Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

My favorite forgotten book of the 20th century is Cyril Connolly’s “The Unquiet Grave.” It’s a seductive mixture of diary, common-place book, essay, travelogue and memoir--arranged in loose paragraphs, in which Connolly gives us his views on women, religion, death, seduction, infatuation and literature. The thoughts are wise, dark and beautifully modeled, with the balance of the best French aphorisms. For example: “There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover,” ’No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us--something more than we could learn from ourselves, from a book.” The charm of the book lies in the narrator’s mischievous, melancholy tone as he shifts between the sublime and the banal: “To sit late in a restaurant (especially when one has to pay the bill) is particularly conducive to angst, which does not affect us after snacks taken in an armchair with a book. Angst is an awareness of the waste of our time and ability, such as may be witnessed among people kept waiting by a hairdresser.”

“The Unquiet Grave” is a book about a thousand things, held together by the intelligence, candor and humor of the author. I’d find it hard to pursue a friendship with anyone who didn’t have any sympathy for it--and hard to hate someone who did.