augustus who will discover his Horace and his Virgil, but with Attila or Hulaku, destroyers of European culture whose poets can contribute only battle-cries and sentimental drinking songs.” He means Hitler: but the very next year, in 1939, the year of the Hitler-Stalin pact, would he have been willing to mean Stalin too? “The poet is a chemist and there is more pure revolutionary propaganda in a line of Blake than in all The Rights of Man” he asserts: a sophistry that can only be the flower of an elitist education. In 1938 what literary intellectual was not moved by the word “revolutionary”?
Nothing, in fact, is less dated than the combination of Connolly’s elitism and his attraction to revolutionary militancy. Any superficial excursion into universities in Western Europe and the United States currently bears this out, nowhere more vividly than in American elitist departments, history, literature, and political science especially. All this is a cliche of our predicament as it was of Connolly’s. “The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose,” Orwell wrote in Inside the Whale, and here is Connolly as prooftext: “Often [solidarity with the working classes] will be recognized only by external symptoms, a disinclination to wear a hat or a stiff collar, an inability to be rude to waiters or taxi-drivers or to be polite to young men of his own age with rolled umbrellas, bowler hats and ‘Mayfair men’ moustaches or to tolerate the repressive measures of his class.” This wizened sentence may be worth the belly laugh due anachronism, but its undigested spirit lingers on. For “disinclination to wear a hat” substitute an earnest inclination to wear Che boots. And “the repressive measures of his class” is as bruisingly trite and vacuous as any bright young Ivy graduate’s assault on the American bourgeoisie, of which he or she is the consummate product.
The consummate product of his class. Should Connolly be blamed for this? Probably. Orwell went to the same schools at the same time, Eton preceded by St. Cyprian’s (St. Wulfric’s in Connolly’s genial account, Crossgates in Orwell’s lugubrious one), and saw straight through what Connolly thrived on. Orwell despised the tyrant-goddess who ruled over St. Cyprian’s; Connolly maneuvered to get on her good side. And of Eton Connolly writes (in the ardently arrested parochial tone of one of the “bloodyminded people at the top”), “My last two years of Eton. . . . were among the most interesting and rewarding of my whole life and I do not believe they could have been so at any other public school or in any other house than College.” The allusion is to school elections; Connolly was, we learn, an ecstatic member of the exclusive “Pop,” which he counts, along with romantic homoerotic adolescence, among those “experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools . . . so intense as to dominate their lives.” Orwell, reviewing Enemies of Promise soon after its appearance, hoots: “He means it!” And sums up the politics of those cosseted few who, between 1910 and 1920, after “five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery,” have fabricated sympathies they have no way of feeling: “Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labor—hardly even words. No wonder,” Orwell charges, “that the huge tribe known as ‘the right left people’ found it so easy to condone the purge-and-Ogpu side of the Russian regime and the horrors of the First Five Year Plan. They were so gloriously incapable of understanding what it all meant.”
Nothing in his brief 1948 introductory note to Enemies of Promise tells us whether Connolly did or did not remain one of the right left people a decade later. “We grow up among theories and illusions common to our class, our race, our time,” Connolly opens his schooldays memoir, but only as a frame for the apology that follows: “I have to refer to something which I find intolerable, the early aura of large houses, fallen fortunes and county families common to so many English autobiographies.” He ends by fretting over whether “the reader can stomach this.” What is even harder to stomach is a self-repudiation that is indistinguishable from self-congratulation. The memoir itself, with its luxuriant pleasure in “our class, our race, our time,” its prideful delight in British Platonism, “popping up in sermons and Sunday questions . . . at the headmaster’s dinner-parties or in my tutor’s pupil-room,” its insurmountable glorying in the stringent achievements of an English classical education—the memoir itself repudiates nothing, least of all the narrator’s background, character, or capacities. To preface such an account of high social and intellectual privilege with the hope that it can be “stomached,” and then to proceed with so much lip-smacking delectation, is, as Orwell saw, to understand nothing, and to stop at words.
Words, it turns out, are what deserve to last in Enemies of Promise—not Connolly’s own sentences, which puff and gasp and occasionally strangle themselves, but the subject of his observations about styles of prose. Critical currencies have altered in the extreme since Connolly first set down his categories of Mandarin and vernacular, and unless one reminds oneself that these terms once had some originality of perspective (they are not so facile as they sound), they drop into the hackneyed posture they now permanently evoke. It is true that the New Criticism, which had the assurance of looking both omnipotent and immortal, has come and gone, and that the universal semiotics shock even now hints at softening, if not receding (though only slightly, and then out of factionalism). And other volumes of this kind, siblings or perhaps descendants of Enemies of Promise, have ventured to record the politics and history of the writer’s predicament— among them critical summaries by Malcolm Cowley, Van Wyck Brooks, John Aldridge, Alfred Kazin, Tony Tanner, Tillie Olsen. The post-Connolly landscape is cluttered with new literary structures of every variety. All the same, Connolly’s report on the increasing ascendancy of journalistic style over the life of contemporary fiction—language stripped of interpretive complexity, language stripped even of “language,” i.e., of the resources of the lyrical or intellectual imagination—remains urgent. The Mandarin “dialect,” as Connolly intelligently calls it (and he is wary in his praise of it, especially when it decays into dandyism, “the ability to spin cocoons of language out of nothing”), has now given way to a sort of telegraphic data-prose, mainly in the present tense, in which sympathies and deductive acuities are altogether eliminated. In poetry, the minimalist
s (whether in all their determined phalanxes they know it or not) are by now played out, moribund, ready for a turning; only the other day I heard a leading subjectivist, a lineal heir of William Carlos Williams, yearn aloud to sink into a long Miltonic sequence. But among fiction writers, the fossilized Hemingway legacy hangs on, after all this time, strangely and uselessly prestigious. (I attribute this not to the devoted reading of Hemingway, but to the decline of reading in general.)
Connolly’s distinctions and his exposition of them, however, address the adherents of both “dialects.” “From the Mandarins,” he exhorts, the writer
must borrow art and patience, the striving for perfection, the horror of cliches, the creative delight in the material [a phrase that itself arouses horror], in the possibilities of the long sentence and the splendour and subtlety of the composed phrase. From the Mandarins, on the other hand, the new writer will take warning not to burden a sober and delicate language with exhibitionism. There will be no false hesitation and woolly profundities, no mystifying, no Proustian onanism.
From the “talkie-novelists,” he continues—i.e., from the laconic anti-stylists influenced by film—the new writer can acquire the “cursive style, the agreeable manners, the precise and poetical impact of Forster’s diction, the lucidity of Maugham, last of the great professional writers, the timing of Hemingway, the smooth cutting edge of Isherwood, the indignation of Lawrence, the honesty of Orwell,” as well as the gift of construction. (It is notable that in nearly fifty years not one of these names, not excluding Maugham and Isherwood, has lost its high familiarity, and Orwell, in fact, has increased in prestige.) The defects of realist or colloquial style Connolly lists as the consequence of “flatness”—“the homogeneity of outlook, the fear of eccentricity, the reporter’s horror of distinction, the distrust of beauty, the cult of violence and starkness that is masochistic.” Nowadays we might add the conviction of existential nihilism. “It is no more a question of taking sides about one way or another of writing, but a question of timing,” Connolly sensibly concludes. All these are good and salubrious particulars—though it is worth recalling that, in prose at least, and wherever we find ourselves in the cycle of reaction, there are no stripped-down Conrads or Joyces; and that modernism never turned its back on plenitude.
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