Like Charles Dickens, Cyril Connolly left among his papers a partly serialized but unfinished murder mystery whose perfectly unknown dénouement has proved a long- acting tease to his admirers. Dickens, as Broadway recently reminded us, gave no one the key to his Edwin Drood; Connolly, however, unlocked the secret of Shade Those Laurels for at least one person—the poet and biographer Peter Levi. Now Mr. Levi has edited the three completed chapters of this abandoned jeu d’esprit, only the first of which was published by Connolly before his death in 1974; he has also fashioned, from memories of long-ago talks with the author, a plausible if perfunctory conclusion. The result is a somewhat creaky country-house whodunit whose real interest, like that of any memorable mystery, lies quite outside the intricacies of its plot. One picks up this novel to listen one last time to the voice of Cyril Connolly, for, as our narrator says of Sir Mortimer Gussage, this little book’s lion and body-to-be, “whatever he [is] saying, his tone [makes] of it a treat, an enlightenment, a special occasion.”
And what a crowd! Besides the narrator and the dashing host, they are eight.
Our narrator is a young and talented book reviewer who, upon proposing to his paper a birthday tribute to Sir Mortimer, is invited by the master to a family dinner at home. Mr. Levi is quite right, in his introduction, to say that this novel “exists almost entirely for the sake of its amazing dinner party,” just as its characters exist almost entirely for the sake of dining—that is, of talking, tasting, and definitively appraising. This party gives us Connolly at his wittiest as his grotesquely overcultivated cast takes up such matters as the best meals described in the Goncourt journals, the most effective aphrodisiacs, the pleasures of keeping a cold-house, and, perhaps most fascinating in the author’s working out of it, the proper way to cook an olive stuffed with capers and anchovies. Among this crowd “not a shrimp is peeled without a dissertation, not a sparrow falls to the ground without a post-mortem.” And what a crowd! Besides the narrator and the dashing host, they are eight: the beautiful Laurian, Sir Mortimer’s daughter; the chic Lady Cressida, his silver-tongued wife; Julian Frere, his no-longer-young disciple; Geoffrey ‘Ginger’ Bartlett, his randy, shambling publisher; Jane Sotheran, pen-name ‘Sacharissa,’ a haughty popular novelist; Hugh Curry Rivel, a Peacockian exquisite; Mona Farran, Sir Mortimer’s dowdy typist; and Norman, Mona’s husband, a gentleman fruit farmer. They are much more like a family than it would first appear, and each, of course, has a perfectly good motive for doing away with Sir Mortimer. And each, to add spice to the plotting, wants more from the callow narrator than he is prepared to give.
The gourmets gathered round Sir Mortimer’s table are eager to sample his rare Actinidia sinesis, a doubtful brown-green cold-house delicacy, to complete their experience of the gooseberry. In much the same spirit, connoisseurs of English prose will be eager to lift to their noses Shade Those Laurels, a gossamer mauve-petaled forced bloom of a novel, to complete their experience of Connolly. They will appreciate its many streaks of high color and will savor, in intermittent whiffs, the characteristically bracing Connolly perfume. For this they will gladly overlook the pronounced droopiness of certain of its leaves, and the bit of Peter Levi’s tape on the stem.