The Charlock’s Shade

Cyril Connolly is the patron saint of literary under-achievers. For all young English graduates who ever believed they had a novel in them but didn’t; every journalist with an edgy work-in-progress hidden in the bottom drawer of his desk; every would-be McEwan or Mantel who has spent frustrated years subbing other people’s words on the Wythenshawe Gazette, Connolly is the figure to whom they cleave for comfort. Because if ever a man had an obvious talent to write it was he.

Part of a prodigiously gifted generation – he was at school with Orwell, and at Oxford with Waugh, Betjeman, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell – Connolly could have equalled or eclipsed them all in literary achievement. At St Cyprian’s he won the English and History prizes (beating Orwell in both) and a scholarship to Eton. At Eton he developed a reputation for intellectual brilliance streets ahead of his peers and picked up a history scholarship to Oxford, where he was taken up by the Deans of both Balliol and Wadham, ‘Sligger’ Urquhart and Maurice Bowra. He was, wrote his contemporary Kenneth Clarke,

obviously an extraordinary person, with a width of knowledge and a maturity of mind of an entirely different class to the rest of us . . . He had read the Greek and Latin authors, including those of the Silver Age, with a subtle, questioning mind; he had read the French poets and critics of the nineteenth century; he had even read the Christian Fathers. All this learning was almost entirely invisible below a surface of wit and intellectual curiosity.

