Youth's a stuff will not endure

Edmund Wilson, writing on Proust, said that the narrator of In Search of Lost Time

has proved the fatal impossibility of ever finding our happiness in another individual. A woman will not, and cannot, live in the world in which we would have her--that is, the world in which we live, which we ourselves imagine; and what we love in her is merely the product of our own imagination: we have supplied her with it ourself.

Proust's view is far gloomier than mine, but he does describe as well as anyone the sense of falling in love, not with a person, but with your projection of them. Young love is particularly susceptible to that mistake: we've simply not had the experience, in the years of our first, fumbling adulthood, to know better. In The Unquiet Grave Cyril Connolly writes,

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.

And in those years when we first take that wrong turning, we do so with such brash confidence, such certainty, that we wouldn't have consulted a map even if we'd had one.

That's what kept coming to mind as I read John Cotter's novel of misplaced love, vague artistic ambition, aimlessness, and drunken nonsense, Under the Small Lights (2010) in one long, absorbed sitting on Saturday. Jack, a twenty-year-old college student, spends a summer drinking and drugging with a pair of recently eloped friends, wasting away the warm days being tempted and teased by the wife of the couple. They skinny-dip in her parents' pool; they kiss in the kitchen when the party's in the den; she snuggles up to him in bed when her husband's away. He spends the summer convincing himself simultaneously that she wants to sleep with him as badly as he wants to sleep with her, that he's going to sleep with her, and that somehow they're also not going to do that because her husband is his best friend. Parties come and go; other girls offer alternatives; the relationship remains painful and impossible.

Cotter dresses the story in prose that matches the haze of drunken dreams with the precision of young memory. Listen to the consonance and assonance in this description of some ill-advised firing of bottle rockets:

I re-lit them and ran back, priding myself on how well my drunk legs hopped the trail. Back together, we saw them flare up then turn on us. Burning, they sent a blue streak straight our way. They hadn't been crooked wrong in the rock but the flare-up on take-off sent them looping, burning blue over gold. As we turned and streaked away I could hear Paul and Corinna panting in my ears. Then I was concentrating on my own running. By the time the flares went bang behind us, Corinna was ahead by twenty yards. I'd drifted off to the side of one of the warehouses. I knew all of our hearts must be pounding a fury but I could only feel my own.

The prose is particularly well-suited to what Cotter is trying to capture: that moment when youth teeters into adulthood, when the languorous pace and lifelong friendships of childhood begin to give way to the fast-flicker rush of adult life, with its consequences and regrets, and new, more subtle forms of monotony and change. The summer is one long deferral of responsibility and consequence, peopled with characters who are starting for the first time to see themselves plain, and really wonder whether who they are is who they want to be. Jack watches his friend Star:

Much of the Star I knew was composed of parts of Corinna she'd caught or memorized. Still, I felt at a loss to watch her change into someone more like Mara. I recognized her low threshold for imitation. Seeing how Bill paused a little before answering any question in a way that centered the action on his answer, I'd started doing it myself. Recently I'd noticed myself unconsciously copying the way Paul ran the tip of a cigarette around the inside rim of an ashtray, never tapping it. But to see Star taking on what I was convinced were Mara's tics (who else?)--the way she tossed her head to move the hair from her eyes, or wearing the same shirt three or four days in a row--made me feel unsteady.

None of this is new territory, of course--I found myself thinking of Edmund Wilson's portrait of dissolute, confused Bohemian New York, I Thought of Daisy, while a funny running scene of drunken artistic collaboration on the shores of Walden in winter called to mind Withnail and I--but Cotter makes it fresh and engaging, with characters whose mistakes make us ache.

Elsewhere in The Unquiet Grave, Cyril Connolly writes,

Art is memory: memory is re-enacted desire.

Under the Small Lights convincingly takes us back to those years when all we were was an inchoate bundle of desire, and our every action was an attempt to figure out the forms we wanted it to take.

"However wise we are, we are only worldly wise for others."

