Cyril Connolly

He married Jean Bakewell in 1930. She however left him in 1939. He married for the second time in 1950—this marriage too did not last long.

He tied the knot for the third time with Deirdre Craven in 1959. The couple had two children and remained together till Connolly’s death.

He died on 26 November 1974, at the age of 71.

He was born on 10 September 1903 as the only child of Major Matthew William Kemble Connolly and his wife, Muriel Maud Vernon. His father was an officer in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry while his mother was the daughter of a colonel.

He traveled a lot as a child due to his father’s profession and spent some of his childhood days in South Africa where his father was posted.

He went to St. Cyprian’s School in Eastbourne where he met the future interior designer Cecil Beaton and would-be novelist George Orwell. He became good friends with both of them.

He won a scholarship to attend Eton College. There he became involved in school politics and charmed everyone around him with his intellect and wit. He won the Rosebery History Prize in 1922 and earned the Brackenbury History scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford.

Before joining Oxford he decided to travel extensively and went to Germany, Austria and Hungary. He developed a taste for traveling and having fun with his friends and thus his academic career at Oxford suffered. He also got used to spending lavishly. He graduated in 1925 with a third class degree in history.

He struggled to find employment after leaving college as he did not possess a good academic record. He had incurred a huge pile of debts due to his extravagant spending which complicated his life further.

Finally he found a job tutoring a boy in Jamaica and went to the Caribbean in November 1925. He returned to England after some months in April 1926. His struggle to find a secure job continued.

He was employed as a secretary for Logan Pearsall Smith, an essayist and critic, in June 1926. Smith had a house called “Big Chilling”. This job introduced him to literary life and influenced his thoughts as a writer. He was paid �8 a week for this role.

A chance meeting with Desmond MacCarthy, the literary editor of the ‘New Statesman’ led him to embark on a literary career. MacCarthy invited Connolly to write book reviews for the ‘New Statesman’.

His job with Smith took him to Spain and from there he set off on a tour of his own before returning to England. In June 1927, the ‘New Statesman’ published his first signed work, a review of Lawrence Sterne.

He is most famous as the author of the autobiographical work, ‘Enemies of Promise’. In this critical work, he tries to describe why, in spite of being a good writer he was unable to produce a major work of literature. This book is considered to be his masterpiece.