Novelists who achieve a cult status write, by definition, for a
narrow and usually specialist readership, and while their books
are not for everyone, they attract certain passionate partisans.
One cult figure, the English novelist, journalist, and television
writer Simon Raven (1927–2001), did not reach a mass audience or
even attain a very broad readership among the upper middle class
and the intelligentsia; but then, he never exerted himself very
far to do so. “I’ve always written for a small audience
consisting of people like myself,” he remarked, “who are
well-educated, worldly, skeptical and snobbish (meaning that they
rank good taste over bad). And who believe that nothing and
nobody is special.”
“People like myself”: there are few of them left, for Raven was
one of a breed that was dying in his youth and is now all but
extinct. Not that well-educated, worldly, skeptical, and
snobbish people have entirely disappeared, only that Raven’s own
type is no longer to be seen: his was not an earnest agnosticism
but a robust eighteenth-century paganism. A civilized man
should, he believed, “reject both enthusiasms and faiths, if only
because of the ridiculous postures, whether mental or physical,
which they require.” This philosophy was allied with a deep
contempt for the egalitarian moral code of postwar England with
its namby-pamby unwillingness to offend. He himself suffered
from no
