Metaphor and Memory

Cyril Connolly and the Groans of Success

I first came on a paperback reprint of Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise when I was already in my despairing middle thirties. Though I had been writing steadily and obsessively since the age of twenty-two, I was still mainly unpublished: a handful of poems, a couple of short stories, a single essay, and all in quirky little magazines printed, it seemed, in invisible ink. Connolly’s stringent dissertation on the anatomy of failure had a morbid attraction for me: it was like looking up one’s disease in the Merck Manual—I knew the symptoms, and it was a wound I was interested in. One day I urgently pressed my copy of Connolly on another failed writer a whole decade younger than myself; we were both teaching freshman composition at the time. He promised to read it; instead he hurried off into analysis and gay pride. I never saw the book again. My ex-colleague has, so far, never published. Enemies of Promise went out of print.

After that, I remembered it chiefly as a dictionary of low spirits; even as a secret autobiography. Over the years one of its interior titles—The Charlock’s Shade—stayed with me, a mysterious phrase giving off old mournful fumes: the marsh gas writers inhale when they are not getting published, when they begin to accept themselves as having been passed by, when envy’s pinch is constant and certain, when the lurch of humiliation learns to precede the predictable rebuff. Writers who publish early and regularly not only are spared these hollow desolations, but acquire habits of strength and self-confidence. Henry James, George Sand, Balzac, Mann: these amazingly prolific presences achieved as much as they did not simply because they began young, but because they were permitted to begin young. James in America started off with book reviews; so, in London, did Virginia Woolf.

But in my despairing thirties it was hardly these colossi of literary history I was fixed on. All around me writers five years older and five years younger were having their second and third novels published, establishing their idiosyncratic and intractable voices, and flourishing, sometimes with the left hand, this and that indomitable essay: Mailer’s The White Negro, Sontag’s Notes on Camp, Roth’s Writing American Fiction, Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Styron’s reply to the critics of Nat Turner, and so on. John Updike, the paramount American instance of early publication, conquered The New Yorker in his twenties, undertaking even then the body of reviewing that nowadays rivals the amplitude and weight and attentiveness of Edmund Wilson’s. At about the same time, in the New Rochelle Public Library, I pulled down from a high shelf of the New Books section a first volume of stories called By the North Gate. The author was an unknown writer ten years my junior; not long afterward, the name Joyce Carol Oates accelerated into a ubiquitous force. A good while before that, in college, I had known someone who knew Truman Capote; and Capote had published in magazines before he was twenty.

In short, these were the Famous of my generation, and could be read, and read about, and mulled over, and discussed. They were—or anyhow they embodied, they were shot through with—the Issues; and meanwhile I was a suffering onlooker, shut out. I could not even say that I was being ignored—to be ignored you have first to be published. A hundred periodicals, both renowned and little, sent me packing. An editor who later went to Hollywood to write Superman led me into his Esquire cubicle to turn back a piece of fiction with the hard-hearted charm of indifference; he looked like someone’s baby brother. Another day I stood on the threshold of the office of the New York Review of Books, a diffident inquirer of thirty-five, and was shooed away by a word thrown out from a distant desk; I had come to ask for a review to write. Partisan, Kenyon, Sewanee, American Scholar, Quarterly Review, Furioso, dozens of others, declined my submissions. An editor of a small Michigan periodical, a poet, wrote to remark that I had yet to find a voice. In New York, a respected reader at a well-known publishing house, having in hand three quarters of my novel, said it wouldn’t do, and rocked me into a paralysis of hopelessness lasting nearly a year. And all the while I was getting older and older. Envy of the published ate at me; so did the shame of so much nibbling defeat. Twenty years of print-lust, muscular ambition, driving inquisitiveness, and all the rest, were lost in the hurt crawl away from the locked door. I wrote, and read, and filled volumes of Woolworth diaries with the outcry of failure—the failure to enter the gates of one’s own literary generation, the anguish of exclusion from its argument and tone, its experience and evolution. It wasn’t that I altogether doubted my powers (though often enough I did, profoundly, stung by disgrace); I saw them, whatever they were, scorned, disparaged, set outside the pale of welcome. I was ashamed of my life, and I lived only to read and write. I lived for nothing else; I had no other goals, motivations, interests—these shallownesses pointing to what the babblers of the hour call psychological health. Nor was it raw Fame I was after; I was not deluded that publishing a first novel at twenty-five, as Mann had done, would guarantee a Buddenbrooks.

