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Describing the protracted gestation of this book, Richard Wollheim says that the desire to write it had long been in his thoughts “like a benign lump” that in his twilight years “now seemed to be growing” (124). The result is a truly exceptional work, an account of childhood that is at once distinctive and distinguished. Those familiar with the author's previous writings on art and philosophy might scarcely have anticipated so personal and undefended a work to be his final legacy. Notable for being somewhat reserved, even forbidding, in his writing (though not in his personal style), Wollheim was an erudite and impressive thinker, a philosopher of mind, of aesthetics and political theory, who had acquired a formidable if mixed reputation on both sides of the Atlantic over the last four decades of the twentieth century. He championed the academic study of Freud and of psychoanalytic theory when both the man and the subject matter were viewed with disdain by more positivistically minded colleagues. Though he once ventured into novel writing (a hobby not unknown to philosophers), and tried unsuccessfully a second time, he had never before essayed anything remotely like this, a childhood memoir devoid of self-pity, wry, funny, and sad.
It is not the subject matter that makes the book so unusual—childhood reminiscences have become a flourishing genre of late—but rather its utter clarity of vision and vividness of expression. Maybe it was felt in some quarters to be too uncompromisingly honest for its own good. At all events, this final project seems not to have appealed to prospective publishers, despite Wollheim's considerable academic renown. No doubt