thumb|[[Blue plaque|Historical marker plaque in St. John's Road, Eastbourne, East Sussex]]

Cyril Vernon Connolly CBE (10 September 1903 – 26 November 1974) was an English literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon (1940–49) and wrote Enemies of Promise (1938), which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of fiction that he aspired to be in his youth.

Early life

Cyril Connolly was born in Coventry, Warwickshire. He was the only child of Major Matthew William Kemble Connolly (1872–1947), an officer in the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, by his Anglo-Irish wife, Muriel Maud Vernon, daughter of Colonel Edward Vernon (1838–1913) J.P., D.L., of Clontarf Castle, County Dublin. His parents had met while his father was serving in Ireland, and his father's next posting was to South Africa. Connolly's father was also a malacologist (the scientific study of the Mollusca, i.e. snails, clams, octopus, etc.) and mineral collector of some reputation and collected many samples in Africa. Cyril Connolly's childhood days were spent with his father in South Africa, with his mother's family at Clontarf Castle, and with his paternal grandmother in Bath, Somerset, and other parts of England.

Connolly was educated at St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, where he enjoyed the company of George Orwell and Cecil Beaton. He was a favourite of the formidable headmistress Mrs Wilkes but was later to criticise the "character-building" ethos of the school. He wrote, "Orwell proved to me that there existed an alternative to character, Intelligence. Beaton showed me another, Sensibility." He then won a scholarship to Eton, a year after Orwell.

Eton

At Eton, after a traumatic first few terms, he settled into a comfortable routine. He won over his early tormentor Godfrey Meynell and became a popular wit. In 1919 his parents moved to The Lock House on the Basingstoke Canal at Frimley Green. At Eton, Connolly was involved in romantic intrigues and school politics, which he described in Enemies of Promise. His intellectual mentors were the Dean of Balliol, Francis Fortescue Urquhart, often referred to as "Sligger", who organised reading parties on the continent, and the Dean of Wadham, Maurice Bowra.

Connolly's academic career languished while his Oxford years were characterised by his travel adventures. In January 1923, he went with Urquhart and other collegers to Italy. In March, he undertook his annual visit to Spain and in September, he went on the annual trip with the college group to Urquhart's chalet in the French Alps. On his return, he visited his father, now in a hotel in South Kensington, close to the Natural History Museum. At the end of the year, he went to Italy and Tunis. At Oxford, in 1924, he made a new friend Patrick Balfour, in the spring he went to Spain and in the summer of 1924, he went successively to Greece and Crete, Urquhart's chalet in the Alps and Naples. He spent Christmas with his parents in a rare get-together at the Lock House in Hampshire and at the beginning of 1925, he went with the college group to Minehead with Urquhart.

In his last year at Oxford, he was cultivating friendships with younger students Anthony Powell, Henry Yorke and Peter Quennell. In spring he was back in Spain, before returning to Oxford to take his final exams. but it was over before he was actively involved. He responded to an advertisement to work as a secretary for Montague Summers but was warned off by his friends. Then in June 1926 he found a post as a secretary/companion to Logan Pearsall Smith, who was based in Chelsea and also had a house called Big Chilling near Warsash in Hampshire, overlooking the Solent. Pearsall Smith was to give Connolly an important introduction to literary life, and he influenced his ideas on the role of a writer with a distaste for journalism. Pearsall Smith gave Connolly £8 a week, whether Smith was around or not, and moreover gave him the run of Big Chilling.

Unable to return to Big Chilling, he was stuck in Berlin for a month before returning to London. John Betjeman had moved into his room at Yeoman's Row, so he went to stay with Enid Bagnold at Rottingdean before visiting Dorset with Quennell. Bakewell had returned to America in the summer and was planning to return to Paris in the autumn to start a course at the Sorbonne. She had agreed before her departure to marry Connolly and Connolly established himself in Paris in September. They spent most of the rest of the year in Paris, and started their collection of pets, first ferrets and then lemurs. Connolly spent Christmas again at Sledmere. She provided modest financial support that enabled him to enjoy travels, particularly around the Mediterranean, hospitality and good food and drink. The newly married couple lived in various spots in England including the Cavendish Hotel, Bury Street, Bath, and Big Chilling, before in July 1930 settling at Sanary, near Toulon, in France. There their close neighbours were Edith Wharton and Aldous Huxley.

Although Connolly admired Huxley, the two men failed to establish a rapport, and the wives fell out. Connolly's bohemian home with the disorder of the lemurs was shunned and with debts rising they were forced to scrounge off Jean's mother. Sometime in 1931, they left Sanary and toured Provence, Normandy, Brittany, Spain, Morocco and Mallorca, before returning to Chagford, Devon. In November, they found a flat near Belgrave Square, and Connolly made his first contribution to the New Statesman in two years.

Connolly was also approached by John Betjeman of the Architectural Review to act as an art critic. an early publication for Fleming's Queen Anne Press.

Personal life

Connolly was married three times. His first wife Jean Bakewell (1910–1950) left him in 1939, moving back to the United States. She later became the wife of Laurence Vail (former husband of Peggy Guggenheim and Kay Boyle) but, following years of health problems, she died of a stroke while on a trip to Paris at the age of 39.

thumb|Connolly's grave (right) in [[Berwick, East Sussex|Berwick, 2017.]]

