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The Rock Pool
A classic novel, first published in 1936, now back in print.
In this engaging satire of the British upper class, a smug young literary man from Oxford joins an international group of artists and writers on the French Riviera, intending to study them as if they were aquatic organisms in a pool-with unexpected results.
In this engaging satire of the British upper class, a smug young literary man from Oxford joins an international group of artists and writers on the French Riviera, intending to study them as if they were aquatic organisms in a pool-with unexpected results.
140 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
14 people are currently reading
335 people want to read
About the author
Cyril Connolly
129 books66 followersCyril Connolly was born in Coventry, Warwickshire in 1903. Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford he was a regular contributor to the New Statesman in the 1930s.
Connolly also co-edited Horizon (1939-41) with Stephen Spender and later was literary editor of the The Observer. Books by Connolly include the novel, The Rock Pool (1938), the autobiographical, Enemies of Promise (1938) and The Unquiet Grave (1944), a collection of aphorisms, reflections and essays.
After the Second World War Connolly was the principal book reviewer of the Sunday Times. He also published several other books including The Condemned Playground (1945), Previous Convictions (1963) and the Modern Movement (1965). Cyril Connolly died in 1974.
Connolly also co-edited Horizon (1939-41) with Stephen Spender and later was literary editor of the The Observer. Books by Connolly include the novel, The Rock Pool (1938), the autobiographical, Enemies of Promise (1938) and The Unquiet Grave (1944), a collection of aphorisms, reflections and essays.
After the Second World War Connolly was the principal book reviewer of the Sunday Times. He also published several other books including The Condemned Playground (1945), Previous Convictions (1963) and the Modern Movement (1965). Cyril Connolly died in 1974.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
September 12, 2018
An interesting novel with some rather unlikeable characters (especially the protagonist). It is set in the south of France in the 1930s in the fictional Trou-sur-mer (based on Cagnes). Living there are a bunch of disparate and rather bohemian characters of varying nationalities. They are all fairly dissolute and for the time it was considered shocking. It was initially published in France in 1936 because no publisher in England would touch it. It was not published in Britain until 1947. What was so shocking? Extreme violence? No. Explicit sex? No.
What was so shocking were the descriptions of lesbians and gay men as functioning members of society and living openly with human strengths and weaknesses. This was unacceptable to the English publishers who looked at it in the 1930s. The Narrator, Naylor was a particular type of Englishman, public school and Oxbridge, a little money, no real occupation and no real purpose. He is also rather unpleasant. He sees Trou-sur-mere as a rock pool whose inhabitants he can study. Inevitably he becomes part of the "pool" and the story charts his decline.
Connolly took his characters from real life and in the early 1930s he and his wife had lived and travelled in the south of France. The origin for the Naylor character was apparently killed in the war flying for the RAF. Racasse, the artist, survived and Connolly had a picture of Connolly and his wife painted by the artist the character is based on. The Rock Pool is basically an attack on the English social system and charts the downfall of some of the "bright young things" of the late 20s. Naylor is a passive character and Peter Quennell has likened him to Frederic in Flaubert's Sentimental Education.
There are some marvellous comic moments and the middle class Englishman is shown up for what he is. There is also the sense of of something coming to an end, no more innocence. A brief book, an easy read and well written. However, given its quality I am surprised it is so little known.
What was so shocking were the descriptions of lesbians and gay men as functioning members of society and living openly with human strengths and weaknesses. This was unacceptable to the English publishers who looked at it in the 1930s. The Narrator, Naylor was a particular type of Englishman, public school and Oxbridge, a little money, no real occupation and no real purpose. He is also rather unpleasant. He sees Trou-sur-mere as a rock pool whose inhabitants he can study. Inevitably he becomes part of the "pool" and the story charts his decline.
Connolly took his characters from real life and in the early 1930s he and his wife had lived and travelled in the south of France. The origin for the Naylor character was apparently killed in the war flying for the RAF. Racasse, the artist, survived and Connolly had a picture of Connolly and his wife painted by the artist the character is based on. The Rock Pool is basically an attack on the English social system and charts the downfall of some of the "bright young things" of the late 20s. Naylor is a passive character and Peter Quennell has likened him to Frederic in Flaubert's Sentimental Education.
There are some marvellous comic moments and the middle class Englishman is shown up for what he is. There is also the sense of of something coming to an end, no more innocence. A brief book, an easy read and well written. However, given its quality I am surprised it is so little known.
July 7, 2025
The genteel Edgar Naylor, an aspiring biographer of Samuel Rogers (of all people), arrives at Trou-sur-Mer with the hopes of studying the remnants of an expatriate artistic colony. He pictures himself as a benign naturalist, a latter-day Linnaeus cataloguing eccentric fauna: "Why not The Rock Pool – a microcosm cut off from the ocean by the retreating economic tide?". The locals oblige.
