The Criticism of Cyril Connolly

1 On not Getting on with it: The Criticism of Cyril Connolly I When Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise was published in 1938, W. H. Auden sent its author an admiring letter: As both Eliot and Edmund Wilson are Americans, I think Enemies of Promise is the best English book of criticism since the war, and more than Eliot or Wilson you really write about writing in the only way which is interesting to anyone except academics, as a real occupation like banking or fucking, with all its attendant boredom, excitement, and terror. The word that catches the eye here is, of course, ‘banking’. It is typical of Auden’s off-hand daringness to suggest that the experience of writing might in some way measure up to the ‘excitement and terror’ of banking. Connolly no doubt appreciated both the compliment and the collusion, the acknowl- edgement from a fellow-writer that he had accurately characterized the ‘real occupation’ that they shared. In fact, Auden’s comment had a wider applica- tion to Connolly’s career as a whole, for what, above all, Connolly did was to ‘ w r ite ab out w r it i ng ’. T h at i s , he w rote ab out t he litera r y li fe a s much a s ab out literature; he wrote, with an empathy fed by constantly renewedexperience, about the activity of writing, and, famously, about the much more common activity of not writing, the source of so much of the boredom and the terror. Perhaps no other author has written so much or so well about not writing. Drawing on the deep wells of his own disappointment and self-reproach, he turned himself into the laureate of literary sloth, the chronicler of time wasted, the learned anatomist of the obstacles to getting down to it. Matthew Connolly (ed.), The Selected Works of Cyril Connolly, i. The Modern Move- ment, ii. The Two Natures (Picador, 2002). 10 writing lives Enemies of Promise itself is an inventory of the pitfalls that may all too easily prevent the writer from doing the one thing that matters, writing a book that will last. Several of the headings of this inventory have passed into the vocabulary of modern literary culture—‘the pram in the hall’, ‘the charlock’s shade’—as has the parable of the seduction of the promising young author, Walter Savage Shelleyblake, into the drudgery of regular reviewing. It is, not altogether paradoxically, the book of Connolly’s that has lasted best. But for someone who turned habitual failure into a positive career move, Connolly actually wrote a great deal else as well. After com- ing down from Oxford in the mid-1920s, he largely existed as a freelance writer and reviewer; he edited the literary magazine Horizon from 1939 to 1950; and he was the lead reviewer on the Sunday Times (mostly in harness with Raymond Mortimer) from 1952 up until his death in 1973. He published one, not very successful, novel in the 1930s, The Rock Pool, one other unclassiE able prose work, The Unquiet Grave, in 1944, several volumes of collected essays and reviews, and a vast quantity of ephemeral literary journalism. Considering the generic unclassiE ability of so much of this œuvre, one is made to pause over Auden’s praise of Enemies of Promise as ‘the best book of criticism since the war’. The truth is that although Connolly is generally re- garded as a literary critic, the greater part of his writing is not in any straight- forward sense literary criticism. Enemies of Promise itself is hardly at all ab o u t p a r t i c u la r wo r k s of li t e r at u r e . I t s Erst part is more a diagnosis of a cultural situation, a temperature-taking enquiry into current literary fashions; its second section is the one mainly devoted to the dangers and disappoint- ments of the literary life (the ‘enemies’ and the ‘promise’ of the title); and the third, entitled ‘A Georgian Boyhood’, is an avowedlyautobiographical account, culminating in an extraordinary recreation of the literary atmos- phere that helped form his sensibility during his last years at Eton. Much of his other writing shares this intriguing, mixed-mode character, always streaked with autobiography, overt or disguised. But surprisingly little of it is literary criticism in the purest sense of that term: the sustained analytical attention to the verbal texture of particular works of literature. Connolly thought of himself as a ‘writer’, usually as a failed writer; he was widely recognized as a ‘critic’, but in the broadest, most residual sense of that term: he was someone who wrote about books but could not be described by other, more specialized labels—he was neither a poet nor, it E nally turned out, a novelist, but nor was he a scholar in any professional or accredited sense, though he was extraor dinarily knowledgeable across a wide range