Enemy of Excellence

...Connolly attended boarding school with George Orwell-who at age 12 told Connolly, with a lugubriousness beyond his years, "Of course, you realize, Connolly, that whoever wins this [First World] war we shall emerge a second-rate nation...

...Such appraisals are often the sign of a reputation unduly inflated-but they point to the reasons he is still an interesting figure: Whatever can be said of his merits, Connolly's influence was undeniable, and it was exercised at the very heart of English letters...

...One is religion, another is unending work, the third is the kind of sluttish antin-omianism-lying in bed till four in the afternoon, drinking Pernod-that Mr...

...Then there is Enemies of Promise, three longish essays in search of a cohesive premise, the closest thing to one being the insight that modernist writers can be divided into those who use big words ("Mandarin") and those who do not ("Vernacular...

...Typical of his timing was his famous reconsideration of A.E...

...A problem for both of them...

...He went through Oxford with Evelyn Waugh (where the two shared a crush on the same male friend), and adventured widely in sex, drink, and books-least widely in books, for Fisher tells us he gained only "scant acquaintance with Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Keats, Hardy or Dickens...

...Connolly was capable of applauding Eliot for revolutionizing modern poetry, then applauding William Carlos Williams for his sentiment that Eliot had ruined modern poetry...

...Reading him is not to follow a big spirit on a long moral journey, but to spend an afternoon in the front room with a chatty companion...

...And yet we have had almost as much fun as anyone ever had...

...He did a hilarious job on Aldous Huxley called "Told in Gath...

...Connolly, to put it kindly, was always fighting the last war...

...It is, not surprisingly, his parodies that, among his non-epigrammatic work, retain the best claim on our attention...

...Better to restore him to the image he had of himself: part-wit, part-aphorist, but chiefly a signpost of failure to writers who would come after...

...Ezra Pound called him the only person he would trust to make a selection of his poems...

...Connolly, the best known, seemed to me the least deserving...

...It is a pity you called Apthorpe' 'Atwater' throughout . . . because it will make your readers think you did not give full attention to the book...

...It would have been a simple matter for him to review more significant work," writes Fisher, "to chart the progress of peers and contemporaries like [Graham] Greene, [Henry] Green, [Anthony] Powell or [Peter] Quennell...

...There is a swim-with-the-tide aspect to it, an element of the joiner, as Connolly constantly pronounces on the death of literature but never meets a living modernist he doesn't like...

...In 1939, Connolly founded Horizon with the dissolute millionaire Peter Watson...

...Insincere because without an early success, he panicked...

...What the Oxford don Maurice Bowra said of Connolly as an undergraduate could be said to the end of his life: "This is Connolly...

...But the problem was more general...

...Connolly liked it that way: As a novel reviewer, he generally chose second-rate novels by first-time writers...

...His rare attacks on contemporaries were confined either to those on whose puppy-doggish loyalty he could bank, like Spender, or those who were too aloof to care, like Waugh (who wrote, after one effort, "I thought your review of Men at Arms excellent...

...As Hemingway wrote to Connolly, "Cyril, we were born into almost the worst fucking time there has ever been...

...To Connolly we owe "The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up...

...And: "Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising...

...Books Enemy of Excellence By Christopher Caldwell In his 1991 Autobiography, Kingsley Amis recalled "a small group of posh chaps," the literary critics who exercised undue sway over London writers of the 1950s: "They were second-generation Blooms-buryites, I suppose, junior and dilute modernists . . . men of small original output and uncertain taste, owing their position to other things than knowledge or merit...

...The Rock Pool is a novel of the gay twenties written ten years after Waugh's Vile Bodies and seven years into a global depression, by which time Britain's literary set were all Marxists...

...Coming man...

...Not very deep praise...

...Never out of a changed mind or out of reconsideration, but seemingly out of sheer complaisance...

...That snobbery was a source of the moral obtuseness that certain of his contemporaries (and such astute later critics as Samuel Hynes) saw in his work...

...And, most famously, "Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out...

...The book, Orwell said, was dated before it was published: "The awful thraldom of money is upon everyone, and there are only three immediately obvious escapes...

...If there is next to nothing about Connolly's actual criticism in Fisher's account, it is because, however felicitous the writing and however quick the wit, it does not today hold up as original thinking...

