CYRIL CONNOLLY—Rock Pool—"Startlingly beautiful"—Henry Miller

Description: • For Your Consideration: • A VG+ / UNREAD copy in Trade Paperback of: • “THE ROCK POOL: A NOVEL”(Persea Books, 1981) (Trade Paperback, Third Edition Thus) • BY CYRIL CONNOLLY INTRODUCED BY PETER QUENNELL • ABOUT THIS TITLE: • “First published in 1936, and long out of print, this famous novel is now presented with a new, informative introduction by PETER QUENNELL to whom the book is dedicated. This totally engaging satire chronicles the clash between two cultures—the snobbish, cliché-ridden English world that NAYLOR, the hero, represents, and an international group of artists and writers who inhabit a French Riviera town. NAYLOR, a smug young literary man from Oxford, at first studies the dissolute inhabitants as if they were aquatic organisms in a pool. But he is soon demoralized and swindled by them, and as winter approaches he remains, scarcely to be distinguished from them. “Much has been written of the expatriate temper, but nowhere has it been treated with greater wit, spirit, and elegance of style than in this small, enduring classic.”—THE PUBLISHER • “Startlingly beautiful phrases…. It’s the sort of book England needs more and more.” —HENRY MILLER • “I was so much pleased by these burlesques (THE CONDEMNED PLAYGROUND), which seem to show something like comic genius, that I looked up MR. CONNOLLY’s one novel, THE ROCK POOL. A snobbish and mediocre young literary man from Oxford, with a comfortable regular income, spends a summer on the Riviera with an artists’ and writers’ colony. His first attitude is interested but patronizing; he tells himself that he has come as an observer and will study the community like a rock pool. But the denizens of the pool drag him down into it, demoralize him, plunder him, and swindle him, until he finds himself at last, with no money, left behind with the more abject derelicts who remain in the place thorough the winter, in process of becoming one himself. The story, which owes something to SOUTH WIND and COMPTON MACKENZIE’s novels of Capri, differs from them through its acceleration, which, as in the wildly speeded-up burlesques, has something demoniacal about it.” —EDMUND WILSON, THE NEW YORKER • “I have read it twice, and I shall read it again, remembering it between whiles as a theme admirably and seriously handled, and as a novel written with a peremptory, witty precision, and a spirited, off-hand elegance extremely pleasing.” —DESCMOND MACCARTHY, SUNDAY TIMES • “A remarkably well-crafted construction that carries us swiftly along.”—PETER QUENNELL, FROM HIS INTRODUCTION• ABOUT THE AUTHOR: • “The range of his interests is amazing. Unflagging curiosity, precision, not a single cliché of thought or style. One could not ask for more, but one could wish that some the pieces were longer.” —KENNETH CLARK, SUNDAY TIMES (LONDON) • CONNOLLY has “a mind so full of our own knowledge and prejudices, our high and low spirits, our own anxiety—and at the same time so competent in self-analysis—that to read him is to explore many neglected corners of oneself.” —JACQUES BARZUN• “I like the concreteness. The never being academic or abstract. The almost throw-away lines which all the same lodge in one’s being as bits of wisdom.”—ELIZABETH BOWEN • “A most unusual creature, a true original, a man of letters who follows no path but his own.” —MAURICE BOWRA, SUNDAY TIMES • CONNOLLY is “always an artist, choosing the right words, putting them in new patterns, and producing something which nobody else can do.” —MAURICE BOWRA. II • “One whose unremitting search for perfection as a writer is among the half-dozen literary inspirations of our time…one who has written some of the finest English prose of his generation….” —JOHN RAYMOND, NEW STATESMAN • “CONNOLLY brought erudition, discrimination, and passion to bear upon everyone from the Roman elegists to SADE to ROBERT LOWELL. He loved literature, and his whole life was given over to expressing that love…. The vigor and precision of the prose…partook, often, of something like genius…. Whatever the obstacles, whatever the gravity of his temperament, the prose could rise like a helium balloon.” —SVEN BIRKERTS • “He was a remarkable man, despite his flaws and failures….” —HILTON KRAMER, THE NEW CRITERION • “Devilishly amusing…a person so devastatingly intellectual….” —CECIL BEATON • “Although plump and far from handsome, he seems to have had a powerful attraction for women….”