Amours et voyages
Richard Shone
A Romantic Friendship: The Letters of Cyril Conno/iy to Noel Blakiston (Constable £5.50) "Life without love for me has always seemed like an operation without an anaesthetic," wrote Cyril Connolly in A Georgian Boyhood. This book of youthful letters shows to what lengths he would go in trying to overcome the Pain which was, he felt, his birthright. The acute analysis of that predicament is seen at from here at a more diffuse and daily level, rrom his last year at Balliol to his first marriage in 1930 when he was twenty-seven. Friendship, literature and travel, the dominant preoccupations of the letters, helped bolster him against a World which he found increasingly brutal and mediocre. His high standards produced an exacting concept of friendship, an intolerance of the second-rate in literature, sensual expectations of travel abroad. If his reading and
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travelling sometimes failed him, the friend these letters were written to held him in thrall. Noel Blakiston (the Nigel of A Georgian B°911°) was eighteen months younger than Connolly whom he met at Eton. He early eseaPed the grip of a privileged muscular Christianity and, not without initial resistance, tell into the more supple arms of Connolly and thcornPany. The post-war, progressive views of that circle made it 'subversive' at Eton and Sophisticated at University. To be sophisticated at Oxford was suave and mature; at Cambridge, "asPiciously frivolous – a distinction which angers, Connolly was an exotic bloom and, according to the memoirs of his contemporaries, exceptionally brilliant and amusing though often unhappy. His academic and Popular success at Eton which came like manna to a solitary child, was seen to count for nothing in an Oxford which grew distasteful to tun – "I feel dissatisfied with everyone and s ,Jtely time tables and guide books." Unable to ue constantly taking rail tickets to Avignon or
Algeciras, he spent time and energy in constructing about him a close yet flexible group of friends. One gets the impression of Connolly as impresario though these friends who included Maurice Bowra, Bobbie Longden and Kenneth Clark, were by no means stage-hands. There are snappy descriptions of the group together which Connolly orchestrates with humour and affection. When talk flags or thought is woolly however, his disappointment clouds the event. The pages teem with literary parallels from several languages, dead and alive, so that at one moment everyone is a character in The Constant Nymph, in Proust, Plato, Pater or in the old Etonian circle of Walpole and Gray – "They make one long to get up our letters (yours and mine) in the same way. Well, we will."
The letters which Noel Blakiston has now 'got up', a year after Cyril Connolly's death, make absorbing reading. Here is a record of a passionate friendship conducted like some immensely civilised tutorial. Every shift of feeling and ripple of affection is scrutinised and aligned to Connolly's vision of what friendship should be. The least flicker spawns a shoal of reflections. Herein lies the difficulty. Without tthe recipient's own letters, some passages lose coherence and the editor's silence is sometimes regrettable though elsewhere the elephantine charge of footnotes customary in published correspondence is absent; obscurity has its
pleasures. Quotations and couplets, classical references, changes of typeface, captivating names of foreign places, give to some of the letters the look of the Cantos of Pound.
But they are never used pretentiously; all flow from an urge to communicate his dazzled feelings for the past and the best of Mediter .ranean culture and to explore his own peculiar sensibility. He has a way of being descriptive and speculative at the same time, where the "senses and intellect . . are irretrievably fused." Knowing this himself he saw that travel was the ideal stimulus. What a travelling companion he must have been, loitering through Tuscany or climbing up to Ronda; savouring the Fl6che d'Or – "a magnificent train, sleek and white and shining like a python that has shed its skin" – or composing obituaries of hopeless hotels. He can gut a town in a matter of hours. Places are starred according to the degree of sensuous satisfac tion found there; he is the epicurean's Baedeker, a Bradshaw for the lonely hearts. "Visions of a leisurely exodus" rise continually from the pages.
To supplement his own Small income (though travel was cheap he seems on occasions to have met the expenses of his companion and could be terribly extravagant), Connolly became private secretary to Logan Pearsall Smith in 1926. He describes the world of the Sitwells (an impudent circus not much to his taste), the Berensons and Stracheys (court life at f Tatti again but sharp) and Desmond and Molly MacCarthy who were exceedingly friendly to him. MacCarthy gave him book reviews for the New Statesman and Life and Letters and encouraged his singular talent. Unemployability, as Connolly once said, may well have been a cause for his drifting into criticism but it was only one. The letters show an intoxicating love and poetry and biography and many of the authors most cited remained inspirations for the rest of his life – Catullus, Horace, Milton, Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Eliot. He soon outgrew a certain sticky fondness for the Georgians.
Youthful letters usually show characteristics in the writer which, with age, become more apparent, but enthusiasms are subject to revision. But here are many which developed into life-long passions, particularly his love of wild animals, food, wine, architecture, plants and perfumes. He came in time to a more curious attitude to the natural world, to painting (here he plumps for Watts) and the collecting of books and manuscripts. I remember him showing me, a year or two before he died, some of the high spots of his collection, commenting on each in that hypnotic voice as he took them from drawers like a priest handling the devotional relics of saints and martyrs with a look on his face of celebration and ineluctable sadness. It is that mixture which makes this book so moving.
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