Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a book published four or more years ago. 

“CHILDREN OF THE SUN – A Narrative of ‘Decadence’ in England after 1918” by Martin Green (first published 1976).

Back in 2020, I introduced to this blog the concept of the “intellectual bestseller” while reviewing John Ralston Saul’s bloated and over-praised ramble Voltaire’s Bastards. I defined an “intellectual bestseller” as a non-fiction book which argues earnestly and intelligently a serious case and gets favourable reviews in highbrow publications; but which often tries the patience of readers and hence, after first purchase and the perusal of just a few chapters, is often left on the shelf largely unread.

I believe that when it was first published, Martin Green’s Children of the Sun caused a little stir and had the makings of an intellectual bestseller. But its lustre faded very quickly. It’s interesting to note that it was first published in America in 1976, but its publication in Britain was held up for one year as it was scutinised by its British publishers for any passages that could be seen as libellous. The few articles I’ve read about it in subsequent years tend to be hostile to Green’s theses such as they are. Perhaps this belated review will show why.

Martin Green is intent on giving us a portrait of a certain class of Englishmen in the 1920s and 1930s whom he designates as either “dandies” or “dandy-aesthetes”. By these he means privileged young men, usually from so-called “public” schools like Eton, who went on to Oxbridge and who dominated much of England’s literary world for a couple of decades. In a pompous, over-long and pseudo-anthropological note at the end of the book (pp. 501-508 in the 1977 English edition I have in front of me) he at last gets around to explaining to us what he means by “children of the sun”. He tells us that “Sonnenkinder” was a term invented by German anthropologists in the late 19^th century when they referred to ancient societies in which heroic sons rebelled against their fathers and became attached to mother figures or mother goddesses like Demeter.

This Martin Green sees as the paradigm of Oxbridge’s dandies.

After the First World War, they rebelled against their fathers’ values of Kiplingesque patriotism, empire and duty, refused to “play the game”, identified with the softer life of aestheticism, and often eschewed marriage and adult responsibilities. Mentally, they remained coddled schoolboys. In his text, Green refers frequently to a “revolt against the world of maturity and responsibility.” Says Green “Oxford was not a place of study, but of exhuberant, anarchic, fantasising hedonism.” (p.200) Furthermore “The undergraduates – those of the right style – got treated by the dons like avatars of Adonis or Orpheus.” (p.201) He refers in detail to a cult of masculine beauty, only occasionally using the term “homosexual” although many of the individuals he discusses were homosexual. Yet for all their “rebellion” against their fathers, these young men enjoyed all the privileges their fathers had bequeathed them, most of them went on to assume their fathers’ roles in fashionable society, and most of them ultimately became conservative or reactionary in their views. In other words, these “rebels” remained loyal to their social class. Green sees Bloomsbury as simply an intellectual variant of the same mindset – Bloomsberries produced much real intellectual writing but no real scrutiny of their own privileges.

In his opening chapters, Martin Green confronts us with what he appears to think are hard-and-fast categories. The “dandy-aesthetes” at Oxbridge were Pierrot figures, self-absorbed, idling about, developing “other-absorption” only as aesthetes and more likely to be homosexual. The “rogue-rebels” at Oxbridge were Harlequin figures, often athletes and getting involved in politics, often at odds with their fathers but readily becoming establishment figures and more likely to be heterosexual. (Green gives Oswald Mosley was one such “rogue-rebel”). As for the “naifs”, they were the ones who, like children, were always looking for a grown-up or authority figure to lead them – explaining why many of these pampered boobies became (temporarily) Communists in the 1930s. For all of them, Green notes the ongoing influence of French and other European “decadents” (Proust, Cocteau, Diaghilev etc.). The trouble with Green’s categories, however, is that they are in fact very imprecise, and often overlapping. This becomes more obvious later in the book when he has to backtrack on some of his first declarations.

His technique is to follow the fortunes of two of Oxbridge’s more overt aesthetes, Brian Howard (who loved to dress in drag) and Harold Acton. As it happens, each had one American parent, and each came from decadent, promiscuous families of the sort who feature in Henry James’ novels. So we follow the careers of Howard and Acton as they go through Eton (1918-22), Oxford (1922-25) and London (1925-32). And, let’s be quite frank about this, much of Green’s text becomes sheer gossip.

