Pleasurable Dexterity

THE CONDEMNED PLAYGROUND (287 pp.) --Cyril Connolly--Macmillan ($2.75).

A critic, aphorist and editor of parts, Cyril Connolly is the latest fashion in bitter elegance in English letters, as his friend George Orwell is the latest fashion in common sense. Connolly's touch of Irish divination and curiosity has given him a greater range than other amateurs of the 18th Century manner. His published pieces yield the vivid image of an Old Etonian still alive and kicking amid the European rubble, somberly turning the pages of psychiatric journals, reaching for the odes of Horace, and composing, with a groan, clever paragraphs to keep his modern anguish under classic control.

In The Condemned Playground, Connolly has collected a sheaf of critical studies, parodies, travel notes and pronouncements dating from 1927 to 1943. They appeared in various London magazines, including his own Horizon. Along with his Enemies of Promise (1939) and The Unquiet Grave (1945), these writings are chiefly valuable in that they communicate and defend a love of writing as an art. They show a humane concern and alertness for the dedicated writer's lot in a radio-cinema civilization. They are full of bright glances into the writing process:

P: "Ten minutes' extra thought on the choice of a word, or the position of a stress, may make in the lyric a difference of a thousand years."

P: "To take a piece of Greek and put it into English without spilling a drop, what pleasurable dexterity!"

P: "Every critic, however roughly he may seem to wisecrack away the achievements of his enemies, the creators, will sooner or later shyly unlock his playbox. . . ."

West Europe, Ltd. Connolly's less agreeable qualities include a tone of pettish portentousness into which he falls when writing of philosophical or religious matters that he can taste but cannot fathom. At Eton little Cyril preserved a pious air in chapel, though reading his blackbound Petronius instead of the prayer book; in more adult ways he has continued to do so.

Other Connolly faults are an occasional forcing of elegance, a weakness for the rare and classy word ("the barathrum of incompetence"), and a neglect which almost seems an aversion for U.S. literature. Connolly's insularity is profound and perhaps defensive. It is, however, an insularity of European rather than British dimensions. One of the curves that could be plotted through his writing culminates in his stated belief that the future cultural relationship between England and France should be "absolute union."

Another curve, just as clearly obedient to the urgencies of the war, goes from the old familiar evaluations of Joyce and Proust to the athletic conclusion that "they both seem to me very sick men, giant invalids who, in spite of enormous talent, were crippled by the same disease, elephantiasis of the ego. They both attempted titanic tasks, and both failed for lack of the dull but healthy quality without which no masterpiece can be contrived, a sense of proportion."

Connolly envisions a kind of glory for new English writers, endowed by the war with a sense of proportion and, by France, with a "sense of intellectual reality." Writes he: "As an industrial nation we lag behind: our factories are not the largest, our-generals not the wisest, but as an ancient civilization that is not neurotic . . . and which fights for its beliefs, we should, in those invisible exports like poetry and fine writing, be in a position to lead the world."

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