Though he wrote extensively and astutely on novelists major and minor throughout his life, Cyril Connolly himself produced only one novel, The Rock Pool (1936), a brief satire of life among a community of expatriate bohemians and ne'er-do-wells on the Mediterranean coast. As he was wont to do in all aspects of life, Connolly made some effort at preempting the criticism he anticipated of the novel, explaining in his introductory letter to the book, addressed to his friend Peter Quennell,

If one has criticized novels for several years one is supposed to have profited from them. Actually one finds one's mind irremediably silted up with every trick and cliche, every still-born phrase and facile and second-hand expression that one has deplored in others. The easy trade of reviewing is found to have carried banality with it to the point of an occupational disease.

Connolly's worry is misguided: the language of The Rock Pool is far too careful to fall into cliche, though at the same time it is less animated than that of his critical writing. A more accurate, if too harsh, critical account is given by Jeremy Lewis in his biography of Connolly:

None of the characters comes alive; the dialogue is as stiff and awkward and unconvincing as that of a group of incompatible strangers, reluctantly introduced to one another and unlikely to take things any further; there is no sense of drama or involvement or interaction between its wooden-seeming puppets, and its ostensibly shocking subject-matter--bohemian life in the South of France, with its obligatory dashes of sex, drugs, drink and general dissipation--seems irremediably tame, lacking even the faintest whiff of brimstone or depravity.

At its best, The Rock Pool's jaded, brutal humor rivals that of the early comic novels of Anthony Powell or Evelyn Waugh, who ruthlessly stripped those books of any hint of sentiment or lyricism, leaving only terse, Hemingway-esque prose and a slashing, cynical wit. Connolly, however, never seems fully comfortable in that mode, alternating awkwardly between that sort of genuinely funny passage and the more lyrical, sentimental, melancholy, and self-lacerating effusions that make The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise so intimate and compelling. Those interludes do deliver the occasional gem--

I shall cultivate obscurity and practise failure, so repulsive in others, in oneself of course the only dignified thing.

[T]he habit and profession of cynicism can often exist without the requisite gold reserves of emotion to back them.

--but they draw attention to the fact that the book is neither emotionally involving enough to be a straight novel nor spare and biting enough to be a first-rate satire. It's a tough no-man's-land to attempt to hold--Dawn Powell did it, but Connolly can't quite pull it off. You can sense the difficulty he had in the writing, can instantly apprehend why, in Quennell's words, this "aesthetic idealist and . . . literary perfectionist" never wrote another novel.

Despite that, The Rock Pool is often a pleasure to read, offering some wonderfully deadpan dialogue. I particularly liked the fresh strangeness of this exchange:

At the main road Toni turned round. "You must walk back with me to my room, Rascasse--because--because--"

"Because what?"

"Because I am afraid of a ghost there."

"What kind of ghost?"

"Oh, well--she is a woman with very red hair, very cold, sometimes she is thin and sometimes she is fat. She comes very close and goes away at the same time like a pendule. She is the ghost of a mountain in Finland and she wants me to go back because I promised never to leave her."

The midnight bus from Nice could not have arrived more opportunely.

Later, Naylor chats up a drunk German blonde named Sonia:

"Ich bin so mude, so mude," she sighed and went on in labored English. "It is terrible. I get so easily drunk. Let us talk philosophy. What is your philosophy?"

"Opportunism."

"What is that?

"Making the most of my chances."

"Pah--how material."

"Well, why not?"

"But you are young. Later you can be material--now is the time to believe."

"But I do believe--I believe in opportunism."

"How silly--what about life--what is life--what is progress--what is growth?"

"But I do believe in growth and progress. I believe that one is young, then not so young, then old, then very old, then dead; timid, then bold, then cautious, then crusty, then feeble; fresh, then stale; innocent, then guilty, then totally indifferent; first generous and then mean; thin then fat; thoughtless then selfish; hairy then bald--what more can you want?"

Later, Naylor learns more about Sonia from Rascasse, a painter friend, who explains:

"I'm just a little bit in love with her."

"Is she in love with you?"

"No, but she's sorry for me, because she's a virgin and so she tries to make it up to me."

"Well, that's something."

"Yes, but she's sorry for the colonial too, because he takes her everywhere in his car."

"He finds her a virgin as well?"

