A memoir

Two masters

T.S. Matthews

It has been said, or perhaps murmured, of Cyril Connolly that none of his friends liked him. The accolade his countrymen bestow on simpler and warmer characters ("What a nice man!") could not in justice have been applied to him. But to which of his fellow literary men could it apply? As Leo Durocher said, nice guys finish last and no literary man, even a third-rate one, can bear to be second-rated.

Connolly himself had almost a fixation about his literary rank. Although he could not admit mediocrity, neither could he conceal the fact that his address was Grub Street; and the loud and lifelong lament of this disconsolate chimera was that his career had been a failure. Was it a failure? I think that, like most of us, he arrogated too much to himself. He may not have been capable of attaining the height of success he pined for, but both his writing and his influence, which went considerably further than the books he failed to write, enhanced and supported the first-rate. In founding and editing Horizon during the iron years of the last war, he not only deserved well of the Englishspeaking states but showed himself an editor of great talent if not genius.

I had been a reader in the main, a grateful and admiring reader of Horizon as long as it lasted, but when I met its editor he did not win me. In the twenty-odd years since our paths first crossed we may have met half a dozen times, but the closest we came to each other was on the two occasions when he reviewed a book of mine.

One of Connolly's friends, as friends are counted among literary men, was Edmund Wilson, who did not suffer anyone gladly, and whose approval was therefore a kind of Order of Merit in itself. The two men had more in common than enthusiasm for Stendhal and Proust; Connolly was sometimes described as "the English Wilson," and Wilson as "the American Connolly." And they shared some obvious likenesses: both were fat (Connolly's famous aphorism about the thin man struggling to get out may well outlast his books and is certainly more widely known); both were cantankerous; both were social bullies (although the style of their bullying was very different). Both men were scholarly, both prided themselves on their command of language and with some justification, although both occasionally came awkward croppers. Both were often rude, each in his fashion. Wilson's way was forthright: although his expression never changed he raised his voice and hurled violent words. Connolly, whose normal manner was chilly and withdrawn, had only to lower the temperature a trifle to set the whole room shivering. Hostesses went in fear of him, and after an evening when he had held his hand and had not actually said anything scathing, would thankfully sing his praises "Dear Cyril behaved so beautifully!"

Wilson, to whom I was in statu pupillari on the old New Republic, ana who was one of my favourite and most gratefully remembered teachers, later picked a quarrel with me that amazed and shook me at the time, and whose principal cause, I am now convinced, was sheer bad temper. Connolly's arctic sulks could be just as devastating, and his silences no less alarming than Wilson's summer thunder. Robert Graves was once invited to dinner at Stephen Spender's in London. Graves understood that Auden and Connolly were to be .there, and feared an ambush. He therefore persuaded Martha Gellhorn, who feared nobody, to ride shotgun for him. Auden, of whom Graves was particularly leery*, did not appear, and nothing untoward occurred, after all except for one piece of silent insolence on Connolly's part. After dinner Graves discovered several of his own books, all first editions which he had sold in earlier, impecunious days, on Spender's shelves. Connolly plucked out one of these books, sat down and read in it for ten minutes and then replaced it, without a word.

I myself was a witness to another example of Connolly's rude silences: it was in my house in London, at a party given for James and Helen Thurber. Thurber, who by then was quite blind, was seated on a sofa in a corner of the living-room, and new arrivals would go up to him and announce themselves or be introduced by myself or my wife. Connolly came rather late. I met him at the door, pointed out Thurber on the sofa, and asked if he would like me to announce him. No, he said brusquely; he would do that himself. He then walked over and stood in front of Thurber's sofa for several minutes, looking at Thurber but never saying a word. A few minutes later he disappeared.

Both Wilson and Connolly were much married Wilson more than Connolly, but Connolly may have had more affairs. Both were selfish men who made great demands on women and sometimes drew a sympathetic respbnse. How do we explan that? In money matters both were childish, itsesponsible, exasperating. Wilson's failure to pay his income tax for so many years that he became liable to a jail sentence is notorious, and he helped make it so by setting out his case in a book, The Cold War and the Income Tax. Connolly's deliberate remissness in paying his bills was a secret disclosed only after his death.

Both Connolly and Wilson were born (Wilson seven or eight years before Connolly) and brought up in what is now known as the Establishment; their parents would have called it "the upper middle class." Connolly's family were not so well off as Wilson's but young Cyril, by dint of winning scholarships, went to a more distinguished school and college (Eton and Balliol to Wilson's Hill School and Princeton). By careful politicking Connolly contrived his election to Pop, the social pinnacle at Eton and a stepping stone to the Himalayan grandeur of White's. Wilson's only club was the Princeton Club of New York a social gulf away from White's. Wilson had no time for the kind of society Connolly liked and lived in.

When Sir John Betjeman, the old-boyish Poet Laureate, in writing a tribute to Connolly said that he had been cut off from London literary life of the 'thirties because temperamentally he was "neither left-wing nor homosexual," Geoffrey Grigson set him straight: "Some writers who are now taken to designate the 'thirties were repelled by what they took to be

Connolly's mixture of social and aesthetic attitudes. In matters of value they saw him as a late and provincial acolyte of much that they rejected." Connolly was acutely conscious of the nuances of London society. Wilson, socially conscious in quite a different sense, became a left-wing reporter of the US Depression, read all of Marx and Engels, and made a pious pilgrimage to the Communist Vatican — which effectively cured him of his Marxist myopia but left a dazzled phrase that dogged him ever after: that the Soviet Union was "the moral top of the world, where the light never quite goes out."

