I wanted to look at the upper-middle-class His undertaking has inevitably been compared with Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, also in ten volumes, as it deals with the same social milieu (but a generation younger) and touches on the same themes of time and mutability. Raven was the author of thirty-four books (as well as many radio and television plays, essays, and reviews), but his reputation today rests almost entirely on his ten-volume roman fleuve, Alms for Oblivion (1964-1976). From earliest youth, he reveled in the role of outrageous provocateur and exuded what one of his school contemporaries, Gerald Priestland, recalled as a 'Luciferian aura,' 'Brilliant when he could be bothered, handsomely copper-headed but with a world-weary slouch and drawl, moved through Charterhouse trailing an odour of brimstone.' Noel Annan felt him to be one of the rare 'liberators' some of us are lucky enough to encounter during our lives: 'Simon was one of those very assured undergraduates who by their example liberate their contemporaries from the shackles of family, school or class.' Raven's offensiveness did not grow from bile or melancholy but from extreme high spirits. He himself suffered from no such diffidence. A civilized man should, he believed, 'reject both enthusiasms and faiths, if only because of the ridiculous postures, whether mental or physical, which they require.' This philosophy was allied with a deep contempt for the egalitarian moral code of postwar England with its namby-pamby unwillingness to offend. Not that well-educated, worldly, skeptical, and snobbish people have entirely disappeared, only that Raven's own type is no longer to be seen: his was not an earnest agnosticism but a robust eighteenth-century paganism. 'People like myself': there are few of them left, for Raven was one of a breed that was dying in his youth and is now all but extinct.

And who believe that nothing and nobody is special?' 'I've always written for a small audience consisting of people like myself,' he remarked, 'who are well-educated, worldly, skeptical and snobbish (meaning that they rank good taste over bad).

One cult figure, the English novelist, journalist, and television writer Simon Raven (1927-2001), did not reach a mass audience or even attain a very broad readership among the upper middle class and the intelligentsia but then, he never exerted himself very far to do so. Novelists who achieve a cult status write, by definition, for a narrow and usually specialist readership, and while their books are not for everyone, they attract certain passionate partisans.

2003 Foundation for Cultural Review 13 Jun.

MLA style: 'Who was Simon Raven?.' The Free Library.

Doctors Wear Scarlet by Simon Raven