Cyril Vernon Connolly (10 September 1903 - 26 November 1974) was an English intellectual, literary critic and writer.

Early life

Cyril Connolly was born in Coventry, Warwickshire, the only child of Matthew William Kemble Connolly, an officer in the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, by his wife Muriel Maud Vernon, daughter of an Anglo-Irish family seated at Clontarf Castle, Dublin. His parents had met while his father was serving in Ireland. His father's next posting was to South Africa, where his mother left him for another military man.^[1] Connolly's father was also a malacologist and mineral collector of some reputation and brought many samples from Africa.^[2] Cyril Connolly's childhood days were spent with his father in South Africa, with his mother's family at Clontarf Castle, and with his grandmother in Bath and other parts of England.^[3]

Connolly was educated at St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne where he enjoyed the company of George Orwell and Cecil Beaton. He wrote "Orwell proved to me that there existed an alternative to character, Intelligence. Beaton showed me another, Sensibility."^[4] Connolly won the Harrow History Prize, pushing Orwell into second place, and the English prize leaving Orwell with Classics.^[5] He then won a scholarship to Eton a year after Orwell. At Eton, after a traumatic first few terms, he settled into a comfortable routine and became a popular wit. He achieved academic success winning the Rosebery History Prize, and followed this up with the Brackenbury History scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford in 1922.

• Cyril Connolly http://www.nndb.com/people/132/000115784/

Literary career

In 1928 Connolly was appointed to the staff of the leftist New Statesman and continued contributing throughout the 1930s. In 1930, he married the American Jean Bakewell who "was to prove one of the more liberating forces in his life... an uncomplicated hedonist, independent, adventurous, celebrating the moment...an attractive personality: warm, generous, witty and approachable ..."^[6] She provided modest financial support that enabled him to enjoy travels, particularly around the Mediterranean, hospitality and good food and drink.^[7] While tolerant of Connolly's affairs for many years, to his great grief she eventually left him in 1935. Connolly wrote only one novel, The Rock Pool (1936), a satirical work describing a covey of dissolute drifters at an end of season French seaside resort, which was based on his experiences in the south of France. He followed this up with what is considered his best known work the autobiography which forms the second half of Enemies of Promise (1938). In this he attempted to explain his failure to produce the literary masterpiece which he and others believed he should have been capable of writing. In 1940 he founded the influential literary magazine Horizon with Peter Watson, its financial backer and de facto art editor). He edited Horizon until 1950 (with Stephen Spender as an uncredited associate editor until early 1941. He was briefly (1942-3) the literary editor for The Observer, until a disagreement with David Astor. During World War II he wrote The Unquiet Grave under the pseudonym 'Palinurus') which is a noteworthy collection of observations and quotes. From 1952 until his death, he was joint chief book reviewer (with Raymond Mortimer) for the Sunday Times.

Personal life

In 1967 Connolly settled in Eastbourne, to the amusement of Beaton who suggested he was lured back by the cakes they had enjoyed in school outings to the town.^[8] He died at Eastbourne in 1974.

Connolly was married three times. His first wife Jean Bakewell (1910-1950) left him in 1935, moving back to the United States. She later became the wife of Laurence Vail (former husband of Peggy Guggenheim and Kay Boyle) but, following years of health problems, died of a stroke while on a trip to Paris at the age of 39. Connolly married secondly, in 1950, to Barbara Skelton. His third wife, whom he married in 1959, was Deirdre Craven, a granddaughter of James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon, by whom he had two children later in life. After Connolly's death in 1974 she married Peter Levi.

Since 1976, Connolly's papers and personal library of over 8,000 books have been housed at the University of Tulsa.

Assessment

Connolly did his best work as a critic. Like Edmund Wilson in the United States, he wielded enormous influence. An astute and often witty commentator, with great gifts for often cruel mimicry, Connolly informed the thinking and attitudes of a generation. In The Unquiet Grave he writes: "Approaching forty, sense of total failure: ... Never will I make that extra effort to live according to reality which alone makes good writing possible: hence the manic-depressiveness of my style,?which is either bright, cruel and superficial; or pessimistic; moth-eaten with self-pity/"

As editor of Horizon, Connolly gave a platform to a wide range of distinguished and emerging writers. He was robust in his criticism of the decline of the Mandarin and perhaps too effusive in his welcome of the New Vernacular.^[9] Kenneth Tynan, writing in the March 1954 Harper's Bazaar, praised Connolly's style as 'one of the most glittering of English literary possessions.'

