Previous Convictions - selected writings of a decade, by Cyril Connolly
What to make of Cyril Connolly? This book is a collection of his "writings" - essays, parodies and book reviews - mainly from the 1950s, when he was chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times. Reading it is an odd experience: annoying, at times difficult, but at the same time impressive and absorbing. I've been meaning to read something of his for some time - anyone who has William Boyd as a fan must be worth getting to know. But my feelings are very mixed. This writing is at times, in Boyd's words, self-conscious and straining for effect; and at times, in the words of Evelyn Waugh which Boyd quotes, snobbish, fey and posturing. Take this, from the first piece in the collection, on the Grand Tour:
Three stars for the Naples museum pulsating with life from the Campanian cities. Once again that tremor before the small still-lives, the peaches with a jug of water, the glow of Pompeian red in architectural trompe-l'oeil, the 'genre' scenes of Dioscorides, the exquisite mosaic of marine life with squid and octopus, crawfish and John Dory (art forms that were to disappear for the next 1,500 years). Shall we give up everything to the study of these flickering foreshortened landscapes and harbours?
It's too rich, this, too self-conscious and too self-consciously artsy, and frankly quite off-putting. A pity, because as you get to know Connolly better you realise that he's capable of making really satisfying sentences in a much plainer English style,
After reading Saint-Simon (a pleasure in itself) one can never be quite the same; the innocent will learn more than they wish to about human depravity, the wicked that they will be found out, the ambitious that even seventy years of kingship of most meticulous order must come to an end.
and of using them to make striking and pithy judgments, like this on Oscar Wilde -
No one talked more about art and artists or worked less. He mistook greed and lust and vainglory for life and allowed insincerity and affectation to seep through everything he wrote, with such facility, that he survives only through his one comedy and a couple of melodramas.
Both quotations comes from reviews, of a translation of Saint-Simon's memoirs and of an edition of Wilde's letters, and I think this is no accident. By far Connolly's best writing here is about books; and as William Boyd wrote in that 2002 Guardian piece, it's when he writes about books that Connolly becomes enthusiastic, unselfconscious and attractive. I disagree with him about Wilde: he overlooks the very good Picture of Dorian Gray and I think understimates Wilde's poetry, those "melodramas" and some of Wilde's other writings, like The Soul of Man under Socialism. But whether or not I agree is beside my point, which is about Connolly's style. The preciousness found in some of the other pieces falls away in his reviews, and the confident critic, self-assured and feeling the need to prove nothing, becomes a pleasure to read. Certainly, I found myself turning from one review to the next, and could happily have continued for hours in the company of a writer who clearly knows so much more about books than me, yet makes me feel I know more than I do, and makes me want to open again my Wilde, my Montaigne, Boswell, Orwell, Yeats, Dylan Thomas and many other writers Connolly champions and chides in these pages with such a balance of serious purpose and wit.
It is not uncommon for a famous writer to produce one thoroughly bad book. When this happens a critic must estimate the extent of the damage, try to explain the causes, and suggest a remedy, for the world would be poorer without the works of Hemingway whose adventurous life has been an inspiration to writers who don't want to be publishers or Government officials.
The longer articles are much less engaging, somehow: in spite of some good writing,
London is the capital of prose, as Paris of art or New York of modern living and most of this good prose is concerned with dandies or with slums or with fog: sometimes the dandy goes slumming and sometimes, taking advantage of the fog, the slum-folk sneak up on the dandy. The London I like best is the one I can find in books where it lies enbalmed between 1760 and 1840, the dandies still outnumbering the sums and the fog as yet barely invented.
there seems much less to get your teeth into. Beyond Believing, for instance, seems to me, again, too self-conscious and with far too little in the way of actual belief so that, while apparently aiming at originality, it simply seems trifling. I agree with William Boyd, too, that the parodies and satires are also lightweight, though well done and (in the case of Bond Strikes Camp, in which Bond is sent on a mission that involves getting professionally dragged up so as to seduce a kinky old Russian general) quite fun.
Always impressive, then, but sometimes so obviously trying to impress; and patchy overall. Again and again, reading this, I thought Connolly was so bookish - the parodies are about books, some of the essays - like First Edition Fever - also about books - that his subject, really, was and only could be books. Perhaps that's why he writes far better about them, as it seems to me from this collection, than he does about life. Perhaps the truth is that for him, books were life, and it's that truth that comes through in the reviews.
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