Who was Simon Raven?(Critical Essay)

Novelists who achieve a cult status write, by definition, for a narrow and usually specialist readership, and while their books are not for everyone, they attract certain passionate partisans. One cult figure, the English novelist, journalist, and television writer Simon Raven (1927-2001), did not reach a mass audience or even attain a very broad readership among the upper middle class and the intelligentsia; but then, he never exerted himself very far to do so. "I've always written for a small audience consisting of people like myself," he remarked, "who are well-educated, worldly, skeptical and snobbish (meaning that they rank good taste over bad). And who believe that nothing and nobody is special?"

"People like myself": there are few of them left, for Raven was one of a breed that was dying in his youth and is now all but extinct. Not that well-educated, worldly, skeptical, and snobbish people have entirely disappeared, only that Raven's own type is no longer to be seen: his was not an earnest agnosticism but a robust eighteenth-century paganism. A civilized man should, he believed, "reject both enthusiasms and faiths, if only because of the ridiculous postures, whether mental or physical, which they require." This philosophy was allied with a deep contempt for the egalitarian moral code of postwar England with its namby-pamby unwillingness to offend. He himself suffered from no such diffidence.

Raven's offensiveness did not grow from bile or melancholy but from extreme high spirits. From earliest youth, he reveled in the role of outrageous provocateur and exuded what one of his school contemporaries, Gerald Priestland, recalled as a "Luciferian aura," "Brilliant when he could be bothered, handsomely copper-headed but with a world-weary slouch and drawl, [he] moved through Charterhouse trailing an odour of brimstone." Noel Annan felt him to be one of the rare "liberators" some of us are lucky enough to encounter during our lives: "Simon was one of those very assured undergraduates who by their example liberate their contemporaries from the shackles of family, school or class."

Raven was the author of thirty-four books (as well as many radio and television plays, essays, and reviews), but his reputation today rests almost entirely on his ten-volume roman fleuve, Alms for Oblivion (1964-1976). His undertaking has inevitably been compared with Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, also in ten volumes, as it deals with the same social milieu (but a generation younger) and touches on the same themes of time and mutability.

 
   I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class 
   scene since the war, and in particular my 
   generations part in it. We had spent our early 
   years as privileged members of a privileged 
   class. How were we faring in the Age of the 
   Common Man? How ought we to be faring? 
   . . . Would the high-minded lot stoop to 
   conquer? . . . And what about their unscrupulous 
   confreres? No Queensberry rules 
   for them, so they had a flying start. But Fate 
   has a way of bitching things up just when you 
   least expect it. 

Many of Alms for Oblivion's protagonists attended the same public school, served in the same regiment (the dashing and aristocratic Earl Hamilton's Light Dragoons), and read Classics or History in a more or less desultory manner at the same Cambridge college (Lancaster, a thinly disguised version of King's). The novels, which, unlike Powell's, jump back and forth in time, take the characters from school (Fielding Gray, 1967) to the Army (Sound the Retreat, 1971, and The Sabre Squadron, 1966), the "corridors of power" (The Rich Pay Late, 1964, and Friends in Low Places, 1965), scenes of international intrigue (The Judas Boy, 1968), student unrest during the Sixties (Places Where They Sing, 1970), the movie business and an excursion into American Philistia (Come Like Shadows, 1972) and finally to nemesis and impending age (Bring Forth the Body, 1974, and The Survivors, 1976).

English romans fleuves of the last century have tended to be elegiac, for obvious reasons. The horror of World War I, the breakdown of traditional society during the interwar years and its complete reinvention in the postwar period were deeply traumatic to the upper middle class from whose ranks so many serious novelists came. Siegfried Sassoon's and Ford Madox Ford's novel sequences record that trauma with bleak eloquence. A Dance to the Music of Time, subtly, and Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour, rather less ...