Word: skipton
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...first difficulty was Philip," recalls Pamela Hansford Johnson, wife of British Novelist C. P. Snow, and herself a noted novelist (The Unspeakable Skipton). Their son Philip was eight last fall when the Snows taught at the University of California's Berkeley campus; they had to find a school for him, and "he would have hated to cool his heels in an ordinary American school." What she delightedly found, reported Novelist Johnson, was "a very odd school indeed." It was San Rafael's booming 3R school, and odd was the word. How can a school that uses the antique...
...Snow married one of his earliest literary critics, handsome Novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, whose books, largely about marriage and the private worlds of modern people, are less ambitious but far better crafted than her husband's; her most recent: The Unspeakable Skipton, a witty, waspish caricature of the famed adventurer, "Baron Corvo." The Snows share a ten-room London flat and a 6½-year-old son. Snow likes to be in the worldly swim and throws parties conspicuously free of fellow novelists. Sir Charles is a shade stuffy about most 20th century authors; of another practicing panoramist, Lawrence...
...UNSPEAKABLE SKIPTON (249 pp.)-Pamela Hansford Johnson-Harcourt, Brace...
This is not the tone in which an author normally begs his publisher for a handout. But Daniel Skipton is no normal author. Pamela Hansford Johnson has modeled him on that unholy terror Frederick William Rolfe, alias "Baron Corvo," who was recently reintroduced to U.S. readers in his previously unpublished novel Nicholas Crabbe (TIME, Feb. 2). Rolfe bit every hand that fed him and died penniless in Venice in 1913. Novelist Johnson has changed his name and shifted time and place to modern Bruges in Belgium, but she has kept intact his characteristics. Skipton boasts a Corvo-like title: Bulgarian...
Author Johnson's novel covers the last summer of Skipton's life. A party of English tourists comes to Bruges, and Skipton sets out to fleece them for his winter wear. He finds a whore for one of the men and snob delights for the woman in the party; for both sexes he arranges a Pigalle-type "spectacle." But by summer's end Skipton has himself been swindled out of what little money remains to him: his sole consolation is that death is close enough to save him from the agonies of another winter...