BOOKS

Bantambiog of a bantam

Bevis Hillier

CYRIL CONNOLLY: A NOSTALGIC LIFE by Clive Fisher Macmillan, £20, pp. 466 Twenty-five years ago I was a regular book reviewer on the Sunday Times along- side Cyril Connolly. It was like having a bit part in a film starring Charles Laughton. (Laughton would have been perfect casting in The Cyril Connolly Story.) I used to meet the great critic in the office of Jack Lambert, the expansive arts editor. If Connolly was undisputed king of the reviews pages, he was a constitutional monarch — Lambert a sort of prime minister who knew how to keep him in line without seeming pushy. Connolly was not disagreeable, but he made no attempt to charm. Kenneth Tynan's description brings him before me:

a baggy, besandalled Budda [with] somewhat sour, blank eyes which express the resigna- tion of one who envisaged himself in a sedan chair sucking on a hubblc-bubble and was fobbed off with secondhand Sheraton and cigars.

A pedant might ask how eyes could be blank and sour, but I know just what Tynan meant. Connolly's charm was reserved for women, preferably rich ones.

In one of his recently published letters the Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White (b. 1912) wrote that he wished he had been born later. Born in 1940, I doubt that many of my generation would say the same — teenagers in the age of rock 'n' roll; at university with grants, not student loans, before the students started burning the libraries; in our twenties throughout the 1960s; initiates of the Permissive Soci- ety before the threat of AIDS; alive when man landed on the moon. A big advantage of being in our generation rather than in Clive Fisher's of 20 years later, is that we were able to read Connolly's reviews in the 1950s, Sixties and Seventies when they were hot from the oven. The best years were when he was lead reviewer of the Sunday Times and Philip Toynbee of the Observer. There, pitted against each other, were a natural nostalgic, steeped in antique culture, and a natural rebel — Toynbee was a troublemaker, almost an anarchist, contentious for the sake of stirring things up. Each was the best possible corrective to the other.

It was Toynbee who, in 1953, put the case against Connolly in words that the older critic considered a betrayal by a former disciple: Hatred of England, an adulatory and snob- bish love of France, embittered and boring connoisseurship of food and wind, an inaccu- rate and unsupported taus temporis acti, these are some of the errors of taste and judge- ment which can no longer give pleasure .. . Cyril Connolly, with an Augustus John portrait behind him and his son Matthew at his knee, shortly before his death As if that were not enough, Connolly con- stantly made a case against himself, from Enemies of Promise (1938) onwards: that he was a failure, a literary `also-ran', someone who squandered his gifts. `What is there to say,' he wrote to the art critic John Russell, `about someone who did nothing all his life but sit on his bottom and write reviews?'

Well, what is there to say? Connolly had a pretty unbeatable arsenal of the qualities that make a good critic. Breadth of refer- ence, starting with a firm grounding in Greek and Latin at Eton; judgment CI rate Mr Holroyd very high as a biographer, almost in the [George] Painter class' — 1968); enough untenderness of heart to be rude about friends' books as well as enemies'; and then the famous prose style, pitched somewhere between the `mandarin' and `vernacular' manners that he had analysed so mercilessly in Enemies of Promise.

His supreme gift was for simile. 'Life without love for me has always seemed like an operation without an anaesthetic'; 'Boys do not grow up gradually. They move for- ward in spurts like the hands of clocks in railway stations'; after his wartime maga- zine Horizon closed down, 'Only contribu- tions continued inexorably to be delivered, like a suicide's milk.' A dust-jacket photograph of Norman Mailer struck him as having the expression 'of a large rough dog waiting for a ball to be thrown which one is already tired of throwing.' His parodies were brilliant, too; and in the middle of a review he would suddenly launch into a sort of inspired Oxford Union wit. Reviewing John Pearson's life of Ian Fleming, he drew a parallel between Fleming and Hemingway. 'I began to imag- ine a composite character, Ernest Fleming- way, author of a macabre thriller, `The Scum Also Rises'.'

