THE CRICHEL BOYS
SCENES FROM ENGLAND’S LAST LITERARY SALON
SIMON FENWICK
Constable, 354pp, £25 Just after the war, three upper-class aesthetes set up home together in Long Crichel House, Dorset – a Georgian old rectory with no electricity. Eddie Sackville West, Desmond Shawe-taylor and Eardley Knollys were all gay and they knew everyone who was anyone in mid20th century British grand-bohemian literary circles. In the Mail, Kathryn Hughes enjoyed Simon Fenwick’s ‘gossipy but scholarly, funny-sad’ account of the ‘Crichel boys’ and their many famous guests. It’s an elegy to a lost world. In the
Spectator, Peter Parker observed that Crichel life coincided with the development of the National Trust where Knollys worked with his close friend James Lees-milne. ‘Indeed, the preservation of old houses, a cause with which many of the leading characters were involved one way or another, is skilfully used as a running theme in a book that, with a fine balance between nostalgia and clear-sightedness, commemorates a privileged world long since vanished.’
DJ Taylor enjoyed the gossip but found the Crichel boys’ snobbishness and pedantry wearing. ‘There is no getting over the air of mustiness,’ he wrote in the Literary Review. ‘A faintly devitalising scent that drifts over these recitations of bygone domestic arrangements and love triangles.’ And in the Times, Laura Freeman couldn’t keep up with the dramatis personae. ‘I’m afraid that some of the boyfriends of boyfriends in the book aren’t so much fringe, as fray. I found myself hooting, morose and owl-like: “Who? Who? Who?” ’