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The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus
Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) was one of the most influential book reviewers and critics in England, contributing regularly to The New Statesmen, The Observer, and The Sunday Times. His essays have been collected in book form and published to wide acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. The Unquiet Grave is considered by many to be his most enduring work. It is a highly personal journal written during the devastation of World War II, filled with reflective passages that deal with aging, the break-up of a long term relationship, and the horrors of the war around him. It is also a wonderfully varied intellectual feast: a collection of aphorisms, epigrams, and quotations from such masters of European literature as Horace, Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, and Goethe. Dazzlingly original in both form and content, The Unquiet Grave has continued to influence generations of writers.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1944
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September 1, 2018
Hemingway said of this book, it is
one which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough
I found this treasure a few years back after reading a NYT interview with Donna Tartt in conjunction with the publication of The Goldfinch. She cited The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus as a go-to book.
The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly (1903-74), an English critic prominent around the time of WWII, is a "word cycle," but primarily it's Mr. Connolly's journal written during the devastation of WWII and it's filled with his reflections on society, aging, the breakup of his marriage and the war. It's a collection of aphorisms, epigrams and quotations from masters of European lit.
I wholeheartedly concur with Ernest Hemingway's description. Each time I open this little book, I find something new to contemplate, some new comprehension of the world around me.
A few of the gems herein:
A MUST for any thinker's library.
I found this treasure a few years back after reading a NYT interview with Donna Tartt in conjunction with the publication of The Goldfinch. She cited The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus as a go-to book.
The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly (1903-74), an English critic prominent around the time of WWII, is a "word cycle," but primarily it's Mr. Connolly's journal written during the devastation of WWII and it's filled with his reflections on society, aging, the breakup of his marriage and the war. It's a collection of aphorisms, epigrams and quotations from masters of European lit.
I wholeheartedly concur with Ernest Hemingway's description. Each time I open this little book, I find something new to contemplate, some new comprehension of the world around me.
A few of the gems herein:
Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those that do.
______
...art is made by the alone for the alone… The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication...
______
The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave.
______
"In the sex-war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated, but a woman's desire for revenge outlasts all other emotion.
`And their revenge is as the tiger's spring,
Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet as real
Torture is theirs, what they inflict they fell.'
When every unkind word about women has been said, we still have to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally sincere. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it."
______________________
"There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another. This should be made clear to all who contemplate such a union. The avoidance of this pain is the beginning of wisdom, for it is strong enough to contaminate the rest of our lives; and since it can be minimized by obeying a few simple rules, rules which approximate to Christian marriage, they provide, even to the unbeliever, its de facto justification. It is when we begin to hurt those whom we love that the guilt with which we are born becomes intolerable, and since all those whom we love intensely and continuously grow part of us, and as we hate ourselves in them, so we torture ourselves and them together."
_____
"A love affair is a grafting operation. 'What has once been joined, never forgets.' There is a moment when the graft takes; up to then is possible, without difficulty, the separation which afterwards comes only through breaking off a great hunk of oneself, the ingrown fibre of hours, days, years."
_____
"There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating."\
_____
All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.
______
The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
**********
A MUST for any thinker's library.
June 1, 2024
Wehleidige, selbstbemitleidende Assoziationen eines mit sich zerstrittenen Schriftstellers.
Inhalt: 2/5 Sterne (Selbstmitleid, Zitat-Fundstücke)
Form: 4/5 Sterne (ausgesuchte, rhythmische Sprache)
Komposition: 2/5 Sterne (ein wenig Vergil-Tristesse)
Leseerlebnis: 2/5 Sterne (leerer Sprachgenuss)
Unter dem Synonym „Palinurus“ verbirgt sich der Schriftsteller und Kritiker Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), der zeitlebens aufgrund seiner sprachlichen Begabung mit der Erwartungshaltung seines Umfeldes konfrontiert worden ist, ein literarisches Wunderwerk zu vollbringen, hier in ganzer Analogie zu Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Beide haben es nicht vermocht, ihre Literaturreflexionen als Kritiker in die Tat als Schriftsteller umzusetzen. Roland Barthes hielt stattdessen eine Vorlesung namens Die Vorbereitung des Romans , die als Text vorliegt, Connolly dagegen Das Grab ohne Frieden:
Als Mythos jedoch, und vor allen Dingen als ein Mythos, der wichtige psychologische Aufschlüsse gibt, ist Palinurus offensichtlich der Typ, der scheitern will, der eine Abneigung gegen den Erfolg hat, der im letzten Augenblick aufgibt und ein dringendes Bedürfnis nach Einsamkeit, Isolierung und Verborgenheit hat. Palinurus verließ seinen Posten im Augenblick des Sieges trotz seiner großen Fähigkeiten und trotz seiner hervorragenden Stellung im gesellschaftlichen Leben und entschied sich für das fremde Gestade.
… das, wohlgemerkt, den Tod für den Steuermann von Aeneas aus Vergils Aeneis brachte. Connolly imitiert im 1944 erschienen Das Grab ohne Frieden die surrealistische Schlüsseltexte von André Breton, Streifzüge, das Flanieren durch Paris, die wohlfeile Ausdrucksweise, ohne jedoch im geringsten die zutiefst konsequente und konsistente Selbstbeobachtung Bretons auszuüben. Er schweift ab, redet über andere, über sein Verhältnis zu Frauen, zur Welt der Kunst, zur Welt der Politik und ähnelt eher den Opas aus der Muppet-Show, Waldorf und Statler, nur ohne ihren Humor:
Die englische Sprache hat sich tatsächlich so sehr unserer eigenen Kleinheit entsprechend zusammengezogen, dass es nicht mehr möglich ist, aus Worten allein ein gutes Buch zu machen.
Hier verrät der pluralis majestatis die Feigheit – und auch den Verzicht, an der Sprache zu arbeiten, statt sie zu akzeptieren und in Zeitungsartikeln zu verballhornen. Nun, Connolly schrieb einen Roman The Rock Pool und, ob des ausgebliebenen Erfolges, keinen weiteren mehr. Seine Reflexionen zeugen vom Willen und Wünschen, einen neuen Mythos zu schaffen, aber er wagt den Irrsinn nicht, weicht aus und ergibt sich den dissoziativen, schweifenden, dahin driftenden Ideen, die ihn nicht fortführen und weiterführen.
Er zitiert Sigmund Freuds Todestrieb-Problematik, verehrt Gustave Flaubert und Henry James, er sehnt sich nach Epikur und der Weisheit Lao-Tse, liest Taoismus und die Klassiker, ahmt Pascal nach und verliert sich im desillusionierten Epigonentum durch zahlreiche, wiewohl gut ausgesuchte Zitate. Viel zu selbstgefällig, ohne den Bartheschen Humor des Scheiterns, ohne die ernsthafte Liebe zur Literatur, die bspw. Ingeborg Bachmanns Vorträge über Literatur zeigen, in der sie die schlechte Sprache überwinden will und überwindet. Zeugnis einer Zeitverschwendung.
