BOOK REVIEWS 85 MISLEADING CASES Children Of The Sun. A Narrative of Decadence in England After 1918. By MARTIN GREEN. Constable, 1977; £7.50. Mr. Green purports to describe the 'imaginative history'

of England between 1918 and 1957, seeing it as a 'cultural Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eic/article/XXVIII/1/85/493747 by guest on 01 October 2021 dialectic' between the 'dandy-aesthetes' and the 'anti- dandies'. He describes the former as representing the culture's 'thesis' (dominant 'temperament') and the latter as supporting its 'antithesis'. Into the first group he puts two 'gangs', one led by Harold Acton, Brian Howard, Connolly, Quennell, Waugh and Betjeman, the other by Auden, Isherwood, Spender and John Lehmann. The anti- thesis is represented by Leavis, Orwell and, sometimes, Lawrence who, along with the Georgian and Victorian forbears of the 'gangs' and their more conventional con- temporaries, stand for 'seriousness' and 'maturity'. The argument of the book revolves around the careers of Acton and Howard as the cultural leaders of the 'thesis'. Here, however, he runs into difficulties: the 'dandyism' of Acton is different in kind from that of Auden. The first gang, then, must be termed 'dandy-aesthete'; the second, 'naif. The 'cult of the naif, he assures us, was 'at the very core of Thirties' Marxism—the image of the sun-bronzed young man with his shirt open, bringing the radiant candour of his gaze to bear on the mess the fathers have made of the world'. But even this is not comprehen- sive enough. What about Beaverbrook and Winston Churchill? What about Peter Rodd and Randolph Churchill? They must naturally form another sub-section: 'uncles' and 'rogue-rebels'. Mr. Green clearly expects us to take all this seriously. Indeed, he goes to such lengths to substantiate his theory that, but for his generous linguistic absurdities, we might be bored into concurrence. One's suspicions, however, are immediately aroused by the indecisive and immature nature of his critical vocabulary. The text is studded with phrases such as 'media-happening', 'rhythms of the earth', 'very philistine', 'a highly aesthetic education', 'a very Twenties' marriage', and so on. It soon becomes clear from the accumulation of factual error and facile generalisation that he has taken 86 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM on a subject beyond his intellectual control. The whole is pervaded by the amateurish enthusiasms and contradic- tions of the committed dabbler. 'My interest', he states, [is] ' "psychological" rather than anthropological. . . . My method is closer to that cultural, or cultic, literary

criticism that we might associate with Orwell . . .'. In Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eic/article/XXVIII/1/85/493747 by guest on 01 October 2021 Appendix B, where he explains the origin of the term 'Sonnenkinder', he admits to 'treating anthropology very cavalierly' in selecting the word to describe the gangs. But this arbitrary extrapolation is the basis of his method. Children Of The Sun is certainly not the product of research. It offers us almost no new information but rather a re-ordering of already published accounts. The author candidly admits his enormous debt to Harold Acton's two volumes of autobiography Memoirs and More Memoirs Of An Aesthete, and to Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster's biography of Brian Howard: Portrait Of \A Failure. The futility of the whole project is in fact revealed by this absurd selection of protagonists. It was Acton and Howard, he considers, who governed the aesthetic sensibility of the important Oxford generation of 1922-25 which included such easily-led men as Waugh, Powell, Graham Greene, Henry Yorke (Green), Betjeman, and Connolly. It was they who set up the 'thesis', of which the 'rogues' expressed a peripheral aspect and against which the naifs, and Orwell, Leavis and Scrutiny reacted. This theory would seem either to stand or fall on the concept of the dandy. Here again he reverts immediately to a published work, Ellen Moers's The Dandy (1960), which defines its sub- ject as 'A man dedicated solely to his own perfection through a ritual of taste . . . free of all human commitments that conflict with that taste: passions, moralities, ambi- tions, politics or occupations'. Earlier, however, Mr. Green has stated that the 'simplest psychological fact at the root of this cult is that worship of the male adolescent by older men . . . expressed in the myths of Narcissus, Adonis, and such . . . One manifestation of this we call dandyism. In its simplest form the young man loves his own beauty and makes it insolently manifest in his own clothes, posture, manners, judgements, imposing on everything a style that denies the "mature" values of his father and BOOK REVIEWS 87 mother'. These two definitions are partly contradictory. In one is expressed an ascetic aestheticism, in the other a passionate indulgence and this confusion, surely, springs from a mis-interpretation of the word 'aesthete'. 'The aesthete', Mr. Green says, 'is crucially different