At Oxford, however, he began to go off the rails. Much of his student career was spent travelling through Italy, Spain, Greece and the French Alps. His work suffered, he left Balliol with a third-class degree, and he spent his twenties writing occasional reviews for the New Statesman and visiting friends in Europe. A pattern emerged: he’d pitch an idea for a book to a publisher, receive a cash advance and spend it on his travels, as he widened his social circle and indulged in good food, fine wine, Mediterranean sunshine, visiting prostitutes and lying in warm baths. The books never got written. At Oxford he used to say his main exercise was ‘running up bills’; it became a lifelong habit. He became part of literary society through meetings and conversation and more reviews. His contemporaries loved to gossip about his travels, his rackety affairs and domestic arrangements: he and his first wife Jean kept a household of pet lemurs. During the Second World War Connolly became a kind of pilot light for British culture; while everyone else was away fighting, he edited Horizon, a magazine of literature and art, soliciting contributions from leading writers and painters, keeping the flame of creativity alight. But some would say he had rather a cushy war. Despite his gifts, Connolly’s literary legacy is disappointing. His reviews, parodies and essays are collected in The Condemned Playground and The Evening Colonnade, but there’s no single major work of criticism. He published just one novel, The Rock Pool, an etiolated satire on a group of Bohemian expatriates living by the Mediterranean. His ‘word cycle’ The Unquiet Grave, written under the nom de plume of Palinurus, is a mixum-gatherum of aphorisms, autobiographical scraps and lengthy quotations by favourite authors, expressive of a disillusioned idealist consumed by a sense of failure. And that, along with a wartime journal and an unfinished novel, ‘Shade those Laurels’, was pretty well it. Except that he also left us Enemies of Promise, written and published in 1938, when he was 35. It’s a book I fell in love with in my twenties, when I was starting out as a writer. I was reading everything by and about the great names of the Twenties and Thirties – James Joyce, Eliot, Waugh, Powell, Greene, Auden, Isherwood, MacNeice – and discovered among them Connolly’s marvellously waspish reviews. He was such a sophisticate, such a cocker of snooks, such a piss-taker – but also a passionate standard-bearer for Modernism, a subtle evaluator of the good and the best. And, mirabile dictu, he was still alive! His reviews appeared every week in the Sunday Times until his death in 1974. They read like pronouncements from Parnassus. And at university, in the early 1970s, I discovered Enemies of Promise. Oh the joy of finding a book which, in brisk commonsensical tones, discusses the nuts and bolts of creativity, the necessity for any writer to produce a masterpiece, and the dangers that lie in wait for him. It is, it must be said, a damned odd work, structurally. It falls into three sections. The first, ‘Predicament’, is about literary style. The second, ‘The Charlock’s Shade’, explains the obstacles a modern writer has to overcome. The third, ‘A Georgian Boyhood’, is an autobiographical fragment. The three parts hang together, just about, because of the charm of Connolly’s writing, his clever, confiding voice, his breezy critical judgements and his ferocious self-laceration. Connolly declares boldly that ‘in a short time, the writing of books, especially works of the imagination that last long, will be an extinct art. Contemporary books do not keep.’ Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, Huxley, the greats of the 1920s, he says, are dead or out of fashion. So the writer’s predicament is: how do you write a book that will last ten years? There follows a division of writers into two stylistic schools. Some employ the ‘Mandarin’ style – stolid, flowery, high-flown, euphuistic, Henry-James-meets-Walter-Pater writing, full of would-be grandeur, classical allusions, invocations to the Muses; he blames Joseph Addison for bringing to English prose a sonorous but whimsical essay-writing style, all affected personality without honesty. Lamb, Keats, Rupert Brooke and Oscar Wilde are held up to ridicule as writers of fancy-sounding vapidities. Other writers, he argues, embrace the ‘Vernacular’ style, closer to human speech or journalism. They use short sentences and simple everyday words. Shaw, Wells, Arnold Bennett, Samuel Butler, Orwell, Isherwood, Forster and Hemingway are all exponents of this plain-man’s style. But this way of writing, he warns, isn’t without drawbacks: he brilliantly intertwines the openings of three works by Orwell, Isherwood and Hemingway to demonstrate how interchangeable, formulaic and flavourless are their effects. To write a masterpiece, Connolly concludes, one should employ a middle style that accommodates elements of both Mandarin and Vernacular. The battle between the Mandarin and the Vernacular becomes, in Connolly’s masterful elaborations, the battle between romanticism and realism, left- and right-wing politics, old-school and newbroom. He delivers stinging blows to writers of huge reputation – Proust, Woolf, Lawrence, Eliot, Huxley – while consigning key works of modern literature to two camps, airily separating sheep from goats. For a young reader (especially a would-be literary chap like me) this was tremendously bracing stuff. Connolly inspected the language of the twentieth century’s most distinguished literary titans and found it wanting, as if he was looking into a duke’s wardrobe and discovering frayed collars, perished rubber, a scent of mothballs. Part Two of the book, ‘The Charlock’s Shade’, itemizes the things that stop us from writing masterpieces. One is having a job, especially one which wastes creative impulses: the Civil Service, the family business, teaching, advertising – all are bad for the aspirant writer, and distract one’s creativity. Journalism (which provided Connolly with an income for most of his life) is demonized for diluting a writer’s style, offering him instant money and instant praise for short-term outpourings. He invents a young author called Walter Savage Shelleyblake who, after publishing his début work Vernal Aires, is approached by a literary editor, Mr Viper, with the offer of reviewing work. Before long, his life is taken up in reading other people’s works for review, never reading anything for himself, never completing any other books. (You can see how autobiographical this is.) Politics, says Connolly, is also a full-time commitment, involving oratory, committee work and the company of vulgar and philistine politicians. He warns against escapism – the ‘self-forgetfulness’ of drink or day-dreaming or sloth or brilliant conversation (he was world-class at all these things) or sport or religion. He cautions those who were once called ‘promising’ and warns, ‘Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.’ He is breathtakingly negative about sex, love and marriage, maintaining that ‘a man who is very much married is only half a writer’ and warning against domestic stability and happiness. One of his most celebrated aphorisms is ‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’ And he concludes with a sorrowful reflection on early success, whether ‘social, professional or popular’. There’s little to be gained from indulging in fashionable society, he writes, because ‘That society is hard-hearted, easily bored, and will exact from a writer either a succession of masterpieces or a slavish industry providing amusement at its own level, while he in turn acquires an appetite for external values.’ The final, autobiographical section, about his schooldays at St Cyprian’s and Eton, is full of fascinating details of fagging, cubicles and schoolboy crushes (on ‘the Faun, the Redhead, the Extreme Blonde and the Dark Friend’), but they don’t hang convincingly together with the warnings about literary style and prams in hallways. Evelyn Waugh felt the same about Enemies of Promise. In his review, he called its structure ‘jerry-built’ and said the author came ‘very near to dishonesty in the way he fakes the transition between these elements, and attempts to pass them off as the expansion of a single theme’. Somerset Maugham sent his regards and wished him luck in combining Mandarin and Vernacular styles of writing (‘If your aim is to combine the grandeur of Sir Thomas Browne with the snappishness of Hemingway, I beg respectfully to suggest that you have got your work cut out.’). And Auden wrote a fan letter to say: ‘I think Enemies of Promise is the best English book of criticism since the war.’ It’s a book that has chimed with several periods of my life. In my twenties I became Walter Savage Shelleyblake, the innocent young reviewer whose talent is wasted on evaluating other people’s work (how I seethed, though I was grateful for the work). When I became a literary editor in my thirties, and turned into the predatory Mr Viper, I felt much better. Since then I’ve published some books and found that Connolly was right about the retarding effects of domesticity, and also right that the best time to start a novel is after the break-up of a love affair. I admire Enemies of Promise, though, for more than its breezy advice to the young. I love its honesty about Connolly’s own laziness, self-indulgence and hedonism – and how he likes to imply they’re the only things that stop him writing a masterpiece. It’s a satisfying irony that, in considering these obstacles to brilliance, he accidentally produced something close to a masterpiece after all, one that is supremely readable seventy-five years later.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 39 © John Walsh 2013