Connolly also presents a couple of splendid descriptions of hangovers:

Naylor woke late, with a hang-over. It was relatively a new sensation for him, for he was proud of a certain donnish temperance. He would take two whiskies at night and suddenly round on those of his friends who had a third one. Not that he minded, only it seemed rather childish; remember the law of diminishing returns? And why make yourself sick the next day? But strangely enough he was not sick--instead he seemed to be spun up in a kind of voluptuous cocoon. The sun streamed in over the purple bougainvillea. He tottered down to the sea. Lying on his back, the curious sensation was stronger, his stomach seemed made of wool, his throat felt some rich sensual craving, his mind floated among a multitude of sensations, all his senses were slowed up to an unusual delicacy. He masticated a line of Eliot: "The notion of some infinitely tender, infinitely suffering thing." Opening his eyes, the sky and sand were grey as a photograph, his antennae played over the tiny crystals, women's brown legs passed him on the board-walk, but he could not look up. "You see in me a creature in the most refined state of intoxication," he thought, and waves of sensual and lotophagous reminiscence swept over him.

That time, one gets the sense that Naylor had the good fortune to still have some alcohol in his system when he woke, thus avoiding the worst of drink's punishment; on another day, he's not so lucky:

This time he woke up with the real thing. Somebody was tapping his skull as if it were a breakfast egg. When he moved loose flints rattled inside it. His mouth seemed full of corrosive sublimate. He had a breath like an old tyre on a smoking dump. . . . Naylor closed his eyes, opened them, and was sick. For some time after he lay like a crushed snail on a garden path.

Connolly was probably right to decide that his gifts lay in criticism rather than in fiction, but anyone whose writing on hangovers deserves to be mentioned in the same boozy breath as Kingsley Amis's has accomplished something to be proud of; if Connolly were still with us, I'd gladly stand him drink after drink on the strength of those paragraphs alone.

"We both are rather comic people," or, Letters Week, Part II!

It seems right to follow the high seriousness of Tolstoy's letters with the more down-to-earth concerns of Barbara Pym. She offers a nice contrast, too in that, for all that Tolstoy took himself too seriously, Pym, at least in her letters, often presented herself too lightly; like the sharper characters in her novels, she tended to try to put the best face on bad news, offering up everything with a leaven of wry, self-deprecating humor.

In this letter to Henry Harvey, a longtime object of failed love interest, for example, her attempts at levity can't hide the emotional strain of a collapsed affair:

I can't exactly remember what I did tell you in my last letter. Did I tell you that I was in love and that it was all hopeless? I expect so--well if I did you may be interested (and relieved?) to hear that we parted at Christmas and haven't seen or written to each other since then--a real Victorian renunciation--the sort of thing I adore in novels, but find extremely painful in real life. Of course we may come together again in the future--time alone will tell (sorry!) but in the meantime he thought it better I should try to find somebody else who can marry me, which he wouldn't be able to do for at least a year. . . . Luckily we both are rather comic people so it isn't as bad as it sounds.

Or take this letter to her friend Bob Smith, from April 22, 1954, about her recurring struggles with the publishing industry:

I had a letter from Jock recently. He liked Jane and Prudence very much. But the Americans and Continentals most definitely don't and now I am feeling a little bruised! In answer to my enquiries Cape tells me that 8 Americans and 10 Continental publishers saw and "declined" (that seems to be the word) Excellent Women and they are still plodding on with J & P. So humble yourself, Miss Pym, and do not give yourself airs!

But late on this Tuesday night, something more truly cheerful seems in order--and what's more reliably entertaining than descriptions of Cyril Connolly? This one is from another letter to Henry Harvey, dated February 20, 1946:

If you haven't read Cyril Connolly's book The Unquiet Grave, you will wonder what I am talking about and say [angst] is just one of my silly German words, but as I expect you have read it you will see that I am keeping up to date with all our clever young men. Not that he is young exactly--he is approaching forty, indeed, probably is forty now, is fat and given to self-pity and nostalgia. But he is clever and puts his finger on what it is we suffer from now--though maybe you don't in the bracing air of Sweden. He is "soaked in French Literature"--not my expression, but the kind of thing one would like to be!

And this passage from a letter to her friend Richard Campbell Roberts, from January 5, 1965, seems a good way to close for today:

It says on this Airmail pad that 12 sheets and an envelope weighs less than half an nounce, but I doubt if I can go on at that length. Also I am writing this in the office in the morning, which seems frightfully sinful.