—FRANK KERMODE • “What a bore: a dogmatic cultivated American bore; no truth in him; but an uneasy worm squirming for compliments.”—VIRGINIA WOOLF, I • “We spent a night with the BOWENS, where, to our horror we found the CONNOLLYS—a less appetizing pair I have never seen out of the Zoo, and apes are considerably preferable to CYRIL. She has the face of a golliwog and they brought in the reek of Chelsea with them.” —VIRGINIA WOOLF, II • “MR. CONNOLLY is almost the only novel reviewer in England who does not make me sick.”—GEORGE ORWELL • “The only bright spot in my deflated life.”—SYLVIA BEACH, ON CONNOLLY’S COLUMN IN THE NEW STATESMAN • “But above [literary criticism], there is the rare Art of Criticism, with its own valuable and distinct literature, its own aspirations and achievements. The only under forty who shows any sign of reaching, or indeed, of seeking, this altitude isMR. CYRIL CONNOLLY.”—EVELYN WAUGH • “Almost everything CONNOLLY wrote was stylish and intelligent.”—WILLIAM BOYD, THE GUARDIAN • CONNOLLY’s “standard of literary criticism is the highest there is.” —JAMES AGATE, THE DAILY EXPRESS • “He is the greatest living English writer of prose, the specialist exponent of a supple style that is both classical and contemporary, eloquent and restrained, witty and humanly searching.” —ALAN ROSS, LONDON MAGAZINE • “A London pundit and character…who brought to his reviewing and journalism considerable diligence and an ineradicable verve and fineness of mind. CONNOLLY, who died in 1974, had become an interesting person, and remains one.” —JOHN UPDIKE, THE NEW YORKER • “As a critic, EDMUND WILSON is more forceful, V. S. PRITCHETT more sensible. But CONNOLLY triumphs in his knack for the memorable phrase (‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway’), his obvious pleasure in reading, and his conversational connoisseurship.”—MICHAEL DIRDA, WASHINGTON POST • “When CYRIL CONNOLLY passed on in 1974 English prose lost one of its guardians. V. S. PRITCHETT is perhaps the only literary journalist of CONNOLLY’s caliber left. And though others—JOHN UPDIKE and WILFRID SHEED, for example—write books with great intelligence and enthusiasm neither has CONNOLLY’s elegance or erudition. They don’t make them as they used to.” —JOHN SEABROOK, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR (1984) • ABOUT THE AUTHOR’S “ENEMIES OF PROMISE” (1938): • “The best book of criticism since the war, and more than ELIOT or WILSON, [CONNOLLY really writes] about writing in the only way it is interesting to anyone except academics.”—W. H. AUDEN • “As this book makes clear, CONNOLLY had an admirable grasp on the history of creative writing, especially in England, and offered some keen insights for writers that still ring true today. And, best of all, he has a unique, lyrical but imminently approachable style that makes his writing sing and spotlights the agile workings of an impossibly sharp mind.”—PUMPJACK PRESS (BLOG) • “No one concerned with writing or reading should miss it.”—PUNCH • “It had the kind of lucidity and intellectual integrity, that clear objectivity which one hardly meets elsewhere than in Frenchmen.”—ENID STARKIE • “An attempt to identify, albeit from the vantage point of 1938, some of the snares that lie in wait for apprentice writers, and the many impediments strewn across their path. Like much of the raw material that went to make up the CONNOLLY myth, ENEMIES is several things: it is a rueful evocation of his Etonian and Oxonian adolescence, a pitiless exploration of his own neuroses and an open hold for a bumper cargo of lapidary epigrams.”