At Eton, Acton and Howard affected a dandy style of dress and writing and influenced others, although not all their schoolboy contemporaries approved of them (Cyril Connolly, Eric Blair i.e. “George Orwell”). At Oxford they had some influence  on middle-class lads who were on the fringes of aestheticism (Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman) and like all aesthetes of the era, their style was often influenced by the Sitwells. Then it comes to London and – guess what? – once out of Oxbridge, the two major dandies failed to make any big splash in the world. Howard and Acton became “bright young men” among the “bright young things”, their showy antics putting them in the gossip columns for some years. But in real achievement, they are soon outstripped by upper-middle-class sloggers like Evelyn Waugh. Martin Green  gives thus a slightly ambiguous tribute to Waugh: “He was the most important because of the close link of friendship that… bound Harold Acton and him, because of the historical testimony he bore in various of his books to the dandies’ achievement, but above all because he was the man of the greatest intelligence and force to get involved in the dandy enterprise. It was in his life and work that the dandy idea achieved its greatest moral and imaginative substance.” (p.214) One can sense a whiff of disapproval here on Green’s part, and in the chapter on London he has the habit of throwing wilfully in all directions the term “dandy”. Cecil Beaton is a dandy. So are the Mitford Girls and all Nancy Mitford’s novels. Fair enough. But is Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm really a work of dandyism? I thought it was a cheerful pisstake of a worn-out genre. The fact is, Green falls into giving us synopses of people’s lives, drifting away from anything like a coherent argument, and only drawing us back to his central theme by inserting the word “dandy”.

As the 1930s and 1940s moved on, the game changed a bit. As Green tells it, many “dandies” took up Leftism but remained dandies, merely dabbling in and playing at politics as a new fashion. Thus he damns Harold Acton’s journalistic reports on China. Thus he views Brian Howard’s intermittent columns in the New Statesman and the Communism of old Etonian Esmond Romilly. Thus he sees the “naif” comrades W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. And speaking of “naifs” looking for a father figure, thus he describes the Oxbridge traitors Burgess and McLean (Children of the Sun was published just three years before another aesthete, Anthony Blunt, was publicly revealed to be a Soviet spy.) Kim Philby was more of a “rogue-rebel”. When he comes to the Second World War, Green can find only one ex-Oxbridge-dandy who fully commits himself to the war, while the others scarper off to safe places. This is Evelyn Waugh who, truth to tell, was always more a satirist of dandyism than a participant.  (For Waugh’s war service, see on this blog comments on his  Sword of Honour  trilogy.)

So what does Green see as the great salvation from the “decadent” British dandyism of the 1920s and 1930s? 

He sees it as the commonsense backlash against aestheticism of George Orwell’s journalism, which looked at cold current realities in books like Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier. And unlike the “dandies” who embraced Communism, Orwell saw through Stalinism. Rather more questionably, Martin Green also praises the critic F.R.Leavis as one of the saviours of English literature and intellectual life. He declares: “With Orwell’s first publications, and those of F.R. Leavis, which were roughly contemporaneous, the effective resistance to dandyism began… these two men mobilised the best consciousness of their contemporaries, the best intellectual and moral forces, in support of maturity and responsibility of taste and temperament.” (p.286) And he declares “Leavis gradually came into more and more of his vocation as the expounder of all that heritage of maturity and responsibility that modern literature and modern England had turned away from.” (p.289) [Note Green’s favourite phrase here – he is really calling the aesthetes spoilt, irresponsible children.]

But almost as soon as he has praised Leavis and his publication Scrutiny, Green has to acknowledge the negative side of Leavis-ism. After the Scrutiny people condemned the novels of P.G.Wodehouse and the detective stories of Dorothy L.Sayers, Green notes “we see how clearly Scrutiny understood the plan of the cultural battlefield, recognising how the detective novel and the humorous novel were in those days the allies of the serious dandy writers.” (p.359) Yet he does fairly note that, in assessing Picasso, surrealism, the ballet and the works of James Joyce, the Scrutiny people’s  “tone tends to become priggish and their manouevring clumsy” (p.360) as they try to keep in touch with modern art while clearly disapproving of it. In fact later on, it is clear to him that Leavisites rapidly became severe, self-righteous killjoys. For them: “To read was not to enjoy or to learn but to judge – and on behalf of the whole culture. As a method, this was both provincial and conservative, although not merely that.” (p.442) So, one wonders, how beneficial was Leavis-ism to the English body intellectual? Didn’t it just impose another snobbish intellectual hierarchy?

