Mr. Brian Howard

[At Eton] Under the influence of a special kind of macabre Brian [Howard] became very prolific.While others walked to Windsor on Sunday afternoons, Brian and I walked conscientiously to Slough, feeling rather like the Goncourts, in search of "copy".The masonry of Slough suggested all sorts of atrocities.As for the Sundayfied people of middle age, Brian was quick to detect streaks of queer cruelty and fetishism under ordinary exteriors: their very ordinariness was suspicious to Brian.He saw witches in charwomen, and in many semi-detached Victorian villas he visualized appalling scenes of sadism; corpulent women in bangs and bustles suffocating pale little girls by inches.He would pause before a neo-Gothic structure and ask, with a startled air: "Did you hear anything peculiar?"
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Very different was his [CC's] Etonian contemporary, the ultra-fashionable Brian Howard, whom I met about the same time, and who, having made me some preliminary advances , he knew that I had published a book of poems; and he professed a deep regard for art and literature , had almost immediately dropped me as beneath his notice.
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If Brian dearly loved a lord, he also greatly enjoyed tormenting one.Confronting a good-natured young peer, he would put him smartly through his paces: ,Your waistcoat, my dear Harry!What do you mean by wearing it?' ,Oh, I say, Brian,' the victim would protest, ,I think it's rather a good waistcoat.' ,Good, indeed!It makes you look, my dear, like some ridiculous old bumble-bee.Go away and take it off at once!' Not only did he lecture his friends on the subject of his clothes, and order them to follow his example and have their racing-colours designed by Charvet, but he generally supervised their education and, to complete the process, at times would fall in love with them , a tribute they accepted just as amiably as his frequent gibes and insults.

Evelyn loathed Brian, and afterwards took several hints from his character when he created the personage of ,Anthony Blanche'; but in his autobiographical narrative he concedes that his old enemy possessed a certain curious fascination , ,a kind of ferocity of elegance that belonged to the romantic era of a century before our own'.Besides resembling Brummell, whose insolent aplomb he matched, Brian had also many of the traits of the youthful Benjamin Disraeli.Through his father he had inherited Jewish blood; hence his acute profile, his pallid fine-drawn skin and his large, long-lashed, heavy-lidded eyes.Brian's mask was supremely self-assured; yet everything about him was a trifle suspect, even his patrician English surname.
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Brian, asked to identify himself by an Oxford proctor or his ,bulldog', always rolled it out triumphantly. ,My name,' he would announce, ,is Brian , Christian , de Claiborne , Howard', in the tone of the Baron de Charlus informing M. Verdurin of the various titles that he bore.Did it perhaps afford him an odd amusement to sail so boldly under false colours?

It was his ambitious American mother who had encouraged his social progress; and, during her sad old age, she would watch him decline into bohemian obscurity.Unlike the Prince Regent, his aristocratic friends did not summarily discard their Brummell; but, once they had gone down and assumed their appointed stations in life, they tended to outgrow his charm; while, at house-parties, their more conventional parents found him an alarmingly exotic guest.I myself happened to witness the occasion when a decisive break occurred.Once we had both left Oxford, he lowered his social standards, and we had renewed our previous friendship.He had invited me to supper at the Eiffel Tower; and, by way of filling a gap in our conversation, I said that I noticed a favourite Guermantes friend had just celebrated his twenty-first birthday with appropriate pomp and splendour.On Brian the effect was violent; and he scarcely troubled to conceal his feelings. ,But I was not asked!Are you perfectly sure you're right?' And waiters were sent hurrying around the streets until they had collected a whole sheaf of papers, which he settled down to pore through.At this moment, I think, he renounced the upper classes, and became an impassioned, though slightly unorthodox supporter of the anti-fascist Left Wing.

Brian had a genuinely demonic nature; during his restless later life, he seems to have been driven by a host of furies, and wandered in search of his own salvation to and fro across Europe, always accompanied by some solid bewildered youth whom he loved and spoiled and often ill-treated, and who (except for the last, killed by a disastrous mishap, which precipitated Brian's suicide) eventually eluded him.
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While Brian Howard suggested an early-nineteenth-century exquisite, Alfred was the Edwardian ,heavy swell'.

Brian HowardToronto-Dominion BankBrian Howard has over 25 years experience with the TD Bank in both branch and corporate functions.For the last 9 years, he has been part of the Education and Training team.Currently he is Manager of Integration for Learning and Development.In this role Mr. Howard developed the measurement and performance management practice.The practice is responsible for working with internal clients to develop management and measurement tools to ensure that training and development programs achieve their business and performance goals.Mr. Howard has a Bachelor of Science from the University of Toronto, and his Masters in mediated learning.He also has a Certificate of Training and Development from Ryerson University and has completed the Certification Program for Measuring Return on Investment for Training and Development.He has his CTDP (training) and C.S.C. (Securities) designations, and is an Associate of Institute of Canadian Bankers.Mr. Howard speaks at conferences on measurement and evaluation and his article on Implementing ROI Strategies was published by the ASTD.