There’s Rascasse, a Bessarabian painter with Bolshevik baggage and an exhibitionist streak. There’s Lola, Toni, and Ruby, each exuding a different shade of predatory weariness. Naylor himself, deafened at the start by wax (a too-perfect metaphor), begins his descent into the inertia of gin-soaked pseudo-existence, mistaking anthropological study for seduction and confusing pity for companionship.
And if his plan had been to catalogue the locals, what he gets instead is a slow emotional disintegration under a Mediterranean sun: “He saw the motes dancing in the dusty room… and felt a sudden uncontrollable ecstasy.” Later, he finds out the nymphs of Trou more closely resemble piranhas.
Every page brings another small slide: Rascasse misplaces anatomy mid-portrait, Toni “forgets” the sitting fee, and Naylor begins entertaining hallucinations of Tahiti as savior, siren, or at least mattress. A mistaken invitation, a drink too far, a smirking refusal from Sonia, a fall onto the road – Naylor’s decline is measured in hangovers and unpaid bills.
“Once you get one proportion wrong, all the other things follow,” warns Rascasse, daubing over the ravaged face of his sitter. The café talk glistens with literary name-dropping – Hemingway, Eliot, Norman Douglas – and Naylor responds with a dream of a picaresque novel steeped in “rhyming slang and Soho English.” But his own style betrays him: “the dialect of Pater, Proust, and Henry James” gums up his sentences, turns promise into paralysis. Even his manuscript on Samuel Rogers has a lacuna the size of Freud: “Rogers and Sex.”
As life at Trou takes on the surreal rhythm of a bad opera scored by Fernet Branca, the epiphany never quite arrives, and the rock pool thickens with its usual sediment: debts, feuds, daydreams, and one gloriously derailed dinner featuring Americans, Norwegians, a faked injury, and the fainting of two Antibes women.
Connolly, best known as a critic and editor of Horizon, wrote The Rock Pool during a burst of literary performance-anxiety, marinated in awareness of cliché and critical self-hatred. As he notes in the preface, “those who can’t, teach,” and those who review novels long enough “find one’s mind irremediably silted up with every trick and cliché”.
The book, barely a novel by conventional definitions, reads like a self-lacerating joke scribbled in the margin of The Waste Land, and yet it survives, laced with mordant wit and pure, gleaming loathing. Emotionally, it leaves you parched, sun-dazed, but faintly exhilarated, like walking home through a town that’s closing down for the season.
Alongside Hemingway and Fitzgerald, The Rock Pool tips its hat – sometimes sarcastically – to Proust, Eliot, Valéry, Whitman, and Henry James, while also name-dropping Evelyn and Alec Waugh, Norman Douglas, and the ever-bland Samuel Rogers.
Rascasse quotes Leaves of Grass as if it were scripture, Naylor dreams of writing in “the dialect of Pater, Proust, and Henry James,” and Connolly’s own preface hails Rochester, Dryden, Pope, and Congreve as spiritual forebears. Together they form a spectral Greek chorus of literary excess, impotence, and inherited affectation – exactly the stuff Naylor is drowning in.
Trou-sur-Mer is an allegory all right – for the way people with the wrong dreams end up drowned in the right settings. Naylor oozes toward the inevitable, his final descent into oblivion as slow and sticky as the syrup in his Pernod.
He enters as a taxonomist and exits as bait, trailed by bills, salt stains, and erotic confusion. The only thing he fishes out of the pool is his own last shred of dignity, which turns out to be decorative, like a monocle at a cockfight.
There’s Rascasse, a Bessarabian painter with Bolshevik baggage and an exhibitionist streak. There’s Lola, Toni, and Ruby, each exuding a different shade of predatory weariness. Naylor himself, deafened at the start by wax (a too-perfect metaphor), begins his descent into the inertia of gin-soaked pseudo-existence, mistaking anthropological study for seduction and confusing pity for companionship.
And if his plan had been to catalogue the locals, what he gets instead is a slow emotional disintegration under a Mediterranean sun: “He saw the motes dancing in the dusty room… and felt a sudden uncontrollable ecstasy.” Later, he finds out the nymphs of Trou more closely resemble piranhas.
Every page brings another small slide: Rascasse misplaces anatomy mid-portrait, Toni “forgets” the sitting fee, and Naylor begins entertaining hallucinations of Tahiti as savior, siren, or at least mattress. A mistaken invitation, a drink too far, a smirking refusal from Sonia, a fall onto the road – Naylor’s decline is measured in hangovers and unpaid bills.
