Robert B. Silvers is editor of The New York Review of Books. Prior to joining the Review, Mr. Silvers was, from 1959 to 1963, associate editor of Harper's magazine, editor of the book Writing in America and translator of La Gangrene. Before that, Mr. Silvers lived in Paris for six years (1952 to 1958), where he served with the U.S. Army at SHAPE Headquarters and attended the Sorbonne and Ecole des Sciences Politiques. He joined the editorial board of The Paris Review in 1954 and became Paris editor in 1956. He also worked as press secretary to Governor Chester Bowles in 1950. Mr. Silvers, who graduated from the University of Chicago in 1947, was born in Mineola, New York. »

The Company They Kept

Writers on Unforgettable Friendships

Edited by Robert B. Silvers
Edited by Barbara Epstein

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 graduate 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."

The many contributors include:

Stanley Kunitz on Theodore Roethke
Robert Lowell on Randall Jarrell
Susan Sontag on Paul Goodman
Jason Epstein on Edmund Wilson
Saul Bellow on John Cheever
Robert Craft on Igor Stravinsky
Darryl Pinckney on Djuna Barnes
Derek Walcott on Robert Lowell
Enrique Krauze on Octavio Paz
Elizabeth Hardwick on Mary McCarthy
Larry McMurtry on Ken Kesey
Seamus Heaney on Thomas Flanagan
Robert Oppenheimer on Albert Einstein
Maurice Grosser on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Read the preface

Reviews

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.
— Booklist

Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein co-edited The New York Review of Books for 43 years, until Epstein died in June. Over those decades, contributors to the Review have written about their personal relationships, and this volume brings together 27 memoirs of friendship. This volume should be read piece by marvelous piece: Robert Oppenheimer on Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow on John Cheever, Susan Sontag on Paul Goodman.
— The Chicago Tribune

An extraordinarily striking, moving and delicious collection of short essays...The writing in most of these essays is dazzling, the anecdotes and insights even more so. It is a superb collection of vignettes, and their variety throws more light on the diversity and possibilities than a treatise could.
— The Financial Times

Whether fond or surprisingly frank, these essays are soothing in their intimacy, their acceptance of fallible fellow humans.
— O Magazine

...[a] smart and eclectic collection.
— Publishers Weekly

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