DRAGON: The 100 best nonfiction books / No 38 / Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly (1938)

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The 100 best nonfiction books / No 38 / Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly (1938)

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 38 – Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly (1938)

Cyril Connolly’s dissection of the art of writing and the perils of the literary life transformed the contemporary English scene

Robert McCrum
Monday 17 October 2016

“Adidactic inquiry into the problem of how to write a book which lasts 10 years”, this interwar masterpiece of cultural criticism transformed the English literary conversation almost overnight, establishing phrases such as “the pram in the hall” at the heart of contemporary creative consciousness.

In the age of book blogs and digital publishing, Connolly’s elevated dissection of the republic of letters might seem more redolent of another world, and different criteria. And yet, rarely in the beaten ways of Grub Street, has one writer so comprehensively nailed his subject. Connolly’s observations about the habit and practice of literature remain excruciatingly accurate. At the point at which he sat down at a table under a plane tree in the south of France (with “a gramophone playing in the next room”), in the summer of 1937, he had spent all his professional life in various literary milieux, and knew in his marrow what made books and writers tick. From the outset, Connolly nurtured a deep fear for the influence of the press, an anxiety which remains as real today as it was in 1938: “Nothing dates like a sense of actuality than which there is nothing in journalism more valuable. A writer who takes up journalism abandons the slow tempo of literature for a faster one and the change will do him harm.”

Connolly’s anatomy of his trade is never less than inspired, and memorable: “In this verbal exchange Fleet Street is a kind of Bucket Shop which unloads words on the public for less than they are worth and in consequence the more honest literary bankers, who try to use their words to mean what they say, who are always “good for” the expressions they employ, find their currency constantly depreciating.”

Almost as damaging, Connolly observes, are the hazards of success: “Success is a kind of moving staircase, from which the artist, once on, has great difficulty in getting off, for whether he goes on writing well or not, he is carried upwards, encouraged by publicity, by fan mail, by the tributes of critics and publishers and by the friendly clubmanship of his new companions … Popular success is like a palace built for a writer by publishers, journalists, admirers, and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot, and death watch beetles are tunnelling away till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down.”

But Enemies of Promise was more than just a highly quotable essay on the threats to literary accomplishment of drink, conversation, politics, domesticity, journalism and worldly success. Connolly’s purpose was to make a lasting and decisive evaluation of his gifted contemporaries, writers such as Auden, Joyce, Proust, Firbank, Woolf, Huxley, Hemingway, Faulkner and Waugh. Our contemporary understanding of Anglo-American literary modernism, from The Waste Land forwards, is shaped by Connolly’s quotable and brilliant sentences about the books and writers of his time. His verdicts, moreover, remain freshly minted and remarkably perceptive, however much he crams them into the Procrustean bed of his analytical framework.

And then, just at the point when Connolly-as-critic is on the point of becoming insufferably show-off and omniscient, he undercuts his own lapidary self-confidence with the closing section of the book, eight chapters of A Georgian Boyhood in which he strips away the veil. “I have always disliked myself at any given moment,” he writes, “the total of such moments is my life.”

In this powerful climax, Connolly’s mandarin criticism morphs into a kind of scintillating but abstract reportage that gives the book its timeless staying power. He and a boy named Eric Blair had attended the same south coast prep school, St Cyprian’s. It’s the measure of their inequality that Connolly’s account of “St Wulfric’s” is not half as lacerating as George Orwell’s famous essay Such, Such Were the Joys, in which the young Eric Blair suffered a “world of force and fraud and secrecy”, where a shy, sickly and unattractive boy surrounded by pupils from families much richer than his own, became “like a goldfish” thrown “into a tank full of pike”. For Connolly, by contrast, St Cyprian’s was “a well run and vigorous example [of an English prep school] which did me a world of good”.

Finally, by connecting his analytical brilliance to his painfully candid account of his schooling at Eton college, Connolly ensured that his ebullient celebration of some remarkable writers was edged with a poignant sense of personal failure. As a young man, he had known some golden moments of acclaim, and knew all about “power and popularity, success and failure, beauty and time”. In fact, he was “as promising as the Emperor Tiberius retiring to Capri”. The sweets of his gilded youth were not bestowed on Connolly’s mature career, and in the end he would be eclipsed by his school friend and rival, Blair/Orwell, who established himself, in 1937, with another book that combines ideas and autobiography in an equally intoxicating combination, The Road to Wigan Pier.

A signature sentence

“The quality of mind of a writer may be improved the more he feels or thinks or, without effort, the more he reads and as he grows surer of this quality so is he better able to make experiments in technique or towards a simplification of it even to its apparent abandonment and the expression of strong emotion or deep thought in ordinary language.”