Cyril Connolly
A Life
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
`In one of tje funniest biographies I have ever read, Lewis assembles all the excellently entertaining anecdotes about this deeply loved, much mocked, sometimes reviled figure whose departure has robbed the litarary world of its social smartness and any worthwhile eccentricity . . . [An] excellent, wildly funny and informative biography. `Auberon Waugh, Literary Review. Precociously brilliant in his youth, Cyril Connolly was haunted for the rest of his life by a sense of failure and a romatic yearning to recover a lost Eden. His two great books, The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise, are classics of English prose, combining wit, romanticism and merciless self-knowledge. As witty in person as he as in his prose, he was notoriously slothful and greedy; he was married three times, abd his dealings with women were bedevilled by a lifelong tendency to be in love with two or more people at once.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In response to Clive Fisher's unauthorized biography of her late husband, Connolly's widow asked Lewis, former longtime director of Chatto & Windus and author of Kindred Spirits, to write an authorized biography. And a good thing too. As a critic, editor, author, raconteur and the composer of clever parodies and doggerel, Connolly was always impassioned about words, and Lewis has greater access to his writings and is himself a fluent, funny and insightful writer. Authorized here doesn't mean adulatory: Connolly was a difficult man--self-indulgent, slothful, a sponger, poor and profligate, and unspeakably hypocritical to women--but he was also profoundly aware of his failings. He had a terrible time writing books, and only The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise have any claim on posterity. In the latter, he inveighs against creativity's foes--domesticity, money, politics, social success and, most of all, the numbing routine of journalism. Journalism, however, is how Connolly made what money and fame he had. In his book reviewing, he was an early advocate of the modern movement. As editor of Horizon (1939-49), he offered a forum for an important emerging school of British writers--many of them old school chums. He went to prep school with Cecil Beaton and George Orwell, to Eton with Brian Howard and Harold Acton, to Oxford with Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, and Lewis's account is in part a biography of a lettered class turning from Walter Pater to T.S. Eliot. Connolly, wrote Waugh, "is the most typical man of my generation." But as Lewis so eloquently shows here, he's much more.
