An Immaculate Mistake: 2

A noted author, actor, and playwright relates his experiences growing up gay in a working-class London community

The affectionate memories of a gay man--not to mention actor, playwright, and author of such novels as At the Jerusalem and Gabriel's Lament--who's clearly made his peace with a troubled past and a family that did its best to keep him in the closet. Bailey was born in 1937 suburban London to a professional maid and a road-sweeper. He was their late-in-life ``mistake,'' though his mother made it clear to him that, as with Shakespeare's bastard Edmund, ``there was good sport'' at her youngest son's making. The knowledge pleases Bailey, which is good since a backward look might otherwise prove depressing for him. He almost died of diphtheria at four, lost his remote father when he was eleven (only to learn at the funeral that the elder Bailey had another family from a failed first marriage), and was both saddled and blessed in his mother, a woman of remarkable prejudices who'd nonetheless remain a touchstone. To her, opera was ``closet music'' sung by ``squawking foreign cows,'' Shakespeare a snob, and a boy (like hers) who cried and brought his mum flowers ``not natural.'' Paul figured out quickly that he couldn't ever be ``natural'': Why else would the movie-star pictures he hoarded be of Marlon Brando instead of Marilyn Monroe? But he didn't anguish over it much, simply signed up for a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama and moved out of his pinched little world. There are no depths probed or nature-nurture insights to be found here, just a fine evocation of time and place offered by a man who knows precisely where he came from. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Bailey is an English novelist with a gift for the interior power of small talk, the dialog line of a few words casually spoken, filled with great emotional history and meaning. Here, he gives us a wryly funny account of growing up in wartime Britain as the third and last child of an already elderly street sweeper and a domestic servant to the royal family. Precocious and intellectual as a child, Bailey seems to have spent most of his youth engaged in verbal sparring matches with his cantankerously strong-willed mother. In fact, this book tells us as much about her as it does about the author; thank goodness she was such an interesting character. About Bailey, we get the picture of a sensitive young man of a dramatic disposition (he memorizes all of Hamlet , knowing that one day he will act in the play), growing up as a gay youth in the working-class neighborhoods of London in the 1940s. Bravely hopscotching through formative years of poverty and discouragement, this memoir of an author making peace with the ghosts of his past is recommended for all collections.
- Jeffery Ingram, Newport P.L., Ore.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.