Odd Jobs (83 page)

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:

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:

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.

T
HE
M
YTH
M
AKERS
, 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.

C
HEKHOV:
A Spirit 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.”

M
ARY
S
HELLEY
, by Muriel Spark. 248 pp. Dutton, 1987.

Muriel Spark’s first book, published in England in 1951 as
Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Shelley
, is now at last, retitled and thoroughly revised, published here. Mary Shelley, not quite seventeen when she eloped
with the twenty-one-year-old poet (who had eloped with his first wife, Harriet, when she was sixteen and he three years older), was the daughter of intellectually eminent parents—the political philosopher William Godwin and the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft—and herself proved to be a considerable author, writing
Frankenstein
before she turned twenty and a good deal of fiction and non-fiction afterward. Her biographer sees her as a fundamentally intellectual, eighteenth-century, “classical” personality in conflict with the Romantic turmoil of teen-age romance, illegitimate children,
ménages à trois
, fantastical idealism, Alps, sailboats, scandal, blackmail, and premature dying. Mrs. Spark picks her way through the tangle of domestic and literary history with her usual unblinking firmness. Part of the book’s pleasure lies in its shrewd and sympathetic reëvaluation of a shadowy reputation; another part lies in the sweet sting of such epigrammatic Sparkian judgments as

and

T
HE
O
NLY
P
ROBLEM
, by Muriel Spark. 179 pp. Putnam, 1984.

Muriel Spark’s writing always gives delight; the sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity. Her new novel,
The Only Problem
, begins: