Saying Life, The Memoirs of Sir Francis Rose, Signed with Original Drawing
Rose, Sir Francis. Saying Life, The Memoirs of Sir Francis Rose. First Edition. 1961. Book good condition; dust jacket is in very good condition. Boards are soiled and faded; the front endpaper is smeared from the original drawing on the flyleaf; title pastedown is becoming unglued. There is an original pen & ink drawing by Francis Rose on the leaf, and the book is inscribed, "To Basis and Gwen, Francis Rose '62."
Few memoirists have traveled through the twentieth century with quite so much money, curiosity, and chaos as Sir Francis Rose. Artist, bon vivant, and occasional fabulist, he drifted from Paris to Berlin to China in the company of an ever-changing cast of writers, aristocrats, eccentrics, and dictators, all while maintaining a traveling zoo that allegedly included an elephant. Rose was an enigma (perhaps even to himself), but his portraits of those he encountered—among them Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Adolf Hitler—are spot on. The result is an unusually entertaining memoir of a vanished world seen through the eyes of one of its most eccentric inhabitants. Scarce in any form, it is especially so here, with its authorial inscription and the original drawing.
An in-depth profile of the fascinating and enigmatic Francis Rose, "'Lord Chaos,' The Life of Sir Francis Rose," is available via the Nick Harvill Libraries blog.
“Today, in 1960, the clever old-fashioned men of the nineteenth century are playing the last cards of the farce and comedy of errors that they had brought about. They were unable to bring a laugh from their audience even with Hitler as their star.”
--Sir Francis Rose