Meet the Modern Ego
by JACQUES BARZUN
1
THE name of Cyril Connolly should be better known than it is to American readers. Those who see the English magazine Horizon, which Mr. Connolly edits, or who used to read his reviews in the New Statesman, know something of his quality as a journalist. They and others would find it equally worth their effort to come to know him through his books as a representative modern mind; a mind so full of our own knowledge and prejudices, our own 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. I choose at random from his latest volume:—
“Were someone to say if I put this pill in your beer it will explode,’we might believe them; but were they to cry ‘if I pronounce this spell over your beer, it will go flat,’ we should remain incredulous. . . . Paracelsus, the Alehemists . . . have lived in vain. Yet when I read science I turn magical; when I study magic, scientific.
Or again: “I wake up in anxiety; like a fog it overlays all I do, and my days are muffled with anguish. Somewhere in the mind arc crossed the wires of fear and lust and till day long nature’s burglar alarm shrills out in confusion. I dread the bell, the post, the telephone, the sight of an acquaintance. Anguish, anxiety, remorse, and guilt. ...”
If you are candid with yourself you will not quickly dismiss the maker of these confessions as an anomaly; rather, you will awaken tomorrow somewhat strengthened by fellow feeling, and you will observe your next glass of beer with a new and philosophic interest. Writers who can affect, us in this way are rare, particularly if, like Mr. Connolly, they have the nerve needed to speak briefly and directly, instead of playing hide-and-seek throughout the pages of a mammoth novel.
So far, I admit, the American reader’s chances of coming face to face with Mr. Connolly have been slight. His first book of criticism, Enemies of Promise, was issued in this country in 1939, but it remained, unaccountably, a monument of secret publishing. Now two more volumes are being pul before us. One, The Unquiet Grove, is a short diary already published, from which I have taken the quotations above, the; other is a collection of the author’s major essays, which Macmillan will bring out. this spring as The Condemned Playground.
If, as is likely, these titles of books fail to invite, it must be said that they exhibit the side of Mr. Connolly’s mind which has struck his critics most forcibly and disagreeably in the writings themselves. That quality — or defect — is self-consciousness, and I believe that what, is so irritating about it is the degree to which it is the mark of our time.
But having said that Mr. Connolly is a representative man, we must obviously start with the feature in him that most clearly makes him so. An example will show what I mean. “ Both my happiness and my unhappiness,” says Mr. Connolly, “I owe to the love of pleasure; of sex, travel, reading, conversation (hearing myself talk), food, drink, cigars and lying in warm water.” A modern man indeed! Restless, sensual, and dependent on bathtubs; self-aware and not restrained by any vestiges of Victorianism from saying what crosses his mind.
But is he wholly emancipated, natural, free? Far from it, for he is self-conscious. Self-consciousness lurks in that parenthetical aside “conversation (hearing myself talk) ” and colors all the rest — wisdom, choice of existence, taste in art, titling of books, and reportorial genius itself. This dye diffused through Mr. Connolly’s pages, whether confessional or meditative, is the same as we find in nearly all modern writing, foreign and domestic. Mr. Connolly, who recounts his boyhood in Enemies of Promise, evidently learned this cosmetic masking of the self from the best sources — his elders in art and literature.
I purposely chose from him a trivial instance, in order to show how universal, even how unconscious, this self-consciousness has become. Mr. Connolly could not let pass the opportunity of telling us that he is not fooled: he knows how much egotism enters into the pleasure of conversation, and he wants us to know he knows. He overstates the fact to prove that his ego hurts him even more than it does us. Nothing, it seems to me, will look to posterity so characteristic of our century as this desire, this compulsive gesture, of self-deprecation and self-depreciation.
