AS GUIDED BY PALINURUS (A WAY YOU'LL NEVER BE): MEMORIES OF CYRIL CONNOLLY

1 3 1 A S G U I D E D B Y P A L I N U R U S ( A W A Y Y O U ’ L L N E V E R B E ) M E M O R I E S O F C Y R I L C O N N O L L Y C . J . D R I V E R Many English journalists came to South Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and some pronounced rather too quickly and ex cathedra on what they had discovered. We usually knew more than they did, and it sometimes seemed to us they found out what they needed to know too easily, even when we happened to agree with them. It was comfortable enough to take sides, especially when one did not have to bear the consequences: moral selfrighteousness was not attractive, particularly when it seemed like metropolitan complacency. On the other hand, and particularly after the massacre of blacks by the police at Sharpeville in 1960, proper English writers – that is, the writers of books – were rare visitors, though no one had then thought of what eventually became the cultural and academic boycott. The days when writers like Rudyard Kipling regularly wintered in the Cape were long since past. While I was at the University of Cape Town, Louis MacNeice had been a great success as a visitor, partly because he enjoyed rugby as well as drink. R. N. Currey looked and sounded rather too like a schoolmaster for people so lately out of school – he could hardly help that, since he had taught at Colchester Royal Grammar School for 1 3 2 D R I V E R Y years, even though his reputation was as a South African poet. Richard Church, the poet and naturalist, had seemed ill at ease with the young writers at the university, and his verse was too formal and Georgian for our tastes. Some interesting American academics were more lively in their influence: Robert F. Haugh from one of the universities in Michigan, Joseph Jones from the University of Texas, Jackson Burgess from Berkeley. I can’t remember now whether it was Jones or Burgess who introduced us to the Beat poets – Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others. Still, exciting and original though the writers of the USA seemed, it was to London we looked most of all. So when we heard that Cyril Connolly was in Cape Town, we were very pleased; he was, after all, regarded as (probably) the foremost literary journalist in the English-speaking world, with his own weekly column in The Sunday Times. For all his public assumption of the mask of a never-quite-successful and foreverprocrastinating author, he had been the editor of Horizon during its brilliant years, and many regarded as a masterpiece The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle, an unclassifiable mixture of anthology and commentary which he had written during World War II, under the pseudonym ‘‘Palinurus’’ (the helmsman of Aeneas’s ship who fell asleep at the wheel and was drowned). Connolly had lived in South Africa as a child, first briefly at the military base Roberts Heights (renamed Voortrekkerhoogte), near Pretoria (his father was a professional soldier), later for three years in Wynberg, in Cape Town; the sensory memories of those years inform the early pages of ‘‘A Georgian Boyhood,’’ the autobiographical section of Enemies of Promise. In February 1964, in his sixty-first year, he came back to South Africa to visit his mother, then living in George, a pleasant small town below the Outeniqua Mountains overlooking the Garden Route. His mother was old, solitary, and reported by neighbors to be very ill; she had been living on her own for sixteen years. To pay the expenses of his visit, Connolly had arranged to write about the trip for The Sunday Times (‘‘The Flawed Diamond’’ appeared on 19 April 1964), and though he went out of his way to be as even-handed as he could be, his article still caused enough rage in Afrikaanerdom to lead to the banning of Connolly’s first and only novel...