Aged 16 Kennedy failed to get into the sixth form at Marlborough and, despite being not very good at arithmetic or typing, through family connections (his family owned the house which Virginia Woolf used in To The Lighthouse), became an apprentice working for Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. This very short and very amusing book chronicles his time there (about a year, before he got the sack). In this time he met all the key characters of the Bloomsbury set, watched plays and mingled with creative people, and did his best to pick up girls (including a failed encounter with a prostitute). As the introduction says:“Kennedy was naif: few boys of 16... are not. He confused DH Lawrence with TE, eschatology with scatology, and when he asked Virginia Woolf what Proust was like he rhymed the word with Faust.” (p 10)
It's only a tiny book but it made me laugh several times. He is also very observant.
Selected quotes:
- “He does have a special way of talking which I think comes of the care he takes to say exactly what he means. It's a kind of drawl.” (p 23)
- In a letter to a friend: “I know I described this place as the Revised Inferno ... Unfortunately, your reply fell into the hands of LW who objects to Ma Cartwright and himself being referred to as Satan and Svengali.” (p 63)
- “Ernest Milton had just finished playing Othello. I asked him if the bed had made him sleepy.” (p 66)
- “When you ask LW a question he looks down at his toes. When you ask Uncle George something he looks up at the ceiling.” (p 84)
- "LW says I can't be trusted to do anything but wrap up parcels and that I am the most frightful idiot he has ever had the privilege of meeting in a long career of suffering fools." (p 99)
Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed in this blog can be found here.
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