“Once you get one proportion wrong, all the other things follow,” warns Rascasse, daubing over the ravaged face of his sitter. The café talk glistens with literary name-dropping – Hemingway, Eliot, Norman Douglas – and Naylor responds with a dream of a picaresque novel steeped in “rhyming slang and Soho English.” But his own style betrays him: “the dialect of Pater, Proust, and Henry James” gums up his sentences, turns promise into paralysis. Even his manuscript on Samuel Rogers has a lacuna the size of Freud: “Rogers and Sex.”
As life at Trou takes on the surreal rhythm of a bad opera scored by Fernet Branca, the epiphany never quite arrives, and the rock pool thickens with its usual sediment: debts, feuds, daydreams, and one gloriously derailed dinner featuring Americans, Norwegians, a faked injury, and the fainting of two Antibes women.
Connolly, best known as a critic and editor of Horizon, wrote The Rock Pool during a burst of literary performance-anxiety, marinated in awareness of cliché and critical self-hatred. As he notes in the preface, “those who can’t, teach,” and those who review novels long enough “find one’s mind irremediably silted up with every trick and cliché”.
The book, barely a novel by conventional definitions, reads like a self-lacerating joke scribbled in the margin of The Waste Land, and yet it survives, laced with mordant wit and pure, gleaming loathing. Emotionally, it leaves you parched, sun-dazed, but faintly exhilarated, like walking home through a town that’s closing down for the season.
Alongside Hemingway and Fitzgerald, The Rock Pool tips its hat – sometimes sarcastically – to Proust, Eliot, Valéry, Whitman, and Henry James, while also name-dropping Evelyn and Alec Waugh, Norman Douglas, and the ever-bland Samuel Rogers.
Rascasse quotes Leaves of Grass as if it were scripture, Naylor dreams of writing in “the dialect of Pater, Proust, and Henry James,” and Connolly’s own preface hails Rochester, Dryden, Pope, and Congreve as spiritual forebears. Together they form a spectral Greek chorus of literary excess, impotence, and inherited affectation – exactly the stuff Naylor is drowning in.
Trou-sur-Mer is an allegory all right – for the way people with the wrong dreams end up drowned in the right settings. Naylor oozes toward the inevitable, his final descent into oblivion as slow and sticky as the syrup in his Pernod.
He enters as a taxonomist and exits as bait, trailed by bills, salt stains, and erotic confusion. The only thing he fishes out of the pool is his own last shred of dignity, which turns out to be decorative, like a monocle at a cockfight.
April 26, 2025
What a fantastic, racy lampoon of expatriates, the language so fresh and current, the treatment of queer sexuality so casual, it's hard to believe this novella was written almost 90 years ago. Many a chuckle to be had, and many a bon mot. The story is of a young English snob who comes on a colony of Bohemian expatriates in an imaginary village in the south of France, Trou-sur-Mer (literally a "hole in the sea," a pun indicating its debasement). These expatriates are all of course degenerates, alcoholics, grifters–and because some of them are gay, lesbian or bisexual, Connolly had difficulties finding a publisher, as it was too subversive for the mainstream, but not nearly salacious enough for the pornographic presses. Remember, this was the 1930s. One thing that struck me was how the plot trajectory feels so incredibly similar to that of another satircal expatriate novel of 30 years later, Jack Reynolds "Woman of Bangkok," which similarly traces a protagonists' rapid dissolution from the haughty ranks of stockbrokers and Oxbridge dons to those of "lotophagous" non-conformists that shuttle between rural artist colonies and urban night worlds. There are so many wonderful quotes. Here's one that describes the protagonist's turn:
"And what was more, he had grown to like the troglodytes, these fierce, unfashionable expatriates. What was fine in them, their refusal to conform, their independence, their moral courage, was their own; what was weak, their instability, hopelessness and predatory friendships, was the result of a system: of the clumsy capitalist world that exalts money-making and poisons leisure, that suppresses talent, starves its artists, and persecutes its sexual dissenters, that denies opportunity, infects charity, and encourages only the vulgarity of competition, the triumphs, the suspicion, the heart-break of the acquisitive life."
"And what was more, he had grown to like the troglodytes, these fierce, unfashionable expatriates. What was fine in them, their refusal to conform, their independence, their moral courage, was their own; what was weak, their instability, hopelessness and predatory friendships, was the result of a system: of the clumsy capitalist world that exalts money-making and poisons leisure, that suppresses talent, starves its artists, and persecutes its sexual dissenters, that denies opportunity, infects charity, and encourages only the vulgarity of competition, the triumphs, the suspicion, the heart-break of the acquisitive life."
