Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure Book

The story of the Brian Howard would hardly have earned the title of Failure if he hadn't been born to such privilege and then had such an prodigious early start to his poet's career - being admired and coddled by Edith Sitwell while still only seventeen. High on his brilliance and marred by his own particular mix of aristocratic snobbery with an extremely uncompromising artistic integrity which together pushed him beyond his adolescent success into a wasteful but fabulous stint as one of the Bright Young People in nineteen twenties London. The story continues as he emerges serious again about poetry but this time his distraction takes the form of politics, whereby after a visit to Germany he becomes virtually the first Englishman to speak out again Nazism. The for a full decade before the onset of war he worries and tires himself out with the threat of Hitler that seemed to go unchecked. When war does come he is wilted and spent and already working his way up from serious drinking to drugs. It is a fascinating tale of a life spent in a sort of retrograde delay. Plagued by laziness, prone to restless travel and either a victim or a hero because of his standards, he was a reckless, bitchy, perhaps truly mad, minor poet, who went missing, couldn't reemerge, and ended badly.