And his very writing demonstrates the standard he required of others. What Raven sought out, with recourse more to elegy than to satire, was a betrayal of that trio of values. In The Sabre Squadron (1966) a moody character looks down on a country view that is “serene, civilised and seemly”. What was more, his words were packed tight into taut plot. Raven wasted not a syllable where rivals squandered lots.
Over other attempts to pin down our century or love-lives, such as Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, these novels had the advantage of being less literary but more literate. The 10 volumes of the Alms for Oblivion sequence, published between 19, deal with a gathering cast of eccentrically self-centred individuals accommodating in often peevish or spiteful ways two of Raven’s pet adjectives) to the corruptions of a society that inspired in the author both disgust and desire.
In 1996, in Michael Barber’s amusing portrait, The Captain, he stepped forward as a snob with insatiable appetites, the cad of bisexuality, a classicist and cricketer always letting down himself if not the side. Four years ago, with an air of modest nonentity, he cleverly kept Melvyn Bragg at bay on a South Bank Show meant to celebrate a life-time’s oeuvre a good deal racier than most and richer than many. In later years, by a fluke of fashion bizarre enough to have tickled him, Raven as a writer was not so much neglected or forgotten as taken for granted. He also did wonderful television, from adapting The Pallisers (1974) to Edward & Mrs Simpsons (1980). May of his 34 books, written for money or mischief, will live on as Gibbonian footnotes to his true achievement: using one 10-decker novel to lure the post-war mid-century into a web of lethal humour. But Raven came nearer than other novelists to exposing, in the grandeur of its squalor and the dubiety of its standards, the times he lived in and saw through. His was a leisurely and not a powered disposition. The highest pinnacles of literary achievement were not denied him he denied them to himself - they would have diminished his life by occasioning too much work. His behaviour often reverted to apes, as though public-school bliss, whether in sport or bed or library, had entrapped his spirit for good. With his slanted eyes devilish eye-brows and in later years rugose cheeks, he had the air of a wickedly innocent Silenus, more than willing to admit his own faults and vices while keeping a sharp look-out for the fibs and evasions he expected of everyone else.
RAVEN PETER NIMBLE SIMON FULL
LIBERTINE, WANDERER, scholar, rogue, debtor - none of these labels ever quite stuck to the writer Simon Raven, though he took full advantage of the seedy kudos they brought him.
The following article, discovered in the Charterhouse scrapbook, details Raven’s extraordinary life.
RAVEN PETER NIMBLE SIMON SERIES
He is best know for is his Alms for Oblivion series of books, though he also gained considerable recognition for his TV work. In later life, he retired to the Charterhouse, and while there was featured as the subject of an episode of The South Bank Show. Simon Arthur Noël Raven (28 December 1927 – ) was an English novelist, essayist, dramatist and raconteur who, in a writing career of forty years, caused controversy, amusement and offence.
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