September 29, 2023
Naylor is a pompous Englishman:
He goes to the South of France to examine the leftovers from the summer season: a collection of bohemians, artists and homosexuals left straggling in the rock pool of Trou-sur-mer. He is instantly sucked into their world: they latch on to him like limpets, drain him, and just as quickly drop him.
It is hard to know who is worst: the artists trying leech money off someone (usually to spend it on getting drunk) or the protagonist ("he was fond of convincing himself that he was a not unimportant cog in the machine") who thinks he is above it all but is dragged into the last stagnant pools and abandoned in drunken self reflection:
"He had pleasant manners which he had learnt at school, while Oxford had fostered […] two separate veins of pedantry and lechery, which, united when drunk and when sober divided, were the most definite things that you noticed about him."
He goes to the South of France to examine the leftovers from the summer season: a collection of bohemians, artists and homosexuals left straggling in the rock pool of Trou-sur-mer. He is instantly sucked into their world: they latch on to him like limpets, drain him, and just as quickly drop him.
"He felt a moment of profound misery, a moment when he considered that nobody really cared what happened to him; his idea of himself as a free spirit who observed the prisoners of the world from the right side of the bars turned to a conviction that he was in solitary confinement"
It is hard to know who is worst: the artists trying leech money off someone (usually to spend it on getting drunk) or the protagonist ("he was fond of convincing himself that he was a not unimportant cog in the machine") who thinks he is above it all but is dragged into the last stagnant pools and abandoned in drunken self reflection:
"He thought of his past. It had kept badly. Something in it, apparently wholesome at the time, had turned in retrospect like milk in a thunderstorm."
June 22, 2020
This is one of those cases where I am torn between awarding stars on the basis of merit (in which case it might be closer to 4 than 3) and on the basis of how much I liked the novel (which resulted in my 3 star rating).
The rock pool is a caustic, unflattering portrait of a cosmopolitan community of sexually uninhibited, mostly broke, opportunistic, aimless, vaguely alcoholic (would be) artists, intellectuals and bright young things residing in mountainside villages about Nice during the thirties. A young Englishman - an effective mixture of pretentiousness, ruthlessness, bitterness, insecurity and self-entitlement - descends among this set. The locals court his favour only to the extent necessary to financially exploit him, after which he is left alone (most of the residents leave) and he turns into one of them.
Somehow the cynicism of it all doesn't make the novel a depressing read, perhaps because nowhere does the book lead the readers to expect much by way of the protagonist's self-redemption. Besides, it is all told with much humour. The cynical outlook is abandoned only for a short while towards the end, when the main character reflects about how this community compares to its more respectable, bourgeois, conformist, heterosexual, city-dwelling counterpart. However, the turn that events take at the end checks any tendency on the reader's part to sympathise with the protagonist's fleeting romanticisation of bohemia.
The rock pool is a caustic, unflattering portrait of a cosmopolitan community of sexually uninhibited, mostly broke, opportunistic, aimless, vaguely alcoholic (would be) artists, intellectuals and bright young things residing in mountainside villages about Nice during the thirties. A young Englishman - an effective mixture of pretentiousness, ruthlessness, bitterness, insecurity and self-entitlement - descends among this set. The locals court his favour only to the extent necessary to financially exploit him, after which he is left alone (most of the residents leave) and he turns into one of them.
Somehow the cynicism of it all doesn't make the novel a depressing read, perhaps because nowhere does the book lead the readers to expect much by way of the protagonist's self-redemption. Besides, it is all told with much humour. The cynical outlook is abandoned only for a short while towards the end, when the main character reflects about how this community compares to its more respectable, bourgeois, conformist, heterosexual, city-dwelling counterpart. However, the turn that events take at the end checks any tendency on the reader's part to sympathise with the protagonist's fleeting romanticisation of bohemia.
December 24, 2022
Really enjoyed. Bohemia in the 30's French Riviera. What a time to be alive!!
July 27, 2023
A strange yet fascinating little novel, which I bought because it is set in a town on the Riviera where we stayed (Cagnes-Sur-Mer, but given a fictitious name). It's largely plotless and ugly moments probably outweigh the beautiful ones, as the protagonist is unlikeable (but feels like a real person). The writing is very much of its time. A historical novel set in the 30s and written today wouldn't resemble this book in the slightest so I cannot recommend it to the casual reader.
October 14, 2022
An interesting short novel about Englishness set in the south of France in the early 1930s. Connolly's Forward says it is about snobbery, published in Paris because English publishers were too afraid of its content- explicitness, obscenity, potential for libel, about a 'futile' young man in a colony of expats living a life soon to disappear.
