EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Volume 27, Number 1 Spring, 1993 MAN OVERBOARD: CYRIL CONNOLLY IN AUSTIN By Robert Murray Davis (University of Oklahoma) In May, 1971, Cyril Connolly came to Austin at the invitation of the University of Texas's Humanities Research Center to be the major attraction at the exhibit based on his The Modern Movement: One Hundred Key Books (1965). Unlike some of his countrymen who sneer at the idea of the Center without having visited Austin, Connolly was charmed by the setting and moved by the memorial to art because it gave him "a sense of belonging to the tradition, a boost to the ego for one's diffident London self." He even liked the accommodations, "an enormous double room in a hotel which is called a club to be able to serve liquor and which provides appetising Southern food and iced tea" ("Apotheosis in Austin," Sunday Times, 6 June 1971). Connolly was being unusually generous; this was undoubtedly the Forty Acres Club, named after the original area of the University of Texas campus. The food was unexceptional even by middle-American standards, and Connolly charitably did not mention the wall paper, striped black and white, which gave one the impression of being inside a trans I ucent zebra. But the Forty Acres Club did have a bar, and most evenings one could see the chairman (equal emphasis on both syllables) of the University of Texas Board of Regents, Frank Erwin, sporting the University colors in white hair and burnt orange blazer. Orange does not flatter the complexions of white Texans, who run to red or dusty tan, but Erwin's jacket was a statement of power, not fashion. Connolly was justifiably impressed by the Humanities Research Center. In stereotypic Texas fashion, the University had gone through the dealers and executors of Europe like a Dallas matron through Nieman Marcus. Harry H. Ransom (Connolly calls him William). President of the University, had funded the Center with Texas oil money, and Warren Roberts, who directed the Center, made annual trips to England to buy archival material in carload lots. He brought it to the original Center headquarters in a very crowded corner on the top floor of the Undergraduate Library next to the Tower, from the top of which a crazed but proficient marksman had shot passing students and professors a few years earlier. Connolly was flattered to see that the Center had acquired some of his manuscripts and impressed by the fact that it had already acquired an impressive number of manuscripts of the works mentioned in The Modern Movement, had proofs or rare editions of others, and set out to acquire still more to complete the exhibit. I had no part in the festivities associated with the exhibit; a newly tenured associate professor at the University of Oklahoma, I had come a mere four hundred miles to work on a catalogue of the Center's collection of materials by and about Evelyn Waugh (including Connolly's unpublished biographical sketch of Evelyn Waugh commissioned by Life). most, including his books and the . furniture of his library, purchased directly from the Waugh estate a few years earlier. The Waugh collection was impressive by any normal measurement, but it formed a minor part of the Center's holdings. Moreover, in 1971 Waugh was generally regarded as a relatively minor comic novelist, though his first novel, Decline and Fall, had made Connolly's list as "one of the wittiest and most original of first novels" with "the old avant-garde Adam" before it was sadly vitiated by overt Catholicism. He had died only five years earlier; the editions of diaries and letters were in early planning stages, if that. It was exciting to work on material that very few people had seen, but it was often no less puzzling. I was reading Waugh's diaries for the late 1920's and early 1930's, and the entries were sometimes fragmentary or allusive, identifying people, important to him but unknown to me, by first names or nicknames. For cataloguing purposes, I did not need to know them, but I planned to do further work on Waugh, and besides, given this opportunity to rummage in someone's private life, it was maddening not to know all the details. I had never met or corresponded with Waugh or, except for a brief encounter with Fr. Martin D'Arcy at Loyola University in the early 1960's, anyone who had known him. Therefore, when I was introduced to Cyril Connolly, a small man by American standards, then in his late sixties and not quite as round and rubicund as he had been in earlier years, I regarded him less as an important man of letters than as a source of information about Waugh. Connolly did not seem to resent the attitude of an unknown American thirty years his junior. When I told him what 1 was