...Of The Unquiet Grave, the collection of French and English quotations and diary extracts that Connolly pompously called a "word-cycle" and published under the name "Palinurus," one can do little better than note that Connolly himself feared it would be read as "a collection of extracts chosen with 'outremer' snobbery and masquerading as a book...

...Orwell, the very image of the engaged intellectual, was deeply offended by The Rock Pool, which in 1936 complains about the plight of European Jewry-but only in Biblical times-and dwells on dancing and drinking on the Riviera at the very moment when the Riviera was being overrun by hungry refugees from the Spanish Civil War...

...Nonetheless, Fisher tells us, "his comments about writers who had become established were incisive...

...This is clearly what Waugh meant when he derided Enemies of Promise: "Mr...

...Hasn't come yet...

...There remains a significance to Connolly, although not as a critic...

...At a certain level, Connolly didn't believe in anything, and he lacked the courage of his lack of convictions...

...He was so insulated that even World War II failed to make an impression on him-unlike Waugh, for example, who saw the war as a test of character and opined that its importance to literary men was obvious, as one of its hidden values "would be to show us finally that we were not men of action...

...it was for more than a decade the most important literary magazine in the English-speaking world...

...Connolly sees recent literary history, not in terms of various people employing and exploring their talents, but as a series of 'movements,' sappings, bombings and encirclements, of party racketeering and jerrymandering [sic...

...He began taking up the momentary enthusiasms of his younger contemporaries, casting madly about for the latest school to which he could belong as an exemplar...

...To describe Connolly as "reactive rather than creative," as Fisher does, is almost too generous: Connolly was imitative...

...Martin's, 466 pages, $27.95) is the first full-scale account of his life...

...Connolly does have his defenders-his new biographer Clive Fisher, for one, whose Cyril Connolly: The Life and Times of England's Most Controversial Literary Critic (St...

...But] Connolly was happy confining himself to the trite and irredeemable because he saw that restriction as giving him the license to be flippant and extravagant...

...Most decisive was Connolly's early job as amanuensis to the cranky American epigrammatist Logan Pearsall Smith, decisive because it is as a crafter of epigrams that Connolly is best remembered...

...The London wit Molly MacCarthy described him as "mean with his own money and perpetually extravagant with everyone else's...

...Here Connolly discovered such young writers as Angus Wilson and Julian Maclaren-Ross...

...His 1936 comic novel The Rock Pool, with its inch-wide margins and its 160 words per page, is better thought of as a padded vignette...

...Almost immediately, he behaved as if time were running out on him...

...Kenneth Tynan once wrote of Connolly, "It is hard to explain his influence to anyone who has not felt the impact of his personality...

...This was a man who stole his friends' books and was given to moaning about those of his dead friends who didn't bequeath him any of their money or real estate...

...Connolly caught up with literary Marxism only in the late 1930s, when its chief British practitioners, WH...

...Even if posterity has treated his discoveries as indifferent talents, no one in those days excelled Connolly's reputation as a literary sage...

...Housman in the pages of the New Statesman-as soon as the poet was safely dead...

...It's hardly surprising that Connolly was given to venting that most insincere of literary boasts: that he was "grateful" (particularly after Waugh published Decline and Fall at age 24) not to have had a big early success that would have hardened him into a caricature of himself...

...By the time Connolly died in 1974, one magazine editor could say he symbolized the "very notion of literature...

...Nor were others much fonder of Cyril Connolly...

...Connolly seems to admire...

...Connolly would come to agree, but only once the war was over, writing, in a 1946 postscript to the book: "Nothing 'dates' us so much as an ignorance of the horrors in store...

...Auden and Christopher Isherwood, were already on their way to (respectively) Christianity and Buddhism...

...These are charitable estimates of one who, for all his gifts as a wit and impresario, never, strictly speaking, wrote a book...

...If all Connolly could be accused of was laggardness in the fight against fascism, criticism of his criticism would be misdirected...

...Within five days of their wedding, his second wife Barbara Skelton felt "very restive and dissatisfied, saddled with a slothful whale of a husband who spends his time soaking in the bath and then . . . studies the racing form...