ON THE FACE OF IT, Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time would seem to be an unlikely subject for the immensely distinguished historian and memoirist Saul Friedländer. Proust’s monumental work is, after all, a work of radical subjectivity, so much so that Edmund Wilson associated it with Einstein’s new theory of relativity, which he developed in the same years that Proust was beginning to write his novel. Historians, by trade, unearth and are beholden to objective facts, whatever interpretation they later apply to those facts.
Some years ago my employer, Penguin Books, asked me to read Early Auden (1981), by the young literature professor Edward Mendelson, with an eye toward our reprinting it as a paperback. At the time I had only a survey course’s worth of acquaintance with Auden’s canonical poems and knew just a bit about his life in the States. A study of his poetic output from 1927 through 1939 seemed, on the face of it, of small commercial value and marginal interest. Then I actually read it, and I got unmarginally interested real fast. Mendelson’s marvelous, granular feeling for Auden’s writing,
In the early ’70s three important novels were published that sorted through the wreckage of the Faustian project that was the American ’60s and reckoned up the costs of our excesses and hubris: Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-two in the Shade, Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, and Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers. And the greatest of these was Dog Soldiers.
As a young literatus in training, I got myself early and often to the Lion’s Head, a legendary and now-extinct writers’ bar on Sheridan Square. Lined with the framed covers of books by its denizens, it offered an atmosphere of boozy bonhomie and the opportunity for literary stargazing of a special sort. (Hey, I’m urinating right next to Fred Exley!) And it didn’t take long before I was told that gin mill’s trademark anecdote: A nonscribbling civilian drops into the Lion’s Head for a couple of beers. After taking in the scene for a while, he remarks to the guy
Midway through Keith Richards’s largely genial Life, he uncorks a sudden barrage of invective against the film director Donald Cammell: “He was the most destructive little turd I’ve ever met. Also a Svengali, utterly predatory, a very successful manipulator of women. . . . Putting people down was almost an addiction for him.” Only the […]
Midway through Keith Richards’s largely genial Life, he uncorks a sudden barrage of invective against the film director Donald Cammell: “He was the most destructive little turd I’ve ever met. Also a Svengali, utterly predatory, a very successful manipulator of women. . . . Putting people down was almost an addiction for him.” Only the narcs and his frenemy Mick Jagger (mocked for his now infamous “tiny todger”) come in for comparable slagging off. Why Richards should harbor such animus against this relatively obscure figure will puzzle anyone unfamiliar with the seedier precincts of late-1960s cinema, specifically the sexed-up, drugged-out
On Sunday, December 22, 1940, at a crossroads outside El Centro, California, a husband and wife died in a car collision. The woman’s name and much of her private life were known to millions by virtue of a series of articles published by her sister in the New Yorker and the subsequent best-selling book My Sister Eileen (1938); in fact, a play based on that book would open four days later on Broadway to excellent reviews, followed by a record-shattering 864-performance run. The man, in contrast, was a novelist whose readers numbered in the thousands at best, according to the
Homer and Langley Collyer, two human relics from Edith Wharton’s New York, became legendary in late Spring of 1947 when they were discovered dead in their decaying Harlem town house on upper Fifth Avenue, immured behind a reported hundred tons of carefully hoarded debris. Most of that tonnage comprised books, as well as magazines and newspapers from as far back as a quarter century, stacked ceiling high to create a maze of tunnels, culs-de-sac, and trip-wired booby traps—one of which had collapsed on Langley, killing him. (Homer, the first brother to be found, died of apparent starvation; Langley’s rat-nibbled body
