Volume 22, Number 10 · June 12, 1975
A Sort of Pilgrim
By Noel Annan
The Evening Colonnade
by Cyril Connolly
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 469 pp., $15.00
Cyril Connolly lay all last fall in a London nursing home, dying like Wilde beyond his means. He bequeathed to his widow and two children a mortgaged house, debts of over $60,000, and a library whose best items, so it appeared, had already been sold. His employers, the London Sunday Times, have come to the rescue and his friends have organized a fund to help his widow. His thriftlessness was disgraceful. All that can be said is that there was no hypocrisy in it. He did not like Harold Skimpole ask only to be free on the grounds that if butterflies were free, mankind would not deny to him what it granted to the butterflies. He did not pose as an innocent incapable of coping with the ways of the world. Yet this disarming self-knowledge was incapacitating in its ruthlessness. It enabled him to turn the same weapons of analysis upon his friends so that he could persuade himself that their vices were as reprehensible as his own Celtic inertia.
Review, 3526 words
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