Literary Lives
Gwen Raverat, Period Piece
Gwen Raverat is best-known for her glorious wood engravings, but in her childhood memoir Period Piece she created a perfect small masterpiece of another kind – a deliciously funny, affectionate and atmospheric picture of life in the small world of nineteenth-century academic Cambridge among the eccentric Darwin clan. Illustrated with Gwen’s own delightful drawings, it not only brilliantly captures a moment in time but also shows us the making of the artist Gwen was to become.
Edward Ardizzone, The Young Ardizzone
The creator of the ever-popular Little Tim and Lucy books begins his story in 1905 when he was 5 and his mother brought him and his two sisters home to England from Haiphong where his father was a telegraph engineer. Left in Suffolk in the care of their grandmother, the three grew up with a full complement of young bachelor uncles, great-aunts and eccentric family friends – a comfortable Edwardian world which is beautifully captured in Ardizzone’s deceptively simple prose and delicately humorous drawings.
Erich Kästner, When I Was a Little Boy
Erich Kästner, author of the immortal children’s book Emil and the Detectives, was born at the end of the nineteenth century in Dresden – that ‘wonderful city full of art and history’ which was razed to the ground by the Allies in 1945. Erich’s gentle father Emil, a master-saddler, and his mother Ida, an intelligent woman who set up as a hairdresser, had come to Dresden from small-town Saxony. Times were tough, and Erich grew up in a tenement flat at the shabby end of a long street called the Königsbrücker Strasse. Yet the book shines with the everyday happiness of a young boy’s life in a close-knit, hardworking family, set against the backdrop of the ancient city with its baroque buildings, its parades before the Kaiser, its trams and glittering Christmas shops. When I Was a Little Boy is an affecting picture of both Erich’s childhood and the city he never ceased to mourn.
Richard Kennedy, A Boy at the Hogarth Press
In 1926, at the age of 16, Richard Kennedy left school without a single qualification and went to work at the Hogarth Press. The Woolfs clearly developed a fondness for their apprentice, but when he left several years later, Leonard pronounced him ‘the most frightful idiot he [had] ever had the privilege of meeting in a long career of suffering fools’. But Kennedy, who became a successful artist and children’s book illustrator, was taking everything in, and 50 years later he produced a minor classic in A Boy at the Hogarth Press, accompanied by his own wonderfully alive illustrations. Later still, he wrote his touching childhood memoir, A Parcel of Time. Now published together in a single edition, the two are a sheer delight.
Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year
In the freezing winter of 1996 Joanna Rakoff, aged 24, moved to New York and landed her first job as assistant at one of the city’s oldest and most distinguished literary agencies. There are no computers in this world of filing cabinets and carbon paper, where Joanna must work on a Selectric typewriter which makes a noise like gunfire, and where one of her main tasks is to reply to the mountain of fan mail which regularly arrives for the elusive novelist J. D. Salinger. How Joanna approaches this task, and what she learns from it about Salinger, his fans and ultimately about herself, is the story of this funny and affectionate book – one which will strike a particularly sympathetic chord with anyone who can still remember what a Selectric typewriter was.
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