of subjects. He made his mark by writing about other writers’ writing and his own not writing. He has been variously described as ‘one of the most on not getting on with it 11 inZ uential literary critics in Britain’ and as ‘the last of the men of letters’. His most economical self-description was ‘a hack’. From this distance, therefore, one is bound to wonder about Auden’s placing of him alongside Eliot and Wilson. Eliot’s poetry was hugely important to Connolly, a formative literary experience: acting, as he often did, as spokesman for a generation, he described Eliot’s early poetry as ‘the great event of our youth’. But he does not in any obvious way seem to resemble or be comparable to Eliot the critic. It is not just that his writing is less feline, more exuberant (and much funnier), with none of Eliot’s ecclesiastical hauteur. It is also that Connolly did not attempt the authori- tative, indeed deliberately revisionist, critical reappraisal of earlier literary periods in the way that Eliot did with the Elizabethans and Metaphysicals. Connolly helped himself from the drinks cabinet of past authors when in the mood for some of his favourite tipple (Sir Thomas Browne, Rochester, Swift), but he was not interested in undertaking an elaborate expository criticism of their work, still less in rearranging the standard cartography of English literary history. His tastes were anyway far more cosmopol- itan than that, and his critical attention was overwhelmingly focused on the Modernist generations after about 1880. One can perhaps more easily see him as having some of the qualities of an English Edmund Wilson in his range and not always predictable opinionatedness, but he had none of Wilson’s political seriousness, his intellectual force, or his sheer, bull-like drive. No twentieth-century critic in English, academic or otherwise, has been able wholly to ignore the impact of Eliot’s criticism, while Wilson turned himself into a three-star literary monument that, at the very least, vaut le détour. It is doubtful if anyone would now put Connolly in this exalted company. Connolly’s more natural place may seem to be alongside those other literary editors and reviewers who played inZ uential parts in London literary life between the 1920s and 1960s, E gures such as Desmond MacCarthy and V. S. Pritchett, Raymond Mortimer and Philip Toynbee, John Lehmann and Alan Ross. But these juxtapositions, while undeniably appropriate, also help to bring out a certain distinctiveness in Connolly. As a writer- critic, he seems a more considerable E gure than any of them apart from P r itche t t (whose novels a nd stor ie s e a r ned h i m a d i f ferent k i nd of st a nd i ng). It is hard to imagine a current mainstream publisher issuing a two-volume selected works of, say, Desmond MacCarthy, who E rst employed Connolly as a reviewer, or of Raymond Mortimer, with whom he shared the literary pages of the Sunday Times for so long. This may be attributable partly to the sheer quality of Connolly’s writing, partly to the continuing life of at least two of his books (Enemies of Promise and The Unquiet Grave), and 12 writing lives partly to the allure shed by his well-documented life. But it may also be that he has come to stand for a certain manner or ideal of writing for a so-called general audience. Auden’s slighting reference to ‘academics’ provides the key here, point- ing to a recurring theme in Connolly’s career. He constantly derided donnish dreariness, gloomily foreseeing that a ‘long littleness of dons lies ahead of us’ in that future when he and his contemporaries would be ‘pushing up theses’. He was especially scornful of ‘the chilly snows of Ben Leavis’, a hostility heartily reciprocated in Scrutiny’s attacks on the ‘Z ank-rubbing’ herd of well-connected London literati. In practice, Connolly was constantly anxious not to be dismissed as a mere slapdash journalist by serious and learned scholars, constantly looking over his shoulder anticipating correction from those who had more qualiE cations and more time. But he needed his caricature of dons in the way many literary journalists did and still do, as a foil against which to set off and justify their own trade, compensating for its ephemerality and mere sur- face brightness by representing the alternative as an unlovely mixture of antiquarianism, envy, and constipation. Just as Connolly’s undergradu- ate years at Oxford had been rather a come-down after the dizzying social and aesthetic pleasures of ‘Pop’ at Eton, so universities always E gured in his writing as the natural habitat of pedantry and pinched provincialism by comparison to the stylishness and creative energy of great metropol- itan cultural centres.

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