LOVE LESSONS: A Wartime Diary

by Joan Wyndham ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 3, 1985

La vie boheme and sex as experienced by a teen-aged art student living among an arty crowd in London's Chelsea district during the early years of WW II. Well into Wyndham's diary the reader learns that, before the war, the Chelsea set consisted of about 120 people who had all been to bed with each other once and were wondering what to do next. As it turns out, they are still going to bed with one another when the diary and the war begin. One of the first members of the set whom Joan meets is Gerhardt, a Pan-like German-Jewish sculptor who plays haunting music on a wooden pipe and for whom the 17-year-old Wyndham conceives a grand passion. This is not requited since 30-ish Gerhardt feels Joan should have a paramour nearer her own age. He nevertheless keeps a kindly eye on her and allows her to visit his studio, where she performs such domestic chores as sewing his pants, the seats of which are constantly in need of darning. Gerhardt knows Jo, a painter who also runs a caf‚ which serves many exotically named dishes, all of which turn out to be meatballs. Jo is handsome, dirty and sex-mad, and Joan is alternately attracted to and repelled by him. Their relationship turns out to be entirely platonic. Not so her relationship with Rupert, a handsome, black-bearded layabout who is a mine of information about sex. It is to him that Joan loses her heart, even though he's rather a bounder. Before meeting her, for example, he had lived with Prudey, who had at one time slept with Henry Miller. She eventually kicks Rupert out, but he doesn't have very far to be kicked because he has his own room upstairs in the same building. Even while living with Prudey, though, Rupert had been sleeping with Squirrel, an exquisitely beautiful girl who is half Polynesian. And likes to wear yellow. Rupert continues to sleep with Squirrel even after he starts sleeping with Joan, and Joan must accept this. Fortunately, she knows other people. There is old school chum Thetis, who loses her virginity before Joan does. There is Laura, for whom sex is out of the question since she is wasting away with tuberculosis. There are Leonard and Yurka, two other painters with designs on Joan, and a weird-looking neighbor named Madam Arcaca, once the mistress of another writer and with an avid interest in other people's sex life. There is also the war to occupy the young diarist, what with the bothersome London blitz and food rationing. But in the end the reader is rather left with the same feeling that Joan had after first bedding down with Rupert. ""Well, that's done, and I'm glad it's over! If that's really alt there is to it, I'd rather have a good smoke or go to the pictures.

Pub Date: July 3, 1985

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1985

Categories: NONFICTION