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Cyril Vernon Connolly CBE (10 September 1903 – 26 November 1974) was an English literary critic and writer. He was the editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon (1940–49) and wrote Enemies of Promise (1938), which combined literary criticism with an Autobiography exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of fiction that he aspired to be in his youth.
Connolly was educated at St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, where he enjoyed the company of George Orwell and Cecil Beaton. He was a favourite of the formidable headmistress Mrs Wilkes but was later to criticise the "character-building" ethos of the school. He wrote, "Orwell proved to me that there existed an alternative to character, Intelligence. Beaton showed me another, Sensibility." Connolly won the Harrow History Prize, pushing Orwell into second place, and the English prize leaving Orwell with Classics. St Cyprian's Chronicle, 1916. He then won a scholarship to Eton College, a year after Orwell.
He established a reputation as an intellectual and earned the respect of Dadie Rylands and Denis King-Farlow. Connolly's particular circle included Denis Dannreuther, Bobbie Longden and Roger Mynors. In summer 1921, his father took him on a holiday to France, initiating Connolly's love of travel. The following winter he went with his mother to Mürren, where he became friends with Anthony Knebworth.
By this time his parents were living separate lives, his mother having established a relationship with another army officer and his father becoming an increasingly heavy drinker and absorbed in his study of slugs and snails. In 1922, Connolly achieved academic success winning the Rosebery History Prize, and followed by the Brackenbury History scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. In the spring, he visited St Cyprian's to report his achievement to his old headmaster before setting off on a trip to Spain with a school friend.
Returning moneyless, he spent the night in a kip at St Martins, London. In his last term at Eton, he was elected to Pop, which brought him into contact with others he respected, including Nico Davies, Teddy Jessel and Lord Dunglass. He established rapport with Brian Howard, but, he concluded, "moral cowardice and academic outlook debarred him from making friends with Harold Acton, Oliver Messel, Robert Byron, Henry Green and Anthony Powell". Connolly was for years afterwards nostalgic about his time at Eton.
Connolly's academic career languished while his Oxford years were characterised by his travel adventures. In January 1923, he went with Urquhart and other collegers to Italy. In March, he undertook his annual visit to Spain and in September, he went on the annual trip with the college group to Urquhart's chalet in the French Alps. On his return, he visited his father, now in a hotel in South Kensington, close to the Natural History Museum. At the end of the year, he went to Italy and Tunis. At Oxford, in 1924, he made a new friend Patrick Balfour, in the spring he went to Spain and in the summer of 1924, he went successively to Greece and Crete, Urquhart's chalet in the Alps and Naples. He spent Christmas with his parents in a rare get-together at the Lock House in Hampshire and at the beginning of 1925, he went with the college group to Minehead with Urquhart.
In his last year at Oxford, he was cultivating friendships with younger students Anthony Powell, Henry Yorke and Peter Quennell. In spring he was back in Spain, before returning to Oxford to take his final exams.
Connolly departed for Sicily then returned to England via Vienna, Prague and Dresden. Connolly's first signed work in the New Statesman, a review of Laurence Sterne, appeared in June 1927. In July he set off to Normandy with his mother and then for his last stay at the chalet in the Alps. In August 1927, he was invited to become a regular reviewer and joined the staff of the New Statesman. His first review in September was of The Hotel by Elizabeth Bowen. Also in September, Connolly moved into a flat at Yeoman's Row with Patrick Balfour. He was working on various works that never saw the light of day: a novel Green Endings, a travel book on Spain, his diary and A Partial Guide to the Balkans. He approached Cecil Beaton to draw the cover design for the last and he received an advance for the work although it was eventually lost.
However, he started contributing pieces to various publications that appeared under his own name and various pseudonyms. At this time he developed a fascination with low life and prostitution and spent time in the poorer parts of London seeking them out (while other contemporaries were seeking out tramps). At the same time, he had developed an infatuation with Alix Kilroy whom he had met on a train back from the continent and used to wait outside her office for a sight of her. He then made a more positive romantic approach to Racy Fisher, one of a pair of nieces of Desmond MacCarthy's wife, Molly. Unfortunately, their father, Admiral Fisher, wanted them to have nothing to do with a penniless writer and, in February 1928, forbade further contact.
Sharing a flat with Balfour, Connolly's social circle expanded with new friends like Bob Boothby and Gladwyn Jebb. However, he was ill at ease and in April 1928 set off for Paris, where he met Pearsall Smith and Cecil Beaton and visited brothels posing as a journalist. He went on to Italy, where he stayed with Berenson and Alice Keppel where he was taken with her daughter Violet Trefusis. Then via Venice and East European cities he made his way to Berlin to meet up with Jebb.
Jebb and Connolly stayed with Harold Nicolson in the company of Ivor Novello and Christopher Sykes and then made a tour of Germany. Connolly returned to Paris in May, borrowing money from Pearsall Smith so he could live cheaply in the rue Delambre. In Paris, he met Mara Andrews, a poetic lesbian who was in love with an absent American girl named Jean Bakewell (who was later to marry Connolly). On the way back to London, Connolly stayed with Nicolson and his wife, Vita Sackville-West, at Sissinghurst.
In August Connolly set off on his travels again to Germany, this time with Bobbie Longden and Raymond Mortimer and the experience gave rise to the essay "Conversations in Berlin" which MacCarthy published in his new magazine Life and Letters. Connolly travelled separately to Villefranche and spent five weeks in Barcelona with Longden before returning to London. Boothby lent him his London flat and he shared Gerald Brenan's fascination with working-class prostitutes with experiences that appeared in his fragment for a novel The English Malady. He spent Christmas at Sledmere with the Sykes family.
