| Cyril Connolly |
Article Index for Cyril |
Website Links For Cyril |
Information AboutCyril Connolly |
|
LIFE Cyril Connolly was born in Coventry , Warwickshire , the only child of Matthew William Kemble Connolly, an officer in the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry , by his wife Muriel Maud Vernon, daughter of an Anglo-Irish family seated at Clontarf Castle , Dublin . He was educated at St Cyprian's School and Eton College . George Orwell , a schoolmate at both St Cyprian's and Eton, remained a life-long friend. Connolly later attended Balliol College, Oxford . A regular contributor to the leftist '' New Statesman '' in the 1920s and 1930s , Connolly went on to edit (with Stephen Spender as an -uncredited- associate editor until early 1941 , and its financial backer Peter Watson as ''de facto'' art editor) the influential literary magazine '' Horizon '' from 1939 to 1950. He was briefly (1942-3) the literary editor for '' The Observer '', until an argument with David Astor ; from 1952 until his death, he was joint chief book reviewer (with Raymond Mortimer ) 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 which forms the second half of '' Enemies Of Promise '' (1938), in which he attempted to explain his failure to produce the literary masterpiece which he and others believed he should have been capable of writing. However, the work he wrote afterwards (''The Unquiet Grave'' under the pseudonym ' Palinurus ') is also noteworthy. He died in 1974. Connolly was married three times: firstly, 1930, to Jean Bakewell (later the wife of Laurence Vail, former husband of Peggy Guggenheim and Kay Boyle ); secondly, 1950, to Barbara Skelton ; and thirdly, 1959, to Deirdre Craven, a granddaughter of James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon . After Connolly's death she married Peter Levi . Since 1976, Connolly's papers and personal library of over 8,000 books have been housed at the University Of Tulsa . ASSESSMENT Connolly did his best work as a critic. Like Edmund Wilson in the United States, he wielded enormous influence. An astute and often witty commentator, with great gifts for often cruel mimicry, Connolly informed the thinking and attitudes of a generation. 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'', Connolly gave a platform to a wide range of distinguished and emerging writers. He was robust in his criticism of the decline of the Mandarin and perhaps too effusive in his welcome of the New Vernacular. Kenneth Tynan , writing in the March 1954 '' Harper's Bazaar '', praised Connolly's style as 'one of the most glittering of English literary possessions.' REFERENCES IN POPULAR CULTURE 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. In April 2007 the '', being judged "a man who, like Homer, never wrote a great novel; whose genius, like Homer's, lay in failure; a man notable for his 'greed, his sloth, his gourmandizing, his inconsistency and melancholy'".Subscription-only link, and this text, preserved at OUP Blog QUOTES
WORKS
BIOGRAPHIES
REFERENCE
NOTES EXTERNAL LINKS
|
|
|