Humphrey Jennings never lacked a sense of self-worth. Peggy Guggenheim, with whom he had a brief affair in 1937, remembered him jumping up and down on their Parisian hotel bed crying out: 'Look at me! . . . Don't you think I'm beautiful?' In fact, she thought he looked like Donald Duck, and insisted he put his clothes on and take her to meet André Breton. 'There has only been one really good edition of anything that Shakespeare wrote,' he told the writer Ruthven Todd, 'and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did myself.' Stephen Spender, who met Jennings in Germany in 1945, noticed the film-maker's 'bumptious expression', as well as his 'pin-head face' and 'flapping ears'.

LRB 3 March 2005 | PDF Download