Word: cyrill
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...CONDEMNED PLAYGROUND (287 pp.) -Cyril Connolly-Macmillan...
...critic, aphorist and editor of parts, Cyril Connolly is the latest fashion in bitter elegance in English letters, as his friend George Orwell is the latest fashion in common sense. Connolly's touch of Irish divination and curiosity has given him a greater range than other amateurs of the 18th Century manner. His published pieces yield the vivid image of an Old Etonian still alive and kicking amid the European rubble, somberly turning the pages of psychiatric journals, reaching for the odes of Horace, and composing, with a groan, clever paragraphs to keep his modern anguish under classic control...
...explanations explain very little. He thinks that Wilde's emotional nature never developed "beyond adolescence"; hence Wilde always remained "an exceptionally brilliant undergraduate, half boy, half genius." Nevertheless, he adds, Wilde was "very much in love" with Constance Lloyd when they married in 1884, and "delighted" in Cyril and Vyvyan, their two sons, born a few years later.* Wilde, moreover, according to Pearson, did not become a "practicing" homosexual until after the children were born. Constance, for her part, remained "completely unaware" of his tendency until he was arrested...
...Cyril, who became a professional soldier, was killed in France in 1915. Vyvyan, now 60, studied law, lives in London, works for the BBC. In 1943 he married Australian-born Thelma Besant, a great-great niece of Theosophist Annie Besant. They have one son, Christopher Merlin Vyvyan, born in 1945. Says Vyvyan Holland (the Holland surname was adopted by Constance Wilde, under strong pressure from her family, after Oscar's conviction): "I was only nine in 1895, and was not even told of my father's difficulties until I was 20. Everything happened so long ago that...
...essay to define Uncle Alfred are more likely than ever in the past 30 years to realize that they have something in common with him: humanity. One of the best and littlest magazines, Horizon, has kept going in London through all the blitzes since 1940, elegantly edited by Cyril Connolly; among its contributors "blast" is too thoroughly understood as a technical term to be wished on anyone. In the U.S., two old Fugitive poets, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, are editing the Kenyan Review and the Sewanee Review, respectively and passably, each at a college. And Uncle Alfred...