The most interesting parts of the lives of writers often enough take place before they become writers. In Colin MacInnes's case, one might say that some of the most interesting parts of his life took place before he was born. He was the great-grandchild of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones, and was thus connected with both the Kipling and the Baldwin families; he was the grandson of an Oxford Professor of Poetry (of no great distinction, it must be admitted); and the son of Angela Thirkell, the novelist of upper-class English life, and James Campbell McInnes, a man of working-class origins who became the foremost British lieder-singer of his generation. Unfortunately for this marriage of the muses and the classes, Campbell McInnes was also drunken, violent, and (though he succeeded in fathering three children by Angela Thirkell, and then in raping the children's nursemaid) inveterately homosexual.

LRB 2 August 1984 | PDF Download