Connolly on "the mellow Stoicism" of Lord Chesterfield

In a deeply sympathetic brief essay on Cyril Connolly, Sven Birkerts writes of Connolly's occasional "venomous spray of self-loathing," occasioned by his disappointment in his own literary output when set against the great works that animated his life. Birkerts writes,

His adoration of genius could not but lead him into the most bitter self-reproach: "Why not me?"

The vigor and precision of the prose, however, were a rebuttal, for they partook, often, of something like genius. It was as if he had to contradict himself into brilliance.

The piece from which I drew the opening lines of yesterday's post, a review of Samuel Shellabarger's Lord Chesterfield (1935), reveals many of Connolly's virtues as both a prose writer and a sympathetic, attentive critic--in a mere five pages. Connolly, attuned to the "transitional age full of a certain beautiful clumsiness" in which Lord Chesterfield wrote poetry and wonderfully amoral letters to his bastard son, finds Chesterfield sympathetic; Shellabarger, on strictly religious grounds, does not. Connolly rightly points out the essential absurdity of Shellabarger's even troubling to write about this age:

Above all this is no subject for the religious, for it represents the first flowering in English life of the Roman spirit, with its urbanity, good sense, and stoical courage, the first reasonable, measured, intelligent attack which the Augustans launched on the citadel of happiness, after impregnating themselves with the spirit of Horace, the city-bred sophistication of Martial and Juvenal, and the solid qualities of the pagan world rather than the Renaissance's wild adaption of them.

It is a truism of biography that the writer inevitably ends up hating his subject, but Shellabarger seems to have begun by hating Chesterfield, and his unrelenting condemnation prevents him from appreciating anything the man accomplished. It's hard to disagree when Connolly, writing about Shellabarger's dismissal of Chesterfield's letters, writes,

A man who could write such a phrase as "Cunning is the dark sanctuary of incapacity" deserves more than moral condemnation.

Yet that fundamental disagreement does not prevent Connolly from giving Shellabarger what credit he deserves. I've drawn on Anthony Powell's paraphrase of this next line before, but it's worth presenting in its full context:

Granted that the author disapproves of Chesterfield, he has written a very interesting book about him, for he is intelligent enough to see that his life represents, as it were, the second line of defense of paganism, just as Rochester's, for instance, is the front line which apologists find almost too hot to hold and which they often have to evacuate.

Lord Rochester, presumably, would have scorned our offers of help regardless, preferring to gloriously fail to hold the front line himself.

Even Connolly's final, sharpest barb is leavened with an elegiac note of appreciation:

Those who are going to write about men of the world ought, I think, to like the world, but apart from this there is much that is interesting, understanding, and well-put in this biography, which has, indeed, a certain mournful epigraphic quality, appearing at a time when we seem about to bid a final farewell to the life of reason, and in a year that has witnessed the demolition of Chesterfield House, and the death of the last Earl of Chesterfield. The Cyrenaicism of Rochester killed him in his thirties, the mellow Stoicism of Chesterfield secured him happiness until he was eighty.

Three or four perceptive, memorable, even quotable lines in a five-page review, written on deadline--it may not have satisfied Connolly, but I'd sure think it a good day's work.

"Your time is short, watery Palinurus. What do you believe?", or, Connolly in Lemuria

{Nursery monkey painted by rocketlass.}

Sven Birkerts describes Cyril Connolly as

a man who wandered slowly and purposefully through the vast territories of the written word. . . . He loved literature, and his whole life was given over to expressing that love.

--which would seem to fit with Anthony Powell's assessment, more generous than it sounds at first blush, that

Connolly's outstanding quality is his pervasiveness, his determination that you are going to like what he likes.

Despite its melancholy overtones, Connolly's magpie masterpiece The Unquiet Grave (1944) demonstrates that enthusiasm, piling quotation after quotation, thought after thought from and about his favorite writers into a sort of literary hedge against the physical and emotional oblivion of the Blitz. With its thumbnail sketches, parables, epigrams, and aphorisms, it feels like a writer's notebook. But rather than pillage it for a novel, Connolly published it as is, perhaps taking his own advice:

Those who are consumed with curiosity about other people but do not love them should write maxims, for no one can become a novelist unless he love his fellow-men.

