Cyril Connolly Re-Evaluated at TQC
My long piece re-evaluating Cyril Connolly’s major work, Enemies of Promise, just went live over at The Quarterly Conversation. Here’s an excerpt:
In the late 1970s, the poet and critic Stephen Spender once appeared on an episode of a PBS series hosted by William Price Fox and George Plimpton called “Inside the Writer’s Workshop.” In connection with Auden, who in his view had accomplished everything he possibly could have (”he set out to write, and succeeded in writing, the Complete Works of W.H. Auden”), Spender listed a number of recently deceased friends whom he felt had not quite lived up to their promise, naming last among them Cyril Connolly. He “used to write reviews that were extremely witty,” Spender said, “every week for the Sunday Times. He’d write [a thousand-word review] in a taxi going to the airport, he could do it so easily.”
As if exasperated by this memory, Spender burst out with a rhetorical question: “How can one understand a person so gifted, who could do something so easily, [that he] should use his gifts so little?”
Intentionally or not, Spender that day articulated the question at the heart of Connolly’s best-known work, Enemies of Promise. But in that work, Connolly doesn’t simply interrogate his own failure to make full use of his gifts: he also examines the whole range of circumstances, circa 1938, that he felt encouraged all promising writers to fall short of what they could otherwise accomplish. And despite the passing of seventy-one years, and the arrival of a complex, global context for Anglophone literature, the considerations he raised then—or more accurately, his peculiar way of raising them—have an enduring relevance today.
posted: 09 May 20
under: The City Word