Volume 31, Number 4 · March 15, 1984
Surviving in the Ruins
By V.S. Pritchett
Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir
by David Pryce-Jones
Ticknor and Fields, 304 pp., $19.95
The Selected Essays of Cyril Connolly
edited by Peter Quennell
A Stanley Moss Book/Persea Books, 307 pp., $17.95
Enemies of Promise
by Cyril Connolly
A Stanley Moss Book/Persea Books, 265 pp., $6.95 (paper)
The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle
by Palinurus (Cyril Connolly)
Persea Books, 142 pp., $5.95 (paper)
The Rock Pool
by Cyril Connolly
Persea Books, 138 pp., $5.95 (paper)
In person Cyril Connolly was a gift to the rueful moralists and extravagant gossips of every kind in his generation, but above all to himself. He was an egoist and actor with many parts and impersonations. I often thought of him in middle age as a phenomenal baby in a pram, his hands reaching out greedily for what he saw, especially when it was far beyond him, or, if he got it, delighted for a moment and then throwing it out and crying to get it back. Marvelous at amusing us, lost or sulky when alone: a baby talked about by the nannies, principled, spiteful, or bemused, who, of course, gathered around the resourceful only child. He disarmed by parodying others and himself. He had his moods. 'I have always disliked myself at any given moment,' he wrote. 'The total of such moments is my life.' Yet soon he would be saying that his life was 'a chain of ecstatic moments.'
Review, 2966 words
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