from the dandy in being much more concerned with some- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eic/article/XXVIII/1/85/493747 by guest on 01 October 2021 thing outside himself—art, beauty, the cultural heritage; he need not be so hard and "heroically" negative. His energies go into receiving impressions and sensations rather than into making them . . .'. So the 'aesthete' is by definition the critic, a Lord Henry Wotton, and not the artist. Mr. Green is aware of the problem. Was not Wilde both artist and aesthete, and were not Acton, Betjeman, Quennell and Howard poets? Surely Evelyn Waugh de- scribed himself as an aesthete? The answer is simple. 'In this study', he states, 'we shall regard the two types as twin aspects of one identity—the dandy-aesthete.' The whole of the preliminary discussion is thus devalued. He faithfully reports Acton's rejection of the cultural ethos of the Nineties at Oxford but does not realise that the 'aesthete' of his own definition is specifically a product of that period and earlier. He establishes the connexions between Acton and the Sitwells, between the Sitwells and Firbank, and between Firbank and Wilde but fails to notice that Acton and those he influenced, while admiring Firbank, loathed Wilde. In a Harper's Bazaar article (3 Nov., 1930, pp. 50-1, 98), for instance, Waugh saved his bitterest attack for 'the great, booby figure of Oscar Wilde'. This condemnation of effeminacy, languor and ego- tism was not peculiar to Waugh. It was something, along with his taste for early Gothic architecture and early- Victoria furnishings, that he inherited from Acton at Oxford. Acton himself wrote an article for The Chenoell ('Tchekov And Some Undergraduates', 17 Nov., 1923, p. 78) defending the Russian playright and fiercely attacking the world of 1892: '. . . when the Yellow Book, Symbolism, Oscar Wilde, Art for Art's Sake and all the pathetically self- conscious, arty little movements and litterateurs were waving weakly [sic] flags and posturing like the protag- onists in a "crime passionnel"'. Both Acton and Waugh 88 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM despised poseurs; they re-defined the term 'aesthete' to include a more cosmopolitan and aggressive attitude to art in reaction to the fatuity of the Nineties and the tea-party cosiness and patronage of London literary cliques. Mr. Green's nineteenth-century definition is wholly inappro-

priate. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eic/article/XXVIII/1/85/493747 by guest on 01 October 2021 Waugh drew, Mr. Green says, like Beardsley. He did not. He was self-consciously avant-garde. Waugh's 1963 remark about regarding writing 'not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language' is said to be misleading: 'His interest in language was not of the kind active then in critical circles. . . . His concern for language must be taken as another example of that old- fashioned provinciality that he perversely cultivated'. This is a complete misrepresentation. Waugh's 1929 essay on Firbank and his 1930 book reviews in the Graphic lucidly display an interest in linguistic experimentation in com- pany with Van Vechten, Osbert Sitwell, Gerhardie and Hemingway. Waugh was always a great champion of Eliot and of Henry Green, lambasting those with 'school ma'am minds' who objected to the latter's disjointed prose. It is this sort of basic inaccuracy, this failure to see each character in his jigsaw as an individual, that causes Mr. Green's overall thesis to founder, even though he does grasp fragments of the truth. There is something in Acton's and Howard's influence at Oxford, and in 'the common cause of defying their fathers' mode of seriousness'. Mr. Green, however, pretends, with insufficient research, to have the full picture. He fails even to distinguish satisfac- torily between Acton and Howard as 'influences', the latter being in fact little more than a dangerous dilettante. Michael Arlen, a genuine literary dandy, is alluded to only briefly because he was not influenced by either. Waugh, who is regarded throughout as 'the keenest observer and commentator on our subject in our period', began aesthetically to move away from Acton after the publication of Decline and Fall (1928). Mr. Green sees things on the grand scale of social history and foolishly attempts to interpret individual action within this framework. His vast canvas includes not only local literary figures but the political and scientific communities BOOK REVIEWS 89 of the world. The Manhattan Project is directly compared to the decadence and inefficiency of MI5 at Wormwood Scrubs during the last war—Oppenheimer was a 'dandy' as were Burgess, Maclean and Philby. It is at this point that the shaky critical structure of the book finally col-

