A Dying Species

...blown like glass from the white-heat of violence...

...True, his approach can lead to extreme inaccuracy when it comes to dates and facts...

...The modern spirit," he says, "was a combination of certain intellectual qualities inherited from the Enlightenment: lucidity, irony, scepticism, intellectual curiosity, combined with the passionate intensity and enhanced sensibility of the Romantics, their rebellion and sense of technical experiment, their awareness of living in a tragic age...

...It seems to have been copped...

...Yet I don't object to Connolly's "gossip" when it is informative...

...It appeared to the postwar young people like the light at the end of a tunnel.' Or this brilliant image of Pound's poem, "Homage to Sextus Propertius": "A kaleidoscope of imperial decay, the changing hues of the dying mullet...

...And this of T. S. Eliot's Selected Essays: "Some criticism affects writers, some readers, some other critics: Eliot's here is of the first kind and administers several oblique coups de grace...

...it would have appeared in all its brash nakedness as an outrageously personal guide to particularly beloved books, which also happened to be "modern" books...

...At least that is the implication of this memorial volumean implication which, one would imagine, is self-evidently valid and yet one which many people, particularly critics, are loath to accept...

...In view of his long and devoted service as a bookman and his evident personal involvement, one would think that he would be forgiven this prankish act of exhibitionism...

...These words echo mournfully through Connolly's book...

...Terminal, petering out, disaster...

...Must be in paperback by now...

...his brief introductions to his hundred rock-bottom selections often mingle gossip and criticism in bewildering proximity...

...Nobody likes to hear bad news, especially the heirs of modernism, who are busy wrangling over the estate while at the same time trying to make it seem that the demise was really a rebirth...

...And like other critics, I find it hard to refrain from pouncing on his mistakes: Céline did not die in Denmark...

...Of course, if you are a strait-laced modernist Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster might seem out of place...

...In the debate with the curiously obstinate but depressed propagandists for what's going on just because it happens to be going on, I must-naturally, with some reservations-take my stand on the side of those still nostalgic for the vanished splendors of modernism...

...The prim tear them up...

...One seems to be sticking paper flags into a dissolving sand-castle, while in full erosion oneself...

...It was also the great age of Cubism, and the beginnings of Surrealism, of Ravel and Stravinsky and Cocteau and the Russian ballet...

...Every critic's phrenology soon begins to look like that filing cabinet in which Harpo Marx groped and scrambled for his socks...

...he died in Paris, holed up in a kind of fortress which was guarded by huge and vicious dogs...

...a committee that refers all esthetic problems to the court of history where the witnesses speak in toneless, inhuman accents about tendencies, "movements," and cultural drifts, and where the final verdicts are the result of the pressure of these "tendencies" on the personal feelings of the judge...

...Every critic is constantly arbitrating in his inner forum between the claims of judgment and the demands of sensibility...

...My judgment tells me that Kafka is a great writer, but my private predilections, my desire for gaiety and grandeur, my deep distaste for a certain kind of Jewish stuffiness and oppressiveness, make Kafka almost unreadable for me...

...In this world, Connolly is, unfortunately, a dying species...

...A critic like Connolly, with his unabashed love for a Mallarmean twilight zone of finesse, malaise and richesse, his preference for the short and comic rather than the ponderous and structured, his exaltation of the vague, seems already to have wandered in and out of another, distant epoch...

...the enthusiasts publish them...

...And he continues in an even more melancholy vein: "In a period where literary taste is changing so rapidly much may already appear incomprehensible...

...But Connolly's definition of modernism is much broader and much more flexible...

...Cyril Connolly, an old, unbattered enthusiast, has just published his, which he entitles, somewhat inappropriately, The Modern Movement (Atheneum, 148 pp., $4.50) and which purports to provide a guide and rock-bottom reading schedule for our disoriented times and readers...

...The reviews, however, have been uniformly severe...

...They knew how to see, how to' hear, and even how to listen...

...But to my mind he is something more valuable: a man with a cultivated sensibility, a feeling for what he likes that refuses to yield to fashion...

...It may well prove the last unsponsored by a faculty...

...But Connolly's value is precisely that he is not straitlaced, either in the moral or esthetic sense...

...Indeed, my criticism of Connolly's selection is not that it is too personal and idiosyncratic, but that it is not personal and idiosyncratic enough...

...they were the impassioned but incorruptible judges for whom, or against whom, it was a joy to work...

...yet in his private list sensibility should call the turn...

