Out in the Open by Geoffrey Dutton

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Previous owner has inscribed inside page. Foxing to top and right foredges. Dust jacket has some light creasing at edges and spine, with spine top protected by book tape. Interior and binding are still very good.

Geoffrey Dutton's (1922-1998) honest, controversial and brilliantly entertaining journey through seventy-crowded years.

His unusual childhood was dominated by the lavish lives of his wealthy parents, who collected houses and books, although young Geoffrey was despatched to boarding school at a young age. At the same time, his mother travelled abroad to enjoy a flirtation with the European aristocracy.

His real education came later, in wartime. He joined the Air Force and embarked on various amorous adventures. During the war, he also began publishing poetry and was closely associated with the modernist movement in art and literature.

Later, he studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, where C S Lewis was one of his tutors. Since then, Geoffrey Dutton has become renowned as a poet, critic, biographer, publisher and editor.

In this masterpiece of literary autobiography, he traces many journeys, from his sojourn in Cold War crazy Kansas to a wild and wonderful visit to Russia as a hapless victim of Intourist. Other travels take him through the Pacific, Africa, Europe and the Mediterranean.

There are many intimate portraits of his sometimes volatile friends, among them the feisty Zhenya Yevtushenko, fellow flier David Campbell, Russell Drysdale, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, the precocious Robert Hughes, Ken Slessor, and Max Harris, an eccentric survivor of Ern Malley. Here, too is the full story of the celebrated, quarter-century friendship with Patrick White, which ended so bitterly. (book flap)