Cyril Connolly (1903-74) was primarily a literary critic, publishing this, his only novel, in 1936.
It falls into the category of books about writing books, or researching them at least.
Our anti-hero, Edgar Naylor, is partly an autobiographical study, and partly modelled on someone who later died in WW2 . He is employed as a stockbroker but is also completing a biography of Samuel Rogers, ‘the banker-bard’.
He pitches up in Trou- sur-Mer, an unfashionable French Mediterranean outpost which is home to a motley crew of artists and expats:
‘…aquarium similes were the rage now, in Proust, in Gide, and another in Point Counter Point. Why not The Rock Pool – a microcosm cut off from the ocean by the retreating economic tide?’
Naylor is an unpleasant character, who derives a sense of power from poking about in this pool, stirring up the inhabitants.
He interacts with a succession of men and women, whose complex web of dysfunctional relationships he strives to unravel and understand, becoming enmeshed himself in the process.
Towards the end of this short novel, he wonders whether the experience will help him to be a better writer:
‘Or would whatever he wrote remain subject to the laws which governed the young Englishman’s first novel and made it a slop-pail for sex, quotations and insincerity.’
Well, yes, it does remain subject to those laws.
Despite the cleverness of the conceit, I could not muster great empathy for, or interest in, the parade of characters, each with their peculiar idiosyncrasies. And, on picking up the book again after a short break, I found it very hard indeed to recollect the narrative.
In the final pages, fresh visitors to Trou debate whether Naylor himself is ‘just another bum’. Perhaps, while agitating the Rock Pool, he has fallen in, becoming just one more of its curious and impecunious inhabitants.
TD
January 2024
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