So rather than being ceded to an imagined character, aphorisms like this one--

Money talks through the rich as alcohol swaggers in the drunken, calling softly to itself to unite into the lava flow which petrifies all it touches.

--remain the property of Connolly himself; similarly, an observation like this one--

It is the fear of middle-age in the young, and of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator.

--stripped of any distancing context, is difficult not to see as a reflection on Connolly's own vexed relationship to marriage.

Even leaving aside possible biographical links, The Unquiet Grave is full of casually interesting thoughts:

How many people drop in on us? That is a criterion of friendship.

Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.

To sit late in a restaurant (especially when one has to pay the bill) or over a long meal after a cocktail party is particularly conducive to Angst, which does not affect us after snacks taken in an armchair with a book.

Not everything Connolly includes is of interest; some ideas, as is bound to be the case in any writer's notebook, remain inert on the page. For example, this question-and-answer seems like warmed-over Lichtenberg or Kafka:

Why do sole and turbot borrow the colours and even the contours of the sea-bottom? Out of self-protection? No, out of self-disgust.

That passage also hints at the pretension that dogs The Unquiet Grave, forever threatening to overwhelm it, especially in the too-common passages of untranslated French and Latin. But for the most part pretension is held at bay by Connolly's wit, self-deprecation, and unexpected humor, as in this "Message from the Id":

If you would collect women instead of books I think I could help you.

Or this pleasantly idiosyncratic list of stimulants, which pops up in the midst of a meditation on the ways to properly feed the brain:

Thus tea, coffee, alcohol stimulate.

So do heights, wet days, south-west gales, hotel bedroom in Paris and windows overlooking harbours. Also snow, frost, the electric bell outside a cinema at night, sex-life and fever.

Which brings me to my favorite moment in the book, when Connolly writes lovingly absurd obituaries for two lemur "houseghosts" who lived with him and his wife along the Mediterranean, one of which sometimes traveled with him by bicycle, "buttoned up inside my jacket with his head sticking out." The lemur Whoopee is described as "gentle and fearless," given to taunting dogs, but it's in the obituary for the other lemur, Polyp, that Connolly really begins to shine:

Most gifted of lemurs, who hated airplanes in the sky, on the screen, and even on the wireless. How he would have hated this war! He could play in the snow or swim in a river or conduct himself in a night-club; he judged human beings by their voices; biting some, purring over others, while for one or two well-seasoned old ladies he would brandish a black prickle-studded penis, shaped like a eucalyptus seed. Using his tail as an aerial, he would lollop through long grass to welcome his owners, embracing them with little cries and offering them a lustration from his purple tongue and currycomb teeth. His manners were those of some spoiled young Maharajah, his intelligence not inferior, his heart all delicacy--women, gin and muscats were his only weaknesses. Alas, he died of pneumonia when we scolded him for coughing , and with him vanished the sea-purple cicada kingdom of calanque an stone-pipe and the concept of life as an arrogant private dream shared by two.

By the end, not only has Connolly convinced us, undoubtedly, to like what he likes, these "wild ghost faces from a lost continent who soon will be extinct," but he's seamlessly drawn their loss into the larger story of his own losses, of his crumbling marriage and the war to come.

It seems only fair to end this with a note labeled "Birthday resolution," which gleams hopefully amid the surrounding melancholy:

From now on specialize; never again make any concession to the ninety-nine parts of you which are like everybody else at the expense of the one which is unique. Never listen to the False Self talking.

Though Connolly had turned forty by the time he completed The Unquiet Grave, that resolution seems admirably like the thought of a young man, still at home in the unusual and confident in his powers; the memorable bricolage of The Unquiet Grave is a unique testament to both qualities.