Dave's Book Blog: "The Rock Pool" by Cyril Connolly

This is the sad story of a lonely man, a man with no discernible charisma, trying to be liked.

A English expat and wannabe writer (of course!) with a small private income (such a trope!) staying on the French Riviera visits Trou-sur-Mer, a hilltop town that used to be an artists' colony and is now the watering hole for wannabe artists and writers and assorted bohemians. He decides that they and their milieu will make an interesting study for a book, positioning himself as the archetypal outsider (letters from England show that he was an outsider there; he reflects "They all seemed to be playing a game of grandmother's steps, in which, whenever he looked round at them, they were somehow blandly and innocently nearer the social success which was their universal goal."; Ch 10).

But it's lonely being an outsider. What he really wants is to make friends. But he repeatedly fails to fit in: "He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample." (Ch 5). Some accept him because they want to sponge from him (almost no one has any money) and he spends much more than he can afford trying to buy their friendship. He occasionally gets to sleep with one of the women. A gay man makes overtures towards him: "He felt like the second most unpopular boy at a school receiving overtures from the first." (Ch 3)

It was one of those books which had so many characters that not only was it difficult for the reader to keep track of them but also the writer was unable to make any of them distinctive. The only character that felt fully fleshed was the narrator, Naylor.

The plot, such as it was, followed the deterioration of Naylor as he tried and failed to make friends, as he spent his money and became poor (and therefore unwanted by the others) and as he devolved from being an observer to becoming one of the creatures in the rock pool.

I think it was the looseness of the plot (and the abruptness of the ending) that was one of the aspects of this book that most annoyed my fellow readers in my U3A Eastbourne Central reading group. But lots of books focus on a group of characters rather than driving a narrative. This book reminded me of novels such as Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, or Less than Zero by Brett Easton Ellis or Generation X by Douglas Coupland or Cocaine Nights by J G Ballard or Climbers by M John Harrison. Perhaps I just have a taste for nihilistic downward spirals!

I think the purpose of the book was to be a study of pond life. The inhabitants of Trou lived off each other, predators and prey, and established their position in the food chain. There seemed no higher purpose to their existence other than to survive and to satisfy their needs. Some affected strange costumes or adopted strange behaviours while others flitted in and out of the shadows.

There was a pervasive sense of sadness. I empathised strongly with this lonely, unpopular man.

In the end, the author asks himself: "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?" (Ch 10) Given that this was Connolly's first (and only) novel, these seem appropriate questions to ask:

Though it is never explicit, there is a lot of sex as the bohemians bed-hop across the town. There is frank discussion of both gay and lesbian relationships (which made it impossible to publish in England; this was 1936 and Radclyffe Hall's ground-breaking lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was declared obscene by an English court in 1928.
There are not that many quotations but there is a lot of foreign words and phrases in French and German and Latin. Regular readers of this blog will know that this is one of my pet hates. Is the author just showing off? Probably. Am I expected to be multilingual or does he want me to miss potentially key moments? What's wrong with footnote translations?
But I get the feeling that is is sincere. Connolly was clearly a snob both in terms of class ("Naylor suddenly realised that she was middle-class and, worse, was assuming that he was."; Ch 1) and in terms of intellectuality (all those foreign phrases, the works of literature cited, words like logophagous etc) but I get the feeling that the description of Naylor as a lonely misfit came from the author's heart.

Notes:

In French 'trou' means a hole or an orifice. In slang it can be used, among other things, as short for 'trou de cul' (arsehole) or to mean a prison cell. Thus 'Trou-sur-Mer' might mean hole-on-sea, arsehole-on-sea, or prison-cell-on-sea. All these are relevant.
Taormina is a resort in Sicily which at the time in which the novel is set was known as a haven for gay men.
At one stage he remembers considering writing book which is a mixture of Petronius (presumably the Satyricon) and Lazarillo de Tormes, the classic Spanish picaresque novel.
Votre truc means 'your thingy', votre machin means 'your thingymajig'

Selected quotes:

"She had something expectant and glistening about her, like a penguin waiting for a fish." (Ch 1)
"Being told that they were both English, Naylor and Varna began those elaborate manoeuvres of introduction which are performed so punctiliously in that formal country by its inhabitants and its dogs. Their problem was how to find, while asking the fewest and least indiscreet questions, their common boasting ground." (Ch 1)
"To wake up in love, to wake up with a procession of buried feelings, bars of music, forgotten poetry returning like the cavaliers of sixteen-sixty; to surprise the priests of the oldest, falsest religion celebrating their mysteries in the reconsecrated heart!" (Ch 2) Of course a sentence full of pretentious melodrama such as this has to end with an exclamation mark!
"Such a horror of the human race that he once had to go to bed for three weeks after standing in a queue." (Ch 2)
"In the streets he seemed to wade through quarrelsome women in cheap pyjamas." (Ch 3)
"It was a world of externals, where jewellery and large cars formed the true background." (Ch 3)
"It was the hour when the soft night of southern cities holds the clearest promise of release and adventure, when a light going off is a portent and the lowering of a blind seems like a sign from heaven." (Ch 3)
"She looked at him complicitly as the matron of a girls' school might at an obstetrician who'd had to be summoned." (Ch 3)
"She held herself so erect that all other women seemed to stoop when one looked at them." (Ch 3)
"For some time he lay like a crushed snail on a garden path." (Ch 4)
"She made him feel as if he wasn't in the room." (Ch 4)
"Jimmy did not pay much attention to the spurts and silences of Naylor's explanation." (Ch 4)
"There are times when the fear of life is greater than the fear of death, when the remaining years ... stretch out ahead like the steps of an infinitely tiring staircase." (Ch 5)
"He didn't like to talk while he was dancing; for him it was like driving through traffic." (Ch 5)
"My! You can see what Trou has done to you, I've never seen anyone so altered. The ravages! It reminds me of the Picture of Dorian Gray, only it's the other way round; my portrait can't keep pace with all the changes." (Ch 6)
"It was natural to want to go to bed with people." (Ch 6)
"Like the circles made by a stone in a pond, his memories of her, yesterday so close and finite, widened into larger, hazier ripples that troubled every part of his consciousness." (Ch 7)
"Is it cynical to learn from much unpleasant experience that experience is usually unpleasant?" (Ch 7)
"The Jealous God, the Envious Being who would pinch any happiness that came one's way, if one showed it, or destroy and excellence." (Ch 7)
"He managed a laugh, if that was the right name for his lubricious whinny." (Ch 9)
"Regeneration does not come quickly, and the drafts of night are seldom honoured by the grim cashier of day." (Ch 10)

It's not very structured and sometimes overwritten; most of the characters come across as self-indulgent hedonists. But, as the selected quotes above show, there were moments of wonderful writing.

June 2024; 138 pages