Children of the Sun

I finally finished reading Martin Green's Children of the Sun: A Narrative of "Decadence" in England after 1918, in which he examines the emergence and eventual dominance of a certain temperament among the young men (and a few women) who came of age just after the first World War. His thesis, which he demonstrates at considerable length and depth, is that this generation rebelled against the accepted norms of their fathers' generation by refusing to accept maturity, and by embracing instead the attitudes of dandies from an earlier era, such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Thus he contrasts the dandies and aesthetes who value culture, beauty, pleasure, and theater to those who advocate maturity, morality, and adult responsibilities of duty and patriotism. I'm oversimplifying, of course, but this is the general idea. Green's two most evocative examples of sonnenkinder, as he prefers to call them, are Harold Acton and Brian Howard. Both of these young men were influential leaders, instigators of dandy and aesthete values at Eton and Oxford, the sorts of young men associated with Anthony Blanche and Lord Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.

As I've said before, Green's book is very important for me because it provides so much helpful background information on this period, from World War I through to the 1950s, just after World War II. More and more I have come to see this as a discrete historical moment. Whether or not we accept, with Virginia Woolf, that the world actually changed sometime around the end of 1910, we must surely accept that after the devastation wrought by the First World War, there was a decided shift for European and American culture, and much of the energy spent by writers and artists of various media went toward coming to terms with the tremendous shifts being felt in the fabric of life. After the Second World War there would be another somewhat different reaction, but that is a story I have lived and been a part of. What I want to discover now is how that earlier group of authors came to terms with their world, because like our own, it is now a world that is lost and irrecoverable except through brief glimpses we catch in the art and literature that these men and women left behind.

Green does a good job of presenting the evidence, but it is filtered through his own lens -- an instructive lens, but still one that selects those things that fit his dialectic, or dichotomy, dandies vs. anti-dandies. And as with other dichotomies -- classical vs. romantic, Apollonian vs. Dionysian, the beautiful and the sublime, straights and hippies -- there is necessarily much selectivity and classification. Green does a very good job of explaining his criteria and judgments, especially in his final chapter, but as even he admits there is much overlap and some confusion when one looks at specific authors and works. And that is now my project. Digging into the specific works to see what I find. I welcome all I've learned from reading Green's book, but now I want to look deeper into the stuff itself that these interesting writers have left behind. Often, I suspect, they did not realize that they were trapped in their moment, as we all are, but sometimes it seems quite clear that they did realize exactly their predicament, perhaps even when their choices seem so obviously misguided to others, especially with the perspective of time, as with the scandals of Burgess, Maclean, and Philby, who were also sonnenkinder and the products of the British public schools and elite universities. Auden said he understood why Guy Burgess rejected England for Russia, as he had rejected England for America.

And so the story quickly grows complicated. Out of a rejection of the values of an older generation that brought destruction to itself and to much of the world it had made comes a desperate effort to find another world to believe in. It seems that even dandies and aesthetes must make a world for themselves and must believe something, even when those beliefs are founded on rejection. So often when we reject one thing we desire to substitute something else in its place. That is an attitude I have struggled to resist. I have tried to withhold judgment and to stand appart and reject nothing, while at the same time trying not embrace anything too completely, to the exclusion of everything else. Green suggests, I think, that this is the proper attitude of the critic: to study, to inform, to try to understand.

One of my erstwhile colleagues, when I was discussing my reading and current fascination with this subject asked what I intended to do, what my object was, and I said that I have no objective beyond my own education. I find it somehow energizing and comforting to study and learn something about this time and these people who were both so different and yet also so similar to myself. But I don't feel the need to do what Martin Green has done. I don't think I could, anyway, and I don't want to repeat what he has done but with my own slightly different perspective. I think I have the soul of a critic, but not the ambition. I don't feel the need to share, other than perhaps to the extent that I've just done so here. The object for me, at this moment when I have nothing more to prove, is to learn what I can about myself by testing what I know against the experiences of some very interesting predecessors. They watched more or less unhappily as first they helped to obliterate the world they inherited and then were present to experience the disintegration of the world they tried to put in its place. It seems not to have been a very joyous time for anyone, despite the great effort put into seeking life's pleasures. Perhaps the book I should turn to now is Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.