Als ich davon träumte, bald vierzig zu werden, sah ich mich sterben und wurde mir bewusst, dass ich nicht mehr ich selber war, sondern eine ganz von Parasiten bewohnte Kreatur, so wie eine Raupe von den Maden, der Ichneumon-Fliege gequält wird. Gin, Whiskey, Dreck, Furcht, Schuld, Tabak waren zu meinen Schmarotzern bestimmt; Alkohol durchsickerte mein Inneres, während Melonen und Weinranken sich vom Ohr zum Nasenloch verbreiteten; mein Geist war ein abgenutzte Grammophonplatte, mein wahres Selbst ein solcher Schatten, dass es nicht vorhanden schien, und all dies war in den letzten drei Jahren geschehen.
Dann lieber, trotz fehlender Sprachvirtuosität, Heinz Strunk in Ein Sommer in Niendorf .
Inhalt: 2/5 Sterne (Selbstmitleid, Zitat-Fundstücke)
Form: 4/5 Sterne (ausgesuchte, rhythmische Sprache)
Komposition: 2/5 Sterne (ein wenig Vergil-Tristesse)
Leseerlebnis: 2/5 Sterne (leerer Sprachgenuss)
Unter dem Synonym „Palinurus“ verbirgt sich der Schriftsteller und Kritiker Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), der zeitlebens aufgrund seiner sprachlichen Begabung mit der Erwartungshaltung seines Umfeldes konfrontiert worden ist, ein literarisches Wunderwerk zu vollbringen, hier in ganzer Analogie zu Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Beide haben es nicht vermocht, ihre Literaturreflexionen als Kritiker in die Tat als Schriftsteller umzusetzen. Roland Barthes hielt stattdessen eine Vorlesung namens Die Vorbereitung des Romans , die als Text vorliegt, Connolly dagegen Das Grab ohne Frieden:
Als Mythos jedoch, und vor allen Dingen als ein Mythos, der wichtige psychologische Aufschlüsse gibt, ist Palinurus offensichtlich der Typ, der scheitern will, der eine Abneigung gegen den Erfolg hat, der im letzten Augenblick aufgibt und ein dringendes Bedürfnis nach Einsamkeit, Isolierung und Verborgenheit hat. Palinurus verließ seinen Posten im Augenblick des Sieges trotz seiner großen Fähigkeiten und trotz seiner hervorragenden Stellung im gesellschaftlichen Leben und entschied sich für das fremde Gestade.
… das, wohlgemerkt, den Tod für den Steuermann von Aeneas aus Vergils Aeneis brachte. Connolly imitiert im 1944 erschienen Das Grab ohne Frieden die surrealistische Schlüsseltexte von André Breton, Streifzüge, das Flanieren durch Paris, die wohlfeile Ausdrucksweise, ohne jedoch im geringsten die zutiefst konsequente und konsistente Selbstbeobachtung Bretons auszuüben. Er schweift ab, redet über andere, über sein Verhältnis zu Frauen, zur Welt der Kunst, zur Welt der Politik und ähnelt eher den Opas aus der Muppet-Show, Waldorf und Statler, nur ohne ihren Humor:
Die englische Sprache hat sich tatsächlich so sehr unserer eigenen Kleinheit entsprechend zusammengezogen, dass es nicht mehr möglich ist, aus Worten allein ein gutes Buch zu machen.
Hier verrät der pluralis majestatis die Feigheit – und auch den Verzicht, an der Sprache zu arbeiten, statt sie zu akzeptieren und in Zeitungsartikeln zu verballhornen. Nun, Connolly schrieb einen Roman The Rock Pool und, ob des ausgebliebenen Erfolges, keinen weiteren mehr. Seine Reflexionen zeugen vom Willen und Wünschen, einen neuen Mythos zu schaffen, aber er wagt den Irrsinn nicht, weicht aus und ergibt sich den dissoziativen, schweifenden, dahin driftenden Ideen, die ihn nicht fortführen und weiterführen.
Er zitiert Sigmund Freuds Todestrieb-Problematik, verehrt Gustave Flaubert und Henry James, er sehnt sich nach Epikur und der Weisheit Lao-Tse, liest Taoismus und die Klassiker, ahmt Pascal nach und verliert sich im desillusionierten Epigonentum durch zahlreiche, wiewohl gut ausgesuchte Zitate. Viel zu selbstgefällig, ohne den Bartheschen Humor des Scheiterns, ohne die ernsthafte Liebe zur Literatur, die bspw. Ingeborg Bachmanns Vorträge über Literatur zeigen, in der sie die schlechte Sprache überwinden will und überwindet. Zeugnis einer Zeitverschwendung.
Als ich davon träumte, bald vierzig zu werden, sah ich mich sterben und wurde mir bewusst, dass ich nicht mehr ich selber war, sondern eine ganz von Parasiten bewohnte Kreatur, so wie eine Raupe von den Maden, der Ichneumon-Fliege gequält wird. Gin, Whiskey, Dreck, Furcht, Schuld, Tabak waren zu meinen Schmarotzern bestimmt; Alkohol durchsickerte mein Inneres, während Melonen und Weinranken sich vom Ohr zum Nasenloch verbreiteten; mein Geist war ein abgenutzte Grammophonplatte, mein wahres Selbst ein solcher Schatten, dass es nicht vorhanden schien, und all dies war in den letzten drei Jahren geschehen.
Dann lieber, trotz fehlender Sprachvirtuosität, Heinz Strunk in Ein Sommer in Niendorf .
August 9, 2012
Cyril Connolly adopts the pseudonym 'Palinurus' (the Pilot) for this key book. It is a key book in the sense that it introduces the reader to myriad other authors and books, many of them classical. Connolly is easy to Google so I won't waste time reciting his CV.
It's a good book to read before committing suicide. It may confirm you in your choice but, conversely, may prompt you to say 'ah fuck it' I'll hang on for another day or two'.
Also a good book to read if one has recently parted from a lover but remains filled with desire - or, perhaps, if one is simply wallowing in anomie as can happen when too many drizzly days follow each other without a single passionate storm.
I reread this every 5/10 years or so.
It's a good book to read before committing suicide. It may confirm you in your choice but, conversely, may prompt you to say 'ah fuck it' I'll hang on for another day or two'.
Also a good book to read if one has recently parted from a lover but remains filled with desire - or, perhaps, if one is simply wallowing in anomie as can happen when too many drizzly days follow each other without a single passionate storm.
I reread this every 5/10 years or so.
