Cyril Connolly: The Life and Times of England's Most Controversial Literary Critic.

Saint Martin's, $27.95, 466 pp.

Those desiring to learn more about a writer usually discover that biographies reveal more about warts than works, but at least they give details about books that the reader values or may be induced to read. However, both Cyril Connolly and Malcolm Muggeridge were more famous as personalities, talkers, and journalists, though of very different orders, than as writers. Most of Connolly's books and all of Muggeridge's deserve at best to be called "historically important," a phrase to cool the ardor even of the vanishing race of literary historians. The justification for these two books must therefore lie in the portraits of the men in the context of their age.

Both Englishmen, born in 1903, they knew a number of the same people through their literary and political connections. But in most respects, they might have lived in totally different countries. Connolly, from a family that once had money and position but had grown poorer with each generation, disliked his military father and learned to manipulate his female relatives. He attended Eton, which impressed him so deeply that he once maintained that the rest of life was anticlimactic. At Eton he met George Orwell, Anthony Powell, and a number of less productive aes thetes, and then at Oxford he met, among others, Evelyn Waugh. During his education and for several years thereafter, until he discovered women, he went through the homosexual phase almost obligatory for his generation and cultivated the private myth that failure was more interesting, even more distinguished, than success. This melancholy conclusion he shaped not only into a persona but into material for a long career.

Nevertheless, Connolly was good at failure, or at least at not finishing things: novels, travel books, biographies, almost anything longer than a review.

He showed more energy, if not more staying power, in his romantic life, marrying three times and carrying on numerous affairs, remarkable achievements for a man regarded as unattractive, even ugly, by his contemporaries. Outside of the circle which delighted in the comic complexity of his personal life, he was best known as founder and editor of Horizon, which carried the lamp of culture through World War II and the Attlee period, and as reviewer for the Sunday Times. He worked and intrigued almost to the end and died at seventy-one as he had lived, immersed in debts and logistical complications about which women could visit him and when, sustained by the forbearance and charity of his friends.

Muggeridge, the grandson of an undertaker, admired his socialist father and seemed to ignore his female connections. He went to state schools "and was thereby spared the various complexes that affected his public school contemporaries," including homosexuality. After an undistinguished and, at least in Ingrams's showing, obscure career at Cambridge, which dampened his sense of humor only temporarily, he married, taught for a while, tumed to political journalism and later to editing Punch, became a television personality and, after a long career of dissipation (drink; women who were not as interesting or at any rate as prone to publishing, as Connolly's) helped to make Mother Teresa world-famous and became a prominent spokesman for preconciliar Catholic values. Long reconciled to his only wife but almost forgotten by the public, he died at age eighty-seven.

Except for a common interest in who was paid how much for doing what, valuable for those interested in the shifts and vicissitudes of the literary life, Fisher and Ingrams take very different approaches to their task. Ingrams, a journalist, knew Muggeridge for almost thirty years and, eight years before his death, was designated authorized biographer and given access to Muggeridge's papers and his surviving friends. He is aware of Muggeridge's short comings as a novelist and memoirist, but he concludes that "In his life, his restlessness, his inconsistency, his obsessions (whether with Marxism or sex) he seems at times like a symbol of twentieth-century man." As a journalist, Ingrams is more interested in what Muggeridge wrote about than how he wrote. And though he gives effective portraits of the people whom Muggeridge knew, he does little to establish the contexts in which Muggeridge thought and worked. On the whole, this is a work of journalism in a quite honorable sense as well as a personal tribute.

Clive Fisher has more lofty ambitions.

(He cannot be blamed for the preposterous and questionably accurate American subtitle, substituted for the English "A Nostalgic Life" in the vain hope of pumping up interest in Connolly.) The language of his final paragraph is less intimate but more eloquent than Ingrams's: Connolly "has refused to surrender his hold on the imaginations of those who care for beautiful writing and the civilized delight of the senses or are interested in the literature of our mid-century" and "becomes an ever more inescapable figure in recent cultural history."

Besides using archives and interviews, Fisher has consulted the large and growing body of material about the period, including memoirs and biographies. Here he has the advantage over Ingrams, for Connolly's friends, some of them world-class gossips, seem more interesting than Muggeridge's. Fisher uses that material not just for facts but for intuitive and effective contrasts with figures like Evelyn Waugh, Peter Quennell, George Orwell, and Desmond McCarthy to reveal his subject's character and achievements.

Fisher is at least as perceptive about Connolly's strengths and limitations as a writer. He not only summarizes books and articles he characterizes them in prose that echoes Connolly's "gift of turning a perfectly balanced and poetic sentence which was both memorable and idiosyncratic." And often, in Fisher's case, witty, as in the description of the youthful Cecil Beaton's imitation of a female singer "with unsettling persuasiveness" or, turning on Connolly's view that inside every fat man was a thin man crying to be let out, "in his case the thin man's entreaties were unheard for almost half a century."

A great many literary biographies are too long. A few, like Ingrams's, are perhaps too short. Clive Fisher's seems just right, not only in length but in the eloquence, urbanity, and wit of his prose.

Robert Murray Davis teaches at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Mid Lands: A Family Album (University of Georgia Press).