But what is it that drives us to it, forcing us back upon ourselves to distort or deny, in this instance, the traditional belief that conversation is a mutual pleasure? Why is the modern ego so uncomfortable? Life has always been hard. We know that Margaret Fuller — and others—did not accept the universe without a struggle, but we, it almost seems, invent defects and hidden sores, which we then pretend to accept with an unconvincing smile. Once we have caught ourselves doing it, we recognize the grimace in others. I remember reading an interview given by a woman novelist in which she insisted that she had been an exceedingly ugly child. Who cares? Why say it? Self-consciousness is the answer. I suspect, though I do not know, that Mr. Connolly lets his friends talk and enjoys hearing them.
The disease for it is nothing less than a disease lives and thrives in our culture, attacking the individual nervous system from without and blighting it with characteristic jitters. Notice the widespread unwillingness to appear pleased with the honors or responsibilities that befall us. A friend of mine was recently made trustee of a hospital. “I suppose,” he said in grumbling announcement of the news, “you just sit there and say ‘Aye’ to the treasurer’s report.” On the surface no one was to know that the new appointee was intensely pleased with himself and eager for the fairly exacting duties he had assumed. And why not be pleased? No: he must check his feelings, repress his ego, belittle his task, and if possible, be what we call funny at the expense of all three.
The motives behind this poor kind of comedy that we all more or less play to one another are too tangled for any simple explanation. But one element, surely, is the decay of manners. Beyond “please” and “thank you,” which are doubtless indestructible, we no longer know how to behave in public or private. The “informal manners” of which we are so proud are no manners at all, the whole point of manners being that there shall be an abundance of easy forms for common use, to save thinking and avoid awkward improvisation.
But this language, this code, has broken down, and we are like shipwrecked sailors hoisting signals to the Flying Dutchman. The result is needless friction in social affairs and silliness in public: the distinguished writer maintains she was an ugly child. This is not modesty, but boasting — naturally enough, since the occasion called for a formal display of the self which our modern ego simultaneously disallowed. Yet the reader is secretly sat isfied by the awkward shuffling, bribed, as it were, to tolerate the more gifted person by this confession of a defect.
This display of false shame is also connected with the people’s mistaken notion of equality. The popular notion translates “one man is equal in rights with another" as “one man is no different from another.” Hence democratic manners must be informal formless—because if they were anything else, they might offend by revealing differences — of intellect, breeding, education, or habits of life.
A man accordingly pooh-poohs his achievements because—again in a democracy — the elevation of one arouses envy and competition in the rest. Benjamin Franklin knew it and said it two hundred years ago, when he explained in that grim passage of his Autobiography how he took care never to seem the originator of any scheme or idea. Instead, he would push it through the back door of others’ minds, striving to make his superior wits anonymous and unobjectionable.
The more prevalent this attitude, the more uncomfortable we all become. “Is my ego,” we wonder, “sticking out somewhere in unpleasant fashion?” We can no longer even say with the Puritan, “Behold I am nothing,”for we have forgotten the words and the creed which made humility simple and palatable; and moreover, the mere utterance of an “I” draws attention to what we actually are or might be thought. Hence when Mr. Connolly has excellent reasons for saying “I love conversation” (which suggests “he thinks he’s bright ”), he must at once qualify it by casting on himself the very odium of egotism we all fear. He reassures us with the afterthought, “and by conversation, I mean hearing myself talk.” We reward him with a smile; “with all his faults,” we say, “Connolly has a sense of humor.”
I need hardly point out that I am here using Mr. Connolly as a representative for all of us children of the Age of Humor. And I so christen the age because humor is our prime virtue, whose formula is perhaps the only rigid commandment we observe. As we now understand it, the sense of humor dictates that we take not ourselves seriously, nor our neighbor, nor anything that he or we may do; and by necessity, that we be ever conscious of ourselves lest we sin through self-acceptance. Self-depreciation (as in my friend the hospital trustee) becomes the one rule of good form, the single piece of etiquette which we have for dealing with one another.