If simply writing a letter in the office of a morning makes her feel sinful, I think she needs a copy of Personal Days! Ed, how's your time machine working?

A Connolly Coda

{Cyril Connolly, photographed by Janet Stone, from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery}

I thought I was done with Cyril Connolly for a while, but I couldn't very well not share this anecdote from a letter that Nancy Mitford sent Evelyn Waugh on April 13, 1946:

Dined at the Embassy on Thurs: Stephen Spender -- I suppose you hate him. He told me an awfully funny story about when Cyril was living with Jean and Diana Witherby & caught them both out having affairs with other people & said to Steve, almost in tears, "It is hard, here have I been absolutely faithful to 2 women for a year, they've both been unfaithful to me."

What Mitford politely doesn't point out is that it would have been an even more impressive story had the two ladies been stepping out on Cyril with each other.

Just in case the addition of that betrayal to the rest of Connolly's history of dismal relationships makes you start to feel too sorry for him, it's worth noting Mitford's reaction years later when Connolly's second wife leaves him:

Poor widowed Smartyboots -- rather sad, isn't it, when he so loves to be the one that chucks.

Mitford's opinion, assuming it is well-founded, does rather deflate Connolly's hysterical rant in The Unquiet Grave about the primal joy women take in discarding their men. As so often in life, and especially in marriages to which one is not a party, the situation is more complicated than it might at first seem--which is, after all, one of the lessons novels are always trying to teach us.

"No doubt Cyril was an exceptionally lazy man."

The headline is from a review Anthony Powell wrote of Cyril Connolly's posthumously published journals, seemingly a good opening to an odds-and-end post to close Cyril Connolly week. Powell opens his review by writing,

On one thing everyone was agreed--schoolmasters and dons, patrons and fellow competitors, friends and enemies--Cyril Connolly was not in the least like anyone else.

George Orwell, meanwhile, in a review of The Unquiet Grave that focuses on the author's struggle between sympathy for socialism and a fear that it would render obsolete his own position and the individual artistic achievements he so prizes, claims one can draw a portrait of the author from simply reading the book:

"Palinurus" is the easily penetrable pseudonym of a well-known literary critic, but even without knowing his identity one could infer that the writer of this book is about 40, is inclined to stoutness, has lived much in Continental Europe, and has never done any real work.

Even the prospect of Connolly working was enough to trouble Evelyn Waugh, at least jokingly; in a letter to Nancy Mitford on April 8, 1951, he wrote of Connolly (whose Mitford-assigned nickname was Boots):

Boots said: "I am going to become a waiter at a fashionable restaurant so as to humiliate & reproach my friends for their ingratitude." He saw a worried look, I suppose on my face & said: "Ah, I see now I have touched even your cold heart." So I said: "Well no Cyril it isn't quite that. I was thinking of your fingernails in the soup."

Perhaps his fingernails were the source of the problem in a terrible lunch he once suffered through with Edith Wharton. Unlikely, I know, but as Powell points out, the bald notation of the event in Connolly's journal leaves us begging for more detail:

Connolly said the luncheon had aged him ten years.

If, as we might more reasonably infer, Wharton found Connolly uncongenial, she was by far not the only one--anyone who reads memoirs of biographies from the period is bound to come across descriptions of rows and sundered friendships, for, as Powell points out,

He had an utter disregard of other people's well-being and convenience, and often abominable manners.

Which makes the behavior of his second wife, Barbara Skelton, as described in a letter by Nancy Mitford, if not excusable then at least a bit more understandable:

Heywood writes that Boots' wife marks him for tidiness, lovingness etc & if less than 6/10 she turns him into Shepherd Market where he spends the night.

If he could be that unpleasant, why pay attention at all? For his friends, the boorish self-absorption was balanced by his reliable intelligence and flashes of charm, while for us there is the simple fun of watching, from a safe remove, such a complicated and often silly character wander through a rich literary scene. But even that would make him only a period curiosity, were his prose not such a pleasure, brimming with personality, and his opinions so strong and subjective. He was an enthusiast, and his criticism seems largely to be a wander through the bookshelves that held him entranced for a lifetime. Earlier this week I quoted Sven Birkerts on Connolly's enthusiasm; Powell also picked up on that characteristic, raising it to the level of a foundational critical position:

One of the things Connolly understands very well--and many contemporary critics fail completely to grasp--is that, as Rilke remarked, it is no good approaching a work of art in any spirit but sympathy. It is perfectly easy to make fun of Shakespeare or the Sistine Chapel if you apply only that treatment.

