A voyage towards a masterpiece?

books:

	• The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus Cyril Connolly Persea Books, 2005 - 160 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Unwittingly, a masterpiece

Cyril Connolly was a prolifically talented schoolboy. Tipped by many for great literary achievement, he wore the burden of this promise like a ball and chain for the rest of his life, anxiously ruminating on greatness.

He was one of the best read men of his generation, and felt that the virgin snow where Shakespeare and Montaigne cut their initial, deep furrows had since become flattened by innumerable tracks so it was no longer able to receive an impression.

Connolly was a great epicurian intellectual, a man whose mind watches itself in Camus' definition. He brooded obsessively on the human condition, admiring those writers who spat in the eye of the ephemeral fame and glory of their own era to follow the solitary and near impossible road to producing a great masterpiece.

A multitude of journalism, a small novel was written, but the masterpiece Connolly was tipped for never came.

But wait. In the course of a lifetime anxiously pondering, well, life itself, Connolly accumulated a hoard of aphorisms that relate to the human being as he or she passes through the stages of life, some of them from the great writers he admired, some of them his own. Here are some choice cuts:

(From Eliot): ''Someone said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.'

'The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.'

'Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable.'

'I am now forced to admit that anxiety is my true condition, occasionally intruded on by work, pleasure, melancholy or despair.'

The quote from Hemingway on the cover of my paperback edition holds true: 'A book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough.'

A masterpiece arrived at through the back door.

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It makes you think

The Unquiet Grave smells of the mannered ways of the English Middle Class before WW2. It has a certain pretentiousness which will repel some but open doors for others. It consists of paragraphs each of which contain a thought culled mostly from the wisdom literature of the last 3 millennia. Not all these thoughts are attributed, so some are presumably those of the author. They do, however, hang together well and may spark a high rate of response in their reader. Connolly does seem to reflect the anxious yearning for direction and certainty which infects many. Those people who current wisdom says should be secure in our modern world but who feel anything but secure will find the book reflecting their uncertainties. It will strike more chords in California than Bosnia, and some of the chords will be life enhancing.

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A voyage towards a masterpiece?

This work was written according to the author's introduction to the revised version between 1942 and 1943 in the midst of the great war. It was written when the former capitol of the world, according to him, London was filled with gloom. It is a reflection on literature and life, and many believe it is the masterpiece that Cyril Connally all his life strove to create.
In it he reflects on greatness in literature and on the meaning of the true masterpiece. He says,when including works by Horace, Virgil, Villon, Montaigne, La Fontaine, La Rouchefoucaud, La Bruyere, Baudelaire, Pope, Leopardi, Rimbaud, Byron in his list, that what is common to them is"Love of life and nature: lack of belief in the iea of progress: interest in , mingled with contempt for humanity. .. In feeling, these works of art contain the maximum of emotion compatible with a classical sense of form."
'Palinurus' is clearly a Francophile who in the midst of the war feels deeply the separation from the Continent, from France especially.
He writes what he calls ' the doubts and reflections of a year' in 'three or four rhythms: art, love, nature and religion.an experiment in self- dismantling , a search for the obstruction which is blocking the flow from the well and whereby the name of Palinurus is becoming an archetype of frustration."
The great critic Walter Benjamin thought to construct according to Hannah Arendt , a masterpiece made out of the quotations of other writers. Connally here devotes a good share of the text to the wisest wisdom he according to his lights could find in others. He also offers his own ruminations in part as a way of consoling himself for the personal loss which in some way sets the grieving tone of the work.
Does it amount to a masterpiece? I would almost want to answer ' for those who feel it so'.
Palinurus himself says of Palinurus in the concluding page of the volume, "Palinurus, in fact, though he despises the emptiness of achievement , the applause of the multitude and the rewards of fame, comes in his long exile to hate himself for this contempt and so jumps childishly at the chance to be perpetuated as an obscure cape."
It appears that if Cyril Connally is perpetuated in Literature it will be through this particular voyage in the heart of life and literature.

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Famous Word Cycle

The book consists of the doubts and reflections of a year. Life has no more continuity than a pool in the rocks. The author asserts that Christianity and Buddhism are stratagems of failure. Success in life is defined by survival. One should study a long life, Goethe's.

The decision to marry balances the fear of bondage against the fear of loneliness. A man with a will to power can have no friends. A woman's desire for revenge outlasts her other emotions. Three faults infect every activity--laziness, vanity, cowardice. These characteristics are impediments to wisdom.

Happiness rests in the avoidance of angst. Anxiety at being kept waiting is a form of jealousy. Connolly relates that the creative moment of a writer comes with the autumn. Surrealism seems to exist in vast cities. Works of art need valid myths, belief, vocation.

No happiness can be obtained through the destruction of another person's happiness. Reading and routines are sanctuaries. Civilized people get more out of life than the uncivilized. Central heating benefitted the north. Air conditioning will benefit the south. In all cultures factors of decadence are a constant.

Ennui is produced through not fulfilling our potential. Artists, mystics, naturalists, and mathematicians work in solitude. The cortex is a machine for thinking. Tea, coffee, alcohol stimulate. People consumed with curiousity without love should write maxims.

Hemingway saturated his books with the memory of physical pleasure. Art is memory, re-enacted desire. The English language is like a broad river. Unhappiness can be valuable. Bio-physical equilibrium is a source of happiness.

This cobbled-together account of deep reading and thinking makes a wonderful book.

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reviews: page 1, 2

This enduring classic is "a book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough" (Ernest Hemingway).

Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) was one of the most influential book reviewers and critics in England, contributing regularly to The New Statesmen, The Observer, and The Sunday Times. His essays have been collected in book form and published to wide acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Unquiet Grave is considered by many to be his most enduring work. It is a highly personal journal written during the devastation of World War II, filled with reflective passages that deal with aging, the break-up of a long term relationship, and the horrors of the war around him. It is also a wonderfully varied intellectual feast: a collection of aphorisms, epigrams, and quotations from such masters of European literature as Horace, Baudelaire, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, and Goethe.

Dazzlingly original in both form and content, The Unquiet Grave has continued to influence generations of writers.

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