Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
Autore di La tomba inquieta: un ciclo di parole
Sull'Autore
Cyril Connolly (1903-74), one of the most influential critics of his time, wrote for such publications as the New Statesman, the Observer, and the Sunday Times. He is the author of many books, including The Rock Pool and The Unquiet Grave
Serie
Opere di Cyril Connolly
Horizon stories 6 copie
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Opere correlate
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Connolly, Cyril
- Nome legale
- Connolly, Cyril Vernon
- Altri nomi
- Palinurus
- Data di nascita
- 1903-09-10
- Data di morte
- 1974-11-26
- Luogo di sepoltura
- St. Michael and All Angels Churchyard Berwick, Wealden District, East Sussex, England
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- England
UK - Luogo di nascita
- Coventry, Warwickshire, England, UK
- Luogo di morte
- Eastbourne, UK
- Luogo di residenza
- Eastbourne, Sussex, England, UK
Bath, Somerset, England, UK
South Africa
Clontarf, Ireland - Istruzione
- Eton College, Eton, Berkshire, England, UK
University of Oxford (Balliol College)
St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, Sussex, England, UK - Attività lavorative
- editor
critic
novelist - Relazioni
- Orwell, George (schoolmate)
Skelton, Barbara (wife) - Organizzazioni
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (Foreign Honorary, Literature, 1974)
- Premi e riconoscimenti
- Royal Society of Literature Companion of Literature
Order of the British Empire (Commander)
Utenti
Recensioni
Liste
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 114
- Opere correlate
- 3
- Utenti
- 1,611
- Popolarità
- #15,999
- Voto
- 3.6
- Recensioni
- 15
- ISBN
- 85
- Lingue
- 8
- Preferito da
- 9
This particular legend occurred to me as The Unquiet Grave is also difficult to grasp. Subtitled as 'A Word Cycle', the book also changes shape through each of its four chapters in a way that can unnerve, or at least bewilder, the reader. (The reader is Peleus in this analogy.) It is hard to say what the book is: certainly not a novel, but neither is it an essay or piece of criticism (though it contains elements of those). It is almost Nietzschean in its style – Connolly has provided an unorthodox lyrical performance in these pages – and yet it seems wrong to label it as philosophy, even though it communicates ideas. The book's genesis was as a series of unconnected vignettes written in a diary by Connolly in wartime Britain, and then stitched together with some sort of underlying structure divined by the writer, in order to provide something approaching narrative force. This is not necessarily a bad thing (Meditations by Marcus Aurelius had a similar genesis, and it's fair to say that worked out well), but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't often longing for a more flowing and consistent prose. The shapeshifting nature of the book was such that I'm still not sure there's an Achilles at the end of the struggle.
What I can be sure of is that I didn't regret grappling with it. If it's never all that clear how it all hangs together, it is at least fascinating from moment to moment. The book is very quotable and opinionated, with an unapologetically high-class demeanour that modern writers wouldn't even dare to approach. Connolly is classically educated and old-school, and he makes allusions to myths, literature and philosophical ideas as though you are already at least somewhat acquainted with them. He expects (not arrogantly, but as a result of having standards) that readers will seek to attain the plain he is writing on, rather than spoon-feeding the sort of self-effacing dumbing-down that too often passes for an author/reader dialogue nowadays.
This allows for an original and wide-ranging discussion and, even though I was alienated sometimes by the structure or by the untranslated passages in French, I never felt stupid or inferior. I was only stimulated by the challenge, by the opportunity to learn more. Ernest Hemingway is on the record as saying that The Unquiet Grave is "a book which, no matter how many readers it will have, will never have enough", and while this may be in part because Connolly praises Hemingway's greatness in these pages (pg. 85), it is also the rare blurb that provides an astute, nuanced observation. Writing of real calibre, that pushes you beyond your comfort zone and encourages you to learn more about things – the story of Palinurus, for example – is writing to be cherished, particularly as it is becoming rarer than giants. Civilisation gurgles in the drain of mediocrity, but you can still sometimes find something that recognises objective standards, that thinks highly of itself but matches that opinion with ability and moves with grace. And such writing will never find enough readers.
