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Cyril Connolly

Name: Cyril Connolly
Author: Clive Fisher
ISBN: 9780312139537

by Clive Fisher

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Overview

In his lively and illuminating study of Cyril Connolly, noted biographer Clive Fisher focuses his lens on the life of one of England's most controversial and influential literary figures. Revered for his intellect, feared for his acerbic wit, the Connolly who emerges from this, the first complete account of his life since his death in 1974, was a brilliant thinker and hugely influential critic who came to literary maturity between the wars. The author of two seminal volumes, Enemies of Promise and The Unquiet Grave, and the founder and editor of Horizon, the monthly wartime magazine that sustained British culture throughout the political and social tumult of the forties, Connolly's reputation quickly spread from London to Paris, from New York to San Francisco, and throughout the English-speaking world. However, despite Connolly's early professional successes, he has been remembered more for his personal excesses and hilarious - if unseemly - behavior. Fisher brilliantly brings to life both sides of the man. Overweight, unattractive, and from an impoverished Irish family, the young Connolly scratched his way to the center of English literary life by ingratiating himself with the powerful, playing the role of a modern-day Falstaff to curry favor, and performing his adopted part with comic melancholy. Drawing on Connolly's huge collection of personal papers and previously unexplored archives in England and abroad, Fisher traces the life and times of this complex figure, exploring Connolly's legacy and restoring him to his rightful place at the heart of twentieth-century letters.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Influential English literary critic Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) is best known for his wartime reflections, The Unquiet Grave (1944), an angst-ridden quest for artistic integrity in a world gone mad. That book's eloquent pessimism about marriage, art, happiness, its self-pity and hedonism, were salient features in Connolly's personal life, observes British author Fisher, a biographer of Noel Coward. This stylish, disarming biography gets beneath Connolly's persona as snobbish, worldly-wise hedonist to reveal a man tormented by self-reproach and self-doubt, beset by a sense of failure despite the success of his magazine Horizon. Fisher dazzlingly portrays Connolly's stellar circle, which included Evelyn Waugh, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Anthony Powell, Sylvia Beach, Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler. He discusses Connolly's three stormy marriages and his encounters with Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Ian Fleming. This spirited biography will send readers to Connolly's self-portraits, The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise (1938), and to his 1936 novel The Rock Pool. Photos. (Jan.)

Library Journal

Connolly should have been a contender. Educated at Eton and Oxford, a man of obvious talent, wit, and charm, with friends such as Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, and many members of Britain's upper crust, Connolly might have parlayed his considerable gifts into the literary stratosphere. Instead, he is remembered mostly as a brilliant and idiosyncratic book reviewer for the London press and as the inspired editor of Horizon, a literary magazine begun in 1940; he is also credited with maintaining the morale of Britain's more literate populace through those dark days. Fisher (Noel Coward, LJ 6/1/92) explicates the character flaws that blighted Connolly's career and emphasizes his friendship and support for the literary greats of the period. Yet he cannot ultimately explain the frittering away of Connolly's talent and the innate sadness of his life. As Malcolm Muggeridge said of him, "His lost masterpieces give a piquancy to his criticism." For specialist and general literary collections.-Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ., Carbondale

Alice Joyce

Connolly's name is arguably far less familiar to most readers than the names of his illustrious circle of literary acquaintances--writers such as Orwell (a prep school classmate), Waugh, Isherwood, and Auden. Although perhaps best known as editor of the British journal "Horizon" (first published in 1939), Connolly also published two volumes of critical writing. Fisher's densely worded biography is ponderous at times, especially early on in the narrative, but it is also revelatory. Connolly's keen intelligence is illuminated, along with the obstacles that kept him from doing the work he imagined for himself. And enmeshed as Connolly's working life was with his personal affairs insofar as the exhausting machinations that went on in his marriages and numerous dalliances, Fisher manages to present an admirable portrait of a colorful and provocative character.