My wife and I are reading Olivia Manning’s School for Love at night and enjoying it, even though it’s very slow-moving (especially compared to her later and classic Fortunes of War series). It’s set in Jerusalem at the tail end of WWII; our hero, Felix, is an innocent and newly orphaned English adolescent in a rooming house run by the awful Miss Bohun (pronounced Boon), who takes ruthless advantage of everyone around her while constantly announcing her self-sacrificing generosity. He is rescued from his bewildered stupor by the advent of the young widow Mrs. Ellis, who drags him out to the cafes where she spends evenings with the louche intelligentsia of the Levant — Arabs, Jews, Englishpersons, and miscellaneous foreigners all more or less getting along and yammering about the prominent new cultural names. Felix, of course, has never heard of any of them, and he whispers to Mrs. Ellis “Who are they talking about?” She “broke up an empty cigarette carton and wrote on the inside: ‘Kafka, Palinurus, Sartre’.” The first and last are self-explanatory, but who or what was Palinurus (other than an obscure character in ancient epic, hardly likely to be on everyone’s lips in the 1940s)? Some googling provided the answer; it was Cyril Connolly, whose The Unquiet Grave was “written in 1944 under the pseudonym Palinurus.”
So that explained that, but why Palinurus? John Leonard, in his NY Times review of a 1982 reprint, says:
If you are soft on your Virgil, be reminded that Palinurus, the pilot, jumped ship just before one of the most important climaxes in the ”Aeneid.” Jung, according to Connolly, would have insisted that Palinurus stood for ”a certain will-to-failure or repugnance-tosuccess, a desire to give up at the last moment.” He opted, instead, for ”the unknown shore,” which perhaps explains why he is usually associated with the lobster.
So, too, did Connolly jump the ship of the novel after ”The Rock Pool.” It was at the beginning of ”The Unquiet Grave” that he made his famous declaration, ”The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.” He had persuaded himself that he could not produce such a masterpiece, even as he was busy doing so, and he retired to grade the papers of his inferiors.
One of my superiors, Wilfrid Sheed, has suggested in a fine essay that Connolly, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, was in ”his pure dedication to Art, his rambunctious melancholia, his rhythm of indulgence and remorse,” some kind of hopeless Celt who might have profited by a training in assertiveness. With respect, I wonder: Fitzgerald drank his way to a suspicious sympathy with characters who were versions of Fitzgerald. Connolly seems to have found in his cups and in his life a failure of nerve, a lack of heroism and of consequence, a longing for ”the role of sucker;” he willed failure.
This frog, this lobster, jumped ship before the moment of victory. If ”The Rock Pool” is not an altogether satisfying novel, it is because its author read and reviewed too many of them by other people, and forgot how good he was. ”The Unquiet Grave” – asking us to listen to the scarifying whisper between chunks of sanctified literature, such a weird amalgam of other voices and other rooms, such a book of uncommon places, so much art, love, nature and religion – sings.
Now that Connolly has largely been forgotten, that eloquent praise seems musty, but hell, Leonard himself, who bestrode the middlebrow American literary world of the late 20th century like a colossus, has probably been forgotten as well, as shall we all be eventually. At any rate, I’ve cleared up a minor mystery, and perhaps at least one reader of Manning will be spared perplexity.
I have in fact read The Unquiet Grave (and knew the pseudonym), but I can’t remember a single thing about it. Evidently it made an impression.
I only knew of the name “Palinurus” in the context of spiny lobsters, and that only for linguistic reasons: the original genus Palinurus (apparently named after Palinuro in Italy, traditionally associated with Palinurus of Aeneid) was joined in 1847 by anagrams Panulirus and Linuparus.
(Kubo, in 1955, apparently continued the joke with Nupalirus.)
…Is there no “backwards tail” in the meaning?
Connolly wrote about his childhood friend Eric in Enemies of Promise. He contrasted other writers’ practices and styles with his own (which he, as noted, deemed unsuccessful). However, that account came out in 1938, just as Orwell was at the beginning of the period that cemented him as one of the most significant writers of the century. So I wonder how Connolly’s thoughts about Orwell developed in the 1940s and after.
I am struck by Leonard’s phrase “soft on your Virgil,” which means in context what I would idiomatically express as e.g. “fuzzy on your Virgil.” No doubt other phrasings would work as well. But this usage of “soft on” to mean “ignorant or forgetful of” is one I can’t recall encountering before.
Me too; in fact, without a context, I’d’ve interpreted “soft on your Virgil” as meaning “having a sentimental attachment to your Virgil”, which is Not the Same Thing at All.
