In his vast biography of the literary critic, Lewis, former deputy
editor of London Magazine, writes with the perfectionism of a
skilled cultural historian and the bloodlust of a tabloid gossip
columnist. Connolly's life is bound to intrigue and entertain.
Although the emphasis here on his years spent dwelling in the
rarefied world of English boys' boarding schools and the "powerful
networks they fostered" may seem a bit strange, that time was in
fact deeply formative for him. Eton not only shaped Connolly's
intellectual character but also provided a touchstone for much of
his later work, including The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise.
His classmates included George Orwell and Cecil Beaton. The idyll
of academia without the responsibility of adulthood truly captured
Connolly's imagination: he eventually referred to Eton as "a
vanished Eden of grace and security." Within its ancient walls he
developed a love and longing for literature that colored his
emotional landscape for years. Yet even though Connolly lived his
life more or less to the full, the vision of his own potential -
"his unfulfilled youthful promise" - was a dark angel that he could
not escape. In Lewis's words, Connolly "combined an incurable,
ever-youthful romanticism . . . with an unwavering, almost
masochistic realism about his weaknesses and failings." Ironically,
perhaps, his sense of his own inadequacies didn't stop him from
completing two highly regarded books, from mentoring other writers,
or from carrying on like a round-faced satyr (he married three
times). To his credit, Lewis never lets Connolly's own vociferous
complaints about his life weigh down the text. Instead, the author
balances a wealth of detail from the man himself with anecdotes
gleaned from Connolly's surviving family and former lovers. The
critic emerges from Lewis's quietly compassionate portrait as an
intriguing and contradictory personality: difficult, bright,
self-serving, and ultimately self-punishing. (Kirkus Reviews)
`In one of tje funniest biographies I have ever read, Lewis
assembles all the excellently entertaining anecdotes about this
deeply loved, much mocked, sometimes reviled figure whose departure
has robbed the litarary world of its social smartness and any
worthwhile eccentricity . . . [An] excellent, wildly funny and
informative biography. `Auberon Waugh, Literary Review.
Precociously brilliant in his youth, Cyril Connolly was haunted for
the rest of his life by a sense of failure and a romatic yearning
to recover a lost Eden. His two great books, The Unquiet Grave and
Enemies of Promise, are classics of English prose, combining wit,
romanticism and merciless self-knowledge. As witty in person as he
as in his prose, he was notoriously slothful and greedy; he was
married three times, abd his dealings with women were bedevilled by
a lifelong tendency to be in love with two or more people at once.
General
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