—DJ TAYLOR, THE GUARDIAN (2016) • “A unique blend of literary criticism and autobiography…. His eye is so sharp, his feeling for language so rich, and his reading so close to the text that his interpretations don’t seem like opinions at all, but like facts.”—JOHN SEABROOK, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR • ABOUT THE AUTHOR’S “THE UNQUIET GRAVE” (1944):• “I cannot help imagining writers hundreds of years hence poring over a twentieth-century classic entitle THE UNQUIET GRAVE, and admiring in it the mirror or their own preoccupations…. PALINURUS is enchantingly clever (and how much more, more habitable this island would become if cleverness were less generally despised). He is soaked in literature, Latin, French, and English. He is blissfully responsive to nature, to history, and to the visual arts…. He is above all conspicuous for the dire penetration of the gaze he turns upon himself.” —RAYMOND MORTIMER, NEW STATESMAN • “It is a book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough.” —ERNEST HEMINGWAY • “A masterpiece-non-masterpiece of a peculiarly modern kind.”—STEPHEN SPENDER • “We ought to be grateful that…one good writer has persisted in producing…a true natural history of the wartime morale.”—EDMUND WILSON, THE NEW YORKER • “Not for the vague enjoyment of the many…but for the exquisite enjoyment of a few.”—ELIZABETH BOWEN, THE TATTLER • “A valuable document.”—GEORGE ORWELL, THE OBSERVER • “It is one of those books which disturb and incite the mind.” —THE NATION • “That curious scrapbook.”—JOHN UPDIKE, THE NEW YORKER • “Maddeningly flawed—pretentious, self-serving, arch—as weall as achingly honest and true.” —WILLIAM BOYD, THE GUARDIAN • “A permanent contribution to the literature of introspection.”—DESMOND MACCARTHY • “One cannot help being grateful for a book that so obviously has a personality revealed in it, a civilized one with a genuine love of the best—and a blessed sense of style.”—IRWIN EDMAN, SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE • “Like nothing under the sun except, perhaps, a combination of PASCAL’s PENSÉES and ARNOLD BENNETT’s journal for the period of World War I…. MR. CONNOLLY (himself a skeptic and individualist) gravely and gaily comprehends his collection of epigrams, diagnoses, prognostications, impressions, nostalgias, and plain, old-fashioned complaints.”—CARLOS BAKER, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (1945?) • “That THE UNQUIET GRAVE has been published in paperback by Persea means that civilization has a chance.” —JOHN LEONARD, NEW YORK TIMES (1981) • “My friend CYRIL CONNOLLY, as readers of THE UNQUIET GRAVE know, had a deeply inquisitive, restlessly inquiring mind and was always happiest when he had discovered a new problem that he could carry around with him and ponder at leisure.”—PETER QUENNELL, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (1983) • “THE UNQUIET GRAVE…contains a good many passages that still touch the heart.”—HILTON KRAMER, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (1984) • “He [EVELYN WAUGH] had recently completed BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, the most important novel of his career, when NANCY MITFORD sent him a copy of THE UNQUIET GRAVE by CYRIL CONNOLLY. WAUGH read and reread CONNOLLY’s book and scribbled his reactions on the margins. The marginalia are extensive, full of insight and full of self-delusion…and the comments he made on the book are fascinating, not just for what they say about CONNOLLY but also for the light they throw on WAUGH himself. For WAUGH was obsessed with CONNOLLY: fascinated and irritated by him; alternately admiring and contemptuous; secretly envious and publicly derisive. These are a set of contrasting reactions easily understood by CONNOLLY fans (amongst whom I count myself among the most ardent) because you cannot read CYRIL CONNOLLY for very long without wanting to acquire—and then developing—a relationship with the personality of the man himself. This is rarely the case with readers and writers.” —WILLIAM BOYD, THE GUARDIAN• “It may be a masterpiece. It is certainly a classic.”