Peterley (David) [vere, Richard Pennington]
Peterley Harvest.
The private diary [...] now for the first time printed.
Description:
FIRST EDITION, frontisipiece portrait of the author (see below),
pp. 286, crown 8vo,
original green cloth, backstrip lettered in gilt with decoration in red, gentle knock to top corners, top edge red, faint partial browning to free endpapers, publisher's review slip laid in (listing date of publication) at front, newspaper clipping regarding the book's suppression laid in at rear, dustjacket by Patricia Davey, a couple of marks at head of rear panel, very good
Publication Details:
Hutchinson, 1960
Notes: This is a scarce first edition: the book was withdrawn after suspicions began to be raised regarding its authenticity, with Leonard Russell of the Sunday Times pronouncing it a literary hoax - perpetrated by the book's supposed editor, Richard Pennington, librarian at McGill University (where the original manuscript was claimed to be held). A comparison of the the frontispiece portrait of the young author and the photograph of the middle-aged editor to the rear flap would seem readily enough to give the lie to the construct. It is, or purports to be, a diary of 1930s London and Prague by a you...moreThis is a scarce first edition: the book was withdrawn after suspicions began to be raised regarding its authenticity, with Leonard Russell of the Sunday Times pronouncing it a literary hoax - perpetrated by the book's supposed editor, Richard Pennington, librarian at McGill University (where the original manuscript was claimed to be held). A comparison of the the frontispiece portrait of the young author and the photograph of the middle-aged editor to the rear flap would seem readily enough to give the lie to the construct. It is, or purports to be, a diary of 1930s London and Prague by a young man of private means, who has for a few years previously been (as Pennington was) in Australia - where he (Peterley/Pennington) knew the poet Christopher Brennan (J.C. Squire had dismissed the latter as one of Pennington's inventions when he attempted to submit an article on him to The London Mercury in 1930!); back in Europe, he continued to move in literary and political circles. The precise status of the book is hard to determine, given its curious blending of fact and fiction. On reviving the work in the 1980s, Michael Holroyd considered it to be neither 'a hoax or a forgery but one of those "fakes" that present autobiographical material with the foreshortening and ambiguity of an imaginative work. And does it matter if the book is a memoir or fiction or an ingenious amalgam of the two?'. Pennington, who had bought up the remaining copies from the publisher once it had become clear that it might be misunderstood, later referred to it as 'a novel which had as its theme life in England of the period between the wars, a period that interested me because I had lived through it and because I had certain ideas about it'. HIDE
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Price: £175
Subject: Modern First Edition
Published Date: 1960
Stock Number: 61305
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