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Cyril Connolly: A Life
`In one of the funniest biographies I have ever read, Lewis assembles all the excellently entertaining anecdotes about this deeply loved, much mocked, sometimes reviled figure whose departure has robbed the literary world of its social smartness and any worthwhile eccentricity . . . [An] excellent, wildly funny and informative biography. `Auberon Waugh, Literary Review. Precociously brilliant in his youth, Cyril Connolly was haunted for the rest of his life by a sense of failure and a romantic yearning to recover a lost Eden. His two great books, The Unquiet Grave and Enemies of Promise, are classics of English prose, combining wit, romanticism and merciless self-knowledge. As witty in person as he as in his prose, he was notoriously slothful and greedy; he was married three times, and his dealings with women were bedevilled by a lifelong tendency to be in love with two or more people at once.
- GenresBiographyNonfiction
653 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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68 people want to read
About the author
Jeremy Lewis
54 books5 followersJeremy Lewis spent much of his life working in publishing. He is the author of two highly-praised volumes of autobiography, Playing for Time and Kindred Spirits, and of biographies of Cyril Connolly and Tobias Smollett.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 26, 2025
Cyril Connolly is a little known character now, but he was one of the bright young things, went to Eton and Oxford. He was at school with Orwell, at Oxford with Evelyn Waugh; friends with Auden, Isherwood, Bowra, Brian Howard, Nancy Mitford, Betjeman, Ian Fleming, Kenneth Clark (snr), Eliot and many others. This review will encompass a gay James Bond spoof and the nature of reviewing. Connolly spent much of his life writing reviews for national newspapers (in the 1940s for his own magazine Horizon). He wrote two excellent and well thought of memoirs, some collections of reviews and a rather good novel ( The Rock Pool ).
Lewis’s biography is not hagiographical; he had access to much more of Connolly’s papers than the only other biographer Fisher and he is honest about Connolly’s faults; the self-absorption, infidelity (he always seemed to be in love with at least two people at once), moodiness.
Connolly was a typical middle class product of the English public school system. He was brilliant when he applied himself, but seldom did. In his youth his partners were almost entirely male; most remained lifelong friends. Women came along in his 20s and he married three times. His first wife was an alcoholic; his second wife was Barbara Skelton (infamously caricatured by Anthony Powell in his Dance to the Music of Time series as Pamela Flitton). It was only with his third wife that Connolly seemed to settle, becoming a father for the first time in his late 50s .
Connolly reviewed books for most of his working life; the best and worst of jobs. He was paid to read (bliss), but did not create as much as he felt he should have. His reviews were often very sharp and he would not tolerate the mediocre. He adored Proust, Gide, Joyce. He was an early supporter of Hemingway and Waugh (he found Waugh’s later novels tedious); he championed Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in this country and was a great supporter of the French modernist movement.
Here is a sample of what he said about books and writers he found less appealing.
About one week’s selection of books; “To read all these books is to be brought face to face with the tragedy of the worthy” and “They are all books that it is worthwhile to have written if there did not happen always to have been something written on the same lines that was better”.
Even better; “What can you expect from a slug but a slug track” and “It is the inefficiency of these slop writers, stupidly churning out emotions that have already been better expressed, in a dumb replica of the language that was used to express them, that really infuriates the reviewer ...”.
He once described his feeling about reviewing; “the feeling of obscure guilt that comes after a day spent in this thankless task of drowning other people’s kittens”.
There is much more, most of it razor sharp and to the point. I do wonder what Connolly would have made of the modern scene and particularly of GR; silence was not one of his strong points.
I think I also mentioned a gay James Bond spoof. Connolly wrote “Bond Strikes Camp” in 1962/3. The plot is simple. A KGB colonel has come to London; he has a penchant for men in drag. M orders Bond to get into drag and allow himself to be picked up. Bond does this with some reluctance and picks up the colonel. In the ensuing clinch the colonel’s moustache comes off and he is revealed to be M. M has always had a secret longing for Bond and this was the only way he could think of to get him into bed. It wasn’t universally well received though apparently Fleming didn’t mind.
Connolly was a bon viveur, book collector and always lived beyond his means. He could be excellent company, as all his friends attested, he could also be moody and difficult. This is a competent, sympathetic and very funny biography of an increasingly forgotten literary phenomenon.