2
HAPPILY, there is more in Mr. Connolly’s work than just another display of literary self-consciousness. There is a minute, dogged study of its inner and outer connections, its objects and causes. For example, in the sentence after the one detailing the author’s love of food, travel, and baths, he gives us the wider context of his unhappiness; and the very first word states another of his — and our — great themes: Reality.
“Reality,” says Mr. Connolly, “is what remains when these pleasures, together with hope for the future, regret for the past, vanity of the present, and all that composes the aroma of the self, are pumped out of the air bubble in which I live.”
This is but to say that like the majority of moderns, Mr. Connolly is at once hypnotized and sickened by Reality. He hates it and fears it and clutches at it; and yet (save by negatives) he cannot bring himself to tell us what it is, nor why it haunts him. In this regard again, he is no freak, not even a recluse within his own bubble; only a franker and more perceptive recorder of our common life.
It was some years ago that Sir Arthur Eddington commented on the surprising prestige accorded in our century to the notion of Reality. The bare word is a power, as Sir Arthur showed by quoting from the report of a political speech: “. . . reality! (Loud cheers.)” Today’s newspaper is built around the one adjective “realistic.” We read about politicians, business leaders, clergymen, and police chiefs wrangling over facts: all can see the wild goose that the others are chasing, but each in his own eyes sees it as a palpable bird. It is the clinching argument: our side is realistic, has a monopoly on reality; you people are dreamers and idealists, if not quite utter fools. The paradox reaches its height when the wheel of fortune turns and time confounds the incredulous. Thus a distinguished historian and diplomat recently had to point out that the “idealists” like himself who had supported a League of Nations in the twenties were actually realists who foresaw another world war, and the “realists” of that time were simply timid men of short sight.
Our trouble is that we assume Reality is out there, like a sack of potatoes, to be seen and felt and inventoried at will. This assumption is very useful in science, from which we borrowed it, but living in the midst of reality flatly contradicts that simple faith. We cannot see reality at will: we bump into it; it changes, and we carefully go around obstacles that are no longer there; which is why we perpetually have to argue about the right road, the practical plan, and — as was said by a famous tautologist — the true facts. No wonder that in this painful voyage of discovery we curse and despair and call each other names.
Apart from personal risk and unhappiness, the result of this endless recharting is that we tend to call real what has hurt us most and made itself instantly respected. We also conclude that what is unpleasant is probably effective. Scanning the news this past week for things “realistic,” I found these among current meanings: shooting prisoners of war during a retreat; locking up a crying child in a closet (“Mother was realistic in the way she brought us up”); taking it for granted that mankind are cowards and knaves (“He was a realistic bargainer and never entered upon negotiations without carrying a gun and a large roll of bills”). Add up these repeated associations of the real with the nasty, and you necessarily arrive at Mr. Connolly’s conclusion: “Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable. Happiness is in the imagination.”
Clearly, there is a close relation between this view of reality, for which Mr. Connolly finds authority in his influential predecessors, — Flaubert, Heidegger, Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, and the rest, — and the self-consciousness that flavors all our dealings. We hate our selves because we hate our culture — or our place in it. Ruskin predicted this outcome when he said that modern industry would so dwarf the individual’s role that men would scorn themselves no less than one another.
Mr. Connolly confirms the prediction, showing that when the person disintegrates, the intolerant and intolerable ego is exposed, miserably shivering and antisocial: “The industrialization of the world, the totalitarian state and the egotism of materialism have killed friendship; the first through speeding up the tempo of human communications to the point where everyone is replaceable, the second by making such demands on the individual that comradeship can only be practised between workers and colleagues for the period of their cooperation, and the last by emphasizing all that is fundamentally selfish and nasty in people, so that we are unkind about our friends and resentful of their intimacy because of something which is rotting in ourselves.”
