Philip Toynbee

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Theodore Philip Toynbee (June 25, 1916 - June 15, 1981) was a British writer and journalist. He wrote experimental novels, and distinctive verse novels; memoirs of the 1930s and on religion in his later years; and reviews and literary criticism, for example of Hemingway. He has been called a 'genuinely marginal poet', and his quick judgement on Colin Wilson has been disparaged.

He was born in Oxford; his father was the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, and his maternal grandfather Gilbert Murray. He was educated at Rugby School, where he became rebellious; inspired by the example of Esmond Romilly, later a friend, he ran away, returned shortly and was expelled. He later wrote a memoir of Romilly, and Jasper Ridley (1913-1944). Through Romilly, Toynbee met the Mitfords. He was also influenced by bookshop owner and would-be encourager of the young radical element, David Archer, and met through him David Gascoyne.

At the University of Oxford in the late 1930s he was the head of the Communist Party there, at the height of its success and social acceptability. He visited Spain at the end of 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, in a student delegation.

In 1938/9 he edited the Birmingham Town Crier.

He married in 1939 Anne Powell. In the early 1940s Philip and Anne lived a bohemian life in London's Fitzrovia, and Philip was drinking heavily. At that time they knew Lucian Freud, Donald Maclean and Robert Kee, Henrietta Moraes and others from Charles Tennant's Gargoyle Club in Soho. In 1945 they moved to the Isle of Wight, for a fresh start. They had two children, the second being the journalist Polly Toynbee. Anne later married Richard Wollheim shortly after divorcing Philip in 1950.

During the 1950s he worked for The Observer, and was one of the more prominent intellectual figures in British life (perhaps to be compared with Edmund Wilson in the United States, for example). In 1961 he wrote that Tolkien's work had "passed into a merciful oblivion", a remark now more likely to be turned back on its author.

He died at St Briavels, Lydney in Gloucestershire.

[edit] Works

A school in private (1941)
The Barricades (1943)
Prothalamium: A Cycle Of The Holy Graal (1947)
Tea with Mrs. Goodman (1947)
The Garden to the Sea (1953)
The Fearful Choice: a debate on nuclear policy (1958)
Pantaloon or the Valediction (1961) verse novel
Underdogs: Anguish and Anxiety, Eighteen Men and Women Write Their Own Case-Histories (1962) editor
Comparing Notes: A Dialogue Across a Generation (1963) with Arnold J. Toynbee
Thanatos, a Modern Symposium at which Nine Characters Argue at Quarles (1963) with Maurice Richardson
Two Brothers: the fifth day of the Valediction of Pantaloon (1964) Pantaloon verse novel
A Learned City: the sixth day of the valediction of pantaloon (1966) Pantaloon verse novel
Views from a Lake: the seventh day of the Valediction of Pantaloon (1968) Pantaloon verse novel
Age of the Spirit: Religion as Experience (1973)
Distant Drum: Reflections on the Spanish Civil War (1976) editor
A Memoir of Esmond Romilly and Jasper Ridley in the thirties (1980)
Part of a Journey: An Autobiographical Journal, 1977-79 (1981)
End of a Journey An Autobiographical Journal 1979-81 (1982)
Towards the Holy Spirit: A Tract for the Times (1982)