What I wanted was access to the narrowest possibilities of my own time and prime; I wanted to bore a chink. I wanted a sliver of the apron of a literary platform. I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be— not to have a career, but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer. I was a haunted punctuator, possessed stylist, sorter of ideas, burrower into history, philosophy, criticism; I wrote midnight poetry into the morning light; I burnished the sentences of my prose so that each might stand, I said (with the arrogance of the desperately humiliated), for twenty years. And no one would publish me.

For this predicament, it was clear, I needed not an anodyne, but salt— merciless salt. Connolly not only supplied the salt, he opened the wounds, gave names to their mouths, and rubbed in the salt. He analyzed—or so it appeared—all the venoms of failure. He spoke, in a kind of metaphoric delirium borrowed from Crabbe, of the blighted rye, the slimy mallow, the wither’d ears—all those hideous signs of poison and decomposition from which the suffocated writer, kept from the oxygen of the age, deprived of print, slowly dies. There was no victory crow to be had from reading Connolly. If he provoked any sound at all, it was the dry cough that comes with panic at the dawn’s early light.

This, at least, is how, all these years, I have kept Enemies of Promise in my head: as a mop and sop for the long, long bleeding, the intellectual slights, the disgraced imagination, the locked doors, the enervating growths of the literary swamp, the dry cough of abandonment. The rest I seem to have forgotten, or never to have noticed at all, and now that the book is once again on the scene, and again in paperback, I observe that it is a tripartite volume, and that, distracted by what I believed to be its diagnostic powers, I missed two thirds of its substance. What I once saw as a pillar of salt turns out to be, in fact, a puff of spun sugar. And this is not because I have gotten over the pounding of denigration and rejection; I have never properly recuperated from them, and on their account resent the white hairs of middle age with a spitefulness and absurdity appropriate only to the hungry young.

"Enemies of Promise was first published in 1938, Cyril Connolly’s 1948 Introduction begins, as a didactic enquiry into the problem of how to write a book which lasts ten years. Yet the question of literary longevity is raised and almost instantly dropped; that this particular book has now lasted" more than four decades is hardly the answer. And I am not sure it has lasted, at least in the form it claims, i.e., as an essay about certain ideas. It hangs on instead as a curiosity, which does not mean it is wholly obsolete; it is only peculiar. Even in organization there is peculiarity: a trinity that does not immediately cohere. The first section divides prose style into Mandarin (a term Connolly takes credit for coining in this context) and vernacular; surely this issue is with us as bemusedly as ever. The second section—The Charlock’s Shade, which so fed my gripes and twinges—now looks to be not so much about failure as about success and its distractions. The third part, finally, is a memoir of Connolly’s childhood in a boarding school for the rich called St. Wulfric’s, and afterward at Eton. In my zealously partial reading long ago, though I was attracted by Connolly’s definitions of Mandarin and vernacular diction, it appears I never took in the autobiographical segment at all; and what drew me to The Charlock’s Shade (or so it now strikes me) was three lone sentences, as follows:

Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting as a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope.

Sloth in writers is always a symptom of an acute inner conflict, especially that laziness which renders them incapable of doing the thing which they are most looking forward to.

Perfectionists are notoriously lazy and all true artistic indolence is deeply neurotic; a pain not a pleasure.