July 9, 2008
This was a cult classic in the 1950s, but now it's hard to see what all the fuss was about. Connolly was known as a brilliant and talented writer who didn't write much, wasting much of his life with alternate bouts of hedonism and regret. I can can see the waste -- he's nothing if not brutally honest about himself -- but the talent is overrated. There are some zingy aphorisms and melancholy insights, but unless pages of self-flagellation and untranslated quotes from French and Latin authors floats your boat, you can safely leave this grave unopened.
January 16, 2022
Penned by the pilot of Aeneas’s ship, man prey to the appetites, lusty slothful glutton constipated with regret and paralyzed by fear, an assemblage of memoirs, maxims, reflections on art, love, and religion, drugs, liquor, and failure.
Not a long work, but then it doesn’t seem right to read it right through. Too deep a draft of this liquid and the cool rigor of its clarity busts up and slackens to choking bile. It takes the form of a journal or commonplace book — significantly a work of quotation — a mosaic of the author’s brain, scaled like a pineapple, caught up in a crossfire of British and continental literature, especially that of Paris, toward whose rues and quais the ink seems to slink automatically, as though, like a marble made mean, the Albion mind and its devices came unstuck to run downhill.
Recommend to lovers of truth (and attempts at it), unclotted philosophy, neuroses, the seven deadly sins, lemurs.
Not a long work, but then it doesn’t seem right to read it right through. Too deep a draft of this liquid and the cool rigor of its clarity busts up and slackens to choking bile. It takes the form of a journal or commonplace book — significantly a work of quotation — a mosaic of the author’s brain, scaled like a pineapple, caught up in a crossfire of British and continental literature, especially that of Paris, toward whose rues and quais the ink seems to slink automatically, as though, like a marble made mean, the Albion mind and its devices came unstuck to run downhill.
Recommend to lovers of truth (and attempts at it), unclotted philosophy, neuroses, the seven deadly sins, lemurs.
March 11, 2013
On November 7, 1940, the deck of Washington’s Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed in high winds and fell into Puget Sound. Engineers identified the reason as elementary resonance: the relentless winds created a frequency which matched the frequency of the bridge itself, thus creating vibrations which brought about the bridge’s structural failure.
The well-documented image of this bridge collapse—or more precisely its cause: elementary resonance—kept recurring to me as I read The Unquiet Grave. Only twice before can I remember books which seemed to speak to me on such a direct and elemental level, a level beyond the words and ideas themselves. Once such experience was reading Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire as I traveled through the Southwest in 2004. Another was one remarkable Christmas Eve when I first read Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and realized that I had lived my entire life just for the experience of reading that play. The Unquiet Grave is another such book, in which the intensity of my experience is echoed by Cyril Connolly himself when he writes, “Intense emotion, a mixture of relief and despair, at reading Saint-Beuve’s notebook Mes Poisons, and discovering ‘This is me’” (pp. 58-59).
Culled from notebooks Connolly kept documenting his despair over the dissolution of his marriage, the Second World War, and the way the war had cut him off from his beloved Paris, The Unquiet Grave is as resonant a portrayal of one man’s emotional collapse as I have ever read in literature. Written in a highly quotable epigrammatic style (I found myself with pen in hand, busily underlining the whole time I read), the book is subtitled “A Word Cycle by Palinurus,” the pilot and helmsman of Aeneas who fell overboard and was killed upon reaching land. Interspersed throughout are passages in French (which I’m eagerly awaiting help in translating) by Saint-Beuve, Flaubert and others, as well as passages from Horace, Virgil and other classical writers which seem to share Connolly/Palinurus’s hope-turned-to-despair over the state of his passage through the world (“Forty—sombre anniversary to the hedonist—in seekers after truth like Buddha, Mahomet, Mencius, St. Ignatius, the turning-point of their lives” (p. 15).
This slim volume (142 pages, including index) riveted me throughout its first two sections, “Ecce Gubernator” (“Behold the Pilot”) and “Te Palunure Petens” (“Looking for You, Palinurus”), but I have to admit my level of concentration waned in the last two sections “La Cle Des Chants” (“The Key to the Songs”), in which Connolly’s writing becomes particularly solipsistic, relating, among other things, the deaths of two beloved lemurs he apparently kept as pets, and “Who Was Palinurus?”, an examination of the passages from the Aeneid which present the story of Palunurus himself.
I feel richer for having read The Unquiet Grave, however, a statement I haven’t made about a book in some time, as if a voice had spoken over the decades to me alone, in a frequency that caused my elemental self to vibrate sympathetically, validating my own experience and allowing me to answer the only way I can: “This is me.”
The well-documented image of this bridge collapse—or more precisely its cause: elementary resonance—kept recurring to me as I read The Unquiet Grave. Only twice before can I remember books which seemed to speak to me on such a direct and elemental level, a level beyond the words and ideas themselves. Once such experience was reading Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire as I traveled through the Southwest in 2004. Another was one remarkable Christmas Eve when I first read Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and realized that I had lived my entire life just for the experience of reading that play. The Unquiet Grave is another such book, in which the intensity of my experience is echoed by Cyril Connolly himself when he writes, “Intense emotion, a mixture of relief and despair, at reading Saint-Beuve’s notebook Mes Poisons, and discovering ‘This is me’” (pp. 58-59).
Culled from notebooks Connolly kept documenting his despair over the dissolution of his marriage, the Second World War, and the way the war had cut him off from his beloved Paris, The Unquiet Grave is as resonant a portrayal of one man’s emotional collapse as I have ever read in literature. Written in a highly quotable epigrammatic style (I found myself with pen in hand, busily underlining the whole time I read), the book is subtitled “A Word Cycle by Palinurus,” the pilot and helmsman of Aeneas who fell overboard and was killed upon reaching land. Interspersed throughout are passages in French (which I’m eagerly awaiting help in translating) by Saint-Beuve, Flaubert and others, as well as passages from Horace, Virgil and other classical writers which seem to share Connolly/Palinurus’s hope-turned-to-despair over the state of his passage through the world (“Forty—sombre anniversary to the hedonist—in seekers after truth like Buddha, Mahomet, Mencius, St. Ignatius, the turning-point of their lives” (p. 15).
This slim volume (142 pages, including index) riveted me throughout its first two sections, “Ecce Gubernator” (“Behold the Pilot”) and “Te Palunure Petens” (“Looking for You, Palinurus”), but I have to admit my level of concentration waned in the last two sections “La Cle Des Chants” (“The Key to the Songs”), in which Connolly’s writing becomes particularly solipsistic, relating, among other things, the deaths of two beloved lemurs he apparently kept as pets, and “Who Was Palinurus?”, an examination of the passages from the Aeneid which present the story of Palunurus himself.
