The Pagan and the Priest: the overlapping lives of Cyril Connolly and Peter LeviThe Pagan and the Priest: the overlapping lives of Cyril Connolly and Peter Levi

Cyril Connolly used to be one of the greatest literary powers in the land, but nearly fifty years after his death, how many remember him now? His novels and memoirs – tantalised with talent – were never fully realised. He flourished in essays and reviews and in his wartime editorship of the Literary Magazine, Horizon. In the 1950s and 1960s, when Sunday newspapers gave serious attention to new books, Connolly’s columns in The Sunday Times could make or break a reputation. But he knew his own limits and despised himself for them. Writing in 1944 in The Unquiet Grave, a book still in print, he said: “Every excursion into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the films, however grandiose, will be doomed to disappointment. To put our best into these is another folly since thereby we condemn good ideas as well as bad to oblivion.”

For most of his life, Connolly was a sun-worshipping pagan, a laid-back sybarite. He was himself the enemy of his promise. On his death in 1974, the diarist James Lees-Milne remarked that Connolly: “…was about the cleverest and most literary of my generation … The best critic of his time … his wit and style, were highly entertaining.” But Lees-Milne delivered a sting when he added that: “… he could be devastatingly rude … [and] … like other brilliant men to whom literary ability comes too easily … he was idle, and never fulfilled himself.”

Harshly put, but fair. Despite Connolly’s weaknesses and notwithstanding his passing resemblance in later life to a “Pekinese in a three-piece suit”, Connolly had a genuine gift for friendship. Indeed he could enchant even as he sponged financially off all who would let him. In the 1930s and 1940s, his acquaintances ranged widely from Evelyn Waugh to Harold Nicolson, from Bernard Berenson to Stephen Spender, from Elizabeth Bowen to Penelope Betjeman. Women and wives were a speciality and serially engaged. France, particularly Provence was irresistible; indeed, his only completed novel, The Rock Pool (1936) is set there and depicts the terminal decline of a young Englishman who succumbs to every temptation.

Connolly was in thrall always to the classical world. His knowledge of Greece and Rome was prodigious, and he used it to captivate his readers and all who knew him through his conversation. This classical preoccupation drew this redoubtable pagan into a friendship from the mid-1960s until his death with Peter Levi, another formidable classicist, a poet who was also a Jesuit priest. Levi had a charm of a different sort; quieter but equally seductive in its own way. Classics and poetry apart, however, the two men must have appeared improbable friends. Connolly, the epicurean who in his youth had frequented prostitutes, was – even in his later more restrained years – a striking contrast to the Jesuit poet.

Levi, the child of a Jewish father and Catholic mother, whose two siblings also joined religious orders, was a man who had never visited Greece (or even been abroad), until enabled to do so by the Jesuits in 1963. This was the start of an abiding fascination with modern and Ancient Greece, which he evoked so vividly in The Hill of Kronos. Levi’s lapidary, playful pen crafted a substantial body of poems whose worth and quality grow with the years. He made friends easily and retained them all his life. In quite a deep sense, Levi was a much more serious man than Connolly.

The two men shared a sensibility, which was a Romantic one. But they shared more than a sensibility; they shared a wife – not at the same time but in sequence. Deidre Craven was the meeting point of the pagan and the priest, of Connolly and Levi. She was the granddaughter of Viscount Craigavon, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, and the former wife of a West Country farmer with whom she had had two children. She would go on to have two more children once married to Connolly. The pram in the hallway he had earlier identified as one of the Enemies of Promise (1938) for any young writer had taken up position relatively late in Connolly’s own life. To add to the incongruities of his final decade, in 1967, he bought the only house he ever owned in Eastbourne, the town of his birth and far removed from the fashionable London hang-outs of his earlier years.

Levi recalled that in 1962 when he was teaching at Campion Hall, Oxford and still with fifteen years as a Jesuit ahead of him, he had had his first passing encounter with Deidre: “One evening … I went into Oxford to an evening of subdued social grandeur and there, as she came down the stairs, I recognised the love of my life. We recognised each other. But it certainly never occurred to me we would one day be married.”

Nor did it ever occur to Connolly. Indeed, whilst both Connolly and Deidre welcomed Levi into their lives in due course, it was Deidre who made the running. Connolly was a vain but not an especially jealous man; even so, he became suspicious of the friendship between his wife and the Jesuit priest. Of course, the friendship was initially somewhat clandestine though the subject of gossip among Connolly’s social circle. Oddly enough, the three of them made the occasional public appearance together, as when Connolly spoke at the Eton College Literary Society, and Deidre and Levi went along with him. But not until after Connolly’s death, aged 71 in 1974, did Levi leave the Jesuit Order and, soon after that, take the decisive step of marrying Deidre.

It was a step neither Deidre nor Levi ever regretted. They formed a newly honed domestic life in Gloucestershire. Levi seemed to enjoy the presence of Deidre’s two young children by Connolly and the occasional visits of her two children by her first husband. He worked voraciously – he needed the money – on a wide variety of books, including some elegant biographies, notably of Edward Lear. His reputation as a poet grew steadily, and in 1984 he was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry. His spirits did not sag even when, towards the end of his life, he became blind. He died in 2000, aged 68. He had enjoyed over twenty years of happy marriage to Deidre.

An odd coda to the overlapping lives of Connolly and Levi occurred in 1990. A novel that Connolly had begun but not completed and which had been serialised in the magazine Encounter in the 1950s was ‘completed’ by Levi. In its first chapter, “Shade Those Laurels” has a splendid set-piece dinner party at which the main characters come alive; but that apart it is a shallow product even with Levi’s additions, but a curiosity nonetheless.

It would be ironic, notwithstanding Cyril Connolly’s variable literary attainments and his noisy life, if Peter Levi’s quiet achievements in poetry and prose – as well as in life – should eventually leave the longer-lasting trace in the sand.