Connolly married his second wife, Barbara Skelton, in 1950. The marriage ended in 1956. His third wife, whom he married in 1959, was Deirdre Craven (1931–2023), a granddaughter of James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon, by whom he had two children later in life, including the writer Cressida Connolly (born 1960). Through his daughter Cressida, Connolly is the paternal grandfather of the English actress Nell Hudson. After Connolly's death in 1974, his widow married Peter Levi.

In 1967, Connolly settled in Eastbourne, to the amusement of Beaton, who suggested he was lured back by the cakes they had enjoyed in school outings to the town. He died on 26 November 1974, having continued to the end as a Sunday Times journalist, and was buried in Berwick churchyard, Sussex.

Since 1976, Connolly's papers and personal library of over 8,000 books have been housed at the University of Tulsa.

Assessment

In The Unquiet Grave, Connolly wrote: "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."

Kenneth Tynan, writing in the March 1954 Harper's Bazaar, praised Connolly's style as "one of the most glittering of English literary possessions".

David Mason, in an essay on crime and booksellers, asserts that Connolly had a reputation amongst booksellers as a conniving thief: "That a man so important to modern literature acted so shoddily as to break an honourable code of conduct and steal from booksellers who had trusted him."

  • Cyril Connolly's name appears in a coda to the Monty Python song "Eric the Half-a-Bee", as a mishearing of the words "semi-carnally". Despite being corrected, the backing vocalists then sing "Cyril Connolly" to the melody of the song. The same comedians made another reference to Connolly in The Brand New Monty Python Bok, which includes a facsimile Penguin paperback, Norman Henderson's Diary, complete with (invented) praise from Connolly.
  • The critic and publisher Everard Spruce in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy is a satire of Connolly.
  • Ed Spain, "the Captain" in Nancy Mitford's 1951 novel The Blessing is a satire of Connolly.
  • Michael Nelson's novel A Room in Chelsea Square (1958) is a thinly disguised homosexualised account about Connolly's time editing Horizon.
  • Elaine Dundy's novel The Old Man and Me (1964) is based on her affair with Connolly.
  • A film producer in Julian MacLaren-Ross's 1964 thriller My Name is Love is based on Connolly. MacLaren-Ross repeated many of the descriptions verbatim in his later memoir of Connolly.
  • Connolly is quoted as saying "Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self" in Season 5, Episode 7 of Criminal Minds.
  • Since the film A Business Affair (1994) is adapted from Barbara Skelton's memoirs of her marriage to Cyril Connolly, Jonathan Pryce's character Alec Bolton in the film is based on Cyril Connolly
  • Connolly is also fictionalised in Ian McEwan's novel Atonement. The principal character, eighteen-year-old Briony Tallis, sends the draft of a novella she has written to Horizon magazine and Cyril Connolly is shown as replying at length as to why the novella had to be rejected, apart from explaining to Briony her strong and weak points and also mentioning Elizabeth Bowen.
  • Michael Lewis's book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game cites Connolly at the top of the first chapter – "Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising." (Enemies of Promise)
  • Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History references Cyril Connolly in Chapter 5-"...Cyril Connolly, who was notorious for being a hard guest to please...".
  • In William Boyd's James Bond novel Solo, Bond recalls Connolly's description of Chelsea as "that tranquil cultivated spielraum... where I worked and wandered" (Connolly, Boyd and the fictional Bond all lived in Chelsea), although Bond can not remember the author of the quote.
  • In An Englishman Abroad (1983) by Alan Bennett, Guy Burgess keeps asking Coral Browne "How is Cyril Connolly?"
  • In Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989) by Mordecai Richler, Moses Berger, sorting his books as an excuse for not writing, finds his copy of The Unquiet Grave and reads "...the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece..." Muttering an imprecation, he throws the book across the room, but immediately retrieves it because of his regard for Connolly.
  • Connolly makes an appearance as the 1940s editor of Horizon in Ian McEwan's 2022 novel Lessons.

Works

  • The Rock Pool, 1935 (novel)
  • Enemies of Promise, 1938
  • The Unquiet Grave, 1944
  • The Condemned Playground, 1945 (collection)
  • The Missing Diplomats, 1952
  • The Golden Horizon, 1953 (editor; compilation from Horizon)
  • Ideas and Places, 1953 (collection)
  • Les Pavillons: French Pavilions of the Eighteenth Century, 1962 (with Jerome Zerbe)
  • Previous Convictions, 1963 (collection)
  • The Modern Movement: 100 Key Books From England, France, and America, 1880–1950, 1965
  • The Evening Colonnade 1973 (collection)
  • A Romantic Friendship, 1975 (letters to Noel Blakiston)
  • Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir, 1983 (edited by David Pryce-Jones)
  • The Selected Essays of Cyril Connolly, 1984 (edited by Peter Quennell)
  • Shade Those Laurels, 1990 (fiction, completed by Peter Levi)
  • The Selected Works of Cyril Connolly, 2002 (edited by Matthew Connolly), Volume One: The Modern Movement; Volume Two: The Two Natures

Notes

References

  • Clive Fisher (1995): Cyril Connolly, New York: St Martin's Press,
  • Jeremy Lewis (1995): Cyril Connolly, A Life, London: Jonathan Cape,
  • David Pryce-Jones (1983): Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir, London: Collins,
  • Michael Shelden (1989): Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon, London: Hamish Hamilton,
  • Bibliography and critical checklist
  • Guardian profile of Connolly by William Boyd (writer)