References in popular culture

Cyril Connolly's name appears in a coda to the Monty Python song "Eric the Half-a-Bee", as a mishearing of the words "semi-carnally". Despite being corrected, the backing vocalists then sing "Cyril Connolly" to the melody of the song.^[10] The same comedians made another reference to Connolly in The Brand New Monty Python Bok, which includes a facsimile Penguin paperback, "Norman Henderson's Diary", complete with (invented) praise from Connolly.

In Ian McEwan's award-winning novel "Atonement" (2001) the protagonist Briony Tallis, a budding novelist, submits to Connolly at "Horizon" her first novelette. The book includes his long rejection letter (fictional, but closely modeled on his actual writings) in which he tries to soften the blow of being rejected, offers some perceptive criticism and encourages Tallis to do better - which she does, as shown in the book's later part where she becomes a successful and well-known novelist, and is shown to have taken to heart some of Connolly's advice.

In April 2007 the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography marked the twentieth anniversary of The Simpsons in its online newsletter, with approximations for the Simpson family from its list of subjects: Cyril Connolly was selected as the equivalent of Homer Simpson, being judged "a man who, like Homer, never wrote a great novel; whose genius, like Homer's, lay in failure; a man notable for his 'greed, his sloth, his gourmandizing, his inconsistency and melancholy'".^[11]es

In "An Englishman Abroad" (1983) BBC TV bio-movie, spy Guy Burgess asks visiting actress Coral Browne for news and gossip from England. Twice he asks about Cyril Connolly and twice she says she does not know him.

Quotes

• "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."
• "Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but the middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium."
• "No city should be so large that a man cannot walk out of it in a morning"
• "We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy."
• "Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river."
• "There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall."
• "A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he starts forth, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts, and to second-rate friends"
• "Perfect taste always implies an insolent dismissal of other people's"

Works

• The Rock Pool, 1935 (fiction)
• Enemies of Promise, 1938
• The Unquiet Grave, 1944
• The Condemned Playground, 1945 (collection)
• The Missing Diplomats, 1952
• The Golden Horizon 1953 (ed., compilation from Horizon)
• Les Pavillons: French Pavilions of the Eighteenth Century,1962 (with Jerome Zerbe)
• Previous Convictions, 1964 (collection)
• The Modern Movement: 100 Key Books From England, France, and America, 1880–1950, 1965
• The Evening Colonnade 1973 (collection)
• A Romantic Friendship, 1975 (letters to Noel Blakiston)
• Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir, 1983 (Edited by D. Pryce-Jones)
• Shade Those Laurels, 1990 (fiction, completed by Peter Levi)
• The Selected Works of Cyril Connolly, 2002 (edited by Matthew Connolly) Volume One: The Modern Movement: Volume Two: The Two Natures

Biographies

• Clive Fisher (1995): Cyril Connolly, St Martin?s Press, New York, ISBN 0-312-13953-5
• Jeremy Lewis (1995): Cyril Connolly , A Life, Jonathan Cape, London, ISBN 0-224-03710-2

References

1. ↑ Jeremy Lewis Cyril Connolly: A Life Jonathan Cape 1997
2. ↑ Obituary Matthew William Kemble Connolly 1872-1947 Journal of Molluscan Studies· Volume 28, Number 1
3. ↑ Cyril Connolly Enemies of Promise Routledge & Kegan Paul 1938
4. ↑ Cyril Connolly Enemies of Promise Routledge & Kegan Paul 1938
5. ↑ St Cyprian's Chronicle - 1916
6. ↑ Clive Fisher Cyril Connolly: A Nostalgic Life
7. ↑ Peter Quennell Introduction to The Rock Pool" 1981 Persea Books ISBN 9780892550593
8. ↑ Cecil Beaton Beaton in the Sixties: More unexpurgated diaries Weidenfield & Nicholson 2003
9. ↑ Michael Shelden (1989): Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon, Hamish Hamilton / Harper & Row, ISBN 0-06-016138-8
10. ↑ Cleese, Idle, Jones: "Eric the Half a Bee", Monty Python's Previous Record, 1972, Charisma Records
11. ↑ Subscription-only link, and this text, preserved at OUP Blog

External links

• 100 key books
• University of Tulsa McFarlin Library's inventory of the Cyril Vernon Connolly papers and library housed in their special collections department
• Find-A-Grave profile for Cyril Connolly

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