Country Life
A good burn
Peter Quince
Like many other people I have my misgivings about the modern farm practice of burning the great quantities of straw left behind by the combines. All the same, a well-managed ' burn ' in a big field can be exhilarating, I have to admit, and even in a curious way Once the autobiographical element in Connolly's best writing is recognised for what it is, his methods and aims begin to emerge more clearly. The question "How to write a book that lasts ten years?", to which the reply is quite simply, " Write a good one," becomes more explicable if we understand it as: " How shall I ensure the survival of myself for ten years!". ' Myself' can, of course, be interpreted in any number of ways, but Mr Connolly is fortunate in being a hedonist. Moments of great pleasure and great pain are what he recollects, many of them of a transitory nature. What he values in literature is intensity of emotion combined with purity of form, and in literature he finds the transitory changed into something that endures. On occasion the two worlds can be brought together, and the second can always serve as a remembrance of the first. What he wishes to achieve in life is what he admires permanently achieved, in literature. The fusion of feeling is the basis of his peculiar mode of autobiography.
He wanted to be a poet, but soon saw that it was something that he could never achieve. Instead he became a man of letters. The danger was that he might turn into a ' bookman,' in the tradition of Andrew Lang or Sir John Squire. His achievement has been to 'find a way of surviving that has enabled him to evade this fate. He has helped other writers greatly and written three lastinE,-. books. None are perfect and they all explore a restricted field, but this they do intensely and with conviction. The three together might be seen as stages in emancipation from a sense of guilt. They assert that happiness is not a sin, that interest in oneself is not a sin, and that an enjoyment of literature can be an essential part of human existence. The position has its limitations, as Connolly would probably admit, but it has been worth establishing.
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