CAN there be a concerted effort among English publishers at the moment to revive interest in Cyril Connolly? Two years ago, a substantial biography of this writer was produced by Clive Fisher: now comes an even bigger book devoted to the same subject. Jeremy Lewis has the advantage of being officially authorised, thereby gaining access to material denied to his predecessors - but Connolly and his circle have been so extensively examined during the past 20 years that the amount of new information he offers is slight. The biggest difference between Lewis and any of the other authors who have scrutinised Connolly is Lewis's well-honed critical faculty; he does not hesitate to enunciate weaknesses as well as strengths, and frequently quotes unflattering sources when discussing his subject's work.
How much of that work will continue to attract an audience is the question which most preoccupied Connolly himself. Comparisons can be made here with the late theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, assiduously promoted by his widow Kathleen but, following her own death, now become little more than a dim memory. Both as a writer and a representative of his age, Cyril Connolly is considerably more interesting than Tynan but the majority of his work still looks likely to fall into desuetude, simply because the critic is no longer a powerful force in English culture.
Connolly knew this to be the case and accordingly never felt terribly comfortable with his own career. He and his admirers always believed he was capable of something more, but quite what that something might have been remained unarticulated.
Almost 30 years ago, Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster edited a book about one of Connolly's contemporaries Brian Howard, which she subtitled Portrait of a Failure. Failure preoccupied the generation which went to Oxford in the immediate aftermath of the first World War - although in Connolly's case, the greatest inhibitor was an excessive desire for total success. His peers at university were an intensely competitive band, but he was always marked out as particularly brilliant. According to Kenneth Clark, the young Connolly was "obviously an extraordinary person, with a width of knowledge and a maturity of mind of an entirely different class to the rest of us."
Then, as now, creative writing was held up as the highest form of literary expression and the desire to produce a novel stultified Connolly for in any years. The eventual result, The Rock Pool, which appeared in 1936 is by no means hopeless, but as Jeremy Lewis confirms. "It provides distressing evidence that Connolly was not a natural novelist".
Two years later he published what is unquestionably his finest book, Enemies of Promise, a remarkable mixture of literary assessment and autobiography. Connolly's best subject was always himself and that is one of the reasons Enemies was so congenial to its author, since he had ample opportunity to explore why he should be unable to live up to his early expectations.
Besides being afflicted by the enduring English virus of chronic snobbery, Connolly was pathologically lazy and undisciplined. Passionate about writing ("Secretly I am convinced that there is no happiness outside my prose and I want the world to know it") he was also greedy, self-indulgent and hedonistic. In an unpublished self-portrait dating from the late 1930s he wrote, "Granted a little money, I have found the life of pleasure to be almost enough. That is my tragedy".
Any little money usually tended to come from others, such as his first wife Jean, or Peter Watson, his patron for Horizon, the magazine he started in 1939. Connolly was an experienced sponger, but easily bored and prone to tears when he felt he was not getting his way; on at least one occasion, he was spotted crying because his dinner companion was insufficiently amusing.
EVENTUALLY, in 1950, the need to earn a regular income drove him to become The Sunday Times's chief literary critic even though he had long been aware of the dangers inherent in such a position. Enemies of Promise includes a warning against taking up journalism,
Connolly advising that any writer who does so abandons the slow tempo of literature for a faster one and the change will do him harm".
He had always been a superb literary critic. It was not the form which suited him ill, but the period. Cyril Connolly ought to have been born a century earlier, and it is not surprising that his all his best writing is suffused with a sense of nostalgia. He was the natural successor to Charles Sainte-Beuve, and an early version of The Unquiet Grave finds him hymning the praises of the 19th-century French critic.
Just like Sainte-Beuve, he is "the `dernier des delicats' who criticises everything and everybody and is a better artist, and yet a weaker one, than any of the contemporaries whom he criticises.
So Connolly's misfortune was not his lack of creative talent or dependency on journalism, but to have lived during a period in which the literary critic lost both popular respect and, just as importantly, editorial space. Essentially a belle-lettrist, he had to watch the genre of belle-lettres steadily retreat until it now takes refuge on the upper shelves of second-hand bookshops. Not even Jeremy Lewis's efforts will be able to rescue most of Cyril Connolly's work from this fate.