Years ago, never having read the Autobiography, I read a description of it as "extraordinary. very frank, very covert". It is certainly all of those things. An autobiography "without women" which sedulously excludes wife, mother and other female relatives, but which finds room for street girls, is one aspect of it. As a lover of JCP's major 'mid-period' novels and their intensely realised English settings it was unexpected to find the figure portrayed here to be that of a inexhaustible itinerant mountebank lecturer, rather than the settled novelist he became, and an adopted American, widely travelled within that country. Much space is occupied, too, with appreciative descriptions of some of the characters he has encountered and who have become lifelong friends. These elements to me were more unexpected and even slightly unsettling, far more so, in fact, than the incessant references to his erotic obsessions, battle with sadistic imaginings, and his persistent gastric ulcers, which all stride vigorously through this monstrous 722-page outpouring. What he has done with his life is to take the elements of his individual nature, irrespective of morality or utility, and quite deliberately focused, intensified and contemplated them until they have become explosively powerful tools to crack the secrets of both his own inmost being, and that of the universe and the nature of life itself! Such an approach, in our modern rigidly moralistic, psychoanalysed world, crammed with conventional, nay compulsory, understandings of everything to the exclusion of the individual, seems both anarchic and old-fashioned, not to say unfeasible and even discredited. Hostile critics, whether of his life or work or both, would say so: hence his reputation as a charlatan, in perhaps both life and art. But don't knock it till you've tried it. He will always divide readers and critics. Those who love his novels would do well to investigate this tome; those who don't should stay well away. ( )