Volume 54, Number 11 · June 28, 2007
The Family Pinfold
By John Banville
Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family
by Alexander Waugh
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 472 pp., $27.50
When we think of the young Evelyn Waugh the image immediately conjured is that of a Twenties swell, brightest of the Bright Young Things, racketing about Oxford and London with the likes of Harold Acton and Brian Howard, knocking off policemen's helmets and permanently tight on champagne. It is somewhat startling, then, to come upon the fact that in 1927 he enrolled in a carpentry course at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Bloomsbury. He was then aged twenty-four and at a loss about what to do with his life, having failed in journalism—he was sacked from the Daily Express after three months there—and as a schoolteacher. He had written a book, Rossetti: His Life and Works, which would be published the following year, but as his biographer Selina Hastings points out, he 'still... thought of himself as a painter and craftsman first, a writer second.'[1] It was natural for him, therefore, to determine on a career as a cabinet-maker.[2] Years later, when he was an established novelist with a worldwide reputation, his mother wistfully expressed the opinion that he would have done better to stick to his saw and wood-plane, since 'furniture is so useful....'
Review, 3102 words
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