Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. ... Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion.
– James Baldwin
…. there is not less, but more in the idea of nonbeing than that of being, in disorder than in order, in the possible than in the real.
— Gilles Deleuze
CREDENTIALS AS FORM
And there it is. Midway through Enemies of Promise, after a stream of eloquent rants (i.e. Proust bad; E. M. Forster divine), the formidable critic named Cyril Connolly turns on himself.
The provocation is titled “Chapter XVII: Credentials,” a single page of text wherein Connolly gets naked, formally and textually, autiobiographically, where the most graphic acts are conducted by professors at Eton:
Up to this point, the function of the work has been entirely critical and performed with those privileges of the critic which allow him to assume equality with those whom he criticizes and to take their books to pieces as if he were their equal in stature. But this equality is a fiction, just as it is a fiction that a juryman is superior to the temptations and stupidities of the prisoner he judges or qualified to convict a company director on a point of corporation law.
And then, Connolly intimates that the illusion of critical neutrality comes at the cost of continuously denying and disavowing the effects of his personal biases, formative experiences, and socialization:
A critic is a product of his time who may affect impartiality but who while claiming authority over the reader projects his doubt and aspiration.
And then:
Every critic writes as if he were infallible, and pretends that he is the embodiment of impartial intellectual sanity, a reasonable though omniscient pontiff. But without his surplice the preacher of the loftiest sermon is only human or subhuman, and now is the moment to step down from the pulpit, to disrobe in the vestry. The autobiography which follows is intended to be such a disrobing; it is meant to be an analysis of the grounding in life and art which the critic received, of the ideas which formed him in youth; the education, the ideals, the disappointments from which are drawn his experience, the fashions he may unwittingly follow and the flaws he may conceal.
And so, the writer presumes herself god; the critic presumes herself the Pope; the costume presumes itself to be of inestimable value. Adorably, Connolly doesn’t prevaricate. He assumes the critic is human; despite pretensions to infallibility, the critic is as much a product of his time as the latest ad-trend. Like any 21st century teen, the critic wants to go viral. The critic watches the linguistic turn in the culture industry and keeps abreast of the most recent breast-related events in the tabloids. The critic is socialized by the dominant media and the desires of the ruling elite. The critic “projects his doubt and aspiration . . . while claiming authority over the reader.” The critic knows bravada, bravado, bavardage.
Notabily, loftiness is a lonely and insecure height — but a lucrative one. The autobiographical critic doesn’t mention this. Instead, Connolly launches (a slightly wobbly analogy): “a critic is an instrument which registers certain observations; before the reader can judge of their value he must know sufficient of the accuracy of the instrument to allow for the margin of error.” And then he zooms in on the shiny surface of the instrument, expanding the mirror:
We grow up among theories and illusions common to our class, our race, our time. We absorb them unawares and their effect is incalculable. What are they? In this case, I am trying to find out, hoping that all I discover, however personal, may prove of use. To do so I have to refer to something which I find intolerable, the early aura of large houses, fallen fortunes and county families common to so many English autobiographers. If the reader can stomach this, I will try to make it up to him.
The apologia is peak Connolly, rubbing his aureole, holding his line, tongue-in-cheek and dead earnest.
What he calls “the autobiography to follow” is memoir of socialization, from the formative ideas of youth to the degrees and fraternities, and then from the fashions he lauds to the “ideals” and “disappointments” that shaped his preferences. Whatever the critic measures depends on how the critic measures themselves. And the critic articulates this measurement in the first line of the autobiographical section:
I have always disliked myself, at any given moment; the total of such moments is my life.
I won’t deny my shock of self-recognition upon reading Connolly’s statement. Nor will I lie by leaving disclaiming the tingling sensation which announces the presence of a kindred spirit: a melancholeric Romantic of the younger years who waves up at her from the page. Like his reader, Connolly whittled away his college days in arbor near the library, where he specialized in “the heresies of anarchists and Albigensians.” Like his reader, he consumed and admired the heretics and the atrocious events of the Middle Ages. To be horribly honest, he loved them all: the courageous Manicheaens, the cosmic love-crimes of the Abelardians, the heroisms of Frederic Stupormundi, the self-mortifications of the Flagellants . . .
But there is more. (He missed Simone Weil, after all.)
Or maybe less. For up there above the rest, somewhere in the stars of his possible futurisms, the Young Romantic adored his Nomanians, the believers in the religion known as No Man, the minds who heaved to simple credos, including “No Man living hath seen God” and “To No Man is it given to escape Death.”
A personal history implicated by the sensibility of the Young Romantic turns Older Writers into friends. They are bonded by secret affinity and perhaps envy for the passionate beliefs of their younger selves, even as they reproach these prior selves for having actually believed anything. Sensibility never gets over its prior selves. This is why sensibility-based friendships feel closer to ideal kinships, conversations hidden in quiet patches between trees where the cruel world of school and sports cannot find you. Where the judgement of the world lacks significance. Where books matter more than SATs.
Of course, literary preferences and cold apple pie are a matter of taste. And maybe we knew then what we cannot afford to know now, given how much more we know and yet how much less occasion we have to share it and commune with others around it. And there it is again — “the intensity of that gem-like flame,” Walter Pater’s dazzling oxymoron. A spark and a sparkling dissonance.
CREDENTIALS AS CONTENT
A few excerpts from this bouquet of critical writing, beginning with what his British professors taught vis a vis poetry and the arousals of purple prose:
To the description of his thrall to Romanticism, which ends by naming the boy he loved for the entirety of his three years at St. Wulfric’s as Tony Watson:
Irresistible Connolly, bearing “the mark of a willful astigmatism” on his forehead — and studying it. Last but not least, given the myriad other things I should be doing, here is how the critic described his discovery of mortality:
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Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)