I feel richer for having read The Unquiet Grave, however, a statement I haven’t made about a book in some time, as if a voice had spoken over the decades to me alone, in a frequency that caused my elemental self to vibrate sympathetically, validating my own experience and allowing me to answer the only way I can: “This is me.”
August 24, 2021
Hans van Mierlo, former Dutch foreign minister, read this, I understood from the beginning he got to make with his autobiography - he died before getting the book past his youth, sadly enough - when he was in the hospital. And the way he talked about it, 'A man getting himself in and out of depression', intrigued me and I ordered the book. And I loved it. There was a lot of untranslated French in it, so when I finished it, using Google Translate a lot, I ordered a Dutch version which also has the French quotes, but in that version they are followed by a Dutch translation. So now I'm reading the book again.
For me, this is a classic, I was writing down so much quotes that I started thinking I would end up with three installments, one English, one Dutch and one in quotes. His French love affair, his intellectually honest way of dealing with questions of politics, religion and human relations, his great feel for the finest quotes and the whole Palinurus-angle - P. is a sailor from the Aeneid, who almost drowned and was killed when he made it ashore - is very smart and highly amusing and insightful, even, or maybe especially, in the dark moments. Read this book.
For me, this is a classic, I was writing down so much quotes that I started thinking I would end up with three installments, one English, one Dutch and one in quotes. His French love affair, his intellectually honest way of dealing with questions of politics, religion and human relations, his great feel for the finest quotes and the whole Palinurus-angle - P. is a sailor from the Aeneid, who almost drowned and was killed when he made it ashore - is very smart and highly amusing and insightful, even, or maybe especially, in the dark moments. Read this book.
July 13, 2015
Cuaderno de notas que pareciera personal sino fuera porque el proceso de ordenación y edición de los fragmentos de los que se compone llevó a su autor un tiempo para componer un plan: una confesión que es una catarsis, un lamento por lo perdido y a la vez, un frío análisis de cómo mejorar como persona y como artista a partir de estas reflexiones, la variedad y densidad de temas que aparecen en este libro hacen que sea imposible resumirlo. Basta con dejarse llevar, identificarse con aquellos que preferimos y reflexionar, como pedía Connolly con la serenidad de los clásicos como él mismo para nosotros.
October 9, 2008
A bit dated, a bit silly, but for all that an interesting specimen of the English Man of Letters. His prognostications are less absorbing than his eliptical and impressionistic descriptions of travels through France ("darker wines at the inns, deeper beds.") And I didn't know he was so into lemurs.
Want to read
October 22, 2013Donna Tartt said in a New York Times interview that this is one of her favorite books: "I've loved it since I was a teenager and like always to have it to hand; when I lived in France, years ago, it was one of only six books I carried with me."
July 26, 2009
Some interesting moments, but I had no idea WHY he was saying the overwhelming majority of what he wrote. If you are looking for anything with even a hint of a plot, look elsewhere.
There is a whole lot of untranslated French in the text, which I find obnoxious.
I would have a hard time recommending this book to most people.
There is a whole lot of untranslated French in the text, which I find obnoxious.
I would have a hard time recommending this book to most people.
July 4, 2022
Published in 1945 when the author was forty two, The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly has no narrative or any organizational structure that I could discern. It’s a series of fragments, aphorisms, quotes by other authors, etc. that calls itself a “word cycle” and feels closer to Pascal’s Pensees or something by Nietzsche (both authors are mentioned in the book) than anything else. If you, like me, don’t know French or Latin, you’ll miss many long untranslated passages that the author includes. Among other things, Connolly has a depressive tendency and a fascination with vegetables and lemurs.
The cover of the book includes a quote by Ernest Hemingway- “It is a book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough.” It’s not surprising that he liked it since the book contains a passage on “the greatness of Hemingway” (p.89 in this edition), but I’m not sure I share his enthusiasm. Every so often I was struck by a really interesting idea or passage but there is a lot to wade through to find the gems. In the last third the book started to lose steam, particularly in the final section which explicates passages from Virgil’s Aeneid.
Here are all the good parts for you so you don’t have to read the rest of the book-
“What is common to these twelve writers [of masterpieces]? Love of life and nature; lack of belief in the idea of progress; interest in, mingled with contempt for humanity.” (P.2)
“Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable. Happiness is in the imagination. What we perform is always inferior to what we imagine; yet daydreaming brings guilt; there is no happiness except through freedom from Angst, and only creative work, communion with nature and helping others are Angst-free.” (p.39)
“Today the State shows a benevolent face to Culture-Diffusion, but to those who create culture no trace of sympathy or indulgence, with the result that we are becoming a nation of commentators, of critics and hack-explainers, most of whom are ex-artists.” (p. 57)
“It is not interesting to be always unhappy , engrossed with oneself, ungrateful and malignant, and never quite in touch with reality.” (p. 67)
“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.” (p.76)
“When the present slaughter terminates humanity can survive only through a return to the idea of happiness as the highest good, happiness which lies not in Power or in the exercise of the Will, but in the flowering of the spirit and which in an unwrapped society should coincide with consciousness.” (p.130)
The cover of the book includes a quote by Ernest Hemingway- “It is a book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough.” It’s not surprising that he liked it since the book contains a passage on “the greatness of Hemingway” (p.89 in this edition), but I’m not sure I share his enthusiasm. Every so often I was struck by a really interesting idea or passage but there is a lot to wade through to find the gems. In the last third the book started to lose steam, particularly in the final section which explicates passages from Virgil’s Aeneid.
Here are all the good parts for you so you don’t have to read the rest of the book-
“What is common to these twelve writers [of masterpieces]? Love of life and nature; lack of belief in the idea of progress; interest in, mingled with contempt for humanity.” (P.2)
“Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable. Happiness is in the imagination. What we perform is always inferior to what we imagine; yet daydreaming brings guilt; there is no happiness except through freedom from Angst, and only creative work, communion with nature and helping others are Angst-free.” (p.39)
“Today the State shows a benevolent face to Culture-Diffusion, but to those who create culture no trace of sympathy or indulgence, with the result that we are becoming a nation of commentators, of critics and hack-explainers, most of whom are ex-artists.” (p. 57)
“It is not interesting to be always unhappy , engrossed with oneself, ungrateful and malignant, and never quite in touch with reality.” (p. 67)
“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.” (p.76)
“When the present slaughter terminates humanity can survive only through a return to the idea of happiness as the highest good, happiness which lies not in Power or in the exercise of the Will, but in the flowering of the spirit and which in an unwrapped society should coincide with consciousness.” (p.130)
November 3, 2022
As Cyril Connolly himself writes, "What follows are the doubts and reflections of a year, a word-cycle in three or four rhythms; art, love, nature and religion: an experiment in self dismantling..." This fragmentary method of writing, with quotes, aphorisms, epigrams, allusions, from a litany of great writers, thinkers, and diarists, with sudden reflections on love, the loss of love, spirituality, desire, literature, art, and psychology are the collected musings of Cyril Connolly, first published in 1944 in Horizon, the magazine he was founder and editor for. My favourite parts of his writing are the plentiful poetic depictions of the scene, usually with the aid of perspicacious and evocative lists, revealing the interior life of the poetic author: "Dead leaves, coffee grounds, grenadine, tabac Maryland, mental expectation - perfumes of the Nord-Sud; autumn arrival at Pigalle..."
