Horizon's Promise

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The Evening Colonnade is a poignant title for a final book. It has the quiet, reflective tone that is perhaps melancholic but not nostalgic. A colonnade suggests grandeur of an age that has passed, one that is noted, even in its ruins, by a nobility and dignity that eludes a demotic culture. Cyril Connolly, the author concerned, is depicted sitting in a Palladian colonnade, a veteran in the scenes of his youth, for the illustration (by Cecil Beaton) resembles Bath, Connolly’s childhood home.

Connolly (1903-74) was one of vanishing type, a belle-lettrist, devoted to writing literature, and to writing about literature, if that distinction is at all useful. He was ashamed not to have written more original creative work. What little there is deserves further consideration.

Connolly’s concern was with enduring fame rather than ephemeral success. He knew that newsprint soon fades, and so he ensured his work was collected. The sight of his name on the spine was a consolation but no more because his stated belief was that the purpose of writing was to produce a masterpiece. The aspiration was absurdly high, inviting doubt in others and a sense of failure in himself.

Cyril Connolly’s life may be seen as a cautionary tale. He cautioned others from the beginning. His first critical book, Enemies of Promise, discusses all the pitfalls that lurk in the shadows for a tyro to pass. Writers are easily distracted by lucrative work in modes of writing that are not Writing. Clever crafting is not deeply creative. Literature is not colourful and glossy copy; it is typified by the bookshop in the narrow passage where out of print treasures may be found.

The thread of Enemies of Promise is the perceived false and treacherous world of writing. Prior to his first critical book was a novel, The Rock Pool, set in an artists’ colony in southern France. There the young but shrewd Naylor quietly uncovers the superficial world of privilege aesthetes at the colony. As is the nature of such communities, there is much talk about art but very little creativity. The endeavour of art demands concentration and patient work not café conversations.

Naylor is socially acceptable in the colony, but not wholly integrated. He is at some distance, enabling him to watch with the necessary irony of a narrator. Compare The Rock Pool with Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and there is no doubting which book is the more acutely observed. Waugh’s evocation of an idyll has an alluring charm. Who would not be flattered to be invited into the intimacy of a grand family which treats you as one of their own? The expectations are inevitably shattered by hubris, and Charles Ryder learns nothing except embittered humiliation. Naylor goes home wiser and more prepared to negotiate with the world even in its disappointments and treachery.

The treachery began in Connolly’s eyes long before he moved in the chic bohemian milieux of London and Paris. He showed promise early in life, winning all the prizes at Eton before transferring to Oxford. In that early success he saw the potential decline, for in his privileged education much was expected, the standard being set high. And Connolly’s education was extraordinarily privileged. He recalled being taught by Aldous Huxley, already discussing the ideas that later came to notable fruition.

Connolly’s contemporaries at Eton were to become leading cultural figures. Cecil Beaton and George Orwell were just two of the names. To be part of such an elite (other names were added at Oxford) was as much a handicap as a resource. Connolly’s good fortune was to see this with clear eyes. The easy entry into a leisurely culture could have become a slide into mannered indolence.

George Orwell famously sought the company of social outcasts. Connolly sought to prove himself worthy of his privilege. He sought to give back to the world what he owed. He wrote for a wider readership than the elite into which he moved so gracefully. He shared the general ideals of his generation, including the discontent with Victorian values of empire and war.

The two men lost touch for a time, coincidentally living in Paris around 1930, each unaware of the other. Connolly’s public memory of that time was seeing the Bunuel and Dali film Un chien andalou. Orwell’s memory was of seeing Marechal Petain, later to become the pro-Nazi dictator of Vichy.

These details illustrates the difference between Connolly and Orwell. They were to meet again, and Connolly’s famous magazine, Horizon, published some of Orwell’s essays. Connolly saw Orwell as primarily a journalist. Ideas were being communicated, rather than perceptions expressed. Nineteen Eighty-Four he thought failed to convince as fiction because of the poor characterization. Its importance, he felt, resided in its concept of Newspeak, the debasing of language as a means of controlling thought. In a generally derivative work it was indeed an original idea.

