Customer Reviews

Loitering With Intent (Vol 1)

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You should know going in to Peter O'Toole's "Loitering with Intent" that it is intended less as a full autobiography (it ends with his teenage years shortly after the end of WWII) and more as an impressionistic canvas of growing up in Europe during 20th century wartime. Bearing this in mind, you will find this both immensely enjoyable and hauntingly well-written.

O'Toole's recollections of his parents--a gorgeous, flirtatious mother and a handsome, ne'er-do-well father--are rich with detail and emotion. He remembers also their friends, their tribulations (and pet mouse!) during WWII, and perhaps most vividly of all, his enforced sojourn in the English countryside when city life was deemed too dangerous for children. His account of going to church and going to a Protestant school (O'Toole was reared a good Irish Catholic boy) are especially hilarious, from the fights with bullies to the strict teachers to the sad family with whom he lodged. One especially funny tale has to do with a school picnic. When the Protestant teacher instructs the class to pray for good weather for the picnic, they all promise to. Of course picnic day arrives and is rainy. The teacher disapprovingly sniffs, "Well, I see God didn't answer our prayers." O'Toole, eight years old and astounded by this non-Catholic outlook, cries out, "Yes, He did! He said no!"

Young O'Toole is obsessed with Adolf Hitler, who makes an appearance every several dozen pages. O'Toole gets at the maniacal dictator's fascination for a young, feverishly imaginative boy with some extraordinary stream-of-consciousness writing:

"Hitler had been poison-gassed [in WWI]. Daring despatch runner that he was, twice he was got. Shrapnel swept a bit of his shin away. After two years of carnage, fighting trench warfare at the front, he was got. Into beetroot fields. stream bottoms, slag heaps, pitheads, broken smoking juts of towns and villages, burning vanished woodlands, into downs and rides and hillsides, the trenches had been dug deep down into the mud and earth . . . hydra-headed, destroyed, constantly relocated, these barbarous earthworks moved and split the countrysides of France and Belgium. Six million soldiers hopped off sandbag parapets and were killed. Many miles of no man's lands ran between the Allied and the German trenchlines, they, too, dying and being reborn in other fields. Barbed-wire gardens to crouch in and be killed."

If only the book explored more of O'Toole's life as a world-renowned actor . . . but it doesn't. It stops shortly after the war and we must all hope that he soon writes a follow-up volume. Had he not been an actor, Peter O'Toole could have made a splendid career as a writer. Thoroughly enjoyable!

A disjoint account of a small part of the life of a talented man who has lived a very full life.