This book is a literary sketch or prayer book, overflowing with ideas and impressions, deeply felt articulations of the psyche, of collated philosophies, of what constitutes one's being, often pitched with crystalline melancholy providing momentary and heartfelt illuminations away from any unnecessary or phoney narratives.
This book is a literary sketch or prayer book, overflowing with ideas and impressions, deeply felt articulations of the psyche, of collated philosophies, of what constitutes one's being, often pitched with crystalline melancholy providing momentary and heartfelt illuminations away from any unnecessary or phoney narratives.
February 4, 2015
Connolly made his name as a critic and so when he opens his book with the statement that “the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence,” it serves both as a jab at fashionable contemporaries and an announcement of his intention to make his own “assault on perfection.” The book was written during WWII and is part journal, part commonplace book, and part philosophical essay. There are lengthy quotations from French authors which, unfortunately, I was usually unable to decipher without help, but Connolly’s own prose is engrossing, his ideas engaging. He was exorcising some personal demons here: his marriage was falling apart at the same time the world around him was falling apart, and the general sense of catastrophe is strong. The Unquiet Grave may not be quite the masterpiece Connolly hoped for, and I can’t endorse certain of his Freudian obsessions and conclusions. Nonetheless, the book is highly quotable, bright if only with a fractured light, and in the end it makes a powerful meditation on the significance of love and of art and of being human in a world that is often short on all three.
November 9, 2017
Someone needs to go back in time and tell Cyril that his publisher accidentally released his pretentious teenage diary entries instead of an actual book.
Read
July 3, 2023Not wise or enjoyable.
July 15, 2023
“We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.”
Okay, this bodes well, I thought to myself. As a pessimist, I love to read pessimist writers.
Cyril Connelly’s The Unquiet Grave, was just that, UNQUIET. Noisy, in fact, which suggests not pessimism but a hope for something different. These were the unquiet (pretentious, self-serving, adolescent) thoughts of a man unraveling, having a breakdown, a mid-life crisis, suffering greatly. WW2, a marriage dissolution, the loss of creativity in a wartime setting. I get it.
He pays homage to what he loves the most; literature and philosophical inquiry. And that is what is compelling about this book. The literary references here made me pull out my Montaigne, Rimbaud and Baudelaire for a re-read. Fascinating also was his inquiry into the relation between a human being’s primal, animal nature and their spiritual quest.
“But is it impossible to improve animal-man so that instead of being made to renounce his animal nature, he refines it? Can anxiety and remorse be avoided that way? Imagine a cow or a pig which rejected the body for a ‘noble eight-fold way of self-enlightenment’. One would feel that the beast had made a false calculation.”
Exactly.
If you can sort your way past the teeth-gnashing, personal guilt, remorse, self-indulgence, women bashing to these gems of insight, you’ll do well.
And he warns us about himself:
After admitting that “anxiety is my true condition”, he adds: “A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant or ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality.”
Yup, not interesting. But he persists.
Connelly submerges himself in self-pity and thoughts of suicide, (I have no objection to the necessary inquiry into the option of suicide), complaints about marriage and women. He is whining and morose.
And, sexist. I should have known when Ernest Hemingway proclaimed himself a fan of this work that sexism would abound.
“There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover. When we see a woman chewing the cud meekly beside the second husband, it is hard to imagine how brutally, implacably and pettily she got rid of the others.”
Yawn. It is hard to read his profound musings; “As we grow older, in fact, we discover that the lives of most human beings are worthless except in so far as they contribute to the enrichment and emancipation of the spirit.” when in the next breath he pronounces that “ there has never been a happy suffragette.”
Some of the best books of “philosophy” have been written in fragments. Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet springs to mind. It is far superior to Connelly’s notebooks and musings as there is a profound authenticity in that book which is missing in this Noisy Grave. Its inconsistencies jar and irritate, at least for this reader.
My verdict about this book comes from the author’s own words:
“Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism.”
Couldn't have said it better myself. This is what I felt he was doing in this book, lots of mental exhibitionism (swathes of the book in untranslated French), dazzling the reader with his insight one moment and confounding us with his rigidity, the next. Talking and wishing the death of personality but demonstrating a profound dedication to his own.
Some great stuff in here but overall, a disappointment. I'll take Pessoa's Disquiet over this any day.
Okay, this bodes well, I thought to myself. As a pessimist, I love to read pessimist writers.
Cyril Connelly’s The Unquiet Grave, was just that, UNQUIET. Noisy, in fact, which suggests not pessimism but a hope for something different. These were the unquiet (pretentious, self-serving, adolescent) thoughts of a man unraveling, having a breakdown, a mid-life crisis, suffering greatly. WW2, a marriage dissolution, the loss of creativity in a wartime setting. I get it.
He pays homage to what he loves the most; literature and philosophical inquiry. And that is what is compelling about this book. The literary references here made me pull out my Montaigne, Rimbaud and Baudelaire for a re-read. Fascinating also was his inquiry into the relation between a human being’s primal, animal nature and their spiritual quest.
“But is it impossible to improve animal-man so that instead of being made to renounce his animal nature, he refines it? Can anxiety and remorse be avoided that way? Imagine a cow or a pig which rejected the body for a ‘noble eight-fold way of self-enlightenment’. One would feel that the beast had made a false calculation.”
Exactly.
If you can sort your way past the teeth-gnashing, personal guilt, remorse, self-indulgence, women bashing to these gems of insight, you’ll do well.
And he warns us about himself:
After admitting that “anxiety is my true condition”, he adds: “A mistake which is commonly made about neurotics is to suppose that they are interesting. It is not interesting to be always unhappy, engrossed with oneself, malignant or ungrateful, and never quite in touch with reality.”
Yup, not interesting. But he persists.
Connelly submerges himself in self-pity and thoughts of suicide, (I have no objection to the necessary inquiry into the option of suicide), complaints about marriage and women. He is whining and morose.
And, sexist. I should have known when Ernest Hemingway proclaimed himself a fan of this work that sexism would abound.
“There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover. When we see a woman chewing the cud meekly beside the second husband, it is hard to imagine how brutally, implacably and pettily she got rid of the others.”
Yawn. It is hard to read his profound musings; “As we grow older, in fact, we discover that the lives of most human beings are worthless except in so far as they contribute to the enrichment and emancipation of the spirit.” when in the next breath he pronounces that “ there has never been a happy suffragette.”