...I am also grateful for thumb-nail sketches that manage to define an old object in a new and revealing manner, as, for instance, Connolly's masterly portrait of Strachey's Eminent Victorians: "It might be described as the first book of the twenties...

...Yet underneath the sceptic and scholar flamed a passionate Elizabethan...

...Connolly puts it neatly: "The Titans depart, the theses begin...

...They knew how to read-a virtue now lost...

...He did not so much advance obscure writers or air revolutionary views as apply his severe philosophical training to removing the varnish, like a picture restorer, from accepted masters sheltering behind the cult of personality in their costly frames...

...He has not yet converted himself into a faceless committee that refuses to be shocked, moved, baffled or bored...

...If one reduces modernism to its avant-garde, then writers like Somerset Maugham and Thomas Hardy, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell must inevitably be excluded...

...It may be true that he is not a critic in any complete, surgical, objective sense...

...It is clear, indeed, that "the faculty" has put sensibility on trial, found it guilty and sentenced it to permanent exile...

...Try as we would to be objective, any such list (exhibition of compulsive pedantry or debt of gratitude...

...Which means that whatever they wished to read, hear, or see again, was, by recapitulation, turned into a solid value...

...And where the hell is that unrecognized masterpiece which I alone had recognized and enjoyed...

...And Death on the Installment Plan, far from expressing Celine's anti-Semitism, mocks his father for having such views...

...I think that these objections can be ascribed more to his misleading title, which evokes the image of a solid phalanx marching toward a rigidly specified goal, than to the actual contents of his book...

...I'm grateful to him for telling me that a suppressed first chapter of The Sun Also Rises has just been published, that Henry Green was influenced by Céline (it explains much about his "dialogued" style), and that in the '40s Raymond Queneau recast Flaubert's Bouvard et Péchucet (that sounds like the version I would like to read, having been unable to read the original with any sustained pleasure...

...Every critic has had these tormented conversations with himself, which frequently turn into lists...

...Of course, if he had followed this tack, Connolly's list would not have been able to pose as a general guide, based on historical principles, to modern writing...

...Connolly, it is said, misunderstands the essence of modernism, confusing the merely contemporary with the stark, undiluted substance which can only be found in Joyce, Kafka and Proust...

...And the world's wealth was thus increased.' Cyril Connolly fits this description because, either in the long or short run, it is generally his own sensibility that determines his choices...

...Not next to Wyndharn Lewis...

...Paul Valéry pointed out that culture and good books depend more on the existence of intelligent connoisseurs than almost anything else-"those matchless amateurs who, if they did not themselves create works, yet created the value of works...

...This would have clarified matters and obviated a good deal of complaint on the part of the critics, who, one must assume, have their own private lists which they are eager to publish...

...These days the outrageously personal is having a rough time of it...

...Strachey (who was born in the year George Eliot died) was engaged not only in trimming the fat off the Victorians, he applied his ironical attitude to humanity in general...

...and some of his personal pleas for his predilections fail to convince because of imprecise and careless writing...

...Or this description of Hemingway's A Farewll to Arms: "After it one could no more imitate that musical crystal-clear style...

...is personal as a cardiogram...

...And Connolly's list is bad news incarnate, for it suggests, obliquely but clearly, that what started with Flaubert, Baudelaire and Ruskin has ground to a halt with Robbe-Grillet, Beckett and Roland Barthes...

...Now where did I put that Huysmans...

...Critics have become trend spotters, historical experts, wise analysts, everything but those unique entities which the modern movement, if it meant anything, labored to nourish and magnify...

...This childish, vicarious pleasure in hoarding and arranging, however, is the critic's particular amusement...

...As we look back across the drifting formlessness of contemporary literature, we see that the Movement had a shape-and that the peak period was from about 1910 to 1925, a period of creativity which included the Eliot of 'Prufrock,' 'The Waste Land, and 'The Hollow Men,' the Pound of the lyrics and early cantos, the later Yeats, the heyday of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, the Joyce of The Portrait, Ulysses and the first Anna Livia, the poetry of Apollinaire and Valéry, the novel of Proust, the emergence of Hemingway, Cummings, Lewis, Wallace Stevens, W. C. Williams, Forster's Passage to India, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the preaching of Lawrence, the giggle of Firbank, the candor of Gide...

...He struck the note of ridicule which the whole war-weary generation wanted to hear, using the weapon of Bayle, Voltaire and Gibbon on the creators of the Red Cross and the Public School System...