Brian Howard : Portrait of a Failure

Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster

With an Introduction By D. J. Taylor

‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’ is how Evelyn Waugh once described Brian Howard, but he was more complicated than that. He was incontestably the wittiest man of his generation. He could be cruel and compassionate by turn. He bulged with talent, but achieved very little.

A paradox at every turn: he was an American at Eton, where he produced The Eton Candle and met Edith Sitwell, who encouraged him as a poet. At Oxford he was the leading light of the most extravagant social set and an aesthete who hunted. In the twenties he was the impresario of the wildest parties and pulled off the craziest practical jokes. Nevertheless, he became a passionate anti- Nazi in the thirties, after having been sent to Germany to be analysed, and later an inspired literary critic. In the Second World War he joined up and must have been the oddest aircraftman since T. E. Shaw.

After the War he became increasingly drunk, quarrelsome and dependent, and finally, after the death of his last lover, Sam, killed himself.

Throughout his life he was surrounded by the most brilliant men and women of the age, who envied his talents, who adored him and who were exasperated by him. Their names alone constitute an anthology of the most exciting people on the English scene between the two wars.

This biography is both an unusual document of that period and a study of its most brilliant failure.

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