—COMMONWEAL • “I love it. For me it is a masterpiece, if an untidy one. It is packed with ideas and wisdom and aphorisms, many of which have passed into the language, their origins forgotten and uncredited.”—ANTHONY PERRY, SLIGHTLY FOXED (JOURNAL) • “The book is very well written, and its piecemeal presentation—aphorisms, quotes, short digressions—make it a marvelous book to dip into. A wealth of classical allusion, and extensive quotation particularly in the French make it something of a challenge, but it is worth the effort. Not for everyone—the style is fairly prissy, the content emphatically ‘intellectual’ (in all the good and bad senses of the word)—but highly recommended.” —THE COMPLETE REVIEW (WEBSITE) • “What THE UNQUIET GRAVE certainly is, is infinitely quotable. Every section has something in it which is profound, which taken in isolation is thought-provoking or insightful. I am not sure if it has meaning to every life, but I think anyone who has ever felt lonely, who has ever been mystified by life, who has ever doubted themselves or felt out of place or lost or struggling in some way (and who in this world hasn’t felt those things) will find some wisdom and solace in this book.”—BIIS BOOKS (BLOG) • “The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” —FIRST SENTENCE OF “THE UNQUIET GRAVE” • • For other details about this book, please see below. • TITLE: “THE ROCK POOL: A NOVEL” AUTHOR: CYRIL CONNOLLY INTRODUCER: PETER QUENNELL TYPE: TRADE PAPERBACKPUBLISHER, LOCALE, & YEAR: Persea Books (New York), 1981 EDITION: Third Edition Thus* *RE: On the Copyright Page, the statement “Third Edition.” FIRST PUBLISHED: 1936 NOTE: This copy is NOT an ex-library copy NOR a book-club edition. PAGES: 138 ISBN: 978-0-89255-059-3 CONDITION OF BOOK: VERY GOOD PLUS. Wraps/covers are bright & clean with only minor scratching & smudging (from normal handling). Corners are sharp. Book is square & firm. Spine is tight & uncreased with sharp tips. Text-block edges are fine. Pages are clean & bright—with no writing, no underlining, no highlighting, no foxing, no staining, no tears/rips, no foul odor, etc. This copy is CLEARLY UNREAD. • SHIPPING NEWS: This book will be wrapped with care before being shipped in a cushioned & sturdy mailer. THANK YOU! ********************** /\___/\=•ᆺ•= “We believe it’s good business to be good to our customers.” *********** FLAPPINCAT’s HOUSE RULES ***********1. GENERAL TREATMENT. We enjoy treating FLAPPINCAT customers with honesty & respect & warmth because that’s how we like to be treated when we buy things on eBay.2. GENERAL ATTITUDE. We are grateful you choose to trust us with your business. We aim for that gratitude to permeate every part of how we engage with you.3. OUR DESCRIPTIONS. We describe every item we sell as clearly and accurately as we can. When it comes to describing condition, we tend toward being conservative. 4. PACKING & SHIPPING. We know from experience that items, when not thoughtfully packed, can be damaged during shipment. To avoid that real danger, FLAPPINCAT wraps & cushions your purchase(s) mindfully—and sometimes zealously—in a sturdy package. WARNING: In our zeal, we sometimes over-tape containers and you may need a penknife to unseal our shipments. NOTE: Though we often recycle shipping materials, we do NOT stint on protection. 5. OUR PRICES. We try to offer the lowest prices on eBay for items we sell. Even our most expensive offerings tend to be lower than what others are asking. “You could look it up!” —to quote baseball immortal JACK KEEFE. SUMMARY: We know you have many buying options on eBay. FLAPPINCAT tries to be distinctive by being accurate, mindful, and friendly. *********** How We GRADECONDITION ***********DETAILS. 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Price: 11.99 USD

Location: Chapel Hill, North Carolina

End Time: 2025-01-05T16:49:48.000Z

Shipping Cost: 5.5 USD