Some of the best books of “philosophy” have been written in fragments. Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet springs to mind. It is far superior to Connelly’s notebooks and musings as there is a profound authenticity in that book which is missing in this Noisy Grave. Its inconsistencies jar and irritate, at least for this reader.
My verdict about this book comes from the author’s own words:
“Dining out is a vice, a dissipation of spirit punished by remorse. We eat, drink, and talk a little too much, abuse all our friends, belch out our literary preferences and are egged on by accomplices in the audience to acts of mental exhibitionism.”
Couldn't have said it better myself. This is what I felt he was doing in this book, lots of mental exhibitionism (swathes of the book in untranslated French), dazzling the reader with his insight one moment and confounding us with his rigidity, the next. Talking and wishing the death of personality but demonstrating a profound dedication to his own.
Some great stuff in here but overall, a disappointment. I'll take Pessoa's Disquiet over this any day.
April 22, 2024
you can read many times and still have to think about it, and it will change over the time you experience life - it’s a life philosophies from all cultures and great men of all time !
July 31, 2010
I can't think of a single way in which this book is not remarkable. Part memoir, part philosophical treatise, part literary criticism; written in varying styles: from the epigrammatic, reminiscent of Thoreau in Walden, to the expansive, luxurious novelistic narrative. I only give it four stars because 10 to 15 percent of it is in French – usually a quote from a famous author – and untranslated. This is excruciatingly frustrating, considering the rest of the book: you just KNOW you’re missing out on something wonderful. Somebody should publish an edition where the French is translated in footnotes, as almost all the Latin is in this edition. Yes, there’s Latin: Palinurus was the pilot of Aeneas’s ship in Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid. I won’t say any more, lest I spoil things ….
October 5, 2017
"Oggi sono piuttosto sicuro, pur essendo consapevole che tutto è estremamente insicuro, che non ho in mano nulla, che si tratta soltanto di un allettamento, allettamento che pur essendo esercitato di continuo e inesauribilmente, è tutto ciò che mi resta dell’esistenza, e oggi tutto quanto mi è piuttosto indifferente, per cui io, in questo gioco nel quale si può soltanto perdere, ho vinto in ogni caso l’ultima partita." (pp. 118, 119)
December 8, 2008
Writers, such as Cyril Connolly, do not appear to be popular anymore. This is not a continuous prose work but more jottings of thoughts, musings etc. I found the work to be full of wisdom but also a little sad that it reflected an old soul tired of the world.
April 19, 2018
Combinación de libro de pasajes y reflexiones diversas con la fuerte influencia de lo clásico, entretenido, aunque me parece que es un libro para la madurez
September 24, 2019
Why has he acquired a seventy years' life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well? It is no answer to say that we are meant to rid ourselves of the self: religions like Christianity and Buddhism are desperate stratagems of failure, the failure of men to be men. As escapes from the problem, as flights from guilt, they may be welcome, but they cannot turn out to be the revelation of our destiny. What should we think of dogs' monasteries, hermit cats, vegetarian tigers? Of birds who tore off their wings or bulls weeping with remorse?
A love affair is a grafting operation. ‘What has once been joined, never forgets.’ There is a moment when the graft takes; up to then is possible without difficulty the separation which afterwards comes only through breaking off a great hunk of oneself, the ingrown fibre of hours, days, years.
Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment; greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear. The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.
There are but two ways to be a good writer: like Homer, Shakespeare or Goethe, to accept life completely, or like Pascal, Proust, Leopardi, Baudelaire, to refuse ever to lose sight of its horror.
When we reflect on life we perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can we gain an idea of its richness and meaning. We know that in such contemplation lies our true personality, and yet we live in an age when we are told exactly the opposite and asked to believe that the social and co-operative activity of humanity is the one way through which life can be developed. Am I an exception, a herd-outcast? There are also solitary bees, and it is not claimed that they are biologically inferior. A planet of contemplators, each sunning himself before his doorstep like the mason-wasp; no one would help another, and no one would need help!
Human life is understandable only as a state of transition, as part of an evolutionary process; we can take it to be a transition between the animal world and some other form which we assume to be spiritual. Anxiety and remorse are the results of failing to advance spiritually. For this reason they follow close on pleasure, which is not necessarily harmful, but which, since it does not bring advancement with it, outrages that part of us which is concerned with growth. Such ways of passing time as chess, bridge, drink and motoring accumulate guilt. But what constitutes the spiritual ideal? Is it the Nietzschean Superman or his opposite, the Buddha? The spiritual trend of human beings would seem to be towards pacifism, vegetarianism, contemplative mysticism, the elimination of violent emotion and even of self-reproduction. But is it impossible to improve animal-man so that instead of being made to renounce his animal nature, he refines it? Can anxiety and remorse be avoided in that way? Imagine a cow or a pig which rejected the body for a ‘noble eight-fold way of self-enlightenment’. One would feel that the beast had made a false calculation. If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are—like fishes not meant to swim. Have the solitary, the chaste, the ascetic who have been with us now for six thousand years, ever been proved to be right? Has humanity shown any sign of evolving in their direction? As well as Diogenes and the Stylite, there is also Aristippus or Epicurus as alternative to the Beast.
So is it with human beings: those who are conscious of another world, the world of the spirit, acquire an outlook which distorts the values of ordinary life; they are consumed by the weed of nonattachment. Curiosity is their one excess and therefore they are recognized not by what they do but by what they refrain from doing, like those Araphants or disciples of Buddha who were pledged to the ‘Nine Incapabilities’. Thus they do not take life, they do not compete, they do not boast, they do not join groups of more than six, they do not condemn others; they are ‘abandoners of revels, mute, contemplative’ who are depressed by gossip, gaiety and equals, who wait to be telephoned to, who neither speak in public nor keep up with their friends nor take revenge on their enemies. Self-knowledge has taught them to abandon hate and blame and envy in their lives until they look sadder than they are.
The spiritual life of man is the flowering of his bodily existence: there is a physical life which remains the perfect way of living for natural man, a life in close contact with nature, with the sun and the passage of the seasons, and one rich in opportunities for equinoctial migrations and home-comings. This life has now become artificial, out of reach of all but the rich or the obstinately free, yet until we can return to it we are unable to appreciate the potentialities of living.
[...]there is no happiness except through freedom from Angst and only creative work, communion with nature and helping others are Anxiety-free.
Only the invalid Pascal demolished friendship on the ground that if we could read each other’s thoughts it would disappear.
Voltaire wrote Candide when he was sixty-five, Peacock wrote Gryll Grange at seventy-five, at eighty Joinville began his Life of St. Louis. Waste is a law of art as it is of nature. There is always time.
Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of contemporary cowardice.
But this is not all, for much of our anxiety is caused by horror of London itself; of the hideous entrails seen from the southern approaches, the high cost of living, the slums where we may die, embodiment of ugly and unnatural urban existence.
When even despair ceases to serve any creative purpose, then surely we are justified in suicide.
Why do ants alone have parasites whose intoxicating moistures they drink and for whom they will sacrifice even their young? Because as they are the most highly socialized of insects, so their lives are the most intolerable.
Let us take such a simple idea as the desire to improve, to become better. Is it a natural human instinct or is it the result of early conditioning?
Even in the most socialized community, there must always be a few who best serve it by being kept isolated. The artist, like the mystic, naturalist, mathematician or ‘leader’, makes his contribution out of his solitude. This solitude the State is now attempting to destroy, and a time may come when it will no more tolerate private inspiration.We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.To fall in love at first sight there has to be what Sainte-Beuve called ‘le mystère’. In my case the mystery must take the form of a rejection of the industrial system and of the twentieth century. It is an aloofness, a suggestion of the primitive that I crave. Hence the appeal of sandals, which alone permit human beings to hold themselves naturally. This air of aloofness is incompatible with happiness since it springs from a feeling of isolation, a sense of rebellion and hostility towards society which cannot in these days make for contentment.With the sweeping up of the dead leaves in the square, the first misty morning, the first yellowing of the planes, I remember Paris and the old excitement of looking for autumn lodgings in an hotel.Approaching forty, a singular dream in which I almost grasped the meaning and understood the nature of what it is that wastes in wasted time.Today my deepest wish is to go to sleep for six months, if not for ever; it is an admission that life has become almost unendurable and that I must look to pleasure as a waking substitute for sleep. We cannot sleep twenty-four hours a day but we can at least make sleep and pleasure alternate, if once we will admit that, like deep narcotic treatment for nervous breakdown, they are remedies for the very sick.It is more important, in fact, to be good than to do good because being, rather than doing, is the state which keeps us in tune with the order of things. Hence Pascal’s reflection that all the evil of the world comes from men not being able to sit quietly in a room.From now on specialize; never again make any concession to the ninety-nine parts of you which are like everybody else at the expense of the one which is unique.The Vegetable Conspiracy: Man is now on his guard against insect parasites; against liver-flukes, termites, Colorado beetles, but has he given thought to the possibility that he has been selected as the target of vegetable attack, marked down by the vine, hop, juniper, the tobacco plant, tea-leaf and coffee-berry for destruction?No one would start to play a game without knowing the rules. Yet most of us play the interminable game of life without any because we have no idea what they are. But there are only two possible systems according to whether or not we believe in God. If we believe that the universe is an accident and life an accident contingent on the universe and man an accident contingent on life; then rules are made for men to be happy and it has been found by generations of exponents that happiness consists in fulfilment of the personality—in former days through the family, now by rendering more and more services to a group—in fact through the happiness of the greatest number. This is the game as played by Epicurus, Holbach, Marx, Mill, Bentham, Comte, and William James.If we apply depth-psychology to our own lives we see how enslaved we remain to the womb and the mother. Womb of Mother Church, of Europe, mother of continents, of horseshoe harbour and valley, of the lap of earth, of the bed, the arm-chair and the bath or of the Court of Charles II, of Augustan London, or the Rome of Cicero; of the bow-window of the club, of the house by the lake or water-front sacred to Venus;—all our lives seeking a womb with a view.Why do we reward our men of genius, our suicides, our madmen and the generally maladjusted with the melancholy honours of a posthumous curiosity? Because we know that it is our society which has condemned these men to death and which is guilty because, out of its own ignorance and malformation, it has persecuted those who were potential saviours; smiters of the rock who might have touched the spring of healing and brought us back into harmony with ourselves.To live according to nature we should pass a considerable time in cities for they are the glory of human nature, but they should never contain more than two hundred thousand inhabitants; it is our artificial enslavement to the large city, too sprawling to leave, too enormous for human dignity, which is responsible for half our sickness and misery.Pascal and Leopardi (both died aged thirty-nine) depress and frighten one because they were ill, almost deformed, and therefore because their deformity renders suspect so much of their pessimism.Three faults, which are found together and which infect every activity: laziness, vanity, cowardice. If one is too lazy to think, too vain to do a thing badly, too cowardly to admit it, one will never attain wisdom. Yet it is only the thinking which begins when habit-thinking leaves off, which is ignited by the logic of the train of thought, that is worth pursuing. A comfortable person can seldom follow up an original idea any further than a London pigeon can fly.Our minds do not come of age until we discover that the great writers of the past whom we patronize, dead though they be, are none the less far more intelligent than ourselves - Proust, James, Voltaire, Donne, Lucretius - how we would have bored them!Action is the true end of Western Religion, contemplation of Eastern; therefore the West is in need of Buddhism (or Taoism or Yoga) and the East of Communism (or muscular Christianity) - and this is just what both are getting. Undergoing the attraction of opposites, we translate the Tao Tê Ching and the Bhagavad-Gita, they learn the Communist Manifesto.With Buddhism, Taoism, Quietism, and the God of Spinoza there can be no disappointment, because there is no Appointment.Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, and will not acknowledge that they are prevented by their present way of life from ever creating anything different.We cannot think if we have no time to read, nor feel if we are emotionally exhausted, nor out of cheap material create what is permanent. We cannot co-ordinate what is not there.What is common in thought to these twelve writers? Love of life and nature; lack of belief in the idea of progress; interest in, mingled with contempt, for humanity.[...] an experiment in self-dismantling [...]Sometimes at night I get a feeling of claustrophobia; of being smothered by my own personality, of choking through being in the world.
La Gloire: 'L'admiration gâte tout dès l'enfance: Oh! que cela est bien dit! Oh! qu'il a bien fait! Qu'il est sage, etc ...' - Pascal
‘Presque tous les hommes sont esclaves, par la raison que les Spartiates donnaient de la servitude des Perses, faute de savoir prononcer la syllabe non. Savoir prononcer ce mot et savoir vivre seul sont les deux seuls moyens de conserver sa liberté et son caractère.’ -Chamfort
'En renonçant au monde et à la fortune, j’ai trouvé le bonheur, le calme, la santé, même la richesse; et, en dépit du proverbe, je m’aperçois que “qui quitte la partie la gagne”.’ -Chamfort
'Les fléaux physiques et les calamités de la nature humaine ont rendu la société nécessaire. La société a ajouté aux malheurs de la nature. Les inconvénients de la société ont amené la nécessité du gouvernement, et le gouvernement ajoute aux malheurs de la société. [...]’-Chamfort
'Quand l’univers considère avec indifférence l’être que nous aimons, qui est dans la vérité?’—JOUHANDEAU
July 31, 2023
While it is the story of Palinurus, the helmsman of Aeneas's ship in Virgil's Aeneid, which Cyril Connolly uses to frame his uncategorisable book The Unquiet Grave, it is another legend of antiquity which occurs to me as I try to review my reading experience. It is the story of the sea nymph Thetis, who refuses to marry a human, Peleus. Peleus subdues her and holds tight to her even as she rages violently, changing into fire, water, a snake and a lioness in an attempt to break free. The product of their union later becomes renowned in war as the dauntless Achilles.
