A dandy time to be decadently English

CHILDREN OF THE SUN: A NARRATIVE OF “DECADENCE” IN ENGLAND AFTER 1918, by Martin Green; Basic Books, 470 pp., $15.

By Don A. Keister

The critic who finds new ways of classifying familiar phenomena often gives not only intellectual pleasure but fresh insights as well. Martin Green turns this valuable trick when he borrows a sociologist's term, "Children of the Sun," and applies it to the English generation that came of age in the decade or so following the end of World War I, the generation reflected in fue writings of such of its members as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender.

:

Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, the notorious defectors to Russia, also belonged to this generation. Some of Green's most illuminating pages show how their conduct resulted from the same influences that produced, for instance, Waugh's novels.

Most of these Sonnenkinder, scions of upper class and upper middle-class families, went to schools like Eton and Harrow and on to Oxford or Cambridge. As adolescents they rebelled against a world battered and discredited by the war in which many of them lost older brothers they had looked up to. It seemed to them that their elders statesmen, generals, empire builders and their supporting poets (Kipling) and journalists had made a mess of things.

-

Refusing to grow up into such a world, they rejected responsibility and maturity for an "exuberant, anarchic, fantasizing hedonism,”

pursued the modern in the arts, especially the exciting new Russian ballet of Diaghilev and Nijinsky, and did whatever would shock, dazzle and confuse the father figures.

Green carries forward along a broad front the story of this decadent generation, using as points of reference the careers of Brian Howard and Harold Acton, brilliant leaders of their generation at Eton and Oxford.

Howard

poet, critic, leftwinger in the 30s, homosexual (like many of the "Children"), drug-user-committed suicide in 1958, leaving his promise largely unfulfilled. Acton poet, novelist, historian, criticturned away in the 30s to study art in China. Now, after completing his Memoirs of an Aesthete, he still enjoys life in his elegant Italian villa.

Green labels these two as type-cases of the "dandy," the first and most spectacular variant of Sonnenkinder. Two other variants are "rogues" like Burgess ("coarse, rough, brutal and cruel") and "naifs" like Spender ("always in process of formation, in search of values and models").

Some members of this generation, however, accepted responsibility and maturity, though not the old-fashioned, "official" kind: George Orwell, for instance, for whom writing was a means to social action, and F. R. Leavis, the Cambridge critic, who aligned himself with the great tradition stretching back through D. H. Lawrence, a coal-miner's son and a wholly serious man. Green, who has written about Frieda Lawrence and her sisters, and who studied with Leavis at Cambridge, associates himself with this group.

But at the end of his account of the often

tangled relationships among the, Children, Green calls for a synthesis of the dandy, ingredient, especially as exemplifed by the cosmopolitan Nabokov, whom he rates well above the English, with the more serious but less imaginative and venturesome Orwell-Leavis elements.

In pursuing his complex.. theme, Green sometimes seems to neglect differences and distinctions in favor of the similarities that make his patterns a better fit. But even though he behaves at times a little like Procrustes, he has found an exciting new way of looking at England in the last several decades. ...

3.2 6"

Don A. Keister is emeritus professor of English at the University of Akron.