Still, man does not readily give up the pursuit of happiness; if he cannot run after it, he will run away from its opposite. In our jargon, he will seek refuge from reality, he will escape. With the refuge of sexual love and marriage, Mr. Connolly deals at length, though indecisively. All sorts of legal, moral, and mechanical devices occur to him as likely to foster true intimacy between man and woman, except the one of extreme mutual considerateness. This avenue may be barred to us by our egotism and our contempt for manners as such, but it ought at least to be mentioned, if only as a forlorn hope when all the books on Married Love have been read and found wanting.
Meanwhile, the word Escape is ever on our lips to condemn ourselves and others. “Dream,” “wish,” “imagination”— we have turned all these into handy scourges to punish the commonest habits of daily life: a good sleep is an evasion, though insomnia argues guilt; to want a bath hints of prenatal predilections, but a cold shower is masochistic. Mr. Connolly, who is well read in Freudian literature, gives us a superb and only half ironic summary of our hounded hunt for bliss, capping the catalogue with a sublime pun: “If we apply depth-psychology to our own lives we see how enslaved we remain to the womb and the mother. Womb of Mother Church, of Europe, mother of coni incuts, of horseshoe harbors and valleys, of the lap of earth, of the bed, the arm-chair and the bath, or of the Court of Charles II, of Augustan London, or the Koine of Cicero, of the bowwindow of the club, of the house by the mill or the waterfront sacred to Venus; all our lives seeking a womb with a view.”
Yet as Air. Connolly sees now and then, the view is Reality only when we have worked to make it so.
3
FOR although we might think that the great worth of Mr. Connolly’s work lies in its contemporary record and diagnosis, the links between his thoughts have an added significance; and in the passage that begins with the words just quoted, he is not simply contemplative. On the contrary, he is forging his way, for perhaps the hundredth time, toward the central question of his existence how to be an artist and it is through his repeated effort to answer that question that he achieves what I consider his chief importance.
For him, artist, thinker, and religious man are blood brothers; often they are three in one, as he himself would obviously wish to be. Certainly it is as a writer concerned with art, reason, and faith that he serves us most, breaking again and again through the bonds that hold us in the stiff Egyptian poses I have described.
To see where and how far he can lead us, one has to retrace Mr. Connolly’s path through various hothouses including Eton and Oxford, through the seventeen years of “modernism” reflected in the literary studies {The Condemned Playground), to the irresistibly witty revolt against contemporary fiction (Enemies of Promise), and finally to the journal which has furnished my illustrations thus far.
Throughout this odyssey, one is struck by a contradiction which holds the clue to the author’s gropings and is the measure ot his accomplishment. A single word enshrines that contradiction, the word “romantic.” Like most modern writers, he uses it now contemptuously, now longingly, and like them also he takes time out to explain why we had better drop it altogether. He keeps on using it, of course, but what is really new and suggestive is thal when he uses “romantic” in a friendly mood, he fills it with a reasoned, positive content; he makes it correspond not only to a desire but to an experience, to a set of experiences, that form a pattern contrasting with the rest of his cultural paraphernalia.
He is a great reader and he seeks to shape his life by ideas, so that we have in him not a mere fad-fancier like Aldous Huxley but a rediscoverer of action. Fettered though he may feel at times by the weight of tradition, the restraints of cleverness, the real and affected despair of the modern ego, he knows that the business of man is doing, with whatever instrument chance and native gift may assign.
Already in the 1999 volume, Mr. Connollv wrote, “There is only one crime: to escape from our talent, to abort that growth which, ripening and maturing, must be the justification of the demands we make on society.” And in the journal, even while bemoaning his recurrent “Angst (anxiety, spleen, noia, guilt, fear, remorse, cafard) ” he admits that “Ennui Is the condition of not fulfilling our potentialities.” The book itself was written in the clear and romantic
conviction “that the true function of writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.”