Here, and only here, was the poisonous wisdom that served my travail. All the rest supposed a sophistication and advancement that meant nothing to a writer who had barely begun, and Connolly’s classifications of dangers hardly applied. To succeed as a writer, he admonished, beware of journalism, politics, escapism, sex, and success itself. Journalism: never write a review that cannot be reprinted, i.e. that is not of some length and on a subject of permanent value. Politics: once the writer has a moment of conviction that his future is bound up with the working classes . . . his behaviour will inevitably alter—in other words, he will be much improved. Escapism: drink, drugs, talk, daydreaming, religion, sloth. Sex: hazards of homosexuality, domesticity, babies, wives. And, aha, success: here the peril lies in getting taken up by the upper crust, according to E. M. Forster’s dictum as cited by Connolly: To be aristocratic in Art one must avoid polite society. But how could any of these cautionary alarms have mattered to a writer who had for years gone altogether unnoticed? Speaking for myself: I never thought about politics. Journalism was something less than a snare, since no one would offer me so much as a five-hundred-word review. I was in no danger of becoming a fad or a celebrity. I didn’t drink or shoot up. I confined religion to philosophical reading, and daydreaming to a diary. I had no baby and no wife. (Connolly, though he mentions Virginia Woolf among the Mandarins, has an ineradicable difficulty in positing a writer who is not male. This is a pity, because the writer’s husband is a worthy, perplexing, and often tragic subject.) Even talk was no drain; what went up into air for others, I mainly put down in letters to literary friends—letters, those vessels of calculated permanence. Then what in Connolly could possibly appeal to the untried and the buried? In his infinite catalogues of promise and its risks, only the terrors of perfectionism and the pain of sure decline had the least psychological concurrence. For the sake of this pins-in-the-ribs pair, Connolly stuck.

He begins now to unstick. "It was Edmund Wilson who remarked that [Enemies of Promise] was not a very well-written book," Connolly confesses. Wilson was right. Connolly is a ragged writer, unraveling his rags behind him as he goes, and capable of awful sentences. If Wilson recoiled from some of them, it might have been in part on account of Connolly’s description of Wilson’s own Axel’s Castle, which, we are reminded, includes essays on Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Proust, Joyce and Gertrude Stein. His summing up, Connolly continues in a typically unpunctuated long breath, is against them, in so far as it is against their cult of the individual which he feels they have carried to such lengths as to exhaust it for a long time to come but it is a summing up which also states everything that can be said in their favour when allowance for what I have termed ‘inflation’ is made. (Observe that the style is neither Mandarin nor vernacular, but Rattling Boxcars.)

Patches of this sort might unglue any essayist, but there is something beyond mere prose at stake. Did Connolly notice that his so-called enemies of promise were in reality the appurtenances of certain already-achieved successes? The warning that journalism threatens art applies, after all, only to fairly established writers long familiar with the practice of getting paid for writing. He is apt to have a private income, he renews himself by travel, Connolly says of the homosexual writer, assuming long-standing privilege and money. A successful wife, he remarks, not only is intelligent and unselfish enough to understand and respect the working of the unfriendly cycle of the creative imagination, but will recognize that there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall. And of course: Of all the enemies of literature, success is the most insidious.

Does failure ever appear at all in Enemies of Promise—the word or the idea? Once. Failure is a poison like success. Where a choice is offered, prefer the alkaline, and that is all. Such sentiments burn rather than salve. And even while cautioning against the especial intimacies of the fashionable, Connolly has a good word for them: It must be remembered that in fashionable society can be found warmhearted people of delicate sensibility who form permanent friendships with artists which afford them ease and encouragement for the rest of their lives and provide them with sanctuary. And in defense of the seductions of wealth not one’s own: It is because we envy [social success] more than other success that we denounce it so often, Connolly explains. He himself does not denounce the ingratiation of writers with the rich so much as their ingratiation with one another:

There is a kind of behaviour which is particularly dangerous on the moving staircase—the attempt to ascend it in groups of four or five who lend a hand to each other and dislodge other climbers from the steps. It is natural that writers should make friends with their contemporaries of talent and express a mutual admiration but it leads inevitably to a succession of services rendered and however much the writers who help each other may deserve it, if they too frequently proclaim their gratitude they will arouse the envy of those who stand on their own feet, who succeed without collaboration. Words like log-rolling and back-scratching are soon whispered and the death-watch ticks the louder.

