World of Simon Raven

by Simon Raven

Although he gained fame with his classic novel series, Alms for Oblivion, which chronicled the misdeeds of English society in the 1950s and 60s, Simon Raven is also recognized as a brilliant travel writer, an unblinking reporter of the seamier side of English upper-class life, and a hilarious commentator on the sexual mores of gay London. His demise in 2001 robbed English letters of one of its most colorful characters. Expelled from Charterhouse “for the usual thing,” he was, for a time, an officer in the British Army. He gambled heavily on the horses for years, was often in debt, drank too much, and had a rich and uncommonly varied sex life. He was said to possess “the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel,” and this selection of his writing contains a magnificent array of pieces on army life, sex, school days, and travel. The quality of his writing and his fearless descriptions of the habits of the English, and indeed of all mankind, will come as a revelation.

313 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2002

About the author

Simon Arthur Noël Raven (28 December 1927 – 12 May 2001) was an English novelist, essayist, dramatist and raconteur who, in a writing career of forty years, caused controversy, amusement and offence. His obituary in The Guardian noted that, "he combined elements of Flashman, Waugh's Captain Grimes and the Earl of Rochester", and that he reminded Noel Annan, his Cambridge tutor, of the young Guy Burgess.

Among the many things said about him, perhaps the most quoted was that he had "the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel". E W Swanton called Raven's cricket memoir Shadows on the Grass "the filthiest cricket book ever written". He has also been called "cynical" and "cold-blooded", his characters "guaranteed to behave badly under pressure; most of them are vile without any pressure at all". His unashamed credo was "a robust eighteenth-century paganism....allied to a deep contempt for the egalitarian code of post-war England"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_R...

Reviews

[F.R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

“No one is disposed to mock me for some pitiful display of bourgeois weakness, like apologising to the restaurateur if a member of my party has been sick on him. My upper-class acquaintance simply recognise my lack of assurance, and then deprecate or tolerate my condition.”

As the above suggests, Simon Raven was a very English creature. He was an effete cricket loving cad, an unapologetically promiscuous bisexual bon viveur who – for all his accomplishments – seems to have felt great insecurities about the class system, whilst still visiting some lovely country piles. I don’t know if we make them like that anymore, but it seems to me there was a point in recent British history where you couldn’t throw a mortar board at an English public school without hitting someone of that ilk. Fortunately Simon Raven could write, and his scribblings genuinely deserve the over-used description of ‘inimitable’.

To be honest, I vaguely knew who he was when a friend of mine gave me this collection for my birthday, but I’d never read a word which had ushered forth from his pen. However ‘The Wit and Wisdom of Simon Raven’ is a fantastic introduction to the man’s work and his world. Collecting pieces which give a biographical flavour of his life, this is a highly entertaining and illuminating whirl through moneyed culture post the Second World War. So we have his childhood cricketing exploits with Peter May and Oliver Popplewell (the latter now a former high court judge, recently in the news for his typically judge-like insensitive comments about the Hillsborough disaster), life at the end of colonial rule in Kenya and various musings on sexual escapades when he’s back in the UK. (I was particularly amused by his suggestion that a large proportion of male prostitutes are off-duty soldiers – do we think that's still the case?) On top of that we have various travel musings, as well as a glimpse into how terrible a night out with Christopher Isherwood would have been.

Raven is a genial companion and guide throughout it all, and I imagine in real life he was probably fantastic raconteur. Yes, it’s incredibly elitist and deals with a world which no longer exists, but it’s great fun, incredibly witty and at times risqué enough to shock us here in 2011.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun, funny occasional pieces.