Cyril Connolly by Clive Fisher Muggeridge by Richard Ingrams Robert

...The language of his final paragraph is less intimate but more eloquent than In-grams's: Connolly "has refused to surrender his hold on the imaginations of those who care for beautiful writing and the civilized delight of the senses or are interested in the literature of our mid-century" and "becomes an ever more inescapable figure in recent cultural history...

...Outside of the circle which delighted in the comic complexity of his personal life, he was best known as founder and editor of Horizon, which carried the lamp of culture through World War II and the Attlee period, and as reviewer for the Sunday Times...

...But in most respects, they might have lived in totally different countries...

...Muggeridge The Biography Richard Ingrams HarperSanFransisco, $27.50, 264 pp...

...He attended Eton, which impressed him so deeply that he once maintained that the rest of life was anticlimactic...

...Fisher uses that material not just for facts but for intuitive and effective contrasts with figures like Evelyn Waugh, Peter Quennell, George Orwell, and Desmond McCarthy to reveal his subject's character and achievements...

...During his education and for several years thereafter, until he discovered women, he went through the homosexual phase almost obligatory for his generation and cultivated the private myth that failure was more interesting, even more distinguished, than success...

...At Eton he met George Orwell, Anthony Powell, and a number of less productive aesthetes, and then at Oxford he met, among others, Evelyn Waugh...

...Fisher is at least as perceptive about Connolly's strengths and limitations as a writer...

...Clive Fisher's seems just right, not only in length but in the eloquence, urbanity, and wit of his prose...

...However, both Cyril Connolly and Malcolm Mug-geridge were more famous as personalities, talkers, and journalists, though of very different orders, than as writers...

...After an undistinguished and, at least in Ingrams's showing, obscure career at Cambridge, which dampened his sense of humor only temporarily, he married, taught for a while, turned to political journalism and later to editing Punch, became a television personality and, after a long career of dissipation (drink...

...Connolly, from a family that once had money and position but had grown poorer with each generation, disliked his military father and learned to manipulate his female relatives...

...Clive Fisher has more lofty ambitions...

...He went to state schools "and was thereby spared the various complexes that affected his public school contemporaries," including homosexuality...

...Long reconciled to his only wife but almost forgotten by the public, he died at age eighty-seven...

...He is aware of Muggeridge's shortcomings as a novelist and memoirist, but he concludes that "In his life, his restlessness, his inconsistency, his obsessions (whether with Marxism or sex) he seems at times like a symbol of twentieth-century man...

...He worked and intrigued almost to the end and died at seventy-one as he had lived, immersed in debts and logistical complications about which women could visit him and when, sustained by the forbearance and charity of his friends...

...Ingrams, a journalist, knew Muggeridge for almost thirty years and, eight years before his death, was designated authorized biographer and given access to Muggeridge's papers and his surviving friends...

...And often, in Fisher's case, witty, as in the description of the youthful Cecil Beaton's imitation of a female singer "with unsettling persuasiveness" or, turning on Connolly's view that inside every fat man was a thin man crying to be let out, "in his case the thin man's entreaties were unheard for almost half a century...

...women who were not as interesting or at any rate as prone to publishing, as Connolly's) helped to make Mother Teresa world-famous and became a prominent spokesman for preconciliar Catholic values...

...Besides using archives and interviews, Fisher has consulted the large and growing body of material about the period, including memoirs and biographies...

...Both Englishmen, born in 1903, they knew a number of the same people through their literary and political connections...

...Here he has the advantage over Ingrams, for Connolly's friends, some of them world-class gossips, seem more interesting than Muggeridge's...

...He cannot be blamed for the preposterous and questionably accurate American subtitle, substituted for the English "A Nostalgic Life" in the vain hope of pumping up interest in Connolly...

...Robert Hurray Davis Those desiring to learn more about a writer usually discover that biographies reveal more about warts than works, but at least they give details about books that the reader values or may be induced to read...

...On the whole, this is a work of journalism in a quite honorable sense as well as a personal tribute...

...And though he gives effective portraits of the people whom Muggeridge knew, he does little to establish the contexts in which Muggeridge thought and worked...

...Muggeridge, the grandson of an undertaker, admired his socialist father and seemed to ignore his female connections...

...Nevertheless, Connolly was good at failure, or at least at not finishing things: novels, travel books, biographies, almost anything longer than a review...

...A few, like Ingrams's, are perhaps too short...

...He showed more energy, if not more staying power, in his romantic life, marrying three times and carrying on numerous affairs, remarkable achievements for a man regarded as unattractive, even ugly, by his contemporaries...

...As a journalist, Ingrams is more interested in what Muggeridge wrote about than how he wrote...

...This melancholy conclusion he shaped not only into a persona but into material for a long career...

...Except for a common interest in who was paid how much for doing what, valuable for those interested in the shifts and vicissitudes of the literary life, Fisher and Ingrams take very different approaches to their task...

...A great many literary biographies are too long...

...The justification for these two books must therefore lie in the portraits of the men in the context of their age...

...Most of Connolly's books and all of Muggeridge's deserve at best to be called "historically important," a phrase to cool the ardor even of the vanishing race of literary historians...

...He not only summarizes books and articles, he characterizes them in prose that echoes Connolly's "gift of turning a perfectly balanced and poetic sentence which was both memorable and idiosyncratic...