Hindustan Times
Funny, adulatory, vengeful…
“Writers have no small talk, said Auden, and so when they run into each other, there is nothing for them to talk about except money.” So begins Sean French’s introduction to this delightful anthology of writers on writers.
Beautifully put together from a vast reservoir of reviews, memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, and letters, we come across instance upon instance – through the ages, from Shakespeare-Ben Jon to Theroux-Naipaul – what happens when writers meet, become friends, turn into enemies, or choose to write about each other, or, indeed, each others’ work.
So F Scott Fitzgerald confides to Ernest Hemingway his anxiety about the size of his penis (and Hemingway deadpans his way out of the situation). Evelyn Waugh lets on about running into the “shambling, unshaven and as it happened quite penniless figure of Graham Greene”. Waugh says: “Took him to the Ritz for a cocktail and gave him 6d for his hat.” Kingsley Amis provides characteristically hilarious accounts of meeting Dylan Thomas and listening to him read, and a terrific send up of Jack Kerouac. Paul Theroux and VS Naipaul meet for tea at the Charing Cross Hotel in London. This is what happens when the bill turns up. “I paid it,” Theroux writes. “I paid the tip. Vidia had not seen it. He did not see bills even when they were brought on the most expensive china and folded like origami and presented to him.”
Here is where you can buy the book.
And, if you happen to live in Mumbai, here is where you can borrow it.
Have fun.
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