I think he means “weak.” Not the same thing as “soft” at all, as the makers of Andrex have made clear, though WP tells me that they retired their iconic slogan in 2004. Où sont les papiers toilettes d’antan?
“Soft on your Virgil” itself strikes me as having potential as an advertising slogan in this general area.
Brush up your Virgil,
Start quoting him now;
Brush up your Virgil
And the women you will wow…
Brush up your Virgil,
Start quoting him now;
Brush up your Virgil
And the women you will wow…
I heard he sang a good song
I heard he had a style
And so I came to see him
To listen for a while
And there he was this young boy
A stranger to my eyes
Wowing them softly
with his words,
wowing them softly
Brett
The other way round, what Orwell thought of Connolly: somewhere in Orwell he disses Connolly for his finding that his time at Eton overshadowed virtually everything else in his life.
It’s a very pleasant surprise to find that Connolly and Palinurus are still with us. I have quite a memory of the Unquiet Grave. One of the things that sticks is the phrase “outremer snobbery”, which Connolly said some of the critics accused him of.
What I would give for a collection of his book reviews in the ST – or of all the ST book reviews for that matter.
It’s a very pleasant surprise to find that Connolly and Palinurus are still with us.
Well, for a certain quite restricted meaning of “still with us”…
Long long ago like DE I read TUG (and similarly remember nothing of it) under the impression that Palinurus the Steersman might have had something to do with Norbert Wiener the Cyberneticist. I don’t know if these links will work but both seem interesting :
J. M. KERTZER Cyril Connolly’s “The Unquiet Grave”: The Pilot and the Noonday Devil, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, Vol. 20, No. 4, DATA and ACTA: Aspects of Life-Writing (Fall 1987), pp. 23-36
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24777645?seq=1
Steven H Strogatz, Norbert Wiener’s brain waves. Frontiers in mathematical biology, 122–138,
Lecture Notes in Biomath., 100, Springer, Berlin, 1994.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5436e695e4b07f1e91b30155/t/5ea896058f2eac62af53cdb0/1588106767322/norbert-wieners-brain-waves.pdf
Do any Hatters have access to a (strong? state-of-the-art?) chatbot which would accept two such documents as a prompt? If so I’d be interested in a compare-and-contrast essay…
What David M said. Isn’t palin-ouros a reference to how a lobster swims?
The name is ascribed to Weber 1795, which seems to be Nomenclator entomologicus secundum Entomologiam systematicum ill. Fabricii adjectis speciebus recens detectis et varietatibus. The information on pp. 94 and 97 is scanty but suggests the Trojan rather than either the port or palin-ouros. Perhaps Weber gave more detail elsewhere
Bizarre. Note that Weber spelled the name as Pallinurus (sic!). (His Nomenclator also has a Palinurus among the butterflies
.)
See paragraph no. 5 on p. 109 here on the adoption of Palinurus in The Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature 12 (1943).
There is a treatment of Weber’s bizarre Nomenclator here, beginning p. 332, in T. R. R. Stebbing ‘Zoological Nomenclature : International Rules and others’, The Journal of the Linnean Society of London 29 (1903–1906). This goes a long way towards explaining what it going on. I guess Weber found the name among Fabricius’ notes and misspelled it? Fabricius then used Palinurus up here in 1798. None of these publications indicates Fabricius’ etymological intentions, as far as I have been able to find.
I wonder, did this mess start a running joke among carcinologists that led to the proposal of Panulirus and Linuparus?
Fabricius 1787 coined Astacus elephas; it was Weber who came up with the new genus and kept the specific epithet elephas.
That reminds me of Ambystoma
Refs 16 & 17:
Amazingly, both DOIs don’t work; they do lead to the site of Science, but to its 404 error page! But the JSTOR links work, and the papers are in open access.
It appears that the terminal “.a” in each Science DOI has been misprinted as “-a”.
The Wikipedia article on Connolly’s life makes depressing reading for me. First, Connolly’s dissipation and total lack of financial responsibility, and his affairs and marriages. Secondly, the incestuous nature of the British literary establishment. Such a tight little world; an innocent like me taking them as luminaries of the literary world to be appreciated for their own shining merits when they were all part of the same coterie, products of a narrow place and time. Sorry if I sound naïve but I really didn’t expect it to be so narrow. I found his life disgusting to read about.
