Odd Jobs (82 page)

BRITISHERS

C
YRIL
C
ONNOLLY:
Journal and Memoir
, by David Pryce-Jones. 304 pp. Ticknor & Fields, 1984.

T
HE
S
ELECTED
E
SSAYS OF
C
YRIL
C
ONNOLLY
, edited by Peter Quennell. 307 pp. Persea Books, 1984.

The aura of disappointment, of failed promise, that surrounded Cyril Connolly was to a large degree his own creation. It was he who, in
Enemies of Promise
(1938), capped adverse diagnoses in all the sickrooms of contemporary literary endeavor with a ruthless self-portrait of his schoolboy self—a study in callow cleverness, romantic dither, permanent adolescence, cowardice, snobbery, and sloth. Though this least flattering of autobiographical sketches ends with Connolly’s leaving Eton at the age of eighteen in 1922, his subsequent career is adumbrated as a continued “useless assignment, falling in love, going to Spain and being promising indefinitely.” It was Connolly who began his other book of note, the suavely melancholy “word cycle” called
The Unquiet Grave
(1944), with the famous assertion “that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” By the bald light of this harsh lantern readers would have no trouble perceiving that the little Diogenes holding it on high, at that time editor of the magazine
Horizon
and afterwards to become the lead reviewer of the London
Sunday Times
, was himself engaged in inconsequent tasks and, according to language farther down the page (“Writers engrossed in any
literary task which is not an assault on perfection are their own dupes”), was his own dupe. Any subsequent critic wishing to write earnestly of Connolly finds himself, therefore, somewhat disarmed, facing a choice between sheepish agreement with these low opinions and disagreement that might seem merely mulish.

David Pryce-Jones, assigned the awkward task of presenting for publication a dishevelled, abjectly self-critical, and at the same time insufferably self-absorbed journal that Connolly kept between 1928 and 1937, seems on balance to agree that Connolly disappointed, while finding something successfully strategic in the pose of
maître manqué:
“The depiction of himself as some sort of royal failure was the foundation of his success.… Playing the leading part in this comedy of his own devising, he was imitating failure. Advantage came from it. Here was the way to avoid making hard choices or sacrifices, here was the way to have everything all at once and all the time, to be artist and critic, powerfully realising ambition while claiming not to be doing so.” In the long biographical sketch that follows these judgments, Mr. Pryce-Jones tends to side with the school authorities so deftly mocked by Connolly in his memoir. The Wilkeses, who under the nicknames of “Flip” (Mrs.) and “Sambo” (Mr.) ran St. Cyprian’s school, had been, we are told, “consistently well-disposed towards Cyril.… Within their capacities, they had done their best for a boy much cleverer and more sophisticated than usual.”
^*
At Eton, we are told, the Master in College, J. F. Crace, wrote with “some prescience” of the sixteen-year-old Cyril, “He is in danger of achieving nothing more than a journalistic ability to write rather well about many things.” Connolly’s “A Georgian Boyhood,” in
Enemies of Promise
, is concerned for most of its pages with Etonian social and political intrigues; of these Mr. Pryce-Jones sniffs, “What had actually been storms in College tea-cups were exaggerated into grandeurs and miseries.”

In the journal itself, the little storms pitter-patter on. Of Robert Longden, an Oxford crush of Connolly’s with whom he continued to correspond and travel, the diarist breathily confided:

Though now well into his twenties and not entirely innocent of post-graduate reality and of heterosexual contacts, Connolly continued schoolboyishly to draw up graded lists of his acquaintances (“Friends,” “In storage,” “The old,” and “
à la carte
” are the categories of one such inventory), to set questionnaires for himself and others (“Are you a sadist or a masochist?” “Are there as many grades of lesbians as of womanisers?” “What are the oddest circumstances in which you have made love?” “Would you drink a pint of blood to save your sister?”), and to pen self-admonishments like “Be more ruthless, and less flabby, cease being influenced by charmers and gentlemen.” Though Connolly himself had little money, “on all branches of his family tree were large houses and private incomes,” as Mr. Pryce-Jones puts it. His taste for the soft life was full-blown and cheerfully confessed: “O the joy of lingering over port and brandy with men in red coats telling dirty stories while it snows outside.” A not untypically posh entry runs, “Enjoyed the rich patina of the Cunard soirée, the lovely women, the vacant faces of the extroverts, the expression of envy on Clarence Marjoribanks and the incredible stupid air of luxurious abandon on Lady Cunard’s face as she danced with the Prince of Wales.” The young would-be writer rarely dined alone, and his stratagems were directed less toward accomplishing work than toward making a social impression. In
Enemies of Promise
he was parenthetically to observe how “all charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.” To his journal in 1928 he confided, “There is no finer sense of power than the power of one’s own imagination over that of other men, no more exciting and impossible task than that of making oneself indispensable to
one’s best friend.” In Zagreb, having spent the night mostly under the stars with a teen-age prostitute, he wondered as he walked home in the dawn “how my friends would see me.” Of another occasion, when he had taken a gramophone onto a Channel-bound train, Connolly noted, “I played slow foxtrots in my empty carriage and felt that at last I had become an interesting person again.” His obsession with his own image, whether as “an interesting person” or as “the most unlovable mug in England,” certainly got in his way as a writer, and gets in our way as we try to read these youthful jottings, both pompous and plaintive, with sympathetic attention.

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.