Connolly was lazy, Wilson was not. When I was editing Time one of my favourite projects was a fortnightly profile, usually written by someone not on the Time staff. V. S. Pritchett wrote several, and when I asked him to suggest the best person to do a profile of Evelyn Waugh he said Cyril Connolly was the man. He strongly advised me, however, not to pay him anything in advance and not even take him out to lunch (1 was in London at the time). So I carried out my dealings with Connolly by letter. When the profile finally arrived, Connolly sent a note with it, telling me how Waugh had reacted to the news that Connolly was writing about him. Waugh had said, "Well, I've said some fairly sharp things about Cyril in my time, so I suppose it's all right. But if the fellow goes too far, I reserve the right to horsewhip him on the steps of his club." I was disappointed by the first version of the profile Connolly sent me; it seemed to me that the shadow of the horsewhip lay heavy on its pages. So I sent it back and asked him to try again. The second attempt was very good, and I am sorry it was never printed. I was saving it for an appropriate occasion and resigned from Time before the occasion came. I still remember a sentence from it, describing Waugh as an Oxford undergraduate: "He resembled a small but valuable fur-bearing animal at bay."

Connolly referred to the incident in one of his Sunday Times reviews. "When Editor of Time, Mr Matthews gave me my most lucrative commissiont, an appreciation of a famous contemporary which was never used. His letters, on the subject revealed the highest standard of editorial diligence and the non-appearance of the article seemed almost a compliment; it was a pleasure to work for him." He then went on to review — favourably, on the whole — a book I had just written. Thirteen years later he reviewed another book of mine, a much-attacked biography of T. S. Eliot: " . . . although Mr Matthews has no very profound understanding of Eliot's poetry and even less of his critical writings, he has done a good job, for which I am grateful, and I hope he is not mowed down by the sabres of the Bard's official bodyguard." He proceeded to give me a couple of jabs himself, made the sign of the cross, and handed me over to the secular authorities.

Wilson's regular and Roman features might' have entitled him to be considered handsome, Or at least good-looking, though his settled expression was peevish. Connolly was not quite ugly, his face was Shandean: that inadequate little nose in the midst of the large moornful dignity of his Irish face gave the impression of being the result of an accident. His expression, which the slightest tilt toward cheerfulness might have turned into a jolly clown's, would not relent from its fixed stare of slightly affronted haughtiness.

Connolly was greedy, and admitted it; Wilson was not, but he drank more than was good for him. Connolly was also covetous about books. If he saw a book on your shelves that he wanted, woe betide you: he was almost certain to get it, though he would sometimes offer a quid (unwanted and inadequate) for the quo. Connolly could never get far away from the contemplation of his "failure" — which he considered the tragedy he had to live with; Wilson deplored not his failure but his country's. Connolly was more openly desirous of literary glory, and in The Unquiet Grave made a bold and deliberate cast for it. And yet his Enemies of Promise, a more endearing book, may prove to be more enduring. Connolly wrote and worked too little to rival the scope and weight of Wilson's thirty-odd books — Axel's Castle, To the Finland Station, I Thought of Daisy, Patriotic Gore, etc, etc — not one classic but half a dozen.

Both Wilson and Connolly were learned scholarly men, almost anomalies among the book-reviewers of their day. The display of their learning differed greatly; there was a wide, didactic generosity in Wilson's literary appreciations that was generally lacking in Connolly's; his reviews, often of an esoteric book or in a far field that had been chosen, you felt, for selfish, connoisseurish reasons, and which he often did not trouble to make either understandable or attractive to the general reader.

First-hand knowledge of anyone is not necessarily either accurate or complete. And whose hand? A wife, a valet and a dog all have their own inside information — and all but the dog's would be belittling. The, picture we have in our minds of anyone we know, either slightly or (as we say) intimately, is a picture we have drawn ourselves, and it is compounded largely of glimpses, snap judgements and hearsay. And yet our picture-gallery memories are crowdedwith portraits — sketches, caricatures, abstractions — of the people we have met and remembered, some of whom we think we know.. We have only to compare one of our portraits with someone else's 'likeness' of the same person to see how slapdash, at best approximate, is our knowledge of anyone else.

1 was reminded of this chastening fact by reading some reviews of Edmund Wilson's first posthumous book, The Twenties. Simply from those reviews (I have not yet read the book) the portrait of Wilson that has hung for years in my mental picture gallery begins, slightly, to blur, here a line is incised more deeply, there a shading is moved a millimetre; the balance of my portrait is disturbed.

Every death breaks an almost identical mould. There will never again be anyone quite like Edmund Wilson or Cyril Connolly, though in time old Mother Nature may manage some reasonable facsimiles. From any outside view human beings are much of a muchness. We exaggerate our glorious differences and ignore or fail to recognise our shameful similarities. Failure and success, glory, immortality — even .the unassailable warriors' paradise of "those who are truly great" — are rickety human notions that pass, forgotten, like a dream. As for a literary man's speculations about himself, even such clever speculators as Wilson and Connolly, they are the view of a rank insider.