[Rarebooks] fa: NORMAN DOUGLAS - LATE HARVEST 1946 - JAMES POPE-HENNESSY'S COPY

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending MONDAY, November 2. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

https://tinyurl.com/y56kr9zj

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Norman Douglas: Late Harvest. London: Lindsay Drummond, (1946). FIRST EDITION. Slim 8vo (22 cm) in original gilt-decorated cloth, now housed in a mylar jacket; 132 pp. Spine a bit sunned, leaves lightly toned at the edges, but clean and sound, firmly bound.

A collection of essays, reminiscences and comments on his own books by the novelist and travel writer Norman Douglas (1868-1952). A rather louche literary figure, Douglas began his career in the Foreign Office, but after several sexual scandals, one involving a pregnant mistress and at least two involving underage boys, he went into self-imposed exile in Italy, eventually taking up semi-permanent residence on the island of Capri, the Emperor Tiberius's old stomping grounds, a suitable haven for a man described as "depraved" and "pagan-to-the-core." He's best known today for his novel South Wind (1917) and for his travel writings on Italy.

With an interesting provenance. The front free-endpaper bears the inscription, "James Pope-Hennessy from Willie King. April 1947." Pope-Hennessy (1916-1974) was one of the leading British biographers of his time, having written quirky, successful lives (much in the Lytton Strachey mode) of Queen Mary, Queen Victoria, Anthony Trollope and Robert Lewis Stevenson. He was also a gay man who, like Douglas, was sometimes driven to explore the darker alleys and recesses of the subculture, a predilection that led to his being murdered in his flat by three young toughs who were reportedly after part of the huge advance Pope-Hennessy had received for a life of Noël Coward. Willie King (1894-1958) was an aesthete and a longtime curator of ceramics and porcelain at the British Museum. He was a close friend of Douglas and for awhile his literary executor, and is mentioned on p. 69 of the present work. Though gay as well, King was married, and he and his bohemian wife, who fittingly went by the name "Viva," cut an eccentric circle through London society. He was the model for the character of the Matthew Price, Curator of Birds, in Angus Wilson's The Old Men at the Zoo.