Francis Wyndham

Fear in a handful of dust

Richard Wollheim died last year, aged 80, after a distinguished academic career as a philosopher fascinated by aesthetics and psychoanalysis. He had recently completed this memoir of his childhood. Posthumous publication reveals it to be a masterpiece — an unclassifiable work of startling originality in which the acutely sensual and confusedly cerebral experience of infancy, boyhood and adolescence is brilliantly recreated. Although it carries self-scrutiny to an extreme of scrupulous candour which I believe to be unique, the term ‘confessional’ — with its suggestion of apology and therapeutic exhibitionism — does not apply. There is little sense here of personal secrets being exposed to public view, but rather of the reader being intimately drawn into the heart of a deeply private life.

This life, of course, had its social dimension and the author’s family and background provide a milieu of peculiar interest. His father, Eric Wollheim, was a cosmopolitan impresario with glamorous connections (Diaghilev, Kurt Weil, belle époque courtesans and Viennese divas) as well as involvement with the worlds of music hall, pantomime and palatial pubs. Several of Eric’s associates were implicated in financial scandals and sent to prison. He himself was always beautifully and expensively dressed, scented and shod (passing on to his son a discriminating interest in shirtmakers). He was also seldom at home. One of Mr Cochran’s Young Ladies named Connie Luttrell had given up a minor career in musical comedy to marry him.

Richard disliked his mother, finding her an embarrassment and a bore, but he writes about her so well that she emerges as a memorable tragicomic character in perpetual need of extravagant praise which she receives only from herself. He had a slightly older brother whom he seldom mentions. The family lived in a house in Weybridge called Upton Pyne before moving to one called The Mask in Walton-on-Thames.

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