Both writers cared about language, but in contrasting ways. Orwell wrote in a plain style, advising others not to use two words where one would do. Connolly felt this led to an anonymity where literature required a personal signature, a sense of individuality especially needed in a mass culture with its enveloping totality.

Style therefore is not an affectation but a means of resistance. Or, as Dwight Macdonald put it: ‘Style is the message.’ Language should not be casual. Its beauty should not be violated. Meanings cannot be discarded at will. The rules cannot be disregarded in a free market of imprecision.

Style is not an incidental element, a disposable flourish. Connolly spoke a mandarin language but in ways accessible to alien ears. He was one of those writers who speak for a whole generation. It was a generation which understood the need to widen the bounds ofexperience. The political vortex of the mid-century years proscribed the trivial and domestic as the territory of imaginative literature.

A satirical piece, Where Engels Fears to Tread, remains a delight in its sustained verve which lightly but almost cruelly exposes the shallowness of declared loyalties to causes that were perhaps barely understood. Of course commitment to the proposed revaluation of society demanded personal sacrifices that were not always understood.

International peace was the dream of the age, and Connolly cherished the dream in a very personal way. The Unquiet Grave, written in wartime, is a strange, entrancing and disturbing book, a masterpiece of style that is an affirmation of life and love in a dark time.

There was for sure a melancholy in Connolly. He feared not the darkness of night, but of the half-light of the dawn. He memorably quoted Sartre on Camus: ‘I should call his pessimism solar when you remember how much darkness there is the sun.’ Or as Connolly put it: ‘I am sufficiently Celtic to be afraid of the morning.’ His background was Anglo-Irish, spending many childhood summers in Ireland. Although he remained English in sensibility, his temperament was aware of the tangible presence of the Atlantic shore and of the infinite possibilities which lie to the West.

The imagined land was an actual territory reconfigured in the dreams of peace which war sought to destroy. The Unquiet Grave locates the dream in occupied France, indeed in Petain’s Vichy, inaccessible except in memory. But the book is not simply about one place or one time. It moves through time and place.

It is unlike any other book one can think of. Unclassifiable, it may be described as a self-portrait of the writer’s soul. Against a soulless enemy was this statement of one man writing on behalf of everyone who cared for and longed for the simple but suspended pleasures of peace.

Connolly once said of Henry James that all the prolific writing could have been distilled into one masterly vignette. It may be the case that if The Aspern Papers alone survived a deluge at Rye we should not think the less of Henry James, whereas we would regret what was gone. There is a regret Connolly in his anxiety to produce only work of the highest order petrified the essential faculty of a confident liberality. He was a perfectionist in an occupation with its necessary share of the rough and ready. What did break through were hints, but rarely more, of genius. The Unquiet Grave is the principal exception.

Its pivotal moment perhaps is the narrator’s pursuit of a stylishly carefree young woman through the bookshops of Charing Cross Road. He follows only to lose her, for he is too shy to speak. An unrequited love determines the nature of the narrative. If only that other man within him had dared to come out. As things are, the lonely, aimless musings are woven into a book. Creativity can spring from a range of emotions. Perhaps dissatisfaction is high on the list. The state of the world and/or the state of one’s life can be the spur.

As the title indicates The Unquiet Grave is a haunted work, an invocation of ghostly memories and prescient concerns. It is a cry from the heart. Quotations from favoure writers, like Sainte-Beuve, and thinkers interlace fragments of conjectured journeys, of autobiography and poignant reflections.

Too idiosyncratic to be labelled under a conventional heading, too rare to be considered a commonplace book, The Unquiet Grave has acquired a curious reputation over the years, chiefly by word of mouth. Initially sold over the counter at the Horizon offices, it has been republished by larger publishing houses in various editions, never selling in any quantity, like a secret that ought to be told if only there were a way of telling it in the cacophony of demands and obligations that impede life.