Edgar Naylor is a young upper middle class academic working on a literary life. Wandering aimlessly he washes up in Trou-sur-Mer, to mingle with local loafers and spongers engaged in love affairs, fights, artistic pursuits. Loathing their louche lifestyle at the same time the uptight and repressed Naylor wants to be accepted into their world. He regards himself as a scientist looking into a rockpool to see what's there, with detached superiority. Naylor's misadventures form the story, such as it is, the process of becoming one of those initially despised.
What truly marks the pleasure of reading however is the quality of writing, that and the attractiveness to a modern audience of a window into a lost time. Connolly's depiction of the landscape and characters whose dissolute, transgressive, bohemian lifestyle has allure that seduces the reader as well as Naylor, with wit, elegance, insight and humour, yet overwhelmingly sad and melancholy because we know what happens by the end of the 30s.
Edgar Naylor is a young upper middle class academic working on a literary life. Wandering aimlessly he washes up in Trou-sur-Mer, to mingle with local loafers and spongers engaged in love affairs, fights, artistic pursuits. Loathing their louche lifestyle at the same time the uptight and repressed Naylor wants to be accepted into their world. He regards himself as a scientist looking into a rockpool to see what's there, with detached superiority. Naylor's misadventures form the story, such as it is, the process of becoming one of those initially despised.
What truly marks the pleasure of reading however is the quality of writing, that and the attractiveness to a modern audience of a window into a lost time. Connolly's depiction of the landscape and characters whose dissolute, transgressive, bohemian lifestyle has allure that seduces the reader as well as Naylor, with wit, elegance, insight and humour, yet overwhelmingly sad and melancholy because we know what happens by the end of the 30s.
July 13, 2017
This is a nice book, probably one I would have liked better had I read it some 20 years ago. All that bohemian approach to the meaninglessness of life appealed to me much more in my youth. Even so, I agree it' well written, and the final chapters are really good and redeem the more or less tepid previous part (if it had ended some 40 pages before, I would rated only a 3 star). Interesting, but I think somewhat dated.
November 10, 2019
The style of writing is intriguing, but the characters were dull and uninteresting, as was the non-story.
I actually abandoned reading the book with only about forty pages to go as I simply didn't care less what might or might not happen to anyone and didn't want to waste any more time on this novel.
I have two far more promising books waiting in the wings.
To sum it up... Much ado about nothing.
Yes, harsh, I know.
Would love to hear other readers views.
I actually abandoned reading the book with only about forty pages to go as I simply didn't care less what might or might not happen to anyone and didn't want to waste any more time on this novel.
I have two far more promising books waiting in the wings.
To sum it up... Much ado about nothing.
Yes, harsh, I know.
Would love to hear other readers views.
August 2, 2016
Increasingly unenjoyable excuse for literature. I made it to the end without much pleasure.
Read
July 1, 2023nasty little book about a nasty little guy
June 11, 2024
This is the sad story of a lonely man, a man with no discernible charisma, trying to be liked.
A English expat and wannabe writer (of course!) with a small private income (such a trope!) staying on the French Riviera visits Trou-sur-Mer, a hilltop town that used to be an artists' colony and is now the watering hole for wannabe artists and writers and assorted bohemians. He decides that they and their milieu will make an interesting study for a book, positioning himself as the archetypal outsider (letters from England show that he was an outsider there; he reflects "They all seemed to be playing a game of grandmother's steps, in which, whenever he looked round at them, they were somehow blandly and innocently nearer the social success which was their universal goal."; Ch 10).
But it's lonely being an outsider. What he really wants is to make friends. But he repeatedly fails to fit in: "He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample." (Ch 5). Some accept him because they want to sponge from him (almost no one has any money) and he spends much more than he can afford trying to buy their friendship. He occasionally gets to sleep with one of the women. A gay man makes overtures towards him: "He felt like the second most unpopular boy at a school receiving overtures from the first." (Ch 3)
The novel didn't really have a plot. It had too many characters. But there was a pervasive sense of sadness. I empathised strongly with this lonely, unpopular man.
In the end, the author asks himself: "Would whatever he wrote remain subject to the laws which governed the young Englishman's first novel and made it a slop-pail for sex, quotations and insincerity?" (Ch 10) Given that this was Connolly's first (and only) novel, these seem appropriate questions to ask:
Though it is never explicit, there is a lot of sex as the bohemians bed-hop across the town. There is frank discussion of both gay and lesbian relationships (which made it impossible to publish in England; this was 1936 and Radclyffe Hall's ground-breaking lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was declared obscene by an English court in 1928.
There are not that many quotations but there is a lot of foreign words and phrases in French and German and Latin. Regular readers of this blog will know that this is one of my pet hates. Is the author just showing off? Probably. Am I expected to be multilingual or does he want me to miss potentially key moments? What's wrong with footnote translations?
