Never still

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32494, 2 January 1971, Page 10

Never still

Fun While it Lasted. By Barnaby Conrad. Michael Joseph. 392 pp. Illustrated. Because Mr Conrad’s career is seemingly based on the maxim, “variety is the spice of life,” his autobiography is a very unusual one. It moves with an almost alarming transitoriness through several countries and encounters a myriad of people of such diversity as Noel Coward and Don Juan Belmonte. Mr Conrad writes of his many and varied professions with an insight that could only have been achieved through intimate experience. In the whirl of an easy and quickly moving style, the reader is carried from the bull-ring to the artist’s studio, from the novelist’s typewriter to the American consulate in Spain, from the breeding of tropical fish to the management of a nightclub, and from the problems of a secretary to those of making a film. What is most striking about Mr Conrad’s autobiography is his youth. One is always surprised at the occasional reminders of his age, for it seems almost impossible that he encountered such amazing experiences before he even reached the age of 30. He finds his maturity near the end of the book, when he no longer feels the need to fight bulls. The many women in his life and his subsequent marriages also play a large part in his life story—a story which, if it were not for its definite reality, would seem incredible. From his experiences in the bull-ring Mr Conrad was almost fatally gored. This event and similar occurrences are described realistically, and without undue sensationalism. There are many potentially sensationalistic incidents in the book, but they are never overstated and are always frankly and plainly treated, frequently with a hint of the sense of humour which unobtrusively pervades. All the illustrations, which are unquestionably good but rarely outstanding, are the work of Mr Conrad himself. They act as a proof of the reality he delineatps. He’ aptly describes himself, in the forward in a phrase derived from a conversation between Noel Coward and Eva Gabor about the author, as “gored but never bored.” Posterity should be enlightened by the acquisition of the autobiography of a man so full of interest and vitality. Although it is unlikely that Mr Conrad will start any literary revolution, what he has written, he has written well.