AN INVITATION TO REJOIN THE HUMAN RACE.(minority groups and martyrdom)(Column)

PEOPLE WHO WRITE a regular column for a journal enjoy hearing from readers. It matters not (or not much) whether comment is critical or complimentary; the mere evidence that someone has actually read you and responded is enough. When a chance occurs--such as now--it is a pleasure to thank all those Quadrant readers who have sent letters or messages.

My latest correspondent is sharp of mind and eye, and owns an uncommonly good memory. In Quadrant of May last I mentioned the insistent complaint of homosexuals that they are unfairly treated--"discriminated against", in the ghastly locution of our age.

Do they do this (I asked) because they are "hungry of an imagined martyrdom"? I had taken the phrase from a writer who had applied the question to John Donne, seventeenth-century English churchman and poet. (That application had nothing to do with homosexuality--an allegation no one ever heard about Donne!)

"Martyrdom" caught my correspondent's attention, and he kindly photocopied for me a book review by the great Cyril Connolly, who died in the mid-1970s. Connolly flourished in the age of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. He was editor of the trenchant journal Horizon, and a prince among book reviewers. For all his swagger--some would have said "arrogance"--he was nevertheless capable rather neatly of sending himself up; as witness:

 
   At Eton with Orwell, At Oxford with Waugh, He was nobody after And nothing 
   before. 

The strong tones of his literary voice grated on the precious ears of E.M. Forster and his like. Noel Annan, in his magnificent new book Our Age, compares Connolly's arrival on the English literary scene to that of "a hunting parson who had blundered into the Oriel common room when Newman and Keble were discussing the illapse of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost". But Annan added: "Connolly made his readers feel that he loved literature. How many critics do?"

In the 1920s Connolly reviewed Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. This book is still recalled as the pioneer novel about lesbianism, and still attracts such epithets as "fearless", "outspoken", "frank", "looks uncomfortable truths straight in the eye". Most often (should you be uncouth enough to ask) your enthusiast has not--well, no, not actually read the book.