Cyril Connolly

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cyril Vernon Connolly (born September 10, 1903 in Coventry , England , † November 26, 1974 in London , England) was an English writer , literary critic , and journalist .

life and work

Connolly's father was a major in the British Army. Cyril attended the prestigious private school Eton College (together with Harold Acton and George Orwell , with whom he became friends) and then studied at the College Balliol of the University of Oxford .

After graduating, he worked as a secretary for the writer and critic Logan Pearsall Smith . From 1927 he wrote articles for British newspapers and magazines such as the New Statesman , the Sunday Times and The Observer .

Connolly's only novel, The Rock Pool, about the life of a young Englishman in an artists' colony on the Mediterranean , was published in 1936. His best-known book is the autobiographical collection of essays Enemies of Promise from 1938. In it, he deals with the expectations that his environment and himself even assumed that given his talent and demands he would produce a literary masterpiece.

Instead he stayed with the "small form", published books with aphorisms , essays and thoughts - The Unquiet Grave (1944, under the pseudonym Palinurus ), The Condemned Playground (1945), Ideas and Places (1953), Previous Convictions (1963) , Modern Movement (1965) and The Evening Colonnade (1973). The novel fragment Shade those Laurels was completed by Peter Levi and published in 1990.

From 1939 to 1950 he edited the influential monthly literary magazine Horizon together with Peter Watson (who essentially financed the project) and initially with Stephen Spender .

Connolly was the Sunday Times' senior literary critic from 1945 until his death in 1974 . In the year of his death, he was elected an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

He was married three times (and also had countless affairs): first with Jean Bakewell, a wealthy American whom he met in Paris, then with the writer Barbara Skelton and finally with Deirdre Craig, who married Peter Levi after his death.

Referencing

The writer Evelyn Waugh , who was friends with Connolly, parodied him with the character of Everard Spruce in his novel Unconditional Surrender .

The comedian group Monty Python honored Connolly at the end of their song Eric the Half-a-Bee .

In Ian McEwan's novel Atonement , the heroine mentions having written a letter to Connolly.

Web links

Literature by and about Cyril Connolly in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

  1. Honorary Members: Cyril Connolly. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 8, 2019 .
  2. ^ "Everard Spruce is Cyril Connolly and his periodical Horizon is Survival " (Johnson, 2012).

swell