The Company They Kept, Volume Two Writers on Unforgettable Friendships

Many of the contributors to The New York Review of Books have written about deep and abiding relationships-both personal and intellectual-with fellow poets, writers, and artists. The Company They Kept is a collection of twenty-eight accounts of these friendships that were always stimulating, often inspiring, and sometimes vexing. There are historic moments-Isaiah Berlin#x19;s conversations with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, Hector Bianciotti#x19;s account of the death of Borges-as well as lighthearted ones-Bruce Chatwin#x19;s hilarious drunken evening with George Ortiz and Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale#x19;s subway ride with George Balanchine. Many of the portraits include vivid images that otherwise would have been lost forever: the poet Ossip Mandelstam, who Anna Akhmatova first glimpsed as #x1C; . . . a thin young boy with a twig of lily-of-the-valley in his button-hole#x1D;; the young Gore Vidal in Dawn Powell#x19;s living room; twelve-year-old aspiring cartoonist John Updike writing Saul Steinberg to ask for a cartoon he had seen in The New Yorker. A sense of the intimacy and verve of the memoirs is captured in Darryl Pinckney#x19;s description of the premises of The New York Review of Books itself, from whose offices these writings were edited and in whose pages they first appeared: #x1C; . . . books were streaking across the ocean and galleys were zooming in from the West Coast or the East Side, nearly all by messenger, by overnight delivery, because everything was urgent . . . . Incredible battles went on during press week as indescribable things rotted in the office refrigerator. Someone#x19;s laughter in the typesetting studio would provoke to fury someone doing layout next door and the storms, the slammed doors. It was a family.#x1D;

Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017) was the 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 École 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.