Wes Lawrence

Lovely Connolly Collection

"Because Mr. Connolly writes with such lucid and supple grace and holds the creative intellect in deepest regard, the cultivated reader will find this book a rewarding and delightful experience.”

So says the publisher of Previous Convictions, Cyril Connolly's first book in 10 years (Harper & Row, $5.95), but I was thinking as I read the book that this was an excellent means for those of us who are less well read than would make us truly cultivated to enlarge our literary acquaint-

ance.

WES LAWRENCE Previous Convictions is a collection of the British critic's best writing of the last decade, and most of the collection consists of book reviews, although there are some travel pieces, a couple of satires and a few general essays. But these are not ordinary book reviews, for Connolly, one of the sweetest living writers of English, writes book reviews in such a manner that one is scarcely aware that they are book reviews.

He indulges in none of the cliches of the trade, and his reviews, with their freshness of metaphor, their amiable views, their readability, are as often as not better literature than their subjects.、

CONSIDER, FOR EXAMPLE, the first sentence in the review of a book by George Gissing: "In the snow-bound country small-hours the intensity of the silence becomes a form of life-giving medium like the blood which the ghosts sip in Homer."

Consider his non-puritanical sermon in a review of Turnbull's biography of

Scott Fitzgerald: "I never want to read about another alcoholic; alcoholism is the enemy of art and the curse of Western civilization. It is neither poetic nor amusing. I am not referring to people getting drunk but to the gradual blotting of the sensibilities and the destruction of personal relationships involved in the long-drawn-out social suicide. The greater the artist, the deadlier the process.'

HERE IS CONNOLLY on the need to go back to the earlier work of such writers as E. E. Cummings: "Anarchist attitudes age badly."

Connolly's literary tastes are inclusive; there is a whole section about books on nature, a subject in which he is quite as taken by the marvelous as you or I. He passes on the knowledge gained from Dr. H. Hediger that the cells of a live sponge, when passed through a sieve, will reassemble into the original animal, and he is as upset as he should be by Dr. Hediger's guess that there is prob ably not a jungle elephant in Africa which has not been shot at,

HERE IS CONNOLLY on a Cieveland poet: "Hart Crane was a frenzied middle-western alcoholic homosexual whose passion was to write like Rimbaud and who succeeded. He was nearly as important as Dylan Thomas, who greatly admired him...

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And here is Connolly on his beliefs: "I believe in two wholly admirable human activities, guilt-free, unpunished, two ends in themselves rewarding: the satisfaction of curiosity (acquirement of knowledge) and the mating of like minds (friendship and mutual attraction) with the apprehension of beauty in so far as it is not to be included in the other two.” A lovely book!