The death-watch? If there is any warning being rattled in all this, surely it must compete with the complicit wink of the sound counselor. A denunciation, one might say, that has the look of a paragraph in a handbook on the wherewithal of success. And a wherewithal that, at a particular rung of society, is affable enough: the comfortable network of class and school associations.

It is the moment for bluntness. Enemies of Promise is an essay—according to the usual English conventions of the early part of the twentieth century— about class and modishness. It has almost no other subject important to Connolly. There are digressions on, say, age, that are nearly worthwhile— more worthwhile when the apergu is not Connolly’s own (though the syntax is): Butler said an author should write only for people between twenty and thirty as nobody read or changed their opinions after that. There is much recognizable humanity in this, whereas Connolly, attempting to generalize in his own voice, manages mainly a self-indulgent turn: The shock, for an intelligent writer, of discovering for the first time that there are people younger than himself who think him stupid is severe. Or: It would seem that genius is of two kinds, one of which blazes up in youth and dies down, while the other matures, like Milton’s or Goethe’s. . . . The artist has to decide on the nature of his own or he may find himself exhausted by the sprint of youth and unfitted for the marathon of middle age. As if one could choose to be Milton or Goethe merely by deciding, as Connolly advises, to become a stayer. Modishness dominates: the notion of likely styles in will, the short-length will and the longer-range.

Modishness rules especially in the politics. Writing in 1948 (the famous year of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four), Connolly suggests that he has retained all the engagingly simple left-wing militancy [of 1938] since it breathes the air of the period. True enough: ten years after its composition, Connolly is offering us Enemies of Promise frankly as a period piece. But the point of the exercise, we are bound to remember, is that ten years after its composition he is also offering it as a successful instance of how to write a book which lasts ten years. Are we to conclude, then, that the more a book is dated, the longer its chances of survival? A remarkable hypothesis. No, it won’t wash, this period-piece candor: Connolly had no wish to revise or update or tone down the left-wing militancy (less engaging, forty-five years later, and in an age of left-linked terrorism, than he might have supposed); perhaps it was only artistic indolence. Or perhaps it was because of an intuition about his own character and its style: a certain seamlessness, the absence of self-contradiction. Connolly is always on the side of his own class, never more so than in his expression of left-wing militancy. It is not that Connolly, in 1938, is mistaken when he declares that today the forces of life and progress are ranging on one side, those of reaction and death on the other, or that fascism is the enemy of art, or that we are not dealing with an Augustus who will discover his Horace and his Virgil, but with Attila or Hulaku, destroyers of European culture whose poets can contribute only battle-cries and sentimental drinking songs. He means Hitler: but the very next year, in 1939, the year of the Hitler-Stalin pact, would he have been willing to mean Stalin too? "The poet is a chemist and there is more pure revolutionary propaganda in a line of Blake than in all The Rights of Man" he asserts: a sophistry that can only be the flower of an elitist education. In 1938 what literary intellectual was not moved by the word revolutionary?

