Cyril Vernon Connolly

Literary critic and writer Cyril Connolly was the founder and editor of the influential literary magazine Horizon (1940–1949) and wrote Enemies of Promise (1938), which combined literary criticism with an autobiographical exploration of why he failed to become the successful author of fiction that he had aspired to be in his youth.

He was born on Sept. 10, 1903, in Coventry, Warwickshire, England, the only child of Major Matthew William Kemble Connolly (1872–1947), an officer in the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, by his Anglo-Irish wife, Muriel Maud Vernon, daughter of Colonel Edward Vernon (1838–1913) J.P., D.L., of Clontarf Castle, Co. Dublin. His parents had met while his father was serving in Ireland, and his father's next posting was to South Africa. Connolly's father was also a malacologist and mineral collector of some reputation and collected many samples in Africa. Cyril Connolly's childhood days were spent with his father in South Africa, with his mother's family at Clontarf Castle, and with his paternal grandmother in Bath and other parts of England.

Connolly was educated at Eton College and then at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1927 he began a career of literary journalism as a contributor to the New Statesman, The Sunday Times, Observer, and other periodicals. His only novel, The Rock Pool, about the headlong decline of a young Englishman in a Riviera art colony, appeared in 1936. His most noted books are his collections of essays, Enemies of Promise (1938), which contains an autobiographical section, and The Condemned Playground (1945); and an assemblage of introspective jottings, The Unquiet Grave (1944). Previous Convictions: Selected Writings of a Decade was published in 1963, and The Evening Colonnade, a collection of essays, in 1975.

Personal Life

Connolly was married three times. His first wife Jean Bakewell (1910–1950) left him in 1939, moving back to the United States. She later became the wife of Laurence Vail (former husband of Peggy Guggenheim and Kay Boyle) but, following years of health problems, died of a stroke while on a trip to Paris at the age of 39. Connolly married his second wife, Barbara Skelton, in 1950. His third wife, whom he married in 1959, was Deirdre Craven, a granddaughter of James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon, by whom he had two children later in life. After Connolly's death in 1974 she married Peter Levi.

In 1967 Connolly settled in Eastbourne, to the amusement of Beaton who suggested he was lured back by the cakes they had enjoyed in school outings to the town. He died suddenly at Eastbourne in 1974, having continued to the end as a Sunday Times journalist.

Since 1976, Connolly's papers and personal library of over 8,000 books have been housed at the University of Tulsa.

Sources: Wikipedia, Biography

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