A Warning from a Wiser Age

A while ago after finally unpacking several hundreds of my books which had previously lacked shelf space, I re-read Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise for the first time in about twenty years.

Connolly’s acknowledged masterpiece of literary criticism was first published in 1938 and re-issued in 1973 by Andre Deutsch on the occasion of its author’s seventieth birthday.

During my own formative years as a writer, I read Connolly’s literary reviews regularly in English newspapers yet had forgotten somehow, over the intervening period, just what an incisive and humorous mind Connolly possessed.

I began my own career as a professional writer in the year Connolly died—1974—and have no grounds for claiming him then or now as any kind of direct influence. Yet re-reading him recently was such a pleasure that I could not help wishing I had met him, however briefly, because of the sense of delighted agreement I felt with so many of his arguments and judgments—especially so perhaps about the merits and demerits of Marcel Proust.

Like everyone else on this planet, writers cannot choose the precise era or circumstances into which they are born. But, as a professional writer, I still cannot help regretting sometimes that I missed out on the experience of the inter-war years.

In spite of the Depression and the darkening shadow of a second world conflict, there seemed a sense of seriousness combined with hope not only among writers generally but also among many of their publishers. Good writing still seemed to matter profoundly to both parties then, as did what Connolly described aptly as a writer’s “duty to the truth”.

Perhaps no other pair of factors can epitomise more clearly the depth of difference between writing seventy years ago and trying to write today. While a general decline in the seriousness of publishers was possibly foreseeable, I doubt whether Connolly or anyone else could ever have foreseen the concerted attack on the idea of singular truth which has been unleashed during the postmodern era. Indeed, Connolly may have avoided a good deal of disillusionment by dying when he did.

Why is the idea of singular truth so distasteful to a post-modernist audience?

In the grey-hued hinterland known as relativism, a worrying confusion seems to me to exist at an elementary level between the unrelated concepts of truth and opinion. This is an especially damaging confusion because while truth can evidently influence opinion, opinion as such can have no bearing on truth.

In short, truths can and do exist which are totally unacknowledged by anyone to date. One needs think no further here than matters of scientific or medical discovery.

However, the discipline which possibly provides the best examples of the fundamental difference between truth and opinion is archaeology. What archaeology provides par excellence, in fact, are examples of literally hidden and buried truths.

What I like especially about archaeology is the clarity with which it demonstrates that truth is in no way dependent even on the opinions of experts. Thus the world’s greatest experts may believe that some historic site is located in such and such an area yet clearly they may or may not be right in their suppositions. Thus until proved to be so or not by incontestable evidence both the riddle and factual truth itself about where the actual location is simply remain. In short, even if nobody ever discovers the truth about where an actual site is located, a truth evidently exists about this which is utterly independent of human opinion.

Archaeologists may exist who seek to advance their careers through ill-advised expressions of opinion, yet they clearly risk, by doing so, some possibility of being proved utterly wrong. A career in archaeology thus seems to me to stand at the furthest possible remove from one in today’s so-called “communications” industry. While the former involves the digging up of buried truths, the latter too often involves the burying of dug-up truths via political spin or what is referred to euphemistically as “public relations”.

Worthwhile criticism—or so it seems to me—involves aiding the reader or, in my former case, viewer to understand what the writer or artist is trying (or failing) to do. A grasp of and profound knowledge of history is vital to such a task, if for no other reason than the sense of perspective it provides. Critics of any of the arts should carry in their minds a list of supreme practitioners and be able at all moments to justify such choices clearly. Yet long before critics can explain complex issues to their readers they must be competent to explain such issues clearly to themselves. Here is yet another reason why re-reading Cyril Connolly in a world abuzz with the vacuities of postmodernist theory remains so revitalising and deeply refreshing to the spirit.

Here are a few of the thoughts Connolly penned in those darkest of days shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War:

Within his talent it is the duty of a writer to devote his energy to the search for truth, the truth that is always being clouded over by romantic words and ideas or obscured by actions and motives dictated by interest and fear. In the love of truth which leads to a knowledge of it lies not only the hope of humanity but its safety. Deep down we feel that, as every human being has a right to air and water, so has he a right to food, clothing, light, heat, work, education, love and leisure. Ultimately we know the world will be run, its resources exploited and its efforts synchronised on this assumption. A writer can help to liberate that knowledge and to unmask those pretenders which accompany all human plans for improvement: the love of power and money, the short-sighted acquisitive passions, the legacies of injustice and ignorance, the tiger instinct for fighting, the ape-like desire to go with the crowd. A writer must be a lie-detector who exposes the fallacies in words and ideals before half the world is killed for them.

Those wise words were written more than seventy years ago. But who on earth writes about “searching for truth” today?