(DOWNLOAD) "John Wyndham and the Sins of His Father: Damaging Disclosures in Court (John Beynon Harris)" by Extrapolation " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: John Wyndham and the Sins of His Father: Damaging Disclosures in Court (John Beynon Harris)
- Author : Extrapolation
- Release Date : January 22, 2005
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 243 KB
Description
John Wyndham, or JBH, as I shall henceforth mainly refer to him, based on the initials of the three names that John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris used in real life, was, like his younger brother, Vivian Beynon Harris, a damaged individual. He was damaged by the breakdown of his parents' marriage in 1911, the year he turned 8. From that point onwards he and Vivian had almost no contact with their father, George Beynon Harris. When he was dying in Brighton in January 1934, JBH and Vivian only came to know about it because of an emergency message broadcast by the BBC. When they arrived at the Brighton address, 89 Marine Parade, George Beynon Harris was in too fragile a state to see them. He died on 31 January aged 71. (1) In the brief biography that JBH provided for Penguin Books, he makes no reference to his parents' separation, the most traumatic event in his life. But the event is implicitly there by way of a psychological substitution. Until 1999, the Penguin biographical synopsis did not change much over the years and this second sentence (which disappears in 1999) did not change at all: "Until 1911 he lived in Edgbaston, Birmingham, and then in many parts of England." (2) The first part of this statement is not true. Nor is the second part if "then" is taken, as seems inevitable, as meaning "from 1911 onwards." Every Penguin edition ever published of Wyndham's works, from the outset in 1954 to 1999, contains this date error. After the separation, JBH lived in Edgbaston with his mother Gertrude and his brother Vivian until 1915 when he attended his first boarding school, Shardlow Hall in Derbyshire. In a 14 April 1972 letter to Angel-Luis Pujante, a Spanish graduate student who was writing an M.A. thesis on Wyndham (and would go on to write a doctoral dissertation on the same subject), Vivian records that, after his parents' separation, "We lived in a small house in Edgbaston until I was nine [in 1915] when I too went to boarding school." (3) In 1911 they moved from a large house in Edgbaston which still stands where the family was intact (239 Hagley Road) to the unidentified "small house" in Edgbaston that Vivian mentions. During the 1911-15 period JBH attended first Miss [Mabel] Woodward's Private School in Edgbaston and then (1914-15) Edgbaston High School for Boys where he was bullied. (4) JBH could not bring himself to mention his parents' separation but by substituting (whether consciously or not) the year of that event for the three-years-later date of his leaving Edgbaston and Birmingham, the severe impact of the separation is registered in his apparently innocuous autobiographical statement. In 1911 he remained in Birmingham but he lost his real home for ever.
 "John Wyndham and the Sins of His Father: Damaging Disclosures in Court (John Beynon Harris)" by Extrapolation " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}