But I get the feeling that is is sincere. Connolly was clearly a snob both in terms of class ("Naylor suddenly realised that she was middle-class and, worse, was assuming that he was."; Ch 1) and in terms of intellectuality (all those foreign phrases) but I get the feeling that the description of Naylor as a lonely misfit came from the author's heart.
It's not very structured and sometimes overwritten; most of the characters come across as self-indulgent hedonists. But, as the selected quotes above show, there were moments of wonderful writing.
A English expat and wannabe writer (of course!) with a small private income (such a trope!) staying on the French Riviera visits Trou-sur-Mer, a hilltop town that used to be an artists' colony and is now the watering hole for wannabe artists and writers and assorted bohemians. He decides that they and their milieu will make an interesting study for a book, positioning himself as the archetypal outsider (letters from England show that he was an outsider there; he reflects "They all seemed to be playing a game of grandmother's steps, in which, whenever he looked round at them, they were somehow blandly and innocently nearer the social success which was their universal goal."; Ch 10).
But it's lonely being an outsider. What he really wants is to make friends. But he repeatedly fails to fit in: "He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample." (Ch 5). Some accept him because they want to sponge from him (almost no one has any money) and he spends much more than he can afford trying to buy their friendship. He occasionally gets to sleep with one of the women. A gay man makes overtures towards him: "He felt like the second most unpopular boy at a school receiving overtures from the first." (Ch 3)
The novel didn't really have a plot. It had too many characters. But there was a pervasive sense of sadness. I empathised strongly with this lonely, unpopular man.
In the end, the author asks himself: "Would whatever he wrote remain subject to the laws which governed the young Englishman's first novel and made it a slop-pail for sex, quotations and insincerity?" (Ch 10) Given that this was Connolly's first (and only) novel, these seem appropriate questions to ask:
Though it is never explicit, there is a lot of sex as the bohemians bed-hop across the town. There is frank discussion of both gay and lesbian relationships (which made it impossible to publish in England; this was 1936 and Radclyffe Hall's ground-breaking lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was declared obscene by an English court in 1928.
There are not that many quotations but there is a lot of foreign words and phrases in French and German and Latin. Regular readers of this blog will know that this is one of my pet hates. Is the author just showing off? Probably. Am I expected to be multilingual or does he want me to miss potentially key moments? What's wrong with footnote translations?
But I get the feeling that is is sincere. Connolly was clearly a snob both in terms of class ("Naylor suddenly realised that she was middle-class and, worse, was assuming that he was."; Ch 1) and in terms of intellectuality (all those foreign phrases) but I get the feeling that the description of Naylor as a lonely misfit came from the author's heart.
It's not very structured and sometimes overwritten; most of the characters come across as self-indulgent hedonists. But, as the selected quotes above show, there were moments of wonderful writing.
October 25, 2024
Back in 2017 and 2018, I've had spurts where I stayed with my sister in Australia. During my spare time, I'd go to second-hand bookstores or book sales: Australia has a greater reading public than the Philippines, so I was optimistic to find books I wouldn't find here.
I had always intended to read Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise, but didn't find a copy of that, until I bought one from eBay late last year. As an analysis of the evolving trends in literature, Connolly provided a masterful dichotomy between the mandarin and the vernacular. Overall, I thought it was a well-written treatise-cum-autobiography.
However, all I found in Australia was a copy of this novel. It would be an understatement to say that nobody reads Connolly nowadays (most people don't even know him). I had no desire to read him right away, but I still felt that I had to purchase the copy, as I don't know when I'd find another one in the wild. Since I'm trying to annihilate my backlog, I finally read the novel today.
Make no mistake: Connolly is an excellent wielder of words. His pinpoint accuracy with using the right words were at play over the course of the novel, and I learned a significant number of words and expressions. In particular, his use of lotophagous was insightful: in one word, he alludes to the mythological lotus-eaters who eat the lotus flower in order to enter a state of dreamy forgetfulness. Disponible as the capacity to be disposed of as one wishes was also a worthy addition to my vocabulary.
Outside of his punctilious use of English, however, the novel was just boring. It was also difficult to empathize with its characters: Edgar Naylor, as the novel progresses, becomes more and more dissolute, and as he is mired with more debt and inebriation, becomes violent toward women and a lech. By the end of the novel, he beats up his paramour, and remains trapped in an aimless hedonism. The other characters aren't any better: if I wanted to watch stupid people doing stupid things, I'd be better off watching reality TV.
Simply put, what makes this novel tolerable is Connolly's skill in writing. There are also occasional gems such as:
Other than that, however, it's best to read Enemies of Promise instead.
