Fisher does not indulge in cheap psychoanalysis about Cyril's feelings of betrayal, but notes that his memoir, "A Georgian Childhood", portrays him as "a virtual orphan"."Is there anything in reality more dangerous than early success?" Connolly later asked His own success was prodigious. Connolly was a child of empire, shipped hither and thither; when his parents moved to Hong Kong he was consigned, aged six, to an English prep school. His parents, Matthew and Maud, were a fearsome soldier whose crusading work on non-marine mollusca outlasts most of his son's jewelled ephemera, and a poetically-disposed gardener who worried about her son's habit of sitting for hours with his lower lip stuck out (he was afraid of developing a double chin). Possibly emboldened by the example of Peter Ackroyd, who circumvented a similar embargo to write his life of T S Eliot, Fisher elected to go ahead without permission - to which Mrs Connolly (now Mrs Peter Levi) responded by commissioning a rival biography from the journalist Jeremy Lewis, publication date as yet unannounced. Fisher has done wonders to quarry so many facts about Connolly's life, but the mercurial Cyril still slips through his fingers. Connolly's ancestors were a vivid amalgam of the swashbuckling and the snooty: English vice-admirals on the male side, Anglo-Irish high sherrifs on the distaff. Many tried before him, but were thwarted by the non-cooperation of Connolly's widow, Deirdre, who refused to authorise a life or release her late husband's multitudinous notebooks and journals. For every advocate who insists on his brilliance -- as critic and wit, as editor of Horizon, the pilot-light of literature in the war years, as the author of Enemies of Promise, with its unsurpassed analysis of prose style - you can find an equal number keen to tell you about Connolly the self-pitying talent-squanderer and to insist that he never amounted to anything beyond a single skinny novel (The Rock Pool), a pretentious anthology of diamant modernist shards (The Unquiet Grave) and some collections of book reviews.

Can the man whose career seems to embody the literary history of the 20th century really have been such a lightweight? Clive Fisher's is the first attempt at a full-scale biography. Fans of Cyril Connolly have long been aware that he is not everybody's cup of tea. "Apes are considerably preferable to Cyril," confided Virginia Woolf, who thought his "cocktail criticism" no more than "a sheaf of feathers in the wind". Excellent as Heart Songs undoubtedly is, no-one should be fooled into thinking that it is an original publication..

In fact, all but two did, and the same collection - with a near- identical cover - has also been available here as a paperback. A tiny front-end paragraph notes that "many" of the stories appeared in a collection published in the US in 1988. Yet you could tell they despised him, too, for making things easy."The conspicuous merits of this volume, issued in the wake of Proulx's Pulitzer-winning The Shipping News, are only slightly tarnished by the scent of a publisher cashing in. In "Electric Arrows", for example, the protagonist recalls his father wiring up the county's first electrity supplies. "The farmer would shake his hand, the wife would dab at her watery, strained eyes and say `It's a miracle' - as if my father had personally given them this wonder. At its best, though, the writing bristles with laconic insights. Embarrassed and repulsed he goes back to his surly wife, the swift abandonment of his plans only confirming the complacent purposelessness of his life.Like many another evocation of the back porch and woodsmoke side of American life, this is written in a highly literary style, a feigned style.