This acknowledgment of the combined artistic and social duties of the talented man is indeed remarkable in one who grew up in the world of colored shadows of the Impressionists and Symbolists, and who later became on his own account a modernist in the wake of Gide, Cocteau, and Eliot. Clearly, the size and power of Joyce had also attracted him. Mr. Connolly’s first full-length article was a brilliant interview with Joyce in 1927, which he reprints as the opening chapter in his volume of critical essays. All but one or two of these confirm the same preference for strength and breadth in literature, even the one calm riddling of A. E. Housman that he chooses in his Preface to belittle. All in all, it seems fair to conclude that Mr. Connolly, while proving that he knows and suffers from the modern palsy, bears witness to the truth that hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.
Now generalize this principle, act on it, and you conquer the Modern Ego. Sardonic or urbane, you can outface any ghost — even that of “reality.” All kinds of realities and democratic diversities replace that one Invisible Policeman: “It is vain,” says Mr. Connolly, “to accuse people of escaping . . . Time is not the same for all of us, neither is our imagination’s food nor our artistic material.” This too is refreshingly romantic, as he explicitly admits when he speaks of “the romantic writer” he himself might have been, possessed of “the courage to accept poverty for the sake of the development of his true personality.”
The psychological basis of such resolves in Mr. Connolly is pure romanticism also. He dismisses as false the supposed split between head and heart, makes a place for the irrational within the life of reason, and asserts that “only creative work, communion with nature, and helping others are Angstfree.” Finally, the very touchstone of Romanticism: “all good writers have to discover the yawning crevasse which separates Man’s finite destiny from his infinite potentialities.”
The recognition of this “crevasse" insures against stupid optimism without killing self-confidence. The writer—and modern man unconsciously patterning himself after the creations of literature — need be neither irritatingly sanguine nor helplessly despondent. Recognizing both the power and the weakness in his nature, he treads the thorny middle path along which all self-justifying action takes place — the kind of action that dispels Ennui and Angst and Ego, and their English equivalents.
And curiously, though the desperate moods and i he sense of chaos are not banished forever,— nothing is nor can be, yet the local and temporary bugbears are driven off, “When did the Ego begin to stink?” asks Mr. Connolly, and his virtual answer is, “When it ceased to act.” What he actually says, dealing on his own account with a predicament more frequent in women, is this: “Obesity is a mental stale, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment. . . . The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.”
At this rate, the delicate loying of many modernists with the idea of original sin ceases to confer the superiority they expect as a reward for accepting the dogma. We lose interest in their spiritual stomach-ache; for, being the common lot, it acquires importance only when some signal achievement results from the travail — and the more gayly exhibited, the better. It is not the least of Mr. Connolly’s merits as a critic that he speaks with decision and serious gayety. The very rhythm of his style marks a departure from the school of Gide and Eliot, whose judicial utterances always sound as if cruelly wrung from a man in the last stages of lockjaw. He is, in a sense, the first man of his generation to break with the fin de siecle and its heirs.
With art raised anew to the level of action, the artist is no longer the sullen bondsman of fiendish abstractions such as Society, or Science, or Mr. Eliot’s choice — Suffering. The writer’s glass of beer remains beer, safe from the scientist’s magic pill, though the writer’s own spell may turn its bubbles into song. This magic at least gives a meaning to sensation as well as contemplation, to effort as well as the forced retreats of despair. “The true pattern of existence,” says our critic, “can best be studied in a long life like Goethe’s — a life of reason, interrupted at intervals by emotional outbursts, displacements, passions, follies.” For Mr. Connolly as for ihe romantic philosophers, art stands next below religion, and equal with love, a social and, as 1 showed previously in speaking of Scott Fitzgerald, a highly sociable mode of self-fulfillment.
At one time, it is true, Mr. Connolly rather agreed with Gide’s formula, according to which the artist bears a wound which “he must not allow to heal, but must keep open and bleeding, in contact with dreadful Reality.” Now he rewords the mission of the artist as “the desire to construct ... in a protest, against the chaos to which all else appears condemned.” I confess I prefer construction to suppuration, and I draw strength from Mr. Connolly’s rephrasing of the writer’s creed: “While thought exists, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.”