Great Literary Friendships Janet Phillips (Bodleian, £16.99)
Imagine our debt of gratitude to Ezra Pound, who edited a young poet and made him dump ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’ and instead call his long poem The Waste Land. Bless Maxwell Perkins who rejected ‘Under the Red, White and Blue’ and insisted on The Great Gatsby. Which gets me to the book at hand.
I fell for it immediately. Not for the cover (more decorative than bookish), but because I already have two volumes on the subject, The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships, in which writers describe the personal and intellectual relationships they’ve had with fellow writers and artists—Seamus Heaney on Thomas Flanagan, Joseph Brodsky on Isaiah Berlin: a literary wander into private lives without feeling prurient.
I thought that Great Literary Friendships would be more of the same, but it’s not. These friendships are created by the writer and live in the pages of novels and plays. If this sounds rather academic (the author is an editor at Bodleian Library Publishing— her modest biography was nine words long, including her name), don’t worry. A few pages in you feel as if you are in the company of a sprightly, charming, wellread friend who has read—and re-read during lockdown—many books you have read, quite a few you’ve meant to read and a few you’ll give a miss. You also realise early on that she reads more attentively than you do.
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