Our book today is Cyril Connolly’s 1938 masterpiece of snark and summation, Enemies of Promise, which largely baffled its critics when it first appeared and has survived them all, as Connolly himself sometimes predicted it would in his tipsier moments. The book is split into three long sections, the first, “The Predicament,” being a tour de horizon of the current reading-world and its trends, almost all of which Connolly very politely deplores, the second, “The Charlock’s Shade,” being a protracted analysis of all the various ways writers wander into thistles and come to ruin, and the third, “A Georgian Boyhood,” being wonderfully acidic account of the author’s own boyhood and youth.

It was the last section that really irritated the critics who were inclined to irritation; they protested, rightly, that it just sat there, utterly out of place. Connolly rather lamely defended it by saying it provided the personal background for all the pronouncements made in the first two sections, but no amount of rationalizing can hide the fact that the third section, though wonderfully written, is an entirely different book than the first two sections and a less entertaining one. It can be summed up fairly accurately in one line: “Edwardian English boys’ schools were a very good rough approximation of Hell itself.”

The first two sections can’t be summed up easily at all, although they can be characterized: Connolly is hugely intelligent and has a great knack for pith. His one-liners are so tart and opinionated that they can still spark argumentative reactions even now. Any reading of Enemies of Promise will have a reader underlining gems like “One can fool the public about a book but the public will store up resentment in proportion to its folly,” or “Children dissipate the longing for immortality which is the compensation of the childless writer’s work.”

And apart from the catcalls, underneath the easy sneering, Connolly is a wonderfully discriminating and even moralistic reader, one who treasures the glories of his day’s literature (it’s uncanny how many of the books he lists as great in the 1930s are books we still consider great – there’s virtually none of the typical “Hamlin Garland is a giant of our time” pronouncements you so often find in old collections of criticism) and scorns the oceans of trash that were as deep in his own day as they are in our own. And since he approaches the subject as a writer as well as a critic, he reserves a special contempt for fellow writers who’ve sufficiently sold their souls to make those oceans just a bit deeper. He wants them to cure themselves:

The one way by which a cure can be undertaken is to persuade such writers to re-read their own books or those contemporary books which, up to a year ago, they most admired. Then, however jauntily they may protest – ‘Well, it was what the public wanted at the time – it was in me and it had to come out; it means no more to me now than my old toe-nails – and hell, who wants to read the same book twice, anyway,’ a doubt will have arisen.

The second section, being mostly a roadmap of ruin, is my favorite of the three, especially the hilarious essay called “The Blue Bugloss,” which deals with writers who fall, by steady stages, to the wretched craft of book-reviewing. The essay is very nearly as much fun as Connolly’s masterpiece of spite, “Ninety Years of Novel Reviewing” (a very difficult essay for any reviewer to read – a laughing-while-wincing type of thing) and deals with the those poor saps who fall into the broad category between “a Hazlitt or a wise old literary stager.” Both those extremes can handle the daily book-review grind happily, without experiencing either burnout or delusion. For all those wretched creatures who fall in between those two extremes, Connolly has some stern words of warning:

Reviewing is a whole-time job with a half-time salary, a job in which the best in him is generally expended on the mediocre in others. A good review is only remembered for a fortnight; a reviewer has always to make his reputation afresh nor will he find time for private reading or writing, for he is too busy reading other people’s books and this will disincline him to read when he is not working. The sight of his friends’ books accumulating depresses him and he knows that, besides losing the time to write books of his own, he is also losing the energy and the application, frittering it away on tripe and discovering that it is his flashiest efforts which receive most praise.

I just recently re-read Enemies of Promise (I have a somewhat shabby trade paperback, which is serving its duty until a Penguin Classic of the book comes along) and found myself smiling and underlining with exactly the same enjoyment I experienced the first time I read it (and the second, and the third). Aspiring to write book-talk that can inspire such enjoyment almost a century after it was written is enough to fire the hopes of pretty much any old literary stager.