Vol. 5 No. 15 · 18 August 1983
pages 3-6 | 4143 words
Speaking well
Christopher Ricks
- Cyril Connolly: Journal and Memoir by David Pryce-Jones
Collins, 304 pp, £12.50, July 1983, ISBN 0 333 32827 2
- J.B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W.B. Yeats and Others, 1869-1922 edited with a memoir by Joseph Hone
Secker, 296 pp, £7.95, May 1983, ISBN 0 436 59205 3
Unlike the publication in 1975 of the touching acute letters of Cyril Connolly to Noel Blakiston, the publication of Connolly’s Journal (1928-1937) does not serve him, except right. He found D.H. Lawrence insufficiently magnanimous (‘Notice how carefully Lawrence refuses to recognise virtue in anyone but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F.R. Leavis much the same, so it may be legitimate to cite the famous excoriation of Bloomsbury that was voiced by Lawrence and amplified by Leavis: ‘they talked endlessly, but endlessly – and never, never a good thing said. They are cased each in a hard littte shell of his own and out of this they talk words. There is never for one second any outgoing of feeling and no reverence, not a crumb or grain of reverence: I cannot stand it.’ The reason why ‘never a good thing said’ was such a good thing to say is that it aligns speaking well with speaking well of others. In that world, a very special thrill attached to speaking ill of one’s friends.
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Letters
Vol. 5 No. 16 · 1 September 1983
From Anne Olivier Bell
SIR: It is depressing to see a Professor of English, in his damnation-by-association of Cyril Connolly (LRB, Vol. 5, No 15), trotting out the hoary old myth, sanctified by Dr Leavis, of D.H. Lawrence’s ‘famous excoriation of Bloomsbury’. Lawrence’s outburst was written, in 1915, after an evening spent with Frieda, David Garnett and Francis Birrell, during which he couldn’t, or didn’t, get a word in edgeways; his ‘excoriation’ was of ‘these young people’ and their talk: ‘never, never a good thing said.’ The reason this was such a good thing to say, writes Professor Ricks, is ‘that it aligns speaking well with speaking well of others.’ ‘In that world a very special thrill attached to speaking ill of one’s friends.’ Although it is Lawrence who is here speaking ill of his friends, Professor Ricks leads us to infer ‘that world’ to be Bloomsbury; and to reinforce his insinuation cites ‘the malicious rage which … Virginia Woolf vented … upon Cyril Connolly’.
One of the objects in publishing a writer’s private letters and diaries in extenso is to enable readers to form a more balanced view of his/her character and personality; one of the dangers is that it enables professors of English etc to pad out their reviews and prejudices by using the indexes to find instant quotes. The Connollys were not friends of Virginia Woolf’s (a fact which could be deduced by further recourse to the indexes to her letters and diaries), thus the unkind if apt description of them confided to her diary and to her sister on encountering them in Elizabeth Bowen’s remote Irish mansion does nothing to support Professor Ricks’s bizarre conception of how members of ‘that world’ achieved their special thrills.
Anne Olivier Bell
Lewes
Vol. 5 No. 19 · 20 October 1983
From Brian Louis Pearce
SIR: In his review concerning Cyril Connolly and Jack Yeats (LRB, Vol. 5, No 15), in which he pays worthy tribute to the latter, Christopher Ricks opines that Enemies of Promise is Connolly’s best book. He could be right, though some may opt for The Rock Pool or object that Enemies is three books rather than one. My own preference would be for The Unquiet Grave, that beautifully composed compendium in which the original passages are rarely inferior to the quoted ones. It is a sensitive, intimate book, showing a delicate insight, a wistful understanding, seldom other than lucid and moving. The ideal book for the ‘bedside’, it is high time it was reprinted. It should be there to be savoured, a few pages a day, in between earning one’s living. A salute to the light, it is hard to reconcile it, with that drab world of cat-talk with which the first page of Professor Ricks’s article is mostly concerned. But whether or not these persons did or said the unpleasantnesses attributed to them matters little now. What matters is their art. The Unquiet Grave is a beautiful book, as (who would deny?) is The Waves. It no longer matters what their authors said at soirées.
Brian Louis Pearce
Twickenham
