Birth, family and education Born on 28 December 1927 in
London, he was the eldest of three children. His father, Arthur Raven, had inherited a fortune from the family's hosiery business, and lived a life of leisure. He was educated first at Cordwalles preparatory school near
Camberley,
Surrey, then as a scholarship pupil at
Charterhouse, whence he was expelled in 1945 for homosexual activities. Amongst his school contemporaries were
James Prior,
William Rees-Mogg,
Oliver Popplewell and
Peter May. After completing national service he entered
King's College, Cambridge, in 1948, to read classics. Although he possessed a first-class intelligence, this was not matched by his application, and his university career was punctuated by regular crises over money, misbehaviour and an apparent inability – or, more likely, unwillingness – to connect actions with their consequences. His intelligence garnered him only an upper second, a degree which would not normally have gained him a studentship to read for a doctorate. That it did so may be attributed, essentially, to his personal charm, which gained him credit with the Fellows responsible for awarding scholarships. He was awarded a studentship (graduate fellowship) to study the influence of the classics in Victorian schooling, but this soon gave way to pleasure-seeking and his thesis was never seriously addressed. In 1951, he married Susan Kilner, a graduate from
Newnham who was expecting his child; the marriage was from duty, as he made clear, and afterwards, he studiously avoided her. A son, Adam, was born in 1952. (The couple divorced in 1957.) Raven, his scholarship funds exhausted, withdrew from King's, and attempted to earn a living as a writer, gaining a small income as book reviewer for
The Listener. He also wrote a novel, which proved unpublishable because of its libellous nature, and only emerged almost 30 years later as
An Inch of Fortune. Seeking a firmer livelihood, Raven decided to rejoin the
British Army.
Army During his earlier
National Service, Raven had briefly served as an officer cadet in the
Parachute Regiment, and in 1947 was on a posting in
India, during the final months of British rule there. He was subsequently commissioned into the
Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, before being seconded to the
77th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment,
Royal Artillery at
Rollestone Balloon Camp in
Wiltshire, where he saw out his service. In 1953, after university, he secured a regular commission with the
King's Shropshire Light Infantry (KSLI), serving in
West Germany and
Kenya, before receiving a home posting to
Shrewsbury. It was during this period, when he was still married to Susan, that he sent his notorious telegram to her in response to her telegraphic plea for money: "Sorry no money, suggest eat baby". Such a callous response suggests that he cared nothing for his wife and child, although in fact he diligently provided for Adam's education and welfare. During his Shrewsbury posting he gambled heavily at local race meetings, and he was soon in severe financial straits following a "disastrous sequence of slow horses". Faced with the prospect of a court-martial for "conduct unbecoming" he was allowed to resign quietly, to avoid scandal in the regiment. This episode he later described with candour in
Shadows on the Grass.
Writing career At almost 30 years of age he had no career or prospects, but from his studies of the classics he had developed a lucid writing style, derived, as he said, from the Army's admirable instruction to be "brief, neat and plain". This, allied to his ready and disrespectful wit, was allowing him to survive precariously in journalism when, in 1958, he was employed by publisher
Anthony Blond: "I had picked him up through
Hugh Thomas who was editing a symposium for me, called
The Establishment. Simon was billed to do the piece on the Army". Blond financed him while he wrote his first published novel,
The Feathers of Death (1959). Blond was impressed enough to offer him a contract to continue writing for him, on condition he lived away from London, and paid off Raven's debts. "This is the last hand-out you get", he was told. "Leave London, or leave my employ". He moved to lodgings in
Deal, Kent, and was paid (reportedly) a £15 wage by Blond. As a consequence of this arrangement, during the remainder of his working life, Raven became one of Britain's most prolific writers in a range of genres including fiction, essays, personal reminiscences, polemics, theatre, screenplays and magazine journalism. He was at various times compared with
Evelyn Waugh,
Graham Greene,
Anthony Powell and
Lawrence Durrell, but his voice was his own: "Raven came nearer than other novelists to exposing, in the grandeur of its squalor and the dubiety of its standards, the times he lived in and saw through". His own view of his craft was less exalted; in the words of his writer-character Fielding Gray in the novel
Places Where They Sing (1970): "I arrange words in pleasing patterns in order to make money". He had a fascination for the supernatural, first manifested in his early novel
Doctors Wear Scarlet, which features Balkan
vampires (though they are practitioners of vampirism as a sexual deviation rather than an actual supernatural manifestation) and was cited by
Karl Edward Wagner as one of the thirteen best supernatural novels. The Gothic themes became stronger in later works such as
The Roses of Picardie,
September Castle, parts of the
First-Born of Egypt sequence, and the 1994 novella
The Islands of Sorrow. Although he acquired an enthusiastic and loyal following, he was never a top-seller in terms of the mass market. Quoted by Brooke Allen: "I've always written for a small audience of people like myself, who are well-educated, worldly, sceptical and snobbish (meaning that they rank good taste over bad)". His ten-novel sequence
Alms for Oblivion is usually regarded as his best achievement –
A. N. Wilson thought it "the jolliest
roman-fleuve" – though it is likely that he gained wider public recognition for his TV work, especially the adaptation of
The Pallisers (1974) and
Edward & Mrs. Simpson (1978). As he grew older his rate of output lessened, and there was deterioration in its quality, Thereafter he planned, or at least threatened, to write a new work
All Safely Dead, in which, safe from the
laws of libel, he could "expose" various deceased luminaries from the British social, academic, political and literary scenes, but the book was never written.
Later life Throughout his life, Raven pursued a hedonistic lifestyle which included eating, drinking, travel, cricket, gambling and socialising. He spent what he earned, and after 34 years in Kent at Blond's behest he finally moved to London on securing lodgings in the
London Charterhouse, the almshouse historically associated with Charterhouse School. Here he led a quieter version of his former life. In 1993, he was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature. A biography of Raven,
The Captain, written by
Michael Barber, was published in 1996. In 1997, he appeared with
Melvyn Bragg in a
South Bank Show devoted to his career, in good spirits and without regrets. His health continued to fail, however, and after a series of strokes he died in London on 12 May 2001, aged 73. ==Legacy==