- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (30 Nov 1995)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140239979
- ISBN-13: 978-0140239973
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 13 x 2 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 886,419 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
Henrietta Moraes, queen of Bohemia, reformed drunk, ex-drug addict, model of Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, and wife of Indian poet, Dom Moraes, has written her extraordinary autobiography. It takes us from her convent girlhood in Peckham Rye to the pubs and jazz clubs of Soho in the 1950s. An habituee of the French pub and the Colony Room, friend to John Minton, George Melly, Francis Wyndham, Bacon, Freud and many more, she leaves Soho and Chelsea for the hippy life in the 1960s. From life in a caravan to a Guinness mansion in Ireland, from LSD to heroin, Henrietta goes from one extreme to another. Finally, she has to come to terms with her alcoholism. Given three months to live, with enormous courage, she gives up the drink and finds a new life.
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4 of 7 people found the following review helpful
The gilded gutter life of a Soho barfly
12 July 2000
Format:Hardcover
A extremely strange and disappointing book. Considering the rare depth and range of her notable acquaintances, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Marianne Faithfull, John Deakin, Dom Moraes and many others, one would expect that Henrietta Moraes must be a surprising and interesting figure, but at no time is this evident in her only published memoir. After an engaging description of a lonely and peculiar English childhood in the thirties and a promising account of SoHo in the fifties, the book flattens out into a strange and dissociated life filled with pointless anecdotes and weirdly unfinished relationships. Time after time, stories begin with promise only to be dropped seemingly half-way as the author's interest falters and she passes on. Whole marriages (and later on, children) pass away without comment. I wanted to ask her: what did she think of all those extraordinary portraits Bacon painted in the sixties? Why was Freud so important to her for so long? What is her relationship with her children like now, after a childhood with an alcoholic acid-tripping convicted burglar mother? The author seems to possess no awareness at all of what a reader might like to know about her - a fatal short-coming in the writer of biography, I would imagine. In fact, she seems to possess no self-awareness at all, or the slightest interest in understanding the meaning of her experiences, so that this book at times feels like a psychiatrist's case-study, and reading it feels prurient. After it, I was sad and deflated.
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