The Last Bookman

By Melvin Maddocks

THE EVENING COLONNADE by CYRIL CONNOLLY 469 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $15.

Your leather-bound classics with the cut India-leaf pages are hopelessly water-stained--those that did not sink on the coral reef coming in. And so the hypothetical question has become not what one Great Book but what one Great Reader would you want to be shipwrecked with on a desert island. For the past four decades, the right answer for the literate Robinson Crusoe has been Cyril Connolly, who died last November at the age of 70.

He was the author of one witty novel (The Rock Pool) and a rather indescribable, rather marvelous volume of quotations, moody autobiography and black-Irish philosophy he called The Unquiet Grave. But by temperament and profession he was above all that obsolescent specimen, The Bookman. The bulk of his writing, like this last collection, was in the form of reviews. Posed against a floor-to-ceiling bookcase with his snub-nose schoolboy's impertinent face, he seemed as much in his natural habitat as a leprechaun in front of a bog.

No other critic, with the possible exception of Edmund Wilson, was so persuasive in coaxing readers to rush out and buy the book he himself had just read. But while Wilson made his readers feel it was their duty as civilized men, Connolly made any recommendation look like a pleasure no hedonist could afford to miss.

Pressed Flower. The son of an avid shell collector, Connolly had a passion for classifying. He invented categories of style--for instance, mandarin (Samuel Johnson, Henry James, and all those who don't write as they talk, including, of course, Connolly). His lifetime hobby was drawing up lists of those who made literature what it is today, culminating in that half book, half catalogue, The Modern Movement. Connolly loved the sweeping judgment: "The greatest single poem of the first half of the twentieth century . . ." turns out to be the Four Quartets. "If there is one key book of the twentieth century . . ."--a clause which, with Connolly, can lead only to Proust. But despite all those reviews in the Observer and then the Sunday Times of London, he was not primarily a critic. He was always being something less or something more: a gossip, an anecdotist or, more often, an essayist. Here he is, taking off from the Gide-Paul Valery letters: "Letters are most alive when freshly delivered in the sender's handwriting, something perishes when they are typed, more when they are printed, most of all when they are translated. Finally we are left with a well-pressed flower from the original blossom, a silent film of a lifelong tennis match without the sound of the rallies, the oaths and the endearments."

Books always led Connolly to authors. If he loved books genetically as things, he loved writers genetically as people. "I could never see enough of him," he recalls of Eliot. At Eton or Oxford he was a schoolmate of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene. As founder and editor of Horizon (1939-45)--one of the most distinguished little magazines of its day and perhaps the most entertaining ever--he worked with contributors like W.H. Auden, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Koestler, Dylan Thomas, Jean-Paul Sartre. He knew Ernest Hemingway; he knew Scott Fitzgerald. "Genet," he confesses, "must be about the only writer I have refused to meet."

Connolly wrote about writers as a race apart, glorified by high quests, humiliated by excruciating failures. Drink, loneliness, writer's block--he recited the weaknesses and charted the hells of the guild as no other contemporary writer has done, except that fellow Irishman, Fitzgerald.

His general reputation was for being a terror, "For being," in his own words, "malicious, indiscreet and sadistic." And yet, he wrote, only partly in irony, "I am full of affection, geniality and sweetness." He made a career of putting his worst foot forward, but his secret virtues may have been as real as his public vices. "I love"--the phrase occurs again and again, even with reference to Alexander Pope.

All his life Connolly put on an act. He played the gifted failure, the cleverest boy in the class who could have stood first if only he had cared to. "The hatred of one's own voice is the beginning of wisdom," he wrote. How he tried to invent a voice he could like.

Perpetually the Irishman in exile whose ideal workshop was a hotel room in the south of France, Connolly never found his persona, as he never tired of telling the world. But now that he has gone--this funny, learned character, the Last Bookman--the question his old readers raise seems to belie his claim to failure. Who, they ask themselves, will replace him? Melvin Maddocks

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