BOOKS OF THE DAY
Mr. Connolly
The Condemned Playground. By Cyril Connolly. (Routledge. 10s. 6d.) ESSAYS, 1927-1944, is the sub-title, and there is a three-page intro- duction which wholly disarms the reviewer. In these three pages Mr. Connolly, the reviewer and anatomist of reviewers, reviews himself, and is entirely just and right ; and it is a painful justice. He says that the earliest of dse articles reprinted here, written between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-five, seem to him as good as any of the more recent articles. They seem to me not only as good, but (with one exception among the later articles) better. And if the reviewer asks himself why the earlier articles seem better, he finds himself again referring to what Mr. Connolly has himself written about Mr. Connolly. He cannot hope to do better ; he cannot have studied the subject so persistently and so lucidly. The answer is to be found on page 15, the last sentence of a just and splendid vindication of Joyce, written in 1929: " I held the uncouth volume dazedly open in the big arm- chair—Narcissus with his pool before him." Mr. Connolly needs a pool, and his quality as a critic depends on the depth and capacity of the pool, the multitude of its refractions of the central image. The image which he finds reflected in the great, conscious, heroic writers, or in the sudden genius, he can reproduce with extra- ordinary intensity. What he then sees is not .entirely his own image, but some facet of the writer's temper and intention ; and the result is the brilliant and mature essays on Joyce and Sterne with which this book begins.
After these early chapters come the more barren years, Narcissus with a cracked mirror. How rarely in these years does Mr. Connolly seem to have sat down again in a big armchair with an un- couth volume, his pool, before him. The writing is so good and the jokes are so good that the reader can never be bored • in chapter after chapter he will contemplate with Mr. Connolly,/vr. Connolly and the novel, Mr. Connolly and reviewing, Mr. Connolly and social revolution, Mr. Connolly and war. But, although Sainte-Beuve is magnificently quoted in the introduction, he will find nothing which can be called criticism, sustained, considered and finished. He will always be expecting and never be satisfied, his expectation stimu- lated by illuminating analogies, phrases, suggestions of every kind. Mr. Connolly displays in these collected essays almost every quality of the great critic, a sense of style, of period, a flair for psychological idiosyncrasy, and for the social background of the writer's work ; what is lacking is a sense of subject, and this defect is so strange in an admirer of Henry James, who regarded the sense of subject, complete absorption and suppression of self in a single " case," as the writer's great virtue and sole inspiration. Without this central virtue the later essays fall apart, and become a succession of squibs which give no consistent light.
However morosely these essays may be judged by the invited reference to the standards of Sainte-Beuve, they will give pleasure in many different ways ; at the very least they are brilliant journalism,
and they survive reprinting. They defend intellectual pleasures against the steady siege of the puritan, the philistine and the hack, and the defence proceeds by sortie in satire and derision. Out-
standing are the appreciations of Gide and Forster, a recapitulation
of the achievements of 1843, and an imaginative and not easily forgotten essay, " The Ant-Lion." I do not believe that this play.
ground of Mediterranean pleasures, literary experiment, and anti- insularity has really been condemned. Apart from the sincere and consistent defence of the European or Latin-European tradition, there is the residue of good writing which has survived the play. Mr. Connolly analyses his own sources and limitations as a writer so sharply that his critic can add nothing—except a doubt whether such self-probing has been as productive as the early Narcissus-and- the-pool method. But the actual surface qualities of his writing are worth attention.
He revives the English language, which now sometimes seems tired and habitual, like an overworked clerk in a black suit. He does not design altogether new clothes and habits, but he adds colour and sudden deviations from the dead routine ; the language comes alive again, and is free and expressive. New and vivid images of taste, and touch and sound are used, and his adjectives strike the reader, and stay in the mind, instead of glancing off and disappearing into the journalists' pool. Any page of this book—excluding the parodies—is a pleasure to read, because of the love of language which informs it ; it is not utility, and it is not stale. The writing follows the speaking voice easily and naturally, and at its worst is loose and lax, when the impulse flags ; the words are better than the sentences, the sentences than the paragraphs, but there are passages of sustained excitement when the writer pursues an image. The savagery always draws blood, and is perfectly calculated to smother the victim's defence with a laugh.
But the parodies, clever, effective and uncomfortable, seem too long. Are the victims really worth so much elaboration? The Aldous Huxley Told in Gath could not be better.
The Pinhead and the Don-in-the-manger are transfixed in this book, and cannot speak again. But there is no living English essayist or critic who more provokes and justifies reference to almost impossible standards than Mr. Connolly, because he so often proclaims the great names and canons of literature himself, and because the glitter of his gifts is so obvious. So after the Pinhead and the Don-in-the-manger there remains the shade of Sainte-Beuve to spoil the recollections of the playground with comparisons and
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