Who Kills Cock Robin?

ENEMIES OF PROMISE (265 pp.)--Cyrit Connolly--Macmillan ($4).

Ten years ago England's waspish Critic Cyril Connolly attempted to figure out how to write a book that would attain the "immortality" of lasting for ten years--nine years longer, say, than the average novel. His own book on the subject, Enemies of Promise, has made the grade: first published in 1938, it has become a familiar, if not a favorite, of many English and U.S. intellectuals. It has now been reissued, and the story it tells is as interesting and topical as ever.

Connolly is chiefly concerned with "the artist," and with what makes him tick, and stop ticking. Why, asks Connolly, does young "Mr. Shelleyblake" write a first novel that the critics hail as bursting with "promise"--only to find that in his next novels young Shelleyblake fails to deliver the promised goods? Is the broken promise the fault of Shelleyblake himself, or of his critics, or of the world in which he writes?

Daddy In the Mines. Connolly's answer, which spreads the blame over a wide area, is written lightly, wittily, and with essential gloom. Mr. Shelleyblake's first novel is generated by a youthful vigor and freshness ; it stands out from the tired works of his older contemporaries. The publisher is pleased, and promptly asks Mr. Shelleyblake if he is at work on Opus 2. Mr. Shelleyblake is too shy, or too ambitious, or too much in need of money to admit that having just blown his top in Opus i he hasn't got enough steam up to do it again. What's more, he has recently fallen in love and married ("Sex," says Connolly, "is a substitute for artistic creation"), and the charm of new-blooming domesticity is making his old notions about art-for-art's-sake look rather silly. So Mr. Shelleyblake signs the contract and goes home to write--what? Well, at least he knows it has to be fiction and run to about 300 pages.

Get Him When He's Down. At this point the other enemies of promise smell blood and close in. While Mr. Shelleyblake is struggling to write the book that he is in fact incapable of writing, he gets a warm note from "Mr. Vampire," a literary editor: "I was so interested to meet you the other night . . . [I have been] looking for someone to [review] the Nonesuch Boswell, and your name cropped up." Mr. Shelleyblake is flattered, and relieved to lay aside his dreadful novel; and his review is enjoyed by all. Unfortunately, his new novel, when at last it appears, is not; but by then Mr. Shelleyblake has become another man, living in another world.

He is no longer a novelist, but he is everything else--a critic who writes a knowing account of royal mistresses, an avid traveler whose "escapes" abroad produce delightful travelogues, a father who often yearns for solitude. He is also drinking more than he used to, as a result of his failure as a novelist, but he is raising his standard of living as a result of his popular "success." In short, he is a dead duck.

Connolly lists the other enemies that combine to destroy Mr. Shelleyblake-- the pointing finger of international politics (which makes him ashamed to sit tight in an ivory tower), the fatal praise that he receives for socially conscious essays, the damning embarrassment of friends who once hymned his promise.

Can he make a new start? It is just possible, Connolly thinks--provided Mr. Shelleyblake is prepared to ditch all his responsibilities to his wife, his children, politics, Mr. Vampire--in fact, to everything except his best work.

Eton Made Me. Connolly concludes his book with a chunk of autobiography that illustrates parts of his thesis. Like Shelleyblake, he too had shown high promise. From his prep school he won a scholarship to Eton; from Eton he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He drugged himself with the heady compliments of classics masters, and made a bible of the Romantic tradition. Now, he feels, it was hardly surprising that his boyish successes served only to underscore his inability to continue them. "I was to continue . . . being promising indefinitely . . . Promise is the capacity for letting people down . . ."

What fatally distorts Critic Connolly's frank and intelligent book is his conception of "the artist." To Connolly, art is a fragile thing, and its maker a highly vulnerable esthete. Gide, Proust, Strachey, Rimbaud and other artists of a particularly tortured and susceptible nature are his inspiration; he draws none from more robust types such as Dickens, Trollope, Shaw, Dostoevsky, Thackeray. His artist is a creature entirely different from the rest of humanity--a fact that makes Connolly regard Mr. Shelleyblake's failure as something horrifying and unusual, as though it were not a common fate in all walks of life.

Indeed, the one terrible enemy of promise that Connolly ignores is the third degree to which the "artist" is subjected today by lovers of the arts such as Connolly himself. A glaring spotlight, directed by dogmatic esthetes, assures the artist of his isolation and triumphantly detects his childhood scars and disfiguring pockmarks. Esthetic policemen suspiciously sniff his every breath and lay down chalk lines which they order him to follow; he is never released, only paroled. A similar attitude toward a baker would alone be enough to ruin any promise of good bread.

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