Passionate Prodigality: Fragments of Autobiography

When A Passionate Prodigality was first published in 1933 it was hailed as one of the finest English works to have come out of the First World War. Today this memoir reads with a graphic immediacy, not merely in the descriptions of the filth and shock and carnage that characterized the struggle, but in its evocation of men at war, certain soldiers who have now become a small quantity of Christian dust’. Stylish, honest and eloquent, A Passionate Prodigality is less a book than a living voice, demonstrating an important if little remembered truth: The poetry is not in the pity. To hell with your generalised pity. What the survivor remembers is not the fears he knew, the pains, but the faces and a few words of the men who were with him at the front’. AUTHOR: Guy Chapman, OBE, MC, served with the 13th Battalion, The Royal Fusiliers in France, Belgium and Germany from 1914 to 1920. Born in 1889, he died in 1972, having been a barrister, soldier, publisher, teacher, student of economics, professor of modern history and writer. His other books include studies of William Beckford, the French Third Republic, the collapse of France in 1940, Vain Glory (an anthology of writing about the Frist World War) and his autobiography A Kind of Survivor which was edited by his wife, the novelist Storm Jameson.