Dandies vs. the Decent Men

...Green experienced his own intellectual awakening in the late '40s, during the resurgence of the "decent man," and that is what he became...

...His "narrative of 'Decadence' " is, then, more than it seems...

...Green provides the facts to evince the importance of class and status in British society, but he makes quirks of temperament transcend them...

...Green does not offer an analytic explanation of events, ideas and men...

...The enthusiastic reception given Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1911, especially by Osbert Sitwell, signaled its inception, but its full force appeared in the generation that reached adolescence during and just after World War I. These young men had been born too late to enter combat, and in their distance from the trenches, where the brothers of many were dying, they became convinced that the intractable wills of old men were to blame for the foolish sacrifice of their slightly older contemporaries...

...The wealthy middle-class industrialists of the 19th century found this out when the sons they sent to the best schools rejected the business careers intended for them and turned to the cultivation of aristocratic refinements and indulgences...

...one looks in vain, for example, for any psycho-historical interpretation of personalties or the relations between them...

...out of trivia comes evil"??was an anathema upon the esthetic temperament of the Sonnenkinder...

...They danced and conversed brilliantly, and they reveled in clownish performance, homoerotic play and fashionable dandyism...

...But it remains a narrative, and therein lies some of its shortcomings...

...Everyone around them came to know, if not emulate, Mallarme and Rimbaud, Proust and Cocteau, Diaghilev and Picasso, and the Sitwells...

...Moreover, we never find out whether temperament is congenital or acquired...

...The wider light is cast by the question underlying the work: Why did England fail to take a leading part in the modernist movement in the arts...

...Nevertheless, Green's complex history modifies his surprising claims...

...Green discerns a pattern here...

...Masculinity and maturity were no longer accepted as virtues...

...And when they went on the attack, they went as moralists protecting beleaguered truths...

...Acton and Howard's manners, style, and advanced opinions in the arts were brilliant, and they made modernism into a creed...

...This dialectic sets the temperament of the dandy against that of the "decent man...

...Now, albeit for no well-defined reasons, he sees the dialectic resolving itself in a provincial, anti-modernist consensus that lacks the strength of either faction...

...Green is not, of course, the first to take up England's failure...

...The Sonnenkinder and their antagonists embody a similar phenomenon...

...The failed bravado of Suez, the treacheries of Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Kim Philby, and the sordid misconduct of Profumo are episodes in the history of a tradition that has departed from its former hallmarks of tough practicality, national pride, aristocratic dignity, and middle-class earnestness...

...In short, The Children of the Sun is, as Green's readers have come to expect, history written close to life, explored and arranged by an inspired curiosity...

...it shifts from one status to the other according to the needs of the book...

...The Children of the Sun, although avowedly a narrative of the career, since World War I, of a particular temperament in English society, also illuminates this moral history as have few other books...

...This leads the author to his equally contrary conclusion that modernism, as represented by the new Englishman, was less an outsider's cult than an insider's fashion...

...The generational cleavage that resulted is regarded as one important reason for England's loss of economic hegemony in Europe...

...The Sonnenkinder, as Green calls them, the Children of the Sun, were perpetual adolescents living in defiance of their fathers' manliness and seriousness...

...Green's reliance on personality also excludes the fine distinctions of social class and status that might have imposed a more prosaic order upon his intricate scheme...

...Alluding to the "serious" dandyism of a Nabokov, Green seeks another way, beyond the limitations of this resolution and the dissensions of the past...

...Leavis' categorical advocacy of seriousness in literature...

...the old universities, especially Oxford...

...They were exactly the opposite: self-indulgent, effete, homosexual dandies...

...The globe-encircling Empire is a memory, and the country now engages in an inglorious economic and political fight for survival...

...It has been apparent to every student of the late 19th and early 20th century years that gave us what we have come to know as the distinctively "modern" in the arts and in social and psychological theory...

...her preeminence is gone...