I had always intended to read Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise, but didn't find a copy of that, until I bought one from eBay late last year. As an analysis of the evolving trends in literature, Connolly provided a masterful dichotomy between the mandarin and the vernacular. Overall, I thought it was a well-written treatise-cum-autobiography.
However, all I found in Australia was a copy of this novel. It would be an understatement to say that nobody reads Connolly nowadays (most people don't even know him). I had no desire to read him right away, but I still felt that I had to purchase the copy, as I don't know when I'd find another one in the wild. Since I'm trying to annihilate my backlog, I finally read the novel today.
Make no mistake: Connolly is an excellent wielder of words. His pinpoint accuracy with using the right words were at play over the course of the novel, and I learned a significant number of words and expressions. In particular, his use of lotophagous was insightful: in one word, he alludes to the mythological lotus-eaters who eat the lotus flower in order to enter a state of dreamy forgetfulness. Disponible as the capacity to be disposed of as one wishes was also a worthy addition to my vocabulary.
Outside of his punctilious use of English, however, the novel was just boring. It was also difficult to empathize with its characters: Edgar Naylor, as the novel progresses, becomes more and more dissolute, and as he is mired with more debt and inebriation, becomes violent toward women and a lech. By the end of the novel, he beats up his paramour, and remains trapped in an aimless hedonism. The other characters aren't any better: if I wanted to watch stupid people doing stupid things, I'd be better off watching reality TV.
Simply put, what makes this novel tolerable is Connolly's skill in writing. There are also occasional gems such as:
People do not fall in love unless there is a remote chance of success, and those who do are secretly inviting failure.
Other than that, however, it's best to read Enemies of Promise instead.
September 15, 2018
It was probably a coincidence the I began reading this book right after I had streamed a documentary about the life of Jean Michel Basquiat - although the time period of the book was some 40 years before Basquiat was painting and living a dissolute fashionable life in lower Manhattan, the scenes and the characters of the book and the film could have been interchangeable. As another reviewer has remarked, it is strange that this little novel is not better known. The depictions of a small herd of non-conformists living the cafe life in the south of France with their hangers-on, their lovers with ambiguous sexual appetites, and artists in their circle with child-like, irresponsible personalities - this could have been written about the 1980's and no one would notice.
The reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is because the story is told from the point of view of a vapid individual of little talent and, accordingly, his depictions of those around him are superficial and never give any clues to the motivations and inner workings of those around him. He is one of those people that "things happen to." His point of view doesn't allow for any growth or message to emerge. The satire is too subtle to allow for a deeper meaning. Imagine if someone without the depth and warmth and psychological acuity of Patti Smith had written "Just Kids....." That would be the kind of book that is "The Rock Pool."
Do read this, though. You will encounter a tribe of people who we all thought could not have existed before Warhol and Stonewall.
The reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is because the story is told from the point of view of a vapid individual of little talent and, accordingly, his depictions of those around him are superficial and never give any clues to the motivations and inner workings of those around him. He is one of those people that "things happen to." His point of view doesn't allow for any growth or message to emerge. The satire is too subtle to allow for a deeper meaning. Imagine if someone without the depth and warmth and psychological acuity of Patti Smith had written "Just Kids....." That would be the kind of book that is "The Rock Pool."
Do read this, though. You will encounter a tribe of people who we all thought could not have existed before Warhol and Stonewall.
December 22, 2018
Only read the author's introduction ( of the Hamish Hamilton 1947 edition – it was first published in 1939, in Paris, by Obelisk), and it seems again this book is about a disappeared 1920s, of artist "colonies" of bohemian lay-abouts in southern France.
"Any first book is always in the nature of a tardy settlement of an account with the past, and in this case my debt is with the nineteen-twenties. It was a period when art was concerned with futility, when heroes were called Denis and Nigel and Stephen and had a tortured look. I wonder who remembers them now. In any case I think I may claim to have created a young man as futile as any. It also dates because the life it deals with has almost disappeared; the last lingering colonies of expatriates have now been mopped up, and if you were to pass by Trou-sur-Mer you would find no trace even of any of the characters in the Rock Pool. The bars are closed, the hotel is empty, the nymphs have departed."
"Any first book is always in the nature of a tardy settlement of an account with the past, and in this case my debt is with the nineteen-twenties. It was a period when art was concerned with futility, when heroes were called Denis and Nigel and Stephen and had a tortured look. I wonder who remembers them now. In any case I think I may claim to have created a young man as futile as any. It also dates because the life it deals with has almost disappeared; the last lingering colonies of expatriates have now been mopped up, and if you were to pass by Trou-sur-Mer you would find no trace even of any of the characters in the Rock Pool. The bars are closed, the hotel is empty, the nymphs have departed."