Lewis’s biography is not hagiographical; he had access to much more of Connolly’s papers than the only other biographer Fisher and he is honest about Connolly’s faults; the self-absorption, infidelity (he always seemed to be in love with at least two people at once), moodiness.
Connolly was a typical middle class product of the English public school system. He was brilliant when he applied himself, but seldom did. In his youth his partners were almost entirely male; most remained lifelong friends. Women came along in his 20s and he married three times. His first wife was an alcoholic; his second wife was Barbara Skelton (infamously caricatured by Anthony Powell in his Dance to the Music of Time series as Pamela Flitton). It was only with his third wife that Connolly seemed to settle, becoming a father for the first time in his late 50s .
Connolly reviewed books for most of his working life; the best and worst of jobs. He was paid to read (bliss), but did not create as much as he felt he should have. His reviews were often very sharp and he would not tolerate the mediocre. He adored Proust, Gide, Joyce. He was an early supporter of Hemingway and Waugh (he found Waugh’s later novels tedious); he championed Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in this country and was a great supporter of the French modernist movement.
Here is a sample of what he said about books and writers he found less appealing.
About one week’s selection of books; “To read all these books is to be brought face to face with the tragedy of the worthy” and “They are all books that it is worthwhile to have written if there did not happen always to have been something written on the same lines that was better”.
Even better; “What can you expect from a slug but a slug track” and “It is the inefficiency of these slop writers, stupidly churning out emotions that have already been better expressed, in a dumb replica of the language that was used to express them, that really infuriates the reviewer ...”.
He once described his feeling about reviewing; “the feeling of obscure guilt that comes after a day spent in this thankless task of drowning other people’s kittens”.
There is much more, most of it razor sharp and to the point. I do wonder what Connolly would have made of the modern scene and particularly of GR; silence was not one of his strong points.
I think I also mentioned a gay James Bond spoof. Connolly wrote “Bond Strikes Camp” in 1962/3. The plot is simple. A KGB colonel has come to London; he has a penchant for men in drag. M orders Bond to get into drag and allow himself to be picked up. Bond does this with some reluctance and picks up the colonel. In the ensuing clinch the colonel’s moustache comes off and he is revealed to be M. M has always had a secret longing for Bond and this was the only way he could think of to get him into bed. It wasn’t universally well received though apparently Fleming didn’t mind.
Connolly was a bon viveur, book collector and always lived beyond his means. He could be excellent company, as all his friends attested, he could also be moody and difficult. This is a competent, sympathetic and very funny biography of an increasingly forgotten literary phenomenon.
December 5, 2016
At Eton with Orwell, at Oxford with Waugh,
He was nobody after, and nothing before. - Cyril Connolly
He was nobody after, and nothing before. - Cyril Connolly
February 17, 2024
The author might as well have edited Connolly's collected diaries and letters, with editorial notes. Such books have their place & I've enjoyed them but this tome is neither one thing nor the other.
Connolly has intrigued me since the late 1970s when I exchanged a series of letters with Godfrey Smith of The Sunday Times. I was looking forward to this read but the thing is mind-numbingly detailed, sometimes digressive in the extreme, and funny and/or interesting only occasionally. Given the author spent most of his life working in the publishing business, it is surprising that so much guff was retained - his sometime colleague, Diana Athill, would have likely made a much, much better fist of it.
Connolly has intrigued me since the late 1970s when I exchanged a series of letters with Godfrey Smith of The Sunday Times. I was looking forward to this read but the thing is mind-numbingly detailed, sometimes digressive in the extreme, and funny and/or interesting only occasionally. Given the author spent most of his life working in the publishing business, it is surprising that so much guff was retained - his sometime colleague, Diana Athill, would have likely made a much, much better fist of it.
July 19, 2014
Connolly seems always to have been regarded- both by those of his generation and by their successors- as someone either to be loved or hated. From this biography, my view is that he is more to be pitied than censured; endowed with considerable talent, Connolly evidently felt as though he never achieved the true greatness he ought to have. Nonetheless, what he did produce is often fascinating and well worth reading. We read in this book of the lassitudes and hardships that punctuated Connolly's life- from his early years as Logan Pearsall Smith's assistant and unsuccessful and fraught first marriage to his later years as an elder statesman- and are perhaps left to wonder whether, if he'd had a smoother ride, he might have achieved the 'great things' he sought to leave to posterity.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews