Adam Raven; artist son of Simon Raven (Weird, down to the last line)
Hyfler/Rosner
Artist son of Simon Raven
The Independent
Thomas Thirkell
01 August 2006
Adam Julian Raven, artist: born London 9 March 1952; died Barcelona 22
June 2006.
Adam Raven was the extraordinary son of extraordinary parents. Simon
Raven was the author of the Alms for Oblivion novels that portrayed
English upper-class life in louche terms - he was described by Noël
Annan, his tutor at Cambridge, as reckless and a scamp, a liberating
example to his more timid contemporaries. Simon married Susan Kilner, a
fellow undergraduate, in 1951, when she became pregnant. The marriage
was largely for form and was dissolved in 1957.
Simon remained a huge influence on Adam, who often used to go and visit
him for Sunday lunch at the hotel he retired to on the South Coast. His
father's opportunistic take on class was reflected in Adam's adulation
of the working-class hero - his chosen companions were often from the
demi-monde.
His mother Susan worked on the pioneering Sunday Times Magazine and
bought a house on communal gardens in Notting Hill, west London, where
Adam was brought up. He went to Bedales, the happiest days, he said, of
his life: he wistfully tried to recreate the camaraderie of those days.
His mother, however, berated the school for failing earlier to
recognise his artistic talent.
As well as sharing his father's passion for cricket Adam Raven also
hatched an ambition to be a writer. In his early twenties he would
carry around a notepad and jot down observations or thoughts that came
to him. Some of these observations anticipated his work as a painter in
their visual power and accuracy.
His life changed when, in 1977, at the age of 25, he was finally
diagnosed as bi-polar; and it was then that he decided to become a
painter, explaining that in dealing with a plastic environment he felt
closer to things in themselves. He taught himself to paint by setting
up his easel outside Notting Hill houses and depicting them on canvas.
His talent became obvious.
Being authentic was a characteristic of Raven's: he was never a snob
and always kind to everybody he met. In his art this was manifested in
his peculiar mix of the architecturally accurate with a Chagall-like
dream quality which found expression in sculptures and details
portrayed as though they had descended from another world; that of his
imagination. A mixture of the naïve and the luminous led to his
selling out his shows and numerous commissions especially for houses,
his patrons mostly coming from the world of the arts.
His mother moved to Shepherd's Bush, partly to get her son away from
"undesirables" that had attached themselves to him in Notting Hill.
There she nurtured his career, building him a studio at the top of her
terraced home.
His first show, in 1980, ended in the kind of farce his father might
have written about. It was to take place in Albemarle Street. It was
reviewed by Brian Sewell in the London Evening Standard and everything
was going swimmingly when the gallery went bust and the receivers were
called in. Raven was lucky to get his pictures out.
Anthony Blond organised another in 1982, which sold out. Others
followed locally in London, as well as on his travels. In 2002 he had
an exhibition at the October Gallery in Silver Hills, New Mexico.
In his last years he wandered the world with his companion Michael
Harkett, carrying his canvases with him. Unusually, he drew on them in
charcoal, completing them in oil when back home. Harkett remembers,
typically, being taught by Raven on the banks of the Mekong how to tell
a fine wine by smelling its cork. In Chiang Mai he was mugged by
prostitutes, another vivid vignette his father might have enjoyed.
When Adam Raven was found dead in his cabin on a cruise liner, his body
was put ashore in Barcelona. A last twist in his story is that the
coroner lost his heart: it has still to be returned.
MWB
Did he have both ears?
Mark
Bill Schenley
> Adam Raven
> Artist son of Simon Raven
<snipped>
> When Adam Raven was found dead in his cabin
> on a cruise liner, his body was put ashore in
> Barcelona. A last twist in his story is that the
> coroner lost his heart: it has still to be returned.
Yeah. Weird. Just like his father's obituary:
Promiscuous Chronicler of Upper-Class Life
FROM: The Guardian (May 16th 2001) ~
By Michael Barber
The death of Simon Raven, at the age of 73 after suffering a stroke, is
proof that the devil looks after his own. He ought, by rights, to have died
of shame at 30, or of drink at 50.
Instead, he survived to produce 25 novels, including Alms For Oblivion
(1959-76), a 10-volume saga of English upper-class life, numerous
screenplays, eight volumes of essays and memoirs, including Shadows On The
Grass (1981) - "the filthiest book on cricket ever written," according to EW
Swanton - and The First Born Of Egypt sequence (1984-92), which contains
requests such as "Darling mummy, please may I be circumcised?" and "Please,
sir, may I bugger you, sir?"
How to explain this total one-off character, who combined elements of
Flashman, Waugh's Captain Grimes and the Earl of Rochester (though, unlike
Rochester, he died an unrepentant pagan)?
The key lies in Simon's love of the classics, which he would read in the
original every day. The long hours he spent as a boy "translating this way
and that, from Greek and Latin into English and vice-versa", taught him to
write with clarity, precision and wit.
He also learned about retribution, a common theme in his books, and about
necessity - "what has to be, has to be, and there's no point in kicking up a
fuss about it."
Above all, he learned that "we aren't here for long, and when we do go,
that's that. Finish. So, for God's sake, enjoy yourself now - and sod anyone
who tries to stop you."
The story of Simon's early life reads like a Victorian cautionary tale gone
wrong. He is the golden youth whose high promise is betrayed by his base
appetites, so that one door after another is closed to him.
The eldest of three children, he was brought up in "respectable, prying,
puritanical, penny-pinching, joyless" middle-class homes in Virginia Water,
Surrey. His father, whom he loathed, had inherited the family hosiery
business and did not need to work; his mother, who Simon approved of, was a
baker's daughter and a nationally-successful athlete, as was her sister Ruth
(obituary below).
He later claimed to have been "deftly and very agreeably" seduced by the
games master at Cordwalles preparatory school, near Camberley, but acquired
his Luciferian reputation as a scholarship boy at Charterhouse school,
before he was expelled in 1945 for serial homosexuality. According to his
contemporary, Gerald Priestland, he "trailed an odour of brimstone".
At Charterhouse, Simon also encountered Peter May - "brilliant batsman, but
oh so dull!" - Jim (later Lord) Prior and William Rees-Mogg, who warned him
that hell was like a bad tooth that got worse and worse for eternity.
Mogg is the scheming Catholic opportunist, Somerset Lloyd-James, in Alms For
Oblivion, while Prior is Peter Morrison, an MP who touches pitch yet is
undefiled. The sequence also contains a portrait of the headmaster, Robert
Birley, an exacting Christian moralist who tried, unsuccessfully, to save
Simon's soul. It was said that after expelling Simon, Birley's hair turned
grey.
After national service in the Parachute Regiment, during which he was sent
as an officer cadet to Bangalore and commissioned, Simon arrived, in 1948,
to read English at King's College, Cambridge, where he immediately felt at
home. "Nobody minded what you did in bed, or what you said about God, a very
civilised attitude then," he said.
He modelled himself on Rhett Butler and the suave cads George Sanders used
to play. But there was also a streak of recklessness in him that reminded
Noel (later Lord) Annan, then assistant tutor, of Guy Burgess as an
undergraduate - "they were both scamps who by their example liberated their
more timid contemporaries".
Debts and dissipation over-shadowed Simon's last two years at Cambridge. In
1951, he married Susan Kilner, a fellow undergraduate who was expecting his
child; afterwards, he studiously avoided her, and they were divorced in
1957. After failing to submit a single word of his fellowship thesis, he
withdrew from King's, and, desperate to flee "the pram in the hall",
successfully applied for a regular army commission.
After three jolly years with the King's Own Shropshire Light Infantry (KSLI)
in Germany and Kenya, where he set up a brothel for his men, he was sent
home to be training officer at Shrewsbury.
Alas, officers in the KSLI were expected to represent the regiment at local
race meetings - a prescription to go bankrupt, which, within a year, Simon
did.
Fortunately, the regiment cared more for its good name than for army
regulations, and he was quietly allowed to resign rather than face a
court-martial for conduct unbecoming.
In civvy street, Simon's only asset was his pen, a far more potent
instrument than his unwieldy sword. Even so, the road back to solvency was a
long one, and he would never have got there without Anthony Blond, an
enlightened publisher who paid him weekly in cash, and picked up the tab for
his evening meal and a percentage of his liquor.
There was only one condition: Simon had to live at least 50 miles away from
London. So, in 1961, he went to Deal, in Kent, where his brother Myles
taught at prep school - and, to everyone's surprise, remained there for the
next 34 years.
Much as he admired fine writing, Simon had a very prosaic view of his craft.
In the words of Fielding Gray (1959), the "disreputable" novelist who is his
alter ego: "I arrange words in pleasing patterns in order to make money . .
. I try to be neat, intelligent and lucid; let others be 'creative' or
'inspired'."
He wrote anything and everything: novels, essays, memoirs and reviews; film
scripts, radio plays, television plays and television series, including the
26-episode The Pallisers (1974). And if Alms For Oblivion, his bleak history
of the class of '45, remains his finest achievement, some of his pithiest
work was done during the 1960s for the Spectator, in whose pages he mocked
traditional moralists and trendy egalitarians alike.
Simon had no taste for possessions. In Deal, he had a succession of digs,
his only requirement being a landlady who would cook him breakfast and, if
required, high tea. His considerable earnings went on food, drink, travel,
gambling and sex - he said that one of the unsung advantages of belonging to
the Reform Club was the presence opposite of a massage parlour where you got
"a good housemaid's wank".
He was a generous host, for whom the pièce de resistance was the arrival of
the bill, the bigger the better. No matter how much he had eaten and drunk
the night before - and his capacity for alcohol was prodigious - he would be
at his desk at 9.30 the following morning.
Tall, slim and beautiful as a youth, Simon soon lost his looks and his
figure. He did not repine, rating a good dinner higher than good
intercourse. Sexually indiscriminate, he preferred the company of men, and
believed that a writer, like a soldier, was better accommodated than married
with a wife. It was entirely appropriate that he should end his days in the
masculine fastness of Sutton's hospital, an Elizabethan almshouse in
Charterhouse Square, London.
Simon devised this epitaph for himself: "He shared his bottle - and, when
still young and appetising, his bed."
He is survived by Susan and their son, Adam.
Simon Arthur Noël Raven, writer and dramatist, born December 28 1927; died
May 12 2001