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Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure
by Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster
Green Candy Press
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Brian Howard probably isn't a name that trips off your tongue, unless you happened to read Martin Green's excellent 1976 Children of the Sun: A Narrative of "Decadence" in England after 1918. Or you might know Evelyn Waugh's famous fictionalization of Howard as the effete Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited. He appears, less famously, as Johnny Hoop in Vile Bodies, or Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford's wonderful Love in a Cold Climate. It's a tribute to Brian Howard -- by all accounts among the wittiest men of his generation -- that he continues to exist as vibrant, minor characters in other people's novels.

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s Green's Children of the Sun recounts, Howard was among the bright young things making their appearance in Great Britain after the devastation of World War I and proclaiming that fun, flippancy, and the imagination was now the ruling sensibility. It was a wild mixture of men and women -- among them Harold Acton, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh, several of the Mitford sisters, Lady Diana Cooper, and on the fringes, Ian Fleming (who wrote the James Bond series), Christopher Isherwood, and W.H. Auden. They defined what would be England's Roaring '20s -- and uttered a final "fuck you" to the fading authority of Victorian patriarchy. These dandies -- some of them, such as Howard, Acton, Isherwood, and Auden were openly homosexual -- redefined masculinity and manhood for the rest of the century.

Brian Howard was a leader of this group -- and one of its least productive members. While he is now hardly known, this newly republished biography (originally released in 1965) is a wonderful introduction for anyone interested in this rich slice of queer cultural history. Lancaster's biography is curious -- an odd mixture of excerpts from Howard's writings, long interviews with his friends and family, a soupçon of cultural analysis, and snippets (often longish) from reviews and articles. It's all really more of a collage then a full-fledged biography, but still effective.

Here's the basic story: Howard, born to American parents in England, is well-bred in upper-class circles. He attends Eton, where he comes out with a bang (there's a famous portrait of him in drag while at school) and starts the noted Eton Society of Arts. He then moves on to Oxford, and spends flamboyant years there without graduating, followed by several years writing occasional pieces as well as dabbling in the theater and the arts, but mostly being a brilliant queen-about-town. He lived in Germany for a while and partook of the active gay life there. After returning to the UK, he worked for the M15 during the war, and continued to dabble, sketch, and write bits and pieces of prose and verse. These frequently showed enormous talent, but except for one slim book of verse, never developed into anything substantial. (An appendix here reproduces many of Howard's poems.) In 1958 his lover, Sam, accidentally died from a leaky gas pipe, and shortly thereafter, at the age of 53, Brian Howard committed suicide.

Imagination trumps output?

Simon Raven is quoted on the jacket that "This book is more than a mere 'portrait' of a failure: it is a whole museum." And it's hard to argue with that. Lancaster maps out not only what Brian Howard did -- or, rather didn't really do -- and places it in the vibrant context in which Howard lived -- a dense network of friends (and enemies) who lead incredibly productive lives.

This biography in places shows its age. Does anyone actually use the word "Jewess" anymore, and with clear anti-Semitic intent besides?

But what Lancaster does give us, in great heaps, are wonderful quotes, gossip, and selections from Howard's writings. These convey a fine sense of Howard and his sensibility, which is really a feat for someone who produced so little.

Lancaster piles on the telling anecdotes. Actor and playwright Emlyn Williams notes that he heard Howard quip at a party, "My dear, I've only ever seen one passable undergraduate and she looked like a vain Boy Scout."

In the end, Lancaster's biography recreates the sharp-edged, competitive, brittle, and brilliant pre-World War II culture of the times.

But while Brian Howard's life might look like a failure -- to him as well as tous -- this biography hints at some-thing quite different. It isn't Lancaster's point, really, but Brian Howard's greatest work was the creation -- from the scratch of his fervid imagination -- of Brian Howard.

In a world of repression, stupidity, and stifling normality and oppressive heterosexuality, the creation of Brian Howard wasn't just a work of art, but also a clearly constructed political act as well.

Lancaster uses "failure" here both descriptively as well as ironically. When we reach the last pages of this biography we are moved, not by Howard's failures, but by his constant vision -- expressed in his conversations as well as his verse and other writings -- of a man in constant revolt against authority and conformity. Howard's "failure" is surely mitigated by his huge success at surviving and continually recreating himself.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com