There is little in Connolly's shambles of a personal life that one is tempted to imitate, but when it comes to literature one could do worse than to set his critical approach as a model, and root one's own efforts in that same rich soil of sympathy.

"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.

Cyril and the Mrs. Connollys

In The Departure Platform (1998), the third volume of her memoirs, Lady Violet Powell relates the following story of the first visit of Cyril Connolly and his second wife, Barbara Connolly (nee Skelton) to her and Anthony's country house, in the early 1950s:

On Sunday morning Cyril set up a record of six sausages at breakfast, one still standing and only equalled nearly twenty years later by the Australian writer Clive James. Later in the day we drove Cyril and Barbara to see Wells Cathedral. Possibly with the idea of conveying peace to her soul, Cyril dictated that Barbara should sit in the Lady Chapel and raise her eyes in contemplation of the roof. Edward Hutton (Highways and Byways in Somerset) describes the Lady Chapel at Wells as "the most beautiful East End to be found in England, a thing beyond criticism or praise, an immortal and perfect loveliness." These might well have been Cyril's sentiments. Barbara's remained a matter for speculation.

If you detect a wry doubt in that last line, you're not incorrect: it wasn't long before Barbara, whom Lady Violet describes as a "seductively pretty girl," was known to be generally, well, available--among her conquests over the years were, reportedly, Charles Addams and King Farouk.

Not long after the Connollys' weekend visit, the Powells attended a party for election night of 1955 hosted by the Daily Telegraph (a party that one assumes was fairly joyous on the whole, given the strong showing by the Telegraph-supported Tories in that election), where Lady Violet ran into Mrs. Connolly again:

As the night wore on, emotions ran hot and cold. At one moment I found myself soothing a disgruntled politician, who was foreseeing the defeat of his party. Later, I listened sympathetically while Graham Greene, an old friend, complained that a young actress to whom he had taken a fancy was showing an unreasonable preference for a TV commentator more nearly her contemporary. These were simply occasions for kind words, but I was somewhat foxed when Barbara Connolly fought her way through the crowd in order to say, "I hear we behaved so well when we stayed with you that we may even be asked again." My difficulty was that Barbara was closely followed by a new partner, George Wiedenfeld, so that the term "we" had become ambiguous.

What delicate, amused irony in that last line!

Perhaps it is to such brazenness that Connolly was looking forward--while, presumably, drawing on the pain of the failure of his first marriage--when he wrote the screed against wives from The Unquiet Grave (1940) that opens,

There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover. When we see a woman chewing the cud meekly beside her second husband, it is hard to imagine how brutally, implacably, and pettily she got rid of the others. There are two great moments in a woman's life: when first she finds herself to be deeply in love with her man and when she leaves him.

By 1959, however, Connolly had overcome his trepidation once more in order to marry Deirdre Craven, to whom he would remain married until his death in 1974. Deirdre also makes a brief appearance in Lady Violet's memoir, at a dinner party soon after the marriage. I enjoy this scene, like the two above, both for the picture of Connolly and for the glimpse of Lady Violet's eye for character and incident, a taste that clearly ran along similar lines to that of Anthony:

Discussing the pattern of the girls he fancied, Cyril had slotted them into the categories of the dark consoler, the redhead and the extreme blonde. This certainly matched the pattern of his wives as far as appearances went, Jeannie, Barbara and Deirdre in that order.

One can easily imagine that act of categorization, barely altered, turning up in the musings of Nick Jenkins A Dance to the Music of Time.

I'll most likely have some more on Connolly--including his obituaries for lemurs!--over the next couple of days.

Some of the perils of thinking

From Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books (1800-06)we

With all my indolence I have ever grown in knowledge of myself without possessing the power to effect an improvement; indeed, the fact that I could perceive how indolent I was has often seemed to me sufficient recompense for it, and the pleasure I received from the exact observation of a fault was often greater than the vexation aroused in me by the fault itself. So very much more did I account the professor in me than I did the man. Strange are the ways Heaven directs its saints.