Connolly's main weaknesses were a taste for vaporous generalisation (Pound belonged to the last generation, almost, when to be a "young poet" was also to be someone who could legislate for mankind') and a tendency to gourmandise with food. Here he is, at his fruitiest and worst, describing the Botticelli Room at the Uffizi: There is something in the breaking water, the whorl of pale wavelets under Venus' whorled shell, or in the pose of the youth examining a fruit with outstretched arm, which confers a benediction on man's search for knowledge and eases the weariness of living.

That's so mandarin, you can see the finger- nails growing.

Up to now, our knowledge of Connolly has come from these sources: his own books; scattered references in others' memoirs; a commemorative issue of Adam magazine; a series of `romantic' letters to his Eton friend Noel Blakiston, published in 1975; a journal prefaced by a souffle- light biographical sketch by David Pryce- Jones; an excellent book on the Horizon years by Michael Shelden; a book on the Sunday Times by Harold Hobson and others; the vivacious memoirs of Connolly's second wife, Barbara Skelton; and the recently published autobiography of Lord Weidenfeld, who succeeded Connolly as her husband. (This last appeared too late to be cannibalised by Fisher, though he has talked to Weidenfeld. The Weidenfeld memoir conveys Connolly's genius as a sav- age mimic. I wonder how lifelike his George Weidenfeld was.) What was really needed next, before all the sources dried up, was a full-fig Holroyd job on Connolly. Instead, Fisher gives us a bantamweight biography.

The bantambiog is in favour. The average reader likes it because it tells him just about all he wants to know about a given figure. Publishers like it because readers buy it. In the background loom the horrid warnings of multi-volume jugger- naut biographies that didn't recoup their authors' advances. But there is a downside to bantambiogs. Too often their appealing concision is achieved not by their authors' mastering a mass of information, then refining; they are produced by authors who scamp their homework — almost as if Lytton Strachey had not been writing ironically when he suggested in Eminent Victorians that

ignorance is the first requisite for the histori- an — ignorance, which simplifies and clari- fies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

A good example of the bantambiog is Adam Sisman's A. J. P. Taylor, recently reissued in paperback with all the rave reviews plastered across its back. A lot of the praise for the book was merited. Sisman is acute, he is fair, he does write well. But to my mind he did not lavish on Taylor the time that the most famous of modern historians deserved. Taylor, in his autobiography, described Theodore (Jack) Yates, whom he first met at Oriel, Oxford, in the 1920s, as 'my most treasured friend until his death'. You might expect, there- fore, to find several pages about Yates in Sisman's book. Not a sausage. Not even a single glancing mention. Yet if Sisman had taken the trouble to track down Yates's niece in Louth, Lincolnshire (where Yates lived for most of his life), he would have found that she owns an unpublished auto- biography of Yates, which would have enriched his account of Taylor's youth (and, one has to say, would have refuted some of Taylor's versions of events, accept- ed by Sisman). Comparably, Clive Fisher is apparently unaware that Lord Kinross, with whom Connolly once shared a flat, published a loose-scrum autobiography in a series of Punch articles in 1961. There Fisher would have found this acid vignette: I took a studio-flat in Bromptonia, done up in the Italianate style . . . I was . . . photographed in this studio for Vogue, seated at a refectory table with Mr Cyril Connolly, who shared the place with me until he found my snobbish way of life too distasteful and, after starting to write a short story about this — which he did not, unfortunately, finish — sensibly left for abroad to get married. In later years he once referred wittily to this period when 'we didn't know where the next meal was coming from, nor whom to ask to it'. When Fisher suggests that Connolly was not jealous of Raymond Mortimer because `Mortimer was not an aspiring novelist', he evidently does not know Mortimer's 1922 novel The Oxford Circus — a glance at Who Was Who would have revealed it. In 1925 Connolly went to Jamaica to tutor a 13- year-old boy called Charles D'Costa. Fisher writes that D'Costa had been 'removed from Marlborough after a rugby accident': what, then, of a Connolly letter to Noel Balkiston of 20 January 1927, reporting that D'Costa

confided that the blow on the head which had occasioned his six months' rest . . . had been a pure invention as he had concocted it the day after the match in order to 'stay out' the week-end?

