BOOKS
226
"CE PAYS NOUS ENNUIE, 0 MORTI"
IDEAS AND PLACES. By Cyril Connolly. Horpers. $3.50.
Perhaps this is not the best time for Cyril Connolly's book
to be published in America. I don't mean that the collection of
Horizon
"Comments" and other pieces would have no interest for American
readers; for, the subjects are surely interesting in themselves: evocations
of Europe just after the war, the lively burst of the existentialists, the
costs of a literary life, an American visit in 1947, the politics of the
period. Nor is that decade of
Horizon's
existence too remote for us to
respond to its questions with anything other than regret or nostalgia;
only four years have elapsed, after all, since the last number of that
valuable magazine appeared. But the "ideas" have most reference to
Britain's cultural situation, and only one of the "places" is America;
moreover, the tone may not be pleasing in this country, so perhaps it
is necessary to advise the reader, as Cyril Connolly does, "try to follow
these defunct and angry controversies of the day before yesterday, and
if you cannot follow, skip."
For, no matter how close we are to the events recorded in these
"Comments," or to British intellectual life, no matter how respon–
sive Americans have always been to
Horizon,
there is still a great
deal to separate us from this book, and it cannot be the distance of
time. When an American reader comes upon Mr. Connolly's farewell
remarks for
Horizon's
last issue, what will he make of an assertion like
this, even if its date is only 1949: "It is closing time in the gardens
of the West, and from now on an artist will be judged only by the
resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair." This statement
does not correspond at all to the present American feeling about art
or about the world, and the reader may respond blankly. In fact, most
of Mr. Connolly's gloom and despair over the state of culture, his
sadness, and his bleak, horrible humor will hardly echo here. There will
probably be a feeling that he was far too extreme in his jeremiads, even
hysterical, and surely infantile, and that all of his reactions to a depress–
ing cultural situation show too much self-hatred. The former editor
of
Horizon,
in his introduction, even refers to the temper of these
"Comments" as a kind of craziness, and suggests how some facts of
his own situation may have sharpened and weighted his tone.
What makes the tone of despair so insistent is that it was expresssd
in
monthly editorials rather than in considered statements; analysis
and remedy are spontaneously and amusingly improvised but never
examined with any sustained detail, so that they repeatedly take the
