Walking in Chiswick in the evening I thought about Simon Raven. Like Leslie Charteris, Dornford Yates, John Buchan and Sapper I am the last generation that will read him.
Shadows, according to EW Swanton, is “the filthiest book on cricket ever written.” Come to think of it, not many of us remember Swanton; I don’t. Although Raven was a prolific author, putting James Joyce in the shade. Joyce had literary constipation – not as badly as Harper Lee and JD Salinger. Raven did have similarities with Joyce: a fondness for the bottle and perpetual impecuniousness. Somehow, despite writing the scripts for two TV series ( The Pallisers and Edward and Mrs Simpson), he blued it. There are spenders and savers; Simon was the former. However, fortune (sometimes) favours the feckless and he was admitted as a Brother at the Charterhouse, to live out his days at ease.
Please indulge me? I’d like to repeat a few lines that I wrote when he died in 2001. They appeared as part of a post in 2015, before I’d come to appreciate Anthony Powell’s novels.
A man of letters ahead of his betters.
His pellucid style sometimes tinged with bile
So much more droll than that old fool Powell.
Impecunious, morally dubious,
But how frightfully sad to lose such an adorable cad.
“Cast a cold eye”, if you remember your Yeats,
Now he too is among the greats.
Just a stone remains on which is graven
Simon Arthur Noël Raven.
I am glad you are hunkering down with Agate this winter. Almost everything about him is unlikely to happen again. Like Munnings in a very different way, he’s a type we are not making now (though his anti-Picasso outburst and the responses to it reminds us that Hampstead vs The Plebs goes way back). I have recently completed a big John Buchan binge, including his colonial writing, whose spirit goes a long way to render attractive the larger aspirations which were common amongst the British elite. Greenmantle strikes me as very strong.
BTW: yr blog makeover is nice and fresh.
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What splendid & apt memorial verse! I too was a fan, & as a Cambridge undergraduate devoured ALMS FOR OBLIVION, as well as such delights as THE FEATHERS OF DEATH and DOCTORS WEAR SCARLET (the last made into an enjoyable bad film starring Patrick Macnee). But re-reading it all years later I found it rather disappointing; and the later novels were rubbish, even when re-written by his long-suffering publisher Desmond Briggs. The impecuniousness is hardly a mystery, seeing that on top of the expensive vices he was an addicted gambler. I hoped to meet him via a friend at the Charterhouse, but he died too soon – probably just as well. I enormously enjoyed THE CAPTAIN, his biography by Michael Barber.
When a writers ideas have all faded, and his blog is in need of a mend,
The only possible course of action is to call in a four leggèd friend.
So Reggie was hastily summoned to trial some new canine spin,
And to the authors delight and amazement the positive comments poured in.
So crafty Christopher realised that to keep all his readers spellbound
He didn’t need to be bookish and brainy, just post pics of a super cute hound.
Perhaps this will silence the critics as they read of one man and his dog?
Though, ‘Blog Bellew’ seems rather erroneous, as it surely is now ‘Bertie’s Blog’!