Again, Fisher mentions that Connolly met the filmstar Joseph Cotten in Holly- wood, but fails to pick up Barbara Skel- ton's diary entry that Connolly felt `sentimental' about Cotten because 'Cotten once made a pass at him'. (In Fisher's index, the actor who starred in The Third Man and was massaged by Loreff a Young in The Farmer's Daughter becomes `Cotton': I have heard of an author's unfortunately losing his thread; Fisher seems unfortunately to have acquired one.) One grace-note is missing from the illustra- tions: in Fisher's place, I would have sought permission to reproduce Osbert Lancast- er's hilarious cartoon of Connolly and Brian Howard at the Cafe Royal, in With an Eye to the Future.

Within its limitations, Fisher's book is astute and engagingly written. The strands and striations of Connolly's character are clear enough. He was ugly — `so ugly you could hardly believe it,' said David Astor, who tried to poach Connolly for the Observer. What do ugly men do? They write about art and beauty; or they go for the scalps of many women to prove they are lovable. Connolly did both, though there was an unusually prolonged early phase of homosexuality. He gravitated towards the rich: the wealth of his first wife, Jean, bought him time off casual jour- nalism to write Enemies of Promise. Reviewing Connolly's The Unquiet Grave, George Orwell, who had been at prep- school and Eton with him, wrote:

On every page this book exhibits that queer product of capitalist democracy, an inferiori-

`You bring out the child in me.'

ty complex resulting from a private income.

Connolly could be kind, but was largely egocentric and selfish. Edmund Wilson, whose Axel's Castle (1931) was part- inspiration for Enemies of Promise, noted how he never listened to anyone else's stories, 'and when the other person has finished gives a little nod and smile that indicates he has paid no attention'. Egocentricity might seem the last quality desirable in a critic, but Jacques Barzun defended Connolly; he was 'so competent in self-analysis that to read him is to explore many neglected corners of oneself. Connolly also showed wonderful flair as editor of Horizon. As Fisher says, he let writers 'explore subjects which interested them, rather than compelling them to probe the topical'. How irresistible was his approach to Auden: 'Write me a poem that will make me cry.' (Result: 'The Fall of Rome'.) Fisher is particularly good on the love- hate relationship between Connolly and Evelyn Waugh, founded on mutual liking and intense jealousy. Waugh thought his friend should have been fighting Hitler rather than running a little magazine. He put him into Unconditional Surrender as Everard Spruce, editor of Survival. Connol- ly still gave the book a good review. Waugh also inscribed a book 'To Cyril, who kept the home fires burning.' Ann Fleming, that super-bitch, reported to Waugh that Con- nolly was most satisfactorily 'hopping mad'. Waugh had to admit Connolly showed courage when he risked American libel actions by publishing The Loved One in Horizon.

For most writers, being a renowned critic and running an influential magazine would be enough. But Connolly set out his mani- festo in The Unquiet Grave:

The more books we read, the sooner we per- ceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence . All excursions into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the fihns, however grandiose, are doomed to disappointment.

His novel, The Rock Pool, was just an inter- esting failure, a damp squid, as it were. Penguin reissued Enemies of Promise in their 'Modern Classics' series — but it was not enough, not nearly enough.

Fisher's best discovery is somebody called Diana (she chooses to be referred to only by her first name) who had an affair with Connolly. She is one of his most perceptive and sympathetic sources; no doubt the gossip columnists will be making guesses. A name glaringly absent from his acknowledgements is that of Connolly's widow, now Deirdre Levi. I hear on the grapevine that Mrs Levi did not cooperate with Fisher but is cooperating with Jeremy Lewis on an authorised biography. On the model of 'Ernest Flemingway', perhaps Jeremy Lewis and Clive Fisher should have got together to write a compromise volume under the pseudonym Mr Jeremy Fisher.