Close, brief or of a third kind

Patrick Skene Catling

ENCOUNTERS edited by Kai Erikson

Yale University Press, £14.95, pp.163

After all the superfluous details of so many unduly protracted biographies, it is like going on holiday to read this collection of subjective microbiographical sketches.

Kai Erikson, a Yale professor of socio- logy and American studies and editor of the Yale Review, invited 43 men and women he says are well known in 'the world of arts and letters' to recall their encounters with other well known people in the same world who are now dead. After publication in the Review in 1987 and 1988, 18 of the reminiscences were chosen for this pleasantly informal book.

Although some of the meetings took place many years ago, when the memoirists were impressionably young, most of their ma- ture recollections are not at all sycophan- tic. Indeed, some of them are quite the reverse. Familiarity bred fond respect only sometimes.

An encounter, [by the Erikson rules] is an event in the life of the person writing rather than an event in the life of the person being written about. It has its location, as it were, in the landscape of the writer's own life. So it should be no surprise that the writers of these pieces so often place themselves at or near the centre of the scenes they are describing.

Here are generally enjoyable, egocentric revelations on a small scale. Do not look for scandals or dazzling illuminations. You probably already know that Auden often wore carpet-slippers in public, Koestler played chess, and when Somerset Maugham was in a grumpy mood the expression on his face was as ugly as Graham Sutherland's portrayal of i6. Any- way, this lissome volume contains some decorously entertaining cultural gossip.

Paul Horgan, the only contributor who was unabashedly star-struck, recalls how Mary Garden, 'the lustrous opera singer and actress', in 1935 brightened a New York publisher's cocktail party that had got off to a dull start. Harper's gave the party to publicise Horgan's second novel, No Quarter Given, in the Plaza Hotel, where Madame Garden earlier that after- noon gave her last public recital.

`To mention Caruso, Melba, Farrar, Chaliapin, or, for today, Maria Callas,' Horgan writes in awful reverence, 'is to suggest the like position of Mary Garden in the international operatic world of her time.' Having admired her voice previously only on records, he attended her recital, and, through her manager, invited her to his party. Golly-gee! — she came! and, as he puts it, 'le tout New York craned and stared for every word and gesture'.

In welcome contrast with Horgan's naiveté, Isaiah Berlin tells irreverently of Edmund Wilson at Oxford. The 'disting- uished literary critic,' according to Berlin, was 'a thickset, red-faced, pot-bellied fi- gure, not unlike President Hoover in appearance; but once he began to talk, almost before we had sat down, I forgot everything save his conversation.'

In 1954, Wilson's anglophobia was at its most virulent. Berlin records with relish his American guest's acerbic judgments of England and the English literary establish- ment.

As they walked past Christ Church, he said: 'Oh, most of these buildings look in very poor shape — I think they're actually falling down,' and looked delighted. 'I think that's the case with a lot of England,' he went on. 'I think your country deserves a bit of this.'

He then launched into a sweeping attack on academic life and academics in general as murderers of all that was living and real in literature and art — classical, mediaeval, modern.

He exempted from this diatribe only a couple of the professors who had taught him at Princeton, Christian Gauss and Norman Kemp Smith.

Berlin relates that Wilson opted for dinner at All Souls, not at a restaurant, because,

he said, he wished to plumb the depths of old, decayed, conservative English academic life in its death throes — I remember his words: 'It can't be long now,' he said ominously, 'I think we're in at the

Wilson commented equally splenetically on many writers he had met at a party organised for him by Hamish Hamilton. Wilson said he saw, among others, T. S. Eliot ('a gifted poet, but somewhere inside him there is a scoundrel'), one or two Sitwells, Cyril Connolly, Siegfried Sas- soon, Harold Nicolson, Peter Quennell and possibly Rosamond Lehmann. 'He wished to talk to none of these.' And he scorned the Bloomsbury set.

It was the aestheticism, the prissiness, the superciliousness, the cliquishness, the thin, piping voices, the bloodlessness, the pre- occupation with one's own emotions both in life and in literature . . . that irritated him.

Berlin says: I asked him if he had disliked every literary person he had met in London. He said, 'No, I liked Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connolly best.' Why? 'Because I thought they were so nasty.'

Quentin Bell is most amusing when he reports the worst of 'Meeting Matisse': `Vanity was too feeble a word with which to describe the feelings of Matisse for Matisse' — so Bell offers a lot of other words as well.

John Hersey, the author of Hiroshima, devastates Sinclair Lewis. Hersey, as a young man, served one summer as Lewis's secretary, at a late stage in the 'hideously ugly', 'notoriously enrageable' novelist's career. 'No matter that Lewis's Muse was in menopause: I was fascinated by his habits as a writer.'

He doted on names [Hersey remembers]: he believed people became their names. . . I would sometimes hear him at his desk calling out names, as if summoning lost souls.

One of my favourite pieces is 'Playing Chess with Arthur Koestler,' by Julian Barnes. The games themselves are well described; so is Koestler, encountered when his Parkinson's disease and leukaemia were far advanced and he had already initiated arrangements to kill him- self. Barnes, with unsentimental fidelity, enables one to hear again Koestler's mid- dle European accent when he justifiably complains that `Zis Parkinson's — it knocks me sidevays.'

Nastiness certainly has a stronger flavour than niceness; but this collection has its nice bits, for example, Maury Yeston's tribute to Alan Jay Lerner, and a second appraisal of Wilson. In 'An Exemplary Edmund Wilson', Monroe Engel says the old curmudgeon 'applied himself . . . with seriousness and energy' to the performance of magic tricks and Punch and Judy shows for children. Of course, the evidence of all these brief encounters is inconclusive.