From Soren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843), collected in The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (1952)

The act of choosing is essentially a proper and stringent expression of the ethical. Whenever in a stricter sense there is a question of an either/or, one can always be sure that the ethical is involved. The only absolute either/or is the choice between good and evil, but that is also absolutely ethical.

From Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (1951)

I am now forced to admit that anxiety is my true condition, occasionally intruded upon by work, pleasure, melancholy, or despair.

From Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

Leonartus Fuchsius, Felix Plater, Herc. de Saxonia, speak of a peculiar fury which comes by overmuch study. Fernelius puts study, contemplation, and continual meditation as an especial cause of madness: and in his 86th consul. cites the same words. Jo. Arculanus amongst other causes reckons up studium vehemens [passionate study]: so doth Levinus Lemnius. “Many men” (saith he) “come to this malady by continual study, and night-waking, and of all other men, scholars are most subject to it”; and such, Rhasis adds, “that have commonly the finest wits.” Marsilius Ficinus puts melancholy amongst one of those five principal plagues of students, ’tis a common moll unto them all, and almost in some measure an inseparable companion.

From Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (1951)

As we grow older, in fact, we discover that the lives of most human beings are worthless except in so far as they contribute to the enrichment and emancipation of the spirit. However attractive in our youth the animal graces may seem, if by out maturity they have not led us to emend one character in the corrupt text of existence, then our time has been wasted. No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, something more than we could learn by ourselves, from a book.

From Cicero’s De Senectute

For my part, in truth, I should rather be old less long than to be old before my time.

From James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951)

Warden sighed. “I believe the only sin is a conscious waste of energy. I believe all conscious dishonesty, such as religion, politics and the real estate business, are a conscious waste of energy. I believe that at a remarkable cost in energy people agree to pretend to believe each other’s lies so they can prove to themselves their own lies are the truth, like my brother. Since I cannot forget what the truth is, I gravitated, naturally, along with the rest of the social misfits who are honest into the Army as an EM. Now what do you say we have another drink? Since we’ve settled the problems of God, Society, and the Individual I really think we should have another drink.”

A writer's purpose

From Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (1951)

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having drawn the conclusion, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, and will not acknowledge that they are prevented by their present way of life from ever creating anything different.

Every excursion into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the films, however grandiose, will be doomed to disappointment. To put our best into these is another folly, since thereby we condemn good ideas as well as bad to oblivion. It is in the nature of such work not to last, and it should never be undertaken . Writers engrossed in any literary task which is not an assault on perfection are their own dupes and, unless these self-flatterers are content to dismiss such activity as their contribution to the war effort, they might as well be peeling potatoes.

From Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (1891), collected in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes

He had stood behind that tree during the interview between the father and son. He had even smoked there. I found the ash of a cigar, which my special knowledge of tobacco ashes enabled me to pronounce as an Indian cigar. I have, as you know, devoted some attention to this, and written a little monograph on the ashes of 140 different varieties of pipe, cigar, and cigarette tobacco.

From Herman Melville’s "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853), collected in The Piazza Tales

At first Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sun-light and by candle-light. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.

. . . .

[Several days later] I noticed that Bartleby did nothing but stand at his window in his dead-wall revery. Upon asking him why he did not write, he said that he had decided upon doing no more writing.

“Why, how now? what next?” exclaimed I, “do no more writing?”

“No more.”

“And what is the reason?”

“Do you not see the reason for yourself?” he indifferently replied.

From Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave (1951)

The goal of every culture is to decay through overcivilization; the factors of decadence, luxury, skepticism, weariness, and superstition,—are constant. The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

. . . .

Yet to live in a decadence need not make us despair. It is but one technical problem the more which a writer has to solve.

Note 40, by editor Leslie S. Klinger, to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (1891), collected in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes

Holmes first mentioned his monograph, without disclosing the actual title, in A Study in Scarlet. He refers to it again in The Sign of Four, giving the full title of his monograph as “Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos: An Enumeration of 140 Forms of Cigar, Cigarette, and Pipe Tobacco, with Coloured Plates Illustrating the Difference in the Ash,” and remarks that Francois le Villard of the French detective service was translating the work into his native language.