At the beginning of 1929, Connolly went briefly to Paris and just before returning to London, he met Jean Bakewell and stayed an extra night to get to know her. After a while, he was drawn to Paris again and, through Jean and Mara, became acquainted with the bohemian Montparnasse set, including Alfred Perles and Gregor Michonze who was to become the basis for Rascasse in The Rock Pool. He also met James Joyce about whom he wrote The Position of Joyce which appeared in Life and Letters. Connolly and Bakewell went to Spain together where they met up with Peter Quennell. Connolly then went to Berlin to stay with Nicolson until the latter managed to remove him as "not perhaps the ideal guest".
Unable to return to Big Chilling, he was stuck in Berlin for a month before returning to London. John Betjeman had moved into his room at Yeoman's Row, so he went to stay with Enid Bagnold at Rottingdean before visiting Dorset with Quennell. Bakewell had returned to America in the summer and was planning to return to Paris in the autumn to start a course at the Sorbonne. She had agreed before her departure to marry Connolly and Connolly established himself in Paris in September. They spent most of the rest of the year in Paris, and started their collection of pets, first ferrets and then lemurs. Connolly spent Christmas again at Sledmere.
Although Connolly admired Huxley, the two men failed to establish a rapport, and the wives fell out. Connolly's bohemian home with the disorder of the lemurs was shunned and with debts rising they were forced to scrounge off Jean's mother. Sometime in 1931, they left Sanary and toured Provence, Normandy, Brittany, Spain, Morocco and Majorca, before returning to Chagford, Devon. In November, they found a flat near Belgrave Square, and Connolly made his first contribution to the New Statesman in two years.
Connolly was also approached by John Betjeman of the Architectural Review to act as an art critic. Connolly's art critiques appeared in the magazine in 1932, and he visited Betjeman at his home at Uffington. There, he would meet Evelyn Waugh, who delighted in teasing Connolly. The Connollys enjoyed being part of a sophisticated literary social scene in London, but towards the end of the year, Jean had to undergo a gynaecological operation. As a result, she could not have a child, and it was hard for her to control her weight.
In February 1933, Connolly took Jean to Greece to recover, where they met Brian Howard. While they were in Athens there was an attempted coup d'état, which Connolly later reported in the New Statesman as "Spring Revolution". The Connollys then went with Howard and his boyfriend to Spain and the Algarve. After a row in a bar, they were incarcerated in a police cell and were sent back to England with the help of the British Embassy. In June, encouraged by Enid Bagnold, they rented a house at Rottingdean.
Writing to Bagnold from Cannes in September, Jean complained that their cheques were being bounced and she asked Bagnold to appeal to her husband Sir Roderick Jones of Reuters for help in work. That was dismissed, and in November, the for the Rottingdean property wrote an appalling report on the state in which the Connollys had left the place.
Early in 1934, the Connollys took a flat at 312A King's Road, where they entertained their friends, including Waugh and Quennell. Elizabeth Bowen arranged a dinner with Virginia Woolf and her husband when Connolly and Virginia Woolf took an instant dislike to each other.
During the year, the Connollys went to Mallow and Cork in Ireland. At the end of the year. Connolly met Dylan Thomas at a party and early in 1935 invited him in the company of Anthony Powell, Waugh, Robert Byron and Desmond and Mollie McCarthy. By then, Connolly's father was finding himself short of funds and was no longer prepared to bail out his son. However, Mrs Warner, Jean's mother, funded an expedition to Paris, Juan-les-Pins, Venice, Yugoslavia and Budapest. In Paris, Connolly spent some time with Jack Kahane, the avant garde publisher, and Henry Miller, with whom he established a strong rapport after an initial unsuccessful meeting. In Budapest, they found themselves in the same hotel as Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.
In 1934, Connolly was working on a trilogy: Humane Killer, The English Malady and The Rock Pool. Only The Rock Pool was completed, the others remaining only as fragments.
Connolly followed it up with a book of non-fiction, Enemies of Promise (1938), the second half of which is autobiographical. In it he attempted to explain his failure to produce the literary masterpiece that he and others believed that he should have been capable of writing.
From 1952 until his death, he was joint chief book reviewer (with Raymond Mortimer) for The Sunday Times.
In 1962, Connolly wrote Bond Strikes Camp, a spoof account of Ian Fleming's character engaged in heroic escapades of dubious propriety as suggested by the title and written with Fleming's support. It appeared in London Magazine and in an expensive limited edition printed by the Shenval Press, Frith Street, London. It later appeared in Previous Convictions.
Connolly had previously collaborated with Fleming in 1952 in writing an account of the Cambridge Spies Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean entitled The Missing Diplomats,Connolly, Cyril. 1952. The Missing Diplomats. London: Queen Anne Press. an early publication for Fleming's Queen Anne Press.
In 1967, Connolly settled in Eastbourne, to the amusement of Beaton, who suggested he was lured back by the cakes they had enjoyed in school outings to the town.Cecil Beaton Beaton in the Sixties: More unexpurgated diaries Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2003 He died on 26 November 1974, having continued to the end as a Sunday Times journalist, and was buried in Berwick churchyard, Sussex. His grave bears the inscription Intus aquae dulces vivoque sedilia saxo ( Aeneid book IX: "Within, fresh water and seats in the living rock.")
Since 1976, Connolly's papers and personal library of over 8,000 books have been housed at the University of Tulsa.
Kenneth Tynan, writing in the March 1954 Harper's Bazaar, praised Connolly's style as 'one of the most glittering of English literary possessions.'
David Mason, in an essay on crime and booksellers, asserts that Connolly had a reputation amongst booksellers as a conniving thief: "That a man so important to modern literature acted so shoddily as to break an honourable code of conduct and steal from booksellers who had trusted him." CNQ: Canadian Notes and Queries, 109, Spring/Summer 2021, p27
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