William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

This honesty, try as he might to disguise it, surfaces again and again in his writings and I think is what makes him perennially modern. Connolly is always confessing his failures one way or another and like all great confessors (Rousseau and Boswell spring to mind as real Connolly precursors and fellow-spirits) we are both appalled by what they tell us and at the same time drawn to them. We’re all human — all too human — but not all of us will admit to it in print. The vicarious thrill and recognition we take in confessional writings is one of the great literary pleasures and is nowhere more evident than in Connolly’s London Journal. Here we have the essence of the young Cyril, just up from Oxford, out of pocket, out of love, fretting and dissatisfied. I think the London Journal deserves its place alongside The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise as representing the best of Connolly. One regrets that this fragment is all we have (it seems Connolly was more of a notebook-jotter than a journal keeper). On the evidence of these few pages he could have been our modern Boswell — and how wonderful it would have been to have Connolly’s journal intime to set alongside Virginia Woolf’s diaries — fascinating, yet highly contrived and self-conscious, written, unlike Connolly’s, with both eyes firmly fixed on posterity.

Connolly earns my further affection by being the great self-appointed anti-Bloomsbury figure. He drew up the battle lines himself early in life, placing himself in Chelsea (“that leafy tranquil cultivated spielraum … where I worked and wandered”) precisely to counter what he saw as the desiccated fastidiousness, the preciosity, the snobism and the cliquishness of Bloomsbury. Chelsea, by contrast, was more open to Europe, more grubby, sexier, more rackety, more worldly and hedonistic. It was not simply a question of the new generation rejecting the values of the older, he saw instead a real opposition: of contrasting lifestyles, of political and cultural values, of attitudes to art. And it was an opposition that he maintained all his life: there was always in his life not just a love of European culture (especially that of France and Spain) but also a love of beauty, of women, of alcohol and food, of sea and sunbathing, of idleness and travel. Connolly is one of the great evokers of place and of pleasure: whether he is talking about a meal of a rough red wine and steak-frites, or wandering through Lisbon or Rome looking at architecture, one feels through his words the physical relish he takes in the experience. He makes you want to do the same things and derive the same intense enjoyment as he does. When he writes that he wants to live in France, somewhere in a magic circle embracing the Dordogne, Quercy, the Aveyron and the Gers, in a “golden classical house, three storeys high with oeil de boeuf windows looking out over water … [with] a terrace for winter, a great tree for summer and a lawn for games; a wooded hill behind and a river below, then a sheltered garden indulgent to fig and nectarine …” you respond, instinctively, “How true, that’s exactly where I want to live and how I want to live as well.” In a curious way he is both a great and dangerous role model: most of us share, to one degree or another, Connolly’s prodigious appetites, both venal and exalted, and most of us share, to one degree or another, Connolly’s failings, both petty and debilitating. This small, podgy, balding, pug-faced, funny, gossipy, lazy, clever, cowardly, hedonistic, fractious, difficult man somehow manages to enshrine in his work and life everything that we aspire to, and that intellectually ennobles us, and all that is weak and worst in us as well.

I think this explains both the fascination and repulsion that Waugh felt. Physically and temperamentally they were not far apart: both small, egotistical, selfish, stout and unhandsome. Waugh took the opposite route to Connolly and studiously and desperately reinvented himself as a parodic Tory squire cum reactionary man of letters. It is a facile oversimplification, but Waugh decided to live a lie while Connolly remained true to himself — however flawed or inadequate that self happened to be. Both men were consumed with self-loathing: both of them, Waugh said, were “always tired, always bored, always hurt, always hating.” Waugh became the rich and acclaimed novelist, with a large family, living in a country house; Connolly was always indigent, the hard-up journalist scraping a living but, somehow, seeming to attract a succession of beautiful women prepared to put up with him. Waugh’s life appears superficially the more successful and achieved and yet, for all his endless moaning, Connolly seems far and away the happier man. The secret, I think, was in his resolute secularity and worldliness: he did not seek solace in spirituality (as Waugh did), instead he took both simple and intelligent pleasure in what the world offered, whether it came in the shape of a building, a marsupial, the company of friends, a fine claret, a train journey, a cigar, a sunny terrace, a beautiful woman, a good book, a Georgian teapot or a painting. That relish of life and its potential joys (and the sense of their fragility and transience) permeates his work and gives it its enduring value — and, I suspect, for I never met him, permeated the man as well. There is a wonderful passage in the London Journal that, I believe, sums up the essence of the Cyril Connolly appeal. It was written in 1929. Unhappy in love, paranoid, fed up with London and duplicitous friends, the young Cyril Connolly flees to Paris for consolation and takes a room at the Hôtel de la Louisiane on the Left Bank:

Hôtel de la Louisiane

… I have a room for 400 francs a month and at last I will be living within my own and other people’s income. I am tired of acquaintances and tired of friends unless they’re intelligent, tired also of extrovert unbookish life. Me for good talk, wet evenings, intimacy, vins rouges en carafe, reading, relative solitude, street worship, exploration of the least known arrondissements, shopgazing, alley sloping, café crawling, Seine loafing, and plenty of writing from the table by this my window where I can watch the streets light up … I am for the intricacy of Europe, the discreet and many folded strata of the old world, the past, the North, the world of ideas. I am for the Hôtel de la Louisiane.

Yes, yes! you cry spontaneously, when you read this. So am I. I’m for all this too. I’m for the life of the Hôtel de la Louisiane. And this, in the end, also explains why we are for Cyril Connolly.

2000

4 November 1977. 9.30 a.m. The painter Keith Vaughan, dying of cancer, opens his journal and prepares to record the moment of his death: “The capsules have been taken with some whisky,” Vaughan writes and keeps on writing, quietly waiting for oblivion to arrive. “I don’t quite believe anything has happened though the bottle is empty. At the moment I feel very much alive… I cannot believe I have committed suicide since nothing has happened.” Vaughan writes on for a few more lines and then the editor adds, “At this point the words lapse into illegibility and stop.”

In December 1945, Edmund Wilson opens his journal to log the beginning of a love affair: “I loved her body which I had first seen in a bathing suit — taller than my usual physical type — there was nothing about it that displeased me — her breasts were low, firm and white, perfect in their kind, very pink outstanding nipples, no hair, no halo round them, slim pretty tapering legs, feet with high insteps and toes that curled down and out.”

On 1 May 1792, Gilbert White, a country curate, opens his journal to observe that, “Grass grows very fast. Honeysuckles very fragrant and most beautiful objects! Columbines make a figure. My white thorn, which hangs over the earth house, is now one sheet of bloom, and has pendulous boughs down to the ground.”