If prejudice dismisses this as an arcane example of coterie writing the defence must be that the author was taking his chance in the market place. He was the figure on the street corner telling his story to anyone willing to listen. Far from being an indulgence of leisurely culture, it was a book, and a career, that was determined against the odds to speak out urgently against the barbarians without and within.

There was a bravery of sorts in keeping a dream alive, especially in a time of total war. Promise, like privilege, is a relative term. Neither talent nor ambition can sustain a career without that rarest of qualities, a tenacity that overcomes all objections, all pleadings, all obstacles. Without talent it is, of course, obsession.

Even with the gift of a golden pen obsession can lure by tempting whispers. Writing to the highest standard is both reasonable and necessary for a writer to succeed. But it is writing to one’s own highest standard. Enemies of Promise is flawed by self-pity. The author is not angry with a world that has failed to recognise his genius: he is angry himself for not being a genius. ‘Taunt me not, sir, with what might have been,’ Dr Johnson memorably lamented. Connolly was taunted by guilt all his life.

Foolish given the output. In a long career he did much. Everything he wrote lives on. Those collections of reviews and essays, occupying the latter half of his career, are worthy, if not required, reading. Then there are the books. Several are considered modern classics, although that can seem more like embalmment than endorsement. That is real success, whereas worldly success is a trap through which many fall. The crowd is sure to applaud with jeers the hanging of the fallen hero. Better to be in an uncrowded place where one’s mind is not swayed by the cheap emotions of the streets.

The writer paces the streets alone, for ever seeking that elusive essence of meaning. What other pursuit can an artist have? The allusive contours of Connolly’s prose, the concision of form, the playful use of pastiche, and the cryptic allusions of meaning all point in one direction. Over the horizon is the mystical imprint of nature, including human nature, transformed. It is the search for the words behind the words. The truth perpetually promises to reveal itself.

But always we are left with unresolved enchantments. The latter half of his career was devoted almost entirely to the reviewing of other people’s books. But, as Clive James remarked, ‘his reviews were his masterpieces’. Connolly was perhaps the most quoted reviewer on paperback reprints. His weekly contributions to The Sunday Times made or enhanced reputations, and were the model for his successors in the literary pages. When others gathered their reviews it was customary to pay homage to the master of metropolitan critics.

It was not the career envisaged, but it was a life of great and lasting achievement, although that was not how it felt. When Horizon closed, despite its great success, Connolly wrote in histrionic despair, ‘It is closing time in the gardens of the West.’ R.D. Laing, then a medical student, wrote in his diary, ‘Speak for yourself. Don’t write me off.’

Connolly’s lament was in part for passing of an unhurried and decorous style of literature and life. War and its aftermath had eroded the gracious gentility that depended on servitude. But something more than, or other than, outmoded structures of class were being mourned. It was the erosion of literature’s centrality in culture. Horizon (1939-50) had been a great source of creativity especially in wartime. A lack of funding was one reason for its closure. Another reason was a sense that the time of its life was passing. The torch passed to Encounter and the revived London Magazine. They were less dependent on the presence of any particular editor. They successfully carried forward the national literary culture.

But a demotic and demonstrative idea of culture was emerging. The song lyric contended with the poem on the page, often very successfully. An age-old tradition was being refashioned. It was the unending pursuit of the enchantment that may be found in a literary culture. Well-crafted words, printed, sung or loudly proclaimed defy the encroachment of the uniformed nightmare that haunts us now as much as ever. The promise must be kept.

Cyril Connolly remains a reliable guide to the ways of writing in all the places where creativity flourishes. His prose was exquisite, the best of his reviews reading like prose poems. Masterpieces indeed, they were pure distillations of acute reading not only of books but of an approach to life which affirms the ideal of a library of infinite resources. The pursuit of the ideal is the promise kept

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