As one would expect, Green damns some works of the late 1940s and early 1950s as dandyism – Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the memoirs of Osbert Sitwell and all of Edith Sitwell’s later work, the plays of Christopher Fry, not to mention the travel books and art books of Harold Acton. These he sees as the desperate reaction of dandies to the new socialist welfare state, the years of austerity and the increasing dominance of American culture. So he welcomes the “angry young men” of the 1950s – Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, John Braine, John Wain, John Osborne, even Colin Wilson (God knows why the last-named should ever be seen as a credible intellectual). These, he claims, were the sensible, sane, responsible voices of the middle classes, as opposed to their elders, the precious upper-crust snobs and dandies. But alas, alas, Martin Green is forced to admit that even by the early 1960s, his vision of these newcomers exploded as, one by one, the “angries” themselves became crustily conservative and reactionary. (For a good example of this, see on this blog my review of John Osborne and his autobiographies.)   Oh, will dandyism never end!?

It is interesting to note that in a 23-page appendix called “Confessions and Conclusions” (pp.475-497), Green tells us that he was a grammar school boy who won a scholarship to Cambridge and always felt uncomfortable with upper-class twits in the university environment. Hard not to conclude that such feelings were the origin of this book. He also basically admits (here comes the back-pedalling) that many of the categories he devised and many of the dichotomies he promoted were not as straightforward as he had thought they were.

So how do I sum up this messy and very self-contradictory book?

It certainly has a sliver of truth to it. Yes, there were pretentious cliques of upper-crust aesthetes in 1920s Oxbridge, with a very “camp” sensibility, many of whom took trivia to be high art. Yes, the “bright young things” were snobbish and condescending in most of their publicity-seeking stunts. Yes, all this set the fashion in some of Britain’s literary life for a while. But in the end, all Green has to say is that fashions changed and they continue to change. Even those who Green sees as presenting a more honest and penetrating view of England and its literature became passe. Worse, as a number of critics have pointed out, Green gets some of his facts wrong, assumes that some of his named “characters” were intimate friends when they weren’t, and underestimates the better works of people he condemns. Is Edith Stwell’s poetry really inferior to Philip Larkin’s (given that they wrote in very different idioms)? Does The Lady’s Not for Burning mean less to us now than Look Back in Anger does? And, though Green does point out the limits of Leavisite criticism, doesn’t he himself often become the reproving self-important killjoy, underestimating the genuinely funny things that the likes of Waugh and Wodehouse wrote?

One of the worst decisions Green took was to structure the book around the careers of Brian Howard and Harold Acton, as if they were cut from the same cloth.

Brian Howard was, in the end, a sybaritic idler whose life developed as nothing much. After Oxbridge he did a little work in journalism, sank to low-rank clerking jobs during the Second World War, lived off his parents’ money as much as he could, took to alcohol and drugs and eventually committed suicide in 1958 after his current male lover had died of a drug overdose. The golden boy of student days had vanished into an embittered middle-aged man with not even his looks to commend him.

By contrast, Harold Acton worked hard at his writing. He had published 28 books on travel, on fine art, on aesthetics and on antiquities. Doubtless Martin Green would condemn Acton’s books as dandyish, twee and precious. Perhaps they were, but nobody can say that Acton wasn’t industrious. Acton (by this stage Sir Harold Acton) was still around when Green researched and published Children of the Sun. Indeed Acton granted Green an interview, an account of which Green places near the beginning of his book. But when the book came out, Acton objected to being paired with the foolish and self-destructive Brian Howard who, long before his death, had been disowned as a sour-tempered cadging sneak by most of his erstwhile Oxbridge pals, including Acton and Waugh.

The after-history of Children of the Sun is interesting. The buzz it caused on its first release in America was echoed in this part of the world. I recall seeing a local newspaper review proclaiming that the book showed up all those horrible upper class snobs who had sabotaged the General Strike of 1926. As in America, it was assumed to be a book of sober historical research. You will still find on Amazon those thumb-nail “reviews”, written by semi-literates, that take Children of the Sun to be a serious history book. But academe does not endorse it. Yes, it is filled with interesting gossip and scandal and some legitimate take-downs of bad and dated writing. But its central “thesis” is so wobbly, vague and ill-defined that it is little more than the author’s dyspeptic take on the writing and ways of people who are now all dead.