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.
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.
September 5, 2025
This is the anti-Leaves of Grass. A work borne of suffering and angst amid the Second World War, written like a message in a bottle tossed into a tempestuous sea. Palinurus (pen name of Cyril Connolly, referencing the pilot of Aeneas's ship who was sacrificed by the gods in exchange for a successful voyage) offers a collection of aphorisms, short essays, reflections, and quotations from other writers to work through his own personal pain and try to emerge on the other end of the maelstrom with some renewed sense of hope. The book has quotable lines on nearly every page: “The object of loving is a release from Love. We achieve this through a series of unfortunate love affairs or, without a death-rattle, through one that is happy”; “each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form”; “We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of self”; “Message from the Id: 'If you would collect women instead of books, I think I could help you.'”
I sometimes think of books like the care packages dropped down by sponsors in The Hunger Games. They can be banal and worthless – or life-saving. It all depends on which package you can find and how you choose to utilize it. One person’s life-saving book might be totally useless to another, depending on the circumstances or context. And they often drop down at the most opportune times, at least for those who are looking for them. This book is one of the essential ones for me.
I sometimes think of books like the care packages dropped down by sponsors in The Hunger Games. They can be banal and worthless – or life-saving. It all depends on which package you can find and how you choose to utilize it. One person’s life-saving book might be totally useless to another, depending on the circumstances or context. And they often drop down at the most opportune times, at least for those who are looking for them. This book is one of the essential ones for me.
January 9, 2026
On the one side this book was odd, at parts hard to get through, and confusing. It is a collection of ramblings that follow the different stages a love-sick and regretful man and a frustrated writer goes through. It is full (!) of French quotes that, in my version at least, were not translated. Connolly explains his choice in the introduction: the book was written in war conditions leading the author to be cut off from France, "to show the affinity between their though and ours". Also, there were parts of the book I just didn't get. At all. I also failed to see how Palinurus' story applied to what's written here - but that's probably on me.
And still I gave this book four stars. That's because there's so many nice formulations, so many things to ponder on; wonderful thoughts on creating, on art, on humanity, on escapism. I just kept on underlining things, and there is so much to reread and come back to.
And still I gave this book four stars. That's because there's so many nice formulations, so many things to ponder on; wonderful thoughts on creating, on art, on humanity, on escapism. I just kept on underlining things, and there is so much to reread and come back to.
"Anxiety and remorse are the results of failing to advance spiritually. For this reason they follow close on pleasure, which is not necessarily harmful, but which, since it does not bring advancement with it, outrages that part of us which is concerned with growth."
"The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up ,the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck."
"There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's divident, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear will be lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves."
April 27, 2025
Evelyn Waugh wrote **annotated I should say in his own hand on the first page of this work upon receiving it**:
'Why should I be interested in this book? Because I have known Cyril for more than twenty years and enjoy dining with him? Because, alone in Dubrovnik, I have not much to occupy me? Rather because Cyril is the most typical man of my generation. There but for the grace of God literally… He has the authentic lack of scholarship of my generation - he read French while getting a third in Greats - the authentic love of leisure and liberty and good living, the authentic romantic snobbery, the authentic waste land despair, the authentic high gift of expression. Here he is in war-time, strait-jacketed by sloth, in Bloomsbury, thinking of Jean in the South of France, peaches and Vichy water, instead of Lys and sirens and official forms. Quite clear in his heart he feels that the ills he suffered are theological, with the vocabulary of the nonsense-philosophy he learned, holding him back. The Irish boy, the immigrant, home-sick, down at heel and ashamed, full of fun in the public house, a ready quotation on his lips, afraid of the bog-priest. Proud of his capers; the Irishman's deep-rooted belief that there are only two final realities - hell and the USA.'
'Why should I be interested in this book? Because I have known Cyril for more than twenty years and enjoy dining with him? Because, alone in Dubrovnik, I have not much to occupy me? Rather because Cyril is the most typical man of my generation. There but for the grace of God literally… He has the authentic lack of scholarship of my generation - he read French while getting a third in Greats - the authentic love of leisure and liberty and good living, the authentic romantic snobbery, the authentic waste land despair, the authentic high gift of expression. Here he is in war-time, strait-jacketed by sloth, in Bloomsbury, thinking of Jean in the South of France, peaches and Vichy water, instead of Lys and sirens and official forms. Quite clear in his heart he feels that the ills he suffered are theological, with the vocabulary of the nonsense-philosophy he learned, holding him back. The Irish boy, the immigrant, home-sick, down at heel and ashamed, full of fun in the public house, a ready quotation on his lips, afraid of the bog-priest. Proud of his capers; the Irishman's deep-rooted belief that there are only two final realities - hell and the USA.'
November 15, 2017
I enjoyed this book well enough, but it's structured in far too aimless a fashion to have provided me with a sustained, narrative theme--despite the author's intentions. Written during World War II, The Unquiet Grave is Cyril Connolly's midlife crisis in book form. Having recently turned 40, he reflects on his divorce and the chaotic state of the world through random collections of his own thoughts and quotations by others (mostly from Flaubert, De Quincey, and Pascal). It's unfortunate that the edition I read did not include translations of the copious French quotations, since I had to skip those (and they account for a surprisingly large number of pages in the book overall).
Even so, the book is alternately beautiful and profound, and I marked dozens of passages as I read through it.
Even so, the book is alternately beautiful and profound, and I marked dozens of passages as I read through it.
April 10, 2018
An endearing little book of maxims and aphorisms, long-winded descriptions of French glories, and lengthy quotes from classical poets. Written in 1942-43 as a wartime diary of sorts, it places itself in the lineage of Chamfort, La Rochefoucauld and Pascal but for all its Mediterranean 'dionysianism', there is something unmistakably English about it. Sarcastic despair is constantly being sublimated into idealism, while the battle against the 'herd-slaughter instinct' and for genuine happiness is never quite lost. In this sense Connolly is more akin to Wilde and Orwell than any angoissé Frenchman, but that is by no means a criticism. Connolly's influences are incredibly varied (from Horace to Lao Tzu via Sainte-Beuve) and his idealism is no pose; it is, rather, an open wound of a love for life, for plants, for lemurs, for a Europe in its death throes, for misspent youth.
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