Nothing, in fact, is less dated than the combination of Connolly’s elitism and his attraction to revolutionary militancy. Any superficial excursion into universities in Western Europe and the United States currently bears this out, nowhere more vividly than in American elitist departments, history, literature, and political science especially. All this is a cliche of our predicament as it was of Connolly’s. The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, Orwell wrote in Inside the Whale, and here is Connolly as prooftext: Often [solidarity with the working classes] will be recognized only by external symptoms, a disinclination to wear a hat or a stiff collar, an inability to be rude to waiters or taxi-drivers or to be polite to young men of his own age with rolled umbrellas, bowler hats and ‘Mayfair men’ moustaches or to tolerate the repressive measures of his class. This wizened sentence may be worth the belly laugh due anachronism, but its undigested spirit lingers on. For disinclination to wear a hat substitute an earnest inclination to wear Che boots. And the repressive measures of his class is as bruisingly trite and vacuous as any bright young Ivy graduate’s assault on the American bourgeoisie, of which he or she is the consummate product.

The consummate product of his class. Should Connolly be blamed for this? Probably. Orwell went to the same schools at the same time, Eton preceded by St. Cyprian’s (St. Wulfric’s in Connolly’s genial account, Crossgates in Orwell’s lugubrious one), and saw straight through what Connolly thrived on. Orwell despised the tyrant-goddess who ruled over St. Cyprian’s; Connolly maneuvered to get on her good side. And of Eton Connolly writes (in the ardently arrested parochial tone of one of the bloodyminded people at the top), My last two years of Eton. . . . were among the most interesting and rewarding of my whole life and I do not believe they could have been so at any other public school or in any other house than College. The allusion is to school elections; Connolly was, we learn, an ecstatic member of the exclusive Pop, which he counts, along with romantic homoerotic adolescence, among those experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools . . . so intense as to dominate their lives. Orwell, reviewing Enemies of Promise soon after its appearance, hoots: He means it! And sums up the politics of those cosseted few who, between 1910 and 1920, after five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery, have fabricated sympathies they have no way of feeling: Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labor—hardly even words. No wonder, Orwell charges, that the huge tribe known as ‘the right left people’ found it so easy to condone the purge-and-Ogpu side of the Russian regime and the horrors of the First Five Year Plan. They were so gloriously incapable of understanding what it all meant.

Nothing in his brief 1948 introductory note to Enemies of Promise tells us whether Connolly did or did not remain one of the right left people a decade later. We grow up among theories and illusions common to our class, our race, our time, Connolly opens his schooldays memoir, but only as a frame for the apology that follows: I have to refer to something which I find intolerable, the early aura of large houses, fallen fortunes and county families common to so many English autobiographies. He ends by fretting over whether the reader can stomach this. What is even harder to stomach is a self-repudiation that is indistinguishable from self-congratulation. The memoir itself, with its luxuriant pleasure in our class, our race, our time, its prideful delight in British Platonism, popping up in sermons and Sunday questions . . . at the headmaster’s dinner-parties or in my tutor’s pupil-room, its insurmountable glorying in the stringent achievements of an English classical education—the memoir itself repudiates nothing, least of all the narrator’s background, character, or capacities. To preface such an account of high social and intellectual privilege with the hope that it can be stomached, and then to proceed with so much lip-smacking delectation, is, as Orwell saw, to understand nothing, and to stop at words.

Words, it turns out, are what deserve to last in Enemies of Promise—not Connolly’s own sentences, which puff and gasp and occasionally strangle themselves, but the subject of his observations about styles of prose. Critical currencies have altered in the extreme since Connolly first set down his categories of Mandarin and vernacular, and unless one reminds oneself that these terms once had some originality of perspective (they are not so facile as they sound), they drop into the hackneyed posture they now permanently evoke. It is true that the New Criticism, which had the assurance of looking both omnipotent and immortal, has come and gone, and that the universal semiotics shock even now hints at softening, if not receding (though only slightly, and then out of factionalism). And other volumes of this kind, siblings or perhaps descendants of Enemies of Promise, have ventured to record the politics and history of the writer’s predicament— among them critical summaries by Malcolm Cowley, Van Wyck Brooks, John Aldridge, Alfred Kazin, Tony Tanner, Tillie Olsen. The post-Connolly landscape is cluttered with new literary structures of every variety. All the same, Connolly’s report on the increasing ascendancy of journalistic style over the life of contemporary fiction—language stripped of interpretive complexity, language stripped even of language, i.e., of the resources of the lyrical or intellectual imagination—remains urgent. The Mandarin dialect, as Connolly intelligently calls it (and he is wary in his praise of it, especially when it decays into dandyism, the ability to spin cocoons of language out of nothing), has now given way to a sort of telegraphic data-prose, mainly in the present tense, in which sympathies and deductive acuities are altogether eliminated. In poetry, the minimalists (whether in all their determined phalanxes they know it or not) are by now played out, moribund, ready for a turning; only the other day I heard a leading subjectivist, a lineal heir of William Carlos Williams, yearn aloud to sink into a long Miltonic sequence. But among fiction writers, the fossilized Hemingway legacy hangs on, after all this time, strangely and uselessly prestigious. (I attribute this not to the devoted reading of Hemingway, but to the decline of reading in general.)

