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Richard Kennedy’s drawings accompany both titles |
Growing up with Woolfs
A Boy At The Hogarth Press and A Parcel Of Time.
By Richard Kennedy. Slightly Foxed Limited Edition No 4, £14.50 inc. postage.
A Cab At The Door. By VS Pritchett.
Slightly Foxed Limited Edition No 3, £14.50 inc. postage.
FIVE years ago, Gail Pirkis and Hazel Wood, two editors at John Murray, the publishers of Lord Byron and Sir John Betjeman, left to found Slightly Foxed, the “real reader’s quarterly”, as Murray had got sucked into the conglomerate Hodder Headline.
Slightly Foxed has proved itself to be a much-needed blast against the insanities of conglomerate publishing.
A particular treat just out is their Limited Edition No 4, Richard Kennedy’s A Boy At The Hogarth Press. Set in 1926, in a damp basement in Tavistock Square where Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press first had its office, it tells the story of 16-year-old Richard’s trial and error apprenticeship, after leaving school without a single GCSE or A-level (or their equivalent).
Richard captures a particular moment in time in the Woolfs’ ongoing saga with much warmth and humour. “Mrs W” obsessively rolls unique shag cigarettes while “LW’s” hands never stop trembling.
Mrs W acted as hand-press compositor and chatter-upper of distinguished visitors like Roger Fry, the art historian, when not engaged in the hard grind of writing where she reached an unattainably high standard.
Her first masterpiece, To The Lighthouse, was published the following year, 1927. Her presence for Richard was will-o’-the-wisp apart from sending him off to the occasional literary party.
LW had a more formative influence on Richard as a father figure (Richard’s father John had been killed in the First World War, and he had been brought up by an emotionally insecure mother and grandmother).
His lunchtime walks with Mrs W and her spaniel Pinker round Tavistock Square provided him with the nearest he got to Proustian moments.
After five years, in which he eyed up various girls and went around the country with a large suitcase of books as a rep, his apprenticeship finally floundered and Mrs W dispatched him into the Big Wide World.
By then his career as a prolific illustrator of children’s books had already begun.
By sharp contrast, Kennedy’s accompanying story, A Parcel Of Time, about his childhood, is without the same supporting cast, and therefore of lesser interest.
A Cab At The Door is a delight, an autobiographical work of great humour and panache. The story of VS Pritchett’s reckless and over-optimistic father, whose Macawberish business ventures crashed before they begun, is centre stage here.
After a much-praised literary career, Pritchett lived with his second wife off Regent’s Park Road, Primrose Hill, until his death in 1997.
Perhaps Slightly Foxed will consider bringing out his exquisite book of short stories, The Camberwell Beauty, in the future.
JOHN HORDER
Slightly Foxed, 67 Dickinson Court, 15 Brewhouse Yard, EC1V 4JX. 020 7549 2121/2111. www.foxedquarterly.com |
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