Cyril Connolly: A Life.

King, Daniel Patrick

Jeremy Lewis. London. Cape. 1997. xvii + 653 pages + 16 plates. [pounds]25. ISBN 0-224-03710-2.

In his Diaries & Letters Harold Nicolson writes of his friend Cyril Connolly, "He admits to being frightened by the V.1s. I said he ought to think of his dear ones at the front who are in far greater danger than he is. 'That wouldn't work with me at all, Harold. In the first place, I have no dear ones at the front. And in the second place, I have observed that with me perfect fear casteth out love.'" One of the English litterateurs, Connolly combined wit, self-assessment, and sloth in a lifelong search for success and accomplishment. Whether or not he succeeded is found in his two novels of import, in his autobiographical reviews, and in his magazine Horizons.

Connolly understood the ambivalences of his character: "I have a reputation for being malicious, indiscreet and sadistic, and yet I am full of affection, geniality and sweetness." Henry Miller found him "a goddamned snob, a pretentious sort of cad, a cheap wise-cracking bastard with an all-knowing air." Connolly was brutally honest as to his stature as a writer, characterizing himself as a "lazy, irresolute person, over-vain and over-modest, unsure in my judgements and unable to finish what I have begun." Why did he not write in the morning like other writers? There was never much of a morning for him, he admitted. He "never went to bed at night." He ate no breakfast so as not to get fatter. After a glass of orange juice in bed, he continued to read the newspapers and books. In winter he spent forty-five minutes in his bath, where he could "read faster than ever, and sometimes imagine having a slate beside me where I can write water-proof maxims." Back to bed, down for a light lunch with the inevitable book, "for I hate not to read while I'm eating." This left the afternoon for work, but he "would always rather talk than write." Thus did he daydream away innumerable unwritten books.

Three stories suggest Connolly's romantic yearnings and hauntings of a sense of failure: "The English Malady" evokes his life in London during the 1920s, though a dazzling fragment, a maddeningly incomplete portrait. "Humane Killer" provides a taste of the time in Paris spent with Jean, one of his three wives. The autobiographical Enemies of Promise describes a young writer's wanderings in Paris, exploring alleys and brothels, stopping to jot down his stray thoughts.

But it is in criticism that he is most vitriolic and merciless: English fiction to him was blighted by "three colossal, almost irremediable" flaws: thinness of material, poverty of style, and lack of power. Most English writers followed a similar pattern. An uneventful childhood was followed by public school, a university stint, a job, and rearing children. The writer was thus deprived of life experiences for more than one book. The English novelist was condemned to write in the "moderately intelligent, rather academic language of the mandarin class." He worried that he too had made himself into that very English thing: "a man of letters who wrote articles about writers," which were then combined into books of essays. But, he admitted, the "dilemmas of authors, the trends of modern literature interest me - the hardships of Chinese peasant women, bullfighters or Jews don't."

Connolly found three good things in life: "to be writing a readable book, to be traveling south in winter with someone one's conscience permits one to love, and to enjoy a fine dinner with old friends." Writing a readable book for Connolly presented a perennial problem, dining with friends added an unwanted corpulence to a slim youth, while his choice of traveling companions placed an increasing strain on his marriage to Jean.

Connolly shared the idealism of Republican Spain, where he spent the Spanish Civil War, later writing: "The pervading sense of freedom, of intelligence, justice and companionship, the enormous upthrust in backward and penniless people of the desire for liberty and education, are things that have to be seen to be understood. It is as if the masses, the mob in fact, credited usually with instincts only of stupidity and persecution, should blossom into what is really a kind of flowering of humanity." But his idealism faded by the time of World War II, when, according to George Orwell, he predicted widespread panic in England once the bombs began to fall and suggested to Scotland Yard that police records of intellectuals be destroyed, as he believed that if Hitler's invasion plans succeeded, he would show no mercy to left-wingers.

Connolly's later years were marked by increasing health problems, comparing himself to an old car, every part of which was worn out and needed replacement: "My own rude health is at last deserting me." He continued to lunch, gossip, and "potter conjugally about the shops in Lewes and Eastbourne."

Jeremy Lewis has written a very personal book, having access to private correspondence and interviews with many who knew Connolly. While it is a sympathetic work, one is compelled to admit it to be the definitive life of the penultimate English virtuosi.

Daniel Patrick King Whitefish Bay, Wi.