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Writers on Unforgettable Friendships
New York Review Books
September 2006
On Sale: September 5, 2006
316 pages
ISBN: 1590172035
EAN: 9781590172032
Hardcover
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Literature and Fiction
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."
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