Cyril Connolly founded and edited a famous literary magazine (Horizon), wrote a novel (The Rock Pool) and several other books, and was for decades one of Britain’s most influential literary journalists and book reviewers. In his own eyes, however, this eminent man of letters was a failure because he never wrote the masterpiece that he and others expected him to produce. It was a failure he dwelt on throughout his life, never more eloquently than in the pages of this book. Detailing the formation of his own sensibility, Enemies of Promise combines personal history, advice, and shrewd critical commentary into an unconventional how-not-to guide to a literary vocation. “By turns funny, astute and elegiac”—to borrow the apt adjectives of Connolly’s biographer Jeremy Lewis—Enemies of Promise offers a bracing education for aspiring writers; it’s filled with expressive pleasures and intuitions about life and literature that will reward readers, too.
To be read with Orwell’s Such, such were the joys.
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