...After 1918 the worth of soldiering could not be what it had been before, and neither could the ideals that had stood behind the soldier's will and pride...

...In other words, it is Green's contention that where the prewar generation may have possessed a naive martial ardor, the postwar boys simply wanted to remain boys...

...The support of the new Englishman ultimately proved detrimental to modernism: In addition to being inconstant champions, Howard, Acton and the rest were capable of provoking powerful enemies...

...Later, the moralistic assault was broadened by the Angry Young Men and all those who attributed England's public misfortunes of the '50s and '60s-including the debacle at Suez and the defections of Maclean, Burgess and Philby??to the irresponsible, effete Sonnenkinder and their corruption of the entire "Establishment...

...Not until the late '20s, when superior literary talents came forward and political and economic life began to demand more energetic engagement than they could provide, did the eminence of the two men decline...

...For the answer to this question, Martin Green believes, speaks not only to English literary history but to the limitations and possibly the destiny of English culture...

...The contrast between this indeterminate approach and the overdetermined psychology of, say, Bruce Mazlish's study of earlier generations of Englishmen, James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the 19th Century, could not be more pronounced...

...Neither of these esthetes is of major importance in English literary history, but both were leaders at Eton and Oxford...

...Indeed, it is one of the more unconventional theses of Green's book that they were so prominent as to give a "new meaning to 'being English.'" The influence he perceives them as having contradicts the common supposition that the prevailing type of cultured Englishman has always been the serious, manly, heterosexual gentleman...

...the literary and publishing circles of London...

...and, in government, the exclusive club that was the secret service...

...The foes of dandyism, led by F.R...

...By then, though, they were themselves the older generation, and their critics had gained ascendency...

...At first, its link with the Sonnenkinder aided modernism's acceptance: Through their imaginative and critical writings and through the editorial offices they controlled, the esthetes and dandies became the leading exemplars and arbiters of educated artistic tastes...

...the dominance of the one provokes the reaction of the other...

...Their typical milieus were the elite prep schools, especially Eton...

...They saw only futility and falsehood in self-sacrifice and responsibility...

...The lives of two others, Harold Acton and Brian Howard, are at the center of Green's book...

...Yet if the subject now receives the more analytical treatment it demands, we have Martin Green to thank for introducing it...

...Reviewed by James Sloan Allen We have no illusions about England...

...Yet who can fail to suspect that England has experienced a moral decline as well...

...Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Peter Quennell, John Betjamin, Guy Burgess, and Kim Philby...

...So they took as their model the whimsical and theatrical figure of Pierrot, known to them through the ballet (which they adored) and French symbolist poetry (which they imitated...

...As a rule, the Children of the Sun came from a privileged class: They were wealthy, aristocratic or both...

...Instead, Green's "cultural psychology" relies on the catch-all of "temperament" under various characterological tags-rougue, naif, dandy, Adonis, Apollo, anti-dandy, gentleman-dandy, hearty, decent man-to account for all the actions, tastes, alliances, conflicts, and vicissitudes of his subjects...

...Besides holding together the story of their generation, the careers of Acton and Howard reflect the mixed fortunes of modernism in England...

...He suggests that the disputes between the dandies and their adversaries are but one phase of a dialectic that has energized all the decisive conflicts in English culture??between generations, among contemporaries and even within the shifting loyalties of individuals-for the past 150 years...

...Green rejects this pattern and explains both the foreign influence in the arts and the character of English modernism itself as expressions of an indigenous cultural movement...

...But historians of this cultural revolution usually mention England merely to observe its irrelevance, or note that its brand of modernism was un-English, was dominated by foreign influences and subsisted outside the prevailing sensibilities of the land...

...Leavis and George Orwell, represented the principles that had been eclipsed just after the War...

...It is plainly not a history with a "method...

...Among them were Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connoly, W.H...

...If he had looked beyond individuals he would have discovered, for instance, that the elitist institutions of England have never been known for promoting "decency" or earnestness...