Bevis Hillier
The tradition of the professional autobiog- rapher is an honourable one — Augustus Hare, Lady Dorothy Nevill, Sir Osbert Sitwell, Sir Compton Mackenzie, Christopher Isherwood — with a few dishonourable exceptions, such as the late Gerald Hamilton (Isherwood's `Mr Norris'), who wrote the same memoir in virtually the same words in three books published in different decades.
My choices all belong to the good part of the tradition: Ved Mehta's Up at Oxford (John Murray, £17.99); Paul Watkins's Stand Before Your God (Faber, £14.99) and A. L. Rowse's All Souls in My Time (Duck- worth, £14.99)). The Mehta self-portraits are building into a heroic saga that cries out for a Merchant-Ivory film. As Mehta's odyssey has carried him to both America
and England, the movie will have a market in both places.
Like Mehta, Paul Watkins came to Oxford as a foreigner — but not to the university. As a seven-year-old American he was dumped by his parents at the Drag- on School CI swear, I thought I was going to a party'). Later he was at Eton. He describes both ordeals with honesty, irony, nerve and verve. Anybody who still thinks that Lord of the Flies is a libel on British boyhood should just read Watkins. The book's sub-title is 'Growing Up to Be a Writer'. Watkins (now 29) did. His novels put him far above the brat-pack.
A, L. Rowse also came to Oxford as an outsider, a poor boy from Cornwall. He made it to the pinnacle of the Brit estab- lishment, an All Souls fellowship. He will be 90 on 4 December — the age Evelyn Waugh would now have been if he had not died in 1965. He maddens many (Private Eye parodied his insistence about his Shakespearean discoveries as 'I have finally settled, once for all, the identity of the Dark Laddie of the Sonnets') but he'll be the best nonagenarian book reviewer since Dame Rebecca West, and this latest auto- biography dances with anecdote and fizzes with apergus about the historic figures who sang the Mallard Song with him over 50 years.
Previous page