Indeed, it is this tragedy, this cultural crisis of the West, which Connolly is diagnosing and commenting on, however oblique that communication often appears. In the final (and, alas, shortest) chapter, Connolly finally confronts the Palinurus motif directly. Palinurus was the "master pilot" (pg. 127) of Aeneas's ship as it travelled stormy oceans, and Connolly speculates on the reason for his alienation and withdrawal, his disenchantment with his captain's voyage, and his eventual death. Not only is the latter a parallel for Connolly's own (admittedly eloquent) mid-life crisis as he navigates his forties ("no true knowledge of anything, no ideals, no inspiration… a decaying belly washed up on the shore" (pg. 24)), but Palinurus's crisis of meaning mirrors the immediately identifiable (and compelling) idea that Western culture is in decline.
I have mentioned Nietzsche already, but remember that Connolly's avatar of choice is Palinurus, not Zarathustra. Nietzsche's ideas of Western philosophical crisis and his proposed cure of the 'superman' are well-known, but Connolly is more cautious. Rather than proposing a superman for what ails ya, Connolly identifies (but certainly does not advocate) the emergence of "a new conception: the Group Man" (pg. 27). He predicts (with depressing accuracy, in my opinion) the decline of appreciation for individual thought, in favour of an indistinguishable communal mass. Not sheep, but "a leap from the poorly organized wolf-pack and sheep-flock into an insect society, a community in which the individual is not merely a gregarious unit, but a cell in the body itself" (pg. 27).
Now, this thread of argument is harder to identify in The Unquiet Grave than my review might suggest, in no small part due to that shapeshifting vignette structure I mentioned earlier. But once you finish the book and look back on it, many of the pieces you thought were broken shards seem to have arrayed themselves into an interesting mosaic. The use of Palinurus as a framing device often seemed obscure in the reading of the book; but, at the end, in light of the above idea of the Group Man, it becomes clearer. Palinurus is the pilot of the ship, not the captain. He doesn't determine the course, but he has an essential role in the success of the voyage. His disenchantment reflects the disenchantment of Connolly, the cultural critic and public intellectual. He's not sure he likes where things are going. Standards are being lowered: "Today our literature is suffering from the decay of poetry and the decline of fiction, yet never have there been so many novelists and poets" (pp 20-21). The modern peasant is now an urban-dweller: "the village idiot walks in Leicester Square" (pg. 35) and we will surely reach a time when, as far as cultural standards are concerned, "the position is reached that whatever the common man does not understand is treason" (pg. 55).
We are, of course, there now; Connolly's 1944 diagnosis has, unfortunately, proved sound. He would be shamed as an 'elitist' nowadays, perhaps for not agreeing that YA is real literature, or for saying that we should expect better music for our ears than Cardi B's 'WAP', or something other than yet another superhero movie on our screens. But his argument is not elitist; rather, Connolly recognises the importance of true art in revivifying a culture. "Art is made by the alone for the alone," (pg. 73), and yet the moribund culture nixes individual creativity in favour of the 'Group Man'. Modern man is in a quasi-Nietzschean catch-22: if we regress to the supernatural religiosity of the past, "we end by stocking our library with the prophecies of Nostradamus and the calculations on the Great Pyramid. [But] if instead we choose to travel via Montaigne and Voltaire, then we choke among the brimstone aridities of the Left Book Club" (pg. 32).
Connolly identifies one of the tragedies in this state of affairs; the awareness that increasingly haunts Palinurus as he tries to follow the captain's orders and steer the ship through stormy waters. True artists, able to pilot through such waters with skill, are starved of connection to a spiritually bereft audience, and the result – for everyone – can only be a frighteningly unarrested decline – if not collapse. We "reward our men of genius" with only "a posthumous curiosity"; our society has "condemned these men to death… out of its own ignorance and malformation, it has persecuted those who were potential saviours" and who could have "brought us back into harmony with ourselves" (pg. 124). Both artist and society are in a "downward rush towards… suicide" (pg. xiv); the society unconsciously so, but the artist, muzzled and in despair, actively contemplating it. For Palinurus, for the educated man, for the artist or man of skill, the horror is not in being tortured, but in being tortured by unworthy men. For all its shapeshifting and its odd vignettes, The Unquiet Grave reminds us that behind every piece of art there is an artist howling.… (altro)