Volume 46, Number 11 · June 24, 1999
The Friend of Promise
By John Banville
Cyril Connolly: A Life
by Jeremy Lewis
Jonathan Cape, 653 pp., $19.95 (paper)
A 600-page biography of a book reviewer may seem an eccentric and supererogatory undertaking. However, Cyril Connolly: A Life is not only a fascinating portrait of a greatly gifted man whose work deserves to be remembered, but also a survey, lightly executed yet remarkably comprehensive, of a generation of Englishmen—it was practically all men, in those days, with one or two notable exceptions—who in youth seemed set to achieve great things, but whose subsequent careers fell far short of expectations. This is the generation that produced such fine artists as W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Benjamin Britten, but also, for example, Maurice Bowra, Harold Acton, Constant Lambert: not failures, exactly, but men whose early promise did not lead to work of the first rank.
Review, 4132 words
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