doing and what problems I encountered, he seemed interested in the -2- project. Perhaps he had already performed his main duties; he certainly seemed to have time to spare, and he came to the table where I had laid out the materials and scanned the diary passages I had noted. At the time, I thought that he was being extraordinarily obliging; now I suspect that he was even more delighted than I to be privy to information, some of it libelous and most of it discreditable, about people he had actually known. We were among the first to read these diaries. Two decades later, readers are occasionally shocked by the tone and content of the expurgated diaries, and when in 1973 the Observer announced that excerpts would be published, booking agents must have been overrun by Waugh's contemporaries fleeing the country. The discretion of Michael Davie, the advice of libel lawyers, and the death of some of the principals made the published version less scandalous than it might have been, but even so, a number of readers were outraged. Not Connolly, who did not appear in passages I showed him; not me, an outsider who regarded the people as extensions or, more accurately, models for the outrageous characters who people Waugh's books. Connolly stopped at the reference to an Audrey who thought she was pregnant but turned out not to be. "That has to be Audrey Lucas," he said, and gave further details about her family and tate. Other names he identified with less editorial comment. He was obviously used to dealing efficiently with words and facts, and besides being grateful for his kindness, I enjoyed watching a professional at \."lork. Later we had gone to the main library in the Tower on some errand-perhaps I had offered to help him look up a reference-and were walking through the lobby of the Undergraduate Library past cases filled with manuscripts and first editions mentioned in The Modern Movement. Near the inner doors of the library Connolly stopped abruptly. He moved as close to the exhibit as the glass allowed and stared at a copy, propped open to show the marginal annotations, of the first edition of his book of reflections, The Unquiet Grave, published in 1944 under the pseudonym "Palinurus," after the pilot of Aeneas lost overboard and unburied. The annotations, many of them extensive, were in Waugh's unmistakable handwriting. On an earlier visit, before the book had been enshrined, I had read Waugh's pointed and largely unflattering comments, but I had grown accustomed to his free and frank appraisals of writing, including his own. But then it wasn't my work. Having seen only the facing pages, Connolly did not seem agitated, but he wanted to examine the rest. I think it was the formidable Mrs. Mary Hirth who had the power to disrupt the exhibit, and within hours the book was in Connolly's hands and he was reading Waugh's comments, some of them recorded in Alan Bell's "Waugh Drops the Pilot" (Spectator, 7 March 1987, pp. 27, 30-31). I don't remember his exact words when he finished, but he was obviously quite disturbed by Waugh's comments comparing the book's persona to a stage Irishman, a lady novelist, and a "tosh­ horse," presumably Waugh's term for a pretentious litterateur. The comments on Connolly's character must have stung enough to make the subject pass over Waugh's frank admission of the similarities between them. Connolly's obvious unhappiness put me in the uncomfortable position of trying to console a much older and far more distinguished man. I said that Waugh made these comments under very difficult conditions: with the British Mission in Yugoslavia, surrounded by Communists and having to drink the local wine. I pointed to passages in Waugh's diaries of the period which dealt with his discomforts and to another which mentioned the fact that he obviously valued the book enough to have it bound. Unfortunately, the entry for January 9-10 characterized The Unquiet Grave as half commonplace book of French maxims, half a lament for his life. Poor Lys; he sees her as the embodiment of the blackout and air raids and rationing and compulsory service and jean as the golden past of beaches and peaches and lemurs. It is badly written in places, with painful psychological jargon which he attempts to fit into service of theological [Davie reads "teleological"] problems. And this was a week before Waugh annotated the book. My attempts to mitigate Connolly's unhappiness obviously had not worked, but I did not know how badly I had failed until I read his "Apotheosis in Austin." What Connolly "minded most was the contempt which emerged from a writer for whom for twenty years (1923-1943) I had looked upon as a friend." Connolly's distress, obviously genuine, is partly the result of a defective memory.