A Tuft of a Masterpiece

The term ‘masterpiece’ is often used lazily as a bit of instant praise, but the dictionary definition is actually ‘a production surpassing in excellence all others by the same hand’. So, strictly, you can only produce one masterpiece.

Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) may have had this on his mind when he began his book The Unquiet Grave: ‘The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.’ He, alas, never produced a major work to earn the distinction himself, and he will mainly be remembered as the founder (with Stephen Spender) of the literary magazine Horizon and as the principal book reviewer of the Sunday Times in the period after the Second World War. But he did write, in The Unquiet Grave, a book in which I have found real personal illumination and for which a few people still warmly remember him. I love it. For me it is a masterpiece, if an untidy one. It is packed with ideas and wisdom and aphorisms, many of which have passed into the language, their origins forgotten and uncredited. ‘Who the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.’ This was written as a wry personal observation (the autobiography he tried his hand at was called Enemies of Promise), but those of us who started out as cocky young lads will recognize its truth. And I am certain he wasn’t cynical when he observed: ‘The dread of loneliness is greater than the fear of bondage, so we get married.’ I think it is true. But most famously he wrote: ‘Inside every fat man there is a thin one wildly signalling to be let out’ – which has been said so many times it is almost a cliché. But who remembers who said it, and who said it of himself? The Unquiet Grave – three notebooks of thoughts, classical allusions, reflections on religion, nature, love and art – was written during the war and was published under the pseudonym ‘Palinurus’ (The Navigator) in 1944 when Connolly was 40. It is a hugely personal book and became personal to me as it rang bell after bell. The statement which for me was a bull’s eye and which I am planning to have tattooed on my chest reads: ‘There is no happiness except through freedom from angst and only creative work, communion with nature and helping others are anxiety free.’ It is perceptive, unpompous and unjudgemental – a gentle admonishment and challenge to himself and to us all. Connolly was educated at Eton and Oxford and was married three times. He blamed his first wife, Jean, an American, for his failure to write his masterpiece, and to an extent this may be true. She was wealthy, and they frittered away many years in a self-indulgent life of luxury. But mainly he blamed his failure on journalism and literary criticism: ‘the feeling of obscure guilt that comes after a day spent in the thankless task of drowning other people’s kittens . . . I review novels to make money because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.’ As a writer and an influential critic he was one of the pivotal figures in the rather suffocating literary log-rolling society of the Thirties and Forties, in which everyone knew everyone and people were clever as hell – greatly in love with themselves, but, in the final count, more interested in their social life and position than in producing masterpieces. He himself had planned a trilogy of short novels of which only one was completed (The Rockpool, 1936), but The Unquiet Grave was a genuine success and much admired at the time. Desmond MacCarthy called it ‘a permanent contribution to the literature of introspection’ and Hemingway wrote: ‘I think it is one of the very best books I have ever read – I am sure it will be a classic’ (adding, ‘whatever that means’), while Raymond Mortimer believed that writers hundreds of years hence would be poring over this twentieth-century classic. As indeed I have been, even if it is only 60 years later. Of course not everyone liked it: Evelyn Waugh, in annotations to his copy of the book, wrote of Connolly’s ‘authentic lack of scholarship and strait-jacketed sloth’. (Commenting on this later, Connolly wrote of Waugh’s ‘bloated, puffed up face, the beady eyes, red with wine and anger’.) Surprisingly, they were said to be good friends. Waugh’s unpleasantness had probably been triggered by Connolly’s thoughts on religion: ‘In my religion all believers would stop work at sundown and have a drink together . . . there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry and doubt. Life would be sacred, because it is all we have and death, our common denominator, the fountain of consideration.’ Those are wise words for priests and prelates. There is quite a bit on women. Although Connolly says a few nice and perceptive things about them, my judgement is that although he lusted after them he didn’t like them very much, frequently claiming that men’s inadequacies were due only to thoughtlessness while women’s derived from vindictiveness. And he made clever, catty comments like: ‘There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover.’ Although he was talking of European cities, the following might resonate today for our political masters: ‘Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.’ So what is his legacy (apart from my tattoo)? Chambers Encyclopaedia dismisses The Unquiet Grave as an autobiographical fragment and says of Connolly: ‘Inclined to sloth and prey to fitful depression, his potential was greater than his achievements.’ Shortly before his death Connolly himself said to an interviewer: ‘What survives me are a few tufts on a fruit tree when I should have been a forest giant.’ That’s nearer the mark, but The Unquiet Grave was a pretty big tuft: a tuft of a masterpiece.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 4 © Anthony Perry 2004