September 18, 2024
It's a well focused satirical plot. Connolly starts with the snobbish character and pokes in new experiences to further push his exploration and keep the character descending to new lows. A lot of the strength of this book stems from how it leans into a cynical outlook - definitely an exhausting read if that's not up your alley.
It's all the more relevant to enjoy the overall playfulness of the author because the protagonist itself isn't really likable. Granted, if he was, the events would generate discomfort as opposed to schadenfreude.
Even if the particulars have gotten outdated (since the 1930s). It still poses topical questions around fitting into society and what we can expect from those that don't.
It's all the more relevant to enjoy the overall playfulness of the author because the protagonist itself isn't really likable. Granted, if he was, the events would generate discomfort as opposed to schadenfreude.
Even if the particulars have gotten outdated (since the 1930s). It still poses topical questions around fitting into society and what we can expect from those that don't.
September 2, 2024
As a sort of axe-to-grind anthropological study of a certain corner of interwar bohemia in the south of France, this was interesting enough. But as a novel it’s pretty rough: the characters are attempted to be drawn to be pretty specific types but are too fuzzy; the heavy handed plot inversion is dull, etc.
February 6, 2024
I can’t help thinking that it isn’t a good sign for a writer’s first novel to be quite so louche and dissipated as The Rock Pool, and in fact this was also Connolly’s LAST novel. An account of wastrels in a resort town in the south of France, and markedly lesbian in content for a novel by a straight male writer, The Rock Pool captures the lassitude of an impecunious protagonist who can barely force himself to get up in the morning (this is described multiple times).
Reading a bit about Connolly’s disappointed life, which is chock full of literary names and dodges about money and pointless to-ing and fro-ing, one immediately detects that unlike an F. Scott Fitzgerald who could live the heavy social drinking lifestyle and somehow write about it with insight and sparkle, it just messed Cyril up, to the point where he had much difficulty focusing (he left fragments of several other novels). He didn’t even have the alcoholic spurts of energy of a Malcolm Lowry, although he did manage to write a rather famous apologia, Enemies of Promise, about why he couldn’t achieve what he wanted to.
Beyond the booze, my partial take is that jadedness before age 40 is not only unattractive, but de-energizing: Connolly was been there, done that, almost from the beginning, and you need enthusiasm and drive to get the big projects done, which he appears not to have possessed.
Despite all that, The Rock Pool is a quite interesting read, and Connolly was later a fairly productive journalist and critic. He just wasn’t a big-guns, sustained-effort kind of writer; even Enemies of Promise and his other well-known book, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus, look very SECTIONAL, and The Rock Pool itself is a shortish novel.
Reading a bit about Connolly’s disappointed life, which is chock full of literary names and dodges about money and pointless to-ing and fro-ing, one immediately detects that unlike an F. Scott Fitzgerald who could live the heavy social drinking lifestyle and somehow write about it with insight and sparkle, it just messed Cyril up, to the point where he had much difficulty focusing (he left fragments of several other novels). He didn’t even have the alcoholic spurts of energy of a Malcolm Lowry, although he did manage to write a rather famous apologia, Enemies of Promise, about why he couldn’t achieve what he wanted to.
Beyond the booze, my partial take is that jadedness before age 40 is not only unattractive, but de-energizing: Connolly was been there, done that, almost from the beginning, and you need enthusiasm and drive to get the big projects done, which he appears not to have possessed.
Despite all that, The Rock Pool is a quite interesting read, and Connolly was later a fairly productive journalist and critic. He just wasn’t a big-guns, sustained-effort kind of writer; even Enemies of Promise and his other well-known book, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus, look very SECTIONAL, and The Rock Pool itself is a shortish novel.
December 11, 2013
This one feels very precisely dated: the main character has a horror of all things middle class and is thrown into a weird bohemian village where everyone's hopping into bed with everyone else but nothing gets described and even the nods and winks got it rejected by respectable publishers. I think a social historian could plot its position on the graph of changing attitudes to within about 3 months.
I enjoyed the first chapter, got annoyed with it and then felt a sudden warmth for the hero in the last ten pages.
I enjoyed the first chapter, got annoyed with it and then felt a sudden warmth for the hero in the last ten pages.
July 31, 2012
Read this while holidaying in the Med which helped me to appreciate the heat and languid lifestyle Naylor experiences. Some impressive observations, the most memorable being '...the clumsy capitalist world that exalts money-making and poisons leisure, that supresses talent, starves its artists...and encourages only the vulgarity of competition'.
All the more poignant a novel for the postcript which preceeds its telling...
All the more poignant a novel for the postcript which preceeds its telling...
December 10, 2015
The bad (re)print made this less of a joy than the content is worth. This is still a very contemporary novel and a really good read. s it really about a lost era?
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