Volume 3, Number 3 · September 24, 1964
A Stranded Whale
By Christopher Ricks
Previous Convictions: Selected Writings of a Decade
by Cyril Connolly
Harper & Row, 414 pp., $5.95
Reviewing someone's collected reivews is parasitic, and it induces a vertiginous glimpse of lesser and still lesser fleas. Not that Cyril Connolly is a flea. He is a stranded whale—to use a comparison which, with characteristic lavishness, he offers twice, applying it once to Coleridge and once to Wilde. He is nothing if not frank: 'The problem of the literary journalist who feels inhibited from completing larger projects is how to make a book.' Not how to write it, how to make it. Was this one worth making? Yes and no. Yes, because Mr. Connolly is fluently readable, cosmopolitanly well-read, and an influential figure on the English literary scene. No, because he is not much of a literary critic and most of his book is literary criticism or nothing.
Review, 1786 words
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