Like J. R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself, this is a biography-cum-autobiography in which the father is more reprehensible by conventional standards - and in the eyes of the law as well - than mere monsters like old Gosse or Butler/Pontifex. Wolff père was a professional conman, if 'professional' is the right word. In some ways it isn't, because his operations were too slapdash, too reckless, and too much part of his dream about himself, to merit that adjective: on the other hand, they were the means by which he kept himself and his wife and two sons in various states of grandeur or misery.

LRB 7 August 1980 | PDF Download