The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590172035 ISBN 13: 9781590172032

Publisher: New York Review Books, 2006

Synopsis

Our most remarkable writers share what has influenced them the most: each other.

Many of the illustrious contributors to The New York Review of Books have had deep and abiding relationships–both personal and intellectual–with other poets, writers, artists, composers, and scientists of equal stature. The Company They Kept is a collection of twenty-seven accounts of these varied friendships–most of them undeniably fraught with “idiosyncratic complexities.”

One of the sweetest and funniest is Prudence Crowther’s memoir of her romance, at age thirty, with the seventy-four-year old S. J. Perelman (“As a friend of mine put it, ‘Yeah, too bad you couldn’t have met when you were twenty six and he was seventy–or when he was thirty, and your parents hadn’t met yet.’”). Darryl Pinckney recalls his unsettling stint as Djuna Barnes’s handyman. Susan Sontag’s piece on Paul Goodman is more about how they never hit it off; Seamus Heaney’s remembrance of Tom Flanagan has all the melancholy affection of a bereft and beloved son. Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey were grad students together–for years afterward, McMurtry recalls, the Merry Pranksters would show up unannounced, and throw his family and neighbors into hilarious chaos. Derek Walcott recalls his parting of the ways with Robert Lowell, and of their bittersweet reconciliation. And Robert Oppenheimer writes that he wants to dispel the clouds of myth surrounding Albert Einstein: “As always, the myth has its charms; but the truth is far more beautiful.”

From Anna Akhmatova’s dreamlike description of wandering through Paris with the impoverished Modigliani to Joseph Brodsky’s account of his first meeting with Isaiah Berlin (from which he returned to report, around the kitchen table, to Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden), these pieces are tantalizing glimpses into the lives of those who have made The New York Review of Books into what Esquire magazine calls "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language."

About this title

About the Author

ROBERT SILVERS and BARBARA EPSTEIN are co-editors of The New York Review of Books.

Reviews

Silvers and Epstein, editors of The New York Review of Books, pull together 27 essays in this smart and eclectic collection. Published over the past four decades in the NYRB, pieces here deal with professional relationships and personal friendships among such writers as Robert Lowell and Jerome London, Susan Sontag and Paul Goodman, and Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein. Saul Bellow writes of the immediate connection he made with John Cheever, whom he "met at irregular intervals all over the US." Derek Walcott shares his take on the work of fellow poet Robert Lowell, who "made the body of literature his body, all styles his style, every varying voice his own." And Larry McMurtry recalls his experiences with Ken Kesey, the original Merry Prankster, whom he first met at Stanford University in September 1960 and kept up with through the '70s, '80s and '90s. But readers unfamiliar with certain names in this anthology might find it all less than fascinating. Essays by relatively obscure writers such as Anna Akhmatova (on Amedeo Modigliani) and Michael Ignatieff (on Bruce Chatwin), for example, prove difficult to finish. A thoroughly academic audience, however, will no doubt appreciate the comprehensive line-up here.
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When some of Stravinsky's disciples suggested that Robert Craft write the great composer's biography, Craft countered that long friendship disqualified him: "I was too close to Stravinsky to do this." Precisely because they value a perspective that brings us closer to a great creator than a biographer ever could, Silvers and Epstein have assembled a remarkable set of essays by friends of prominent musicians, scientists, poets, and novelists. Only the close proximity of friendship allows readers to glimpse Einstein taking rare delight in a day of sailing, Roethke playing tennis with fierce abandon, and Kesey playing enchanting melodies on the wandering bus he shared with his Merry Pranksters. Seeing through the eyes of friends permits readers to glimpse titans up close, without the often--dehumanizing lenses of theory or ideology. Even the political passions of Mary McCarthy part long enough to disclose a woman too spontaneous to keep a diary, too homespun to let others grind her coffee beans. These wonderful reminiscences will renew readers' appreciation for those unpredictable joys shared between all close friends. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: New York Review Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1590172035
• ISBN 13: 9781590172032
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 298
• Editor: Silvers Robert B., Epstein Barbara