lapses. Earlier passages might have warned us: 'And Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eic/article/XXVIII/1/85/493747 by guest on 01 October 2021 roughly at the same time as Edward the Eighth abdicated, T. E. Lawrence died in a road accident'. There is always an inept hand attempting to re-organize chance into fate. Mr. Green's problem is that he is really writing two potentially sensible books. One is about the influence of the Sitwells, Diaghilev and Eliot on Acton's Oxford genera- tion. The other concerns the general movements of social and literary history after the Great War. The two are connected by the most tenuous of threads—the careers of Acton and Howard—and to disguise this Mr. Green constantly dives into tenebrous cul-de-sacs to emerge, triumphant, with irrelevancies. We are treated to a long history of Stanford White (Acton's grandfather), Frank Gassaway (possibly the first husband of Howard's paternal grandmother), and Esmond Romily 'who ended up reviewing books about dogs'. The section on Gassaway describes him as 'the American Kipling' and includes two lengthy quotations but concludes by admitting that 'it seems [Howard] . . . never actually read him'. The book ends with three 'conversations' entitled 'Confessions and Conclusions'. 'I chose the decent man,' he says, 'turned my back on the dandies, and never till now asked myself what it felt to be like them. Finding out has been interesting. But finishing the book leaves me with the uneasy feeling that the subject has gone academic on me, that it had ceased to be a living problem, a living part of my past.' He need not fear that the book has become 'academic' if by that he means 'scholarly'. The real dilemma is that he has fallen half in love with the easeful dandy and finds it difficult to admit to this irrational infatuation. The 'Prologue' describes his visit to La Pietra, Sir Harold Acton's Florentine palace. He goggles at the sheer scale of the ornamentation, and having nothing in his aesthetic vocabulary to deal with the Baroque and Rococo, des- 90 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM cribes the room he is given by listing its dimensions and contents in the form of an inventory. He finds the effect 'quite stupefying' and is visibly impressed by an invitation to lunch with deposed European royalty. The book itself is partly an intellectual justification of this indulgence in

snobbery, partly an attempt at literary exorcism. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/eic/article/XXVIII/1/85/493747 by guest on 01 October 2021 The three conversations, however, do nothing but con- vince us that Mr. Green has trailed slavishly after Leavis. We have throughout sensed the gradual disintegration of his argument and his own awareness of its inadequacy. The sad little footnotes (pp. 67, 239-240, and 317) re- defining his terms were miserable attempts to patch it up. Following Leavis, we learn, he had approved of Amis as a force for sanity and 'maturity' complementing the Great Tradition. Now that Amis admits to liking Waugh's irreverence he is confused. Nabokov seems to be his only hope for the future. Mr. Green is doubly handicapped. Firstly, the puritanical limitations of 'cultural-moral' criticism have refused him a sense of humour and a delight in luxury; secondly, he believes the critic's task is 'to discover and be in the thick of the crucial debate of the time'. The latter concept is, surely, dangerous for it presumes there to be a 'crucial debate' constantly in progress. It requires for its argument 'groups', 'movements', 'themes', which the individual artist of real worth may dislike because of the originality of his vision. For Mr. Green, however, if the 'crucial debate' does not exist then he must invent it. One might, perhaps, with all humility, direct him to a passage from 'Fan-Fare', Waugh's mordant reply (in the magazine Life) to the aesthetic ineptitudes of his admirers. Asked if he con- sidered his characters 'typical' he replied: 'No ... I do not. ... Do not ask yourself, when you read a story: "Is this the behaviour common to such and such an age-group, income-group, psychologically—con- ditioned group?", but: "Why did these particular people behave in this particular way?" Otherwise you are wasting your time in reading works of imagination at all.' MARTIN STANNARD University of Edinburgh