Cyril Connolly
Encyclopedia : C : CY : CYR : Cyril Connolly
Cyril Vernon Connolly (10 September 1903 - 26 November 1974) was an English man of letters.
Life
He was born in Coventry in Warwickshire to a wealthy family of Anglo-Irish extraction. He was educated at St Cyprian's School and Eton College, at both of which he was an exact contemporary of George Orwell, who remained a life-long friend. Connolly later attended Balliol College, Oxford.
A regular contributor to the leftist New Statesman in the 1930s, Connolly went on to co-edit, with Stephen Spender and Peter Watson, the influential literary magazine Horizon from 1939 to 1950. He was at one time the literary editor for The Observer, and, after 1950, the chief book reviewer for the London Sunday Times. Connolly wrote only one novel, The Rock Pool (1935) a satirical work which was generally well received. Perhaps his best known work is the autobiography The Enemies of Promise (1938), in which he attempted to explain why he failed to produce the literary masterpiece which he and others believed he should have been capable of writing. He died in 1974.
Since 1976, Connolly's papers and personal library of over 8,000 books have been housed at the University of Tulsa.
Assessment
Cyril Connolly was a man of letters, a species now almost extinct. He did his best work as a critic and, like Edmund Wilson in America, wielded enormous influence. Like Wilson, he also wrote fiction, but neither man was successful in a form they could analyse with insight and style.
Connolly was an astute critic who informed the thinking and attitudes of a generation. He set exacting standards for himself and his failure to flourish as a writer was something he both acknowledged and was able to explain. 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 (1939 - 1950), Connolly gave a platform to a wide range of distinguished and emerging writers. The magazine was an integral component of intellectual and literary life in England and contributed to the maintenance of a vital literary culture.
His definitions of the Mandarin and the New Vernacular styles began a debate that still continues. He was robust in his criticism of the decline of the Mandarin and perhaps too effusive in his welcome of the New Vernacular. As this style now seems to have won out it seems fair to speculate that Connolly might be less than enamoured of the flat, colourless prose that now infects most modern writing.
The practice of criticism has migrated, for the most part, to the universities with the attendant opacity and point scoring. To find men of letters today we must look to James Wood of The Guardian and The New Republic and Anthony Lane of The New Yorker.
Works
- The Rock Pool, 1935
- The Enemies of Promise, 1938
- The Unquiet Grave, 1944
- The Condemned Playground, 1945
- The Missing Diplomats, 1952
- The Golden Horizon 1953
- Les Pavilions,1962 (with Jerome Zerbe)
- Previous Convictions, 1964
- The Modern Movement: 100 Key Books From England, France, and America, 1880–1950, 1965
- The Evening Colonnade 1973
- A Romantic Friendship, 1975
- Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir, 1983 (Edited by D. Pryce-Jones)
- Shade Those Laurels, 1990
- 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
Reference
- Michael Shelden (1989): Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon, Hamish Hamilton / Harper & Row, ISBN 0-06-016138-8
External links
- [100 key books]
- [Connolly Library description at the University of Tulsa]
- [Find-A-Grave profile for Cyril Connolly]
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.