Connolly’s distinctions and his exposition of them, however, address the adherents of both dialects. From the Mandarins, he exhorts, the writer

must borrow art and patience, the striving for perfection, the horror of cliches, the creative delight in the material [a phrase that itself arouses horror], in the possibilities of the long sentence and the splendour and subtlety of the composed phrase. From the Mandarins, on the other hand, the new writer will take warning not to burden a sober and delicate language with exhibitionism. There will be no false hesitation and woolly profundities, no mystifying, no Proustian onanism.

From the talkie-novelists, he continues—i.e., from the laconic anti-stylists influenced by film—the new writer can acquire the cursive style, the agreeable manners, the precise and poetical impact of Forster’s diction, the lucidity of Maugham, last of the great professional writers, the timing of Hemingway, the smooth cutting edge of Isherwood, the indignation of Lawrence, the honesty of Orwell, as well as the gift of construction. (It is notable that in nearly fifty years not one of these names, not excluding Maugham and Isherwood, has lost its high familiarity, and Orwell, in fact, has increased in prestige.) The defects of realist or colloquial style Connolly lists as the consequence of flatness—the homogeneity of outlook, the fear of eccentricity, the reporter’s horror of distinction, the distrust of beauty, the cult of violence and starkness that is masochistic. Nowadays we might add the conviction of existential nihilism. It is no more a question of taking sides about one way or another of writing, but a question of timing, Connolly sensibly concludes. All these are good and salubrious particulars—though it is worth recalling that, in prose at least, and wherever we find ourselves in the cycle of reaction, there are no stripped-down Conrads or Joyces; and that modernism never turned its back on plenitude.

As for my own disappointment in encountering Enemies of Promise after so long a hiatus: it was never Connolly’s fault that I made up a book that wasn’t there. I wanted to brood over failure. Connolly presides over the groans of success. He knows no real enemies—unless you count the threat to revolution ambushed in Mayfair moustaches.

Published in The New Criterion, March 1984

William Gaddis and the Scion of Darkness

Carpenter’s Gothic is William Gaddis’s third work of fiction in thirty years. That sounds like a sparse stream, and misrepresents absolutely. Gaddis is a deluge. The Recognitions, his first novel, published in 1955, matches in plain bulk four or five ordinary contemporary novels. His second,//?, a burlesquing supplementary footnote appearing two decades later, is easily equivalent to another three or four. Gaddis has not been prolific (that spendthrift coin); instead he has been prodigious, gargantuan, exhaustive, subsuming fates and conditions under a hungry logic. His two huge early novels are great vaults or storehouses of crafty encyclopedic scandal—omniscience thrown into the hottest furnaces of metaphor. Gaddis knows almost everything: not only how the world works—the pragmatic cynical business-machine that we call worldliness—but also how myth flies into being out of the primeval clouds of art and death and money.

To call this mammoth reach ambition is again to misrepresent. When The Recognitions arrived on the scene, it was already too late for those