[CONNOLLY, Cyril] (pseud. PALINURUS). The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle.

‘The Object of Loving is to End Love’

[CONNOLLY, Cyril] (pseud. PALINURUS). The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle. London: Curwen Press for Horizon. 1944.

8vo. Original card wrappers with integral pale grey dust-jacket lettered in blue to upper cover and spine, priced 15s net to front flap; housed in a dark green cloth folding chemise with gilt burgundy morocco lettering-piece to upper cover and emerald green ties; pp. [vi], 107, [1 (limitation statement)], 4 collotype plates including frontispiece; light rubbing to spine and folds, short split to wrapper at foot of upper joint, top- and tail-edges a touch dusty; else a bright, near-fine copy, in like wrapper; presentation inscription to ‘Miss Temkin’ to half-title, dated December 1944 (see below), 3 manuscript corrections in Connolly’s hand in the text.

A fine copy, presented by the author to his ‘dream executive’ at Horizon with corrections in his hand, of the first, limited, edition of Connolly’s melancholy and deeply personal masterpiece – one of the great literary self-portraits of the twentieth century.

Although Cyril Connolly (1903–1974) was arguably the most gifted English literary critic and man of letters of his generation, his reputation rests on two books: Enemies of Promise (1938), his celebrated meditation on the conditions necessary for literary greatness (with its memorable image of ‘the pram in the hall’), and The Unquiet Grave (1944). The latter, a book of pensées, some coined by Connolly himself, others drawn from favourite, chiefly French, authors, was compiled the year he turned forty, while cut off by the war from the continental civilisation he loved and suffering the unhappiness of separation from his wife Jean. Although the first US edition (1945) identifies Connolly as author on the jacket, nothing in this edition (or the 1945 first UK trade edition) identifies the author as anyone other than ‘Palinurus’.

Connolly takes his pseudonym from Aeneas’s famous helmsman, who, having steered the Trojan fleet past Scylla and Charybdis, unaccountably falls asleep at the tiller, is washed overboard, then put to death by natives, his body left unburied upon the shore.
When Aeneas descends into the underworld, Palinurus’s ghost begs him to see that his bones are properly laid to rest so that he may finally find peace. The myth, for Connolly, offered a way of thinking about what he felt to be his own position in life. Palinurus, he surmised, did not fall overboard by chance, but rather abandoned his place in the great adventure. ‘Palinurus’, he writes, ‘clearly stands for a certain will-to-failure or repugnance-to-success, a desire to give up at the last moment, an urge towards loneliness, isolation and obscurity. Palinurus, in spite of his great ability and his conspicuous public position, deserted his post in the moment of victory and opted for the unknown shore.’

Although few readers can have been in much doubt who stood behind the pseudonym, Connolly felt the need for a veil of anonymity, however ineffectual, to separate himself from what might otherwise have seemed too confessional – and the work is certainly an unflinching exercise in self-laceration. ‘A fat, slothful, querulous, greedy, impotent carcass […]’ is how he describes himself, a theme picked up again by the book’s most frequently quoted line: ‘Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out’ (later winningly parodied by Kingsley Amis as ‘Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in’). Memorable aperçus abound: ‘There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say’; ‘The true index of a man’s character is the health of his wife.’ What might otherwise have become a gloomy exercise in self-pity, however, is lightened and leavened by Connolly’s wit and his exquisite prose (‘Secretly I am convinced that there is no happiness outside my prose’, he once remarked).

Issued in December 1944 by Horizon – the literary journal founded and edited by Connolly – and printed by the Curwen Press on handmade paper in an edition of one thousand copies, The Unquiet Grave was rapturously received by Connolly’s friends and contemporaries. Osbert Sitwell, according to his sister Edith, could talk of nothing else: ‘he carries [it] about with him from bedroom to writing-room, from writing-room to dining-room’, while Nancy Mitford wrote to Connolly that she was ‘extremely touched & gratified at being sent the Grave & have been gobbling about it the whole evening & can’t wait to begin again ... It is really very much like talking to you, always a major pleasure.’ From America, his estranged wife Jean, whose absence haunts the book, wrote to say how much she had loved it, ‘but it makes me too sad to talk about. I think you are one of the few people whom self-pity or unhappiness develops rather than shuts in.’ Ernest Hemingway was an unlikely admirer, writing to Connolly that ‘I am no good at saying this sort of thing but I wanted [...] to tell you how much the Palinurus book meant to me. [It is] a book which no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough.’

This uncommonly sharp copy is warmly inscribed by Connolly on the half-title ‘To Miss Temkin, the author’s | dream executive, this rough draft | from | her ever | grateful | Palinurus | ΠΑΛΙΝΟΥΡΟΣ | London 4 Dec. 1944’. Miss Temkin, briefly mentioned in Jeremy Lewis’ Life of Connolly, was ‘production manager’ at Horizon (we have been unable to find her first name). There are three manuscript corrections in Connolly’s hand, later incorporated into the first trade edition of 1945.

See Sheldon, Friends of Promise (1989).

SKU: 2125684