Just dandy
at Rogers
Children of the Sun Martin Green (Constable 27.50)
The Twenties are always with us, and usually It seems to be Oxford in the Twenties. If it s not undergraduates mantiing trams during the strike, it is the jeunesse dore disporting themselves at all points along the line from Garsington to Fleet Street. Tender sensibilities bruised on the playing-fields of Eton are constantly reviving on the banks of the Cherwell. This is a period which is now better known than Periclean Athens or Shakespeare's London; there are memoirs of hearties as well as those of aesthetes, and the documentary sources grow more abundant as the era recedes. They don't need reading so much as cataloguing. Martin Green ought to have written an absurd and impossible book, and I'm not Wholly sure why he hasn't. His study of English decadence (and its enemies) ranges from 1918 to 1958 — a terminus ad quern Which seems to be fixed for two reasons.
i One s the death in .that year of Brian Howard, the more outrageous of two quintessential Oxford Twenties people whose lives form the centre of this book. (The other is Harold Acton.) Like a Germanic scholar of the last century, Green has been through all the primary sources — sooner him than me — and sifted endless dustheaps of fact and legend. He has virtually no new independent information. The familiar anecdotes reappear, often quite well told, and the usual episodes, sometimes two or three times. And of • course twentieth-century England is yet again represented by a cast of tens. As well as the major roles, taken by Waugh, Auden, Connolly and Orwell, there are guest spots for Rosa Lewis, Burgess and Maclean, Father d'Arcy, Sligger Urquhart, Bowra, old uncle Tom Driberg and all. And yes, the clans are gathered. Thurber once wrote about a party attended by 'the three Sitwells, and -four or five Waughs'. Green has summoned the full complement of Sitwells, a whole raft of Romillies, Duggans and Plunket-Greenes, a quorum of Mitfords.
This doesn't sound too enticing, but Green has imposed his own bold pattern on these well-rehearsed topics. He draws on myth and anthropology to identify a central category of Sonnenkinder, and divides the decadents into smaller groups — the dandies (aesthetes and poseurs), the rogues (brutes and poseurs, with Randolph Churchill at their head), the naifs and so oil. Ranged against these types is the 'decent man', represented most oddly by Lawrence, Orwell and Leavis. This scheme is complicated by certain moonlighting activities of the sun-children, when they function as pierrots or rogue-uncles to a new generation. It looks a little daft, and in a way it is: but at least the pattern allows Green to write provocatively and brightly about an interesting collection of people. His main drift is that English writers preferred the purely playful dandyism of English aristocrats to the dangerously experimental dandyism of international aestheticism'. Where the masters of Russian ballet, coniposers like Stravinsky and writers like Nabokov 'found their ways through the modernist and aesthete maze', English artists simply retreated. Even in the Thirties, the leftist thinkers had become 'Latin dandy' types; in Green's typology, Auden and Isherwood are seen as basically dandy in temperament. Temperament is a key strategy in the development of Green's argument; it allows him to smooth over difficulties with talk of Waugh's 'fundamentally ambiguous attitudes', or to define the 'cultural vectors' that made ideological socialists like Philip Toynbee into temperamental dandies. We get a lot of this kind of psychological interbreeding — `Toynbee's knowing Basil Murray as a boy obviously prepared him to appreciate Esmond Romilly later — just as knowing Peter Rodd as a brother-in-law may have prepared Jessica to appreciate Esmond.' What being married to Esmond prepared Such classifications are bound to arouse disagreement, and nobody is likely to accept all the author's judgments. Green thinks it is 'surely undeniable that Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Tom and Daisy are Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine', and Brett Ashley 'another different Columbine'. (Undeniable? — go on, try me.) He also claims that such women as Brett 'were castrators of their lovers'; it seems hard to accuse Brett of castrating the one hero in literature unlikely to need this service, for hadn't the war got there first? Green goes on to describe. the 'writing of the Oxford Collective Poem, not as a dandy phenomenon but as part of 'stiffening of the moral fibre. . . a new aesthetic realism.' He is able to convince himself that Orwell and Leavis were 'in alliance with nearly all the serious forces on the national scene', that Orwell became 'the average adult man' and — with unblushing Cambridge philistinism — that Scrutiny ' could fairly claim to own (criticism), as far as England went.' Throughout Green is inclined to use decent where other epithets suggest themselves puritanical, paranoid, shrill, petulant. It is hard not to side with the most flippant and soft-centred among the dandies when one sees the self-righteous hostility to art which confronted them.
Green is an Englishman who now works in the United States, and his book seems designed for a transatlantic readership. He uses the American title of some books, and goes out of his way to explain terms like Wisden, Lloyd's, the WRNS and Fowler. More widely he seems to be writing for people who have heard of the Mitfords but can't place which is which. The level of factual accuracy seems to me high, though The God that Failed is dated 1930, which is like putting St Paul's conversion at 5 BC. Green's method does lead to an unconscious amount of repitition — Robert Byron keeps coming in dressed as Queen Victoria, and Evelyn Waugh will go on falling in love with Richard Pares. Against this stand some admirable epigrams— Brian Howard and his set 'worshipped youth while they were still adolescents', Orwell at Eton 'was all the more complete a failure for being a discreet one', Lord Beveridge was 'a virtuous dowdy', dandies and poufs did 'more than anyone else to fix the official image of cheery, hearty, proletarian England at war'. The story begins to tail away with the war and then the too-recent history of Burgess and Maclean, right up to the Profumo affair. But then none of it seems really distant. The photographs, which ought to have a faded period charm, breathe an awful contemporaneity, whether it is Stephen Spender trying to look scruffy or Rupert Brooke in his Leonard Cohen pose. It was, after all, only yesterday.
The other reason for ending the main story in 1958 is that Green started to write about these matters at that date. His final chapter embodies 'the critic's conversation with himself', and includes some reassess ment of the author's stance. Green now thinks that 'the man of culture' needs to relax 'his rigid disapproval of dandyism'; he must 'work out vocabulary of feeling that can accommodate the meanings of Waugh as well as those of Lawrence'. And crucially the English need to learn from Nabokov how to wed aestheticism with 'serious' purpose. That's something, at least. Not everyone would care to be a man of culture if it means accepting Green's terms — you are still to regard the Sitwells and Betjeman, if not indeed Auden, as trivial; you have still to cast out Wodehouse; and you can't escape your dose of Hoggart and Raymond Williams. But the interdictions are beginning to crumble at the edges. In time it may be possible to get a more objective estimate of the inter-war aesthetic movement, written from less extremist pro or anti positions: but that will only come when we stop living with one foot in the Twenties. At present they are about as authentically antiquated as last season's hemline: dur sense of remoteness is willed and spurious.
Previous page
