Enduring the unquietness. (The Unquiet Grave - Cyril Connolly)

Member Name: peel.rebekah

Product:	The Unquiet Grave - Cyril Connolly
Date:	27/09/01 (294 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: I enjoyed it.

Disadvantages: I've got a really nasty cold.

'The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out there muck.'

So let me further foul in your intellectual waterways in an attempt that this litter may contain the remnants of a recently (and decently) digested author:

Palinurus was the ill fated pilot of Aeneas' ship (Virgil's Aeneid) who fell into the sea while he slept. He was scraped and scrubbed by the waves for three days before finding safe haven on a shore line...but, being a character of tragic virtues, he was found by the unforgiving inhabitants of the land, who murdered him for his clothes. His body was left unburied on the seashore.

Or, Palinurus, the critic persona chosen by Cyril Connolly, founder of the literary magazine, Horizon in 1939, contributor to The New Statesman, The Times and The Observer, writer and critic during (and of) the Second world War, receiver of a CBE in 1972...dead in 1974...'Dare I suppose that a cure has been accomplished, the bones of Palinurus buried and his ghost laid?'

The Unquiet Grave is an unraveling cogitation, a tapeworm of contemplation, scurrying from ancient lands and poets, listening to the whispers of long dead Frenchmen, casting its metaphorical mind through the darkness of its times (it was written during the Second World War), but eluding the real horror of it all by finding cover in the wisdom of words.

It's not really a book about anything in particular; there's definitely no beginning, middle and end...more of a continuous cycle of words that lose themselves in your 'id'eas as you read, regurgitating themselves at your concentration's expense, leading sometimes gently, but mostly viciously, from one field of thought to another, biting at the tail of the last sentence as your brain attempts to take on board the full wherefores and whys.


If I really have to be pinned down as to the content of this book, then I suppose I can say this: Palinurus' meditations revolve around relationships between the sexes, art, literature and culture, religion...and a life full of self awareness and memories...of which 'Art is memory: memory is reenacted desire.'

The words (and they are just that, and that fact alone really scares me when I read some authors) that Palinurus uses to tweak our brains and convey his nearly, almost melancholic state of being, are prioritized and pigeon holed with such thought and truth, that the honesty of them defies their age, their sex and their schooling. They are less specific about the emotions of their writer, and as I said before, these words lead you in grand, ever increasing circles, hoping to find the beliefs that ripple beneath the surface:

'Well, which side are you on? The Corn-Goddess or the Tractor? The Womb or the Bulldozer? Christ, Freud, Buddha, Baudelaire, Bakunin, or Marx, Watson, Pavlov, Stalin, Shaw? Come clean, moody Palinurus, no synthesis this time and no Magic Circle either! We need men like you at the Group Age. Will you take your turn at the helm as you used to? Remember?'

Yet we find such truisms as these:

'In the sex-war thoughtlessness is the weapon of the male, vindictiveness of the female. Both are reciprocally generated, but a woman's desire for revenge outlasts all other emotions...When every unkind word about women has been said, we have still to admit, with Byron, that they are nicer than men. They are more devoted, more unselfish and more emotionally secure. When the long fuse of cruelty, deceit and revenge is set alight, it is male thoughtlessness which has fired it.'

'If, instead of Time's notorious and incompetent remedy, there was an operation by which we could be cured of loving, how many of us would not rush to have it!'

'Civilization is mai
ntained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether...The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven. One by one, the Golden Apples of the West are shaken from the tree.'

The Unquiet Grave is a stiringness of these sort of tight observations; it is also a deep adventure into Palinurus' mind and memories: The text often veers into highly personal reminiscences of Paris streets on an Autumn evening; of the flavour smoke that filled the air or the hue of the leaf that fell at Palinurus' feet; of discreetly following a damp and mysterious women in the hope that his breeding will finally abandon him and he will be able to approach her and ask her her name. We find him ruminating at the incoming tide on many occasions - times and ages seem disturbed and in flux as one feels the emotions of a holiday in the south of France and those of an invading soldier being churned together to make this delectably disturbing butter.

His words are often accompanied by those of 'mightier' men, and this is definitely a book of name dropping proportions (as it is for French, Greek and Latin sound bites): These comparisons are made to aid Palinurus' reflection (rather than illustrate it) as much as for the reader's benefit...I regret to say that one might have to have a French/English dictionary at one's side if one is to get the most out of all of the text.

Yet this is the enticing manner of Palinurus: Many words, and their order, are so familiar to us that we instantly take refuge in the self identity that we find. So when a philosophical school of thought gropes to grab our attention, we already have that safe stone from which to peer at this new and unheard of ideology...Palinurus constructs these texts to aid the opening of our ears and eyes, yet he also constructs them so that they
counteract one another, leading the reader to a place where they HAVE to start thinking for themselves.

Take, for instance, this:

"Dry again?" said the Crab to the Rock-Pool. "So would you be," replied the Rock-Pool, "if you had to satisfy, twice a day, the insatiable sea."

Any reflections gladly received in the comments section (or on a postcard, just make sure it has a picture of a really cute kitten on it.)

There is a dark, self hating undercurrent swirling beneath Palinurus (I suppose quite obviously, otherwise why would Connolly have chosen this character as to represent himself?) yet one can only make of that what one normally makes of the same ailment in so many other writers. Although Palinurus wants to see himself as the eternally pessimistic critic, his incredibly beguiling wit shines through the murky doubt, his cheeky grin and enticing laughter lets us forget the bleakness of the reality...

'The object of Loving is a release from Love. We achieve this through a series of unfortunate love affairs or, without a death-rattle, through one that is happy.'

This book has been my introduction to the author, so I am, as yet, unsure of the greatness of his other works. This, however, is a beautiful moment of discovery and recognition that I will treasure...it's that moment of actually remembering that you can open yourself and learn again, change your mind, grow...and also that moment that reminds you that your ego needs to take a step down, and to make a deep bow in the direction of another.

What else would there be for me to say that might encourage you to pick up this extremely short collection of words and read it for yourself? Let's not justify ourselves with the numbers of other titles that make up your list of 'must-reads'; yes, you must-read those, but why not just-read this one first?

So there can be no accusations of the hard sel
l, I'll leave it to Palinurus to speak for himself (and now you know where it comes from, SexyKay):

'There was once a man (reputed to be the wisest in the world) who, although living to an untold age, confined his teaching to the one command: "Endure!" At length a rival arose who challenged him to a debate which took place before a large assembly. "You say endure," cried his competitor, "but I don?t want to endure. I wish to love and to be loved, to conquer and create, I wish to know what is right, then to do it and be happy." There was no reply from his opponent, and, on looking more closely at the old creature, his adversary found him to consist of an odd-shaped rock on which had taken root a battered thorn that represented, by an optical illusion, the impression of hair and a beard. Triumphantly he pointed out the mistake to the authorities but they were not intimidated. "Man or Rock," they answered, "does it really matter?" And at that moment the wind, reverberating through the sage's moss-grown orifice, repeated with a hollow sound: "Endure!".

The Unquiet Grave, Palinurus. Published by Penguin, ISBN 0140285547, price £4.99.

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