@Bathrobe. That’s why sensible Brits with a long-term view emigrated to Australia. No class distinction; no drug addiction.
all part of the same coterie, products of a narrow place and time
I have no paricular brief for Connolly or his set, but it seems to me that “narrow place and time” would do nicely to damn Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Socrates …)
It seems questionable to declare that narrow places and times are incapable of producing anything of real artistic merit.
What DE said. maybe the Elizabethan/Jacobean age (or e.g., the Renaissance in Florence) had a broader cultural base than inter-war Britain, but where patronage is concentrated or exercised through gatekeepers, you get coteries. I think Bloomsbury was even a self-organised coterie, where people like Leonard Woolf provided funding without trying to (or at least succeeding in) influencing what the artists produced.
It is perhaps significant that these temporal and spatial settings known for great literary production often coincide with the golden ages of major thalassocracies.
Oh. Yes, with “.a” the DOIs work. I’ve fixed the Wikipedia article. Thanks!
the incestuous nature of the British literary establishment. Such a tight little world; …, products of a narrow place and time.
I was about to itemize the variety of literati mentioned in that wikip, but it rapidly got to be too many. Just who isn’t mentioned that would make it less narrow? There’s not much the chap can do (however vile you judge him to be) about his times.
And I think @Bathrobe needs to get out more: I see no correlation between the artistic/humanitarian sensitivity expressed in a creative’s works vs. their in-person personality. (Within my area of focus) see the total-shit Mahler wrt KindertotenLieder; or Fauré’s Dolly Suite, a staple of my BBC Listen-with-Mother childhood.
Bathrobe is also totally unfair to Connolly. Has he actually read TUG? The book is replete with quotations, references to continental and other non-British authors and thinkers, hence the accusations of outremer snobbery. Connolly said one of the motivations behind the book was to assuage his anguish at being cut off from the continent because of the war.
As to the most fertile environment for great art, Kenneth Clark thought it was a region with many smaller noble courts, as Tokugawa Japan, or Germany in the 18th C.
What does get up one’s nose in the UK scene is the obsession with the Bloomsberries, which does seem out of all proportion to their achievements.
As to the most fertile environment for great art, Kenneth Clark thought it was a region with many smaller noble courts, as Tokugawa Japan, or Germany in the 18th C.
That is a great point! Where in Clark’s publications or broadcasts is it made?
Ambystoma
I don’t believe Stejneger’s explanation from ἀνὰ στόμα βύειν for a moment. Looking at the rest of Tschudi’s coinages in the same monograph, it does not seem at all like how he would form a new name. Such an interesting genus with such an unfortunate name, a mere printer’s error…
I don’t think of 18th-century Germany or walled-off Tokugawa Japan as being among the major thalassocracies of history, so we clearly have rival and inconsistent theories here.
@Xerib
Sorry, but it just fell out of my internal rubbish tip : I think I half recall it was in an interview that he said it, when? where? no idea!
The point could be that culture flourishes in a multi-centric environment: think also of the Italian renaissance (it wasn’t just Florence), painting of the Low Countries, music in the German speaking world.
England suffered from being totally dominated by the great Wen, and having no provincial centres.
But this is beginning to smack of historicism, sorry Popper!
no drug addiction.
Yes, provided you don’t consider alcohol a drug
@Vanya: the English language as commonly spoken does not consider alcohol a “drug” in the relevant sense. Whether any given individual disagrees with the semantic scope of common words as generally used is not really relevant. That’s why professional jargon uses phrasing like “substance use disorder” if they want an umbrella term that covers problematic use of both heroin and vodka, because they know it’s counterproductive to get all lectury with the general public about why the common-parlance taxonomy of “drugs” is unscientific or whatever.
And of course the old paean to Australia I was quoting was always a bit of a marketing slogan and was as to that point eventually overtaken by events. The headline “Melbourne has had Australia’s worst heroin addiction for years. Why can’t the city kick its habit?” is from 2023 but I daresay could have been run almost any time in the preceding four decades.
vodka ??
Although (as I’ve observed) Australians can down impressive quantities of beer, it’s too weak to make them seriously intoxicated before needing to adjourn to the dunny. I think it doesn’t meet the threshold for “addiction”.
@AntC: Well, one prominent UK immigrant to Australia (Bon Scott, born Scotland in 1946 and relocated Down Under with his family in 1952) did wind up dead of what the coroner concluded was “acute alcohol poisoning,” although I rather suspect his intake on that particular night was not limited to beer. There are, it perhaps should be noted, persistent conspiracy theories that heroin was also a causal factor in the death but was for some reason overlooked or hushed up by the authorities, but I have not gone down that rabbithole far enough to develop an opinion on the plausibility of that alternative account.