Customer Reviews

The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships

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This is a fine collection of specific episodes and times in the lives of well known men and women, written by well known men and women who knew or had met them. 27 lives were covered in 289 pages. The characters discussed include Igor Stravinsky, Albert Einstein, Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson, Octavio Paz, and Francis Bacon. The famous contributors included Robert Oppenheimer whose piece came from the lecture he delivered to UNESCO in December 1965. His poignant description of Einstein had the clarity of the scientist that Oppenheimer was as well as the sincerity that comes only from a true admirer, as Oppenheimer was. He said of Einstein: "He was almost wholly without worldliness. I think that in England people would have said that he did not have much 'background', and in America that he lacked 'education'. This may throw some light on how these words are used. I think that this simplicity, this lack of clutter and this lack of cant, had a lot to do with his preservation throughout of a certain, pure, rather spinoz-like , philosophical monism, which of course is hard to maintain if you have been 'educated' and have a 'background.'

Joseph Brodsky wrote about his meeting with Isaiah Berlin when the former was thirty-two years old and the latter, sixty-three. "Still, I think I was sitting in front of him on that sunny July afternoon not only because his work is the life of the mind, the life of ideas. Ideas of course reside in people, but they can also be gleaned from clouds, water, trees; indeed, from a fallen apple. And at best I could qualify as an apple fallen from Akhmatov's tree. I believe he wanted to see me not for what I knew but for what I didn't - a role in which, I suppose, he quite frequently finds himself vis-a-vis most of the world." Brodsky, in turn, was depicted in Tatyana Tolstaya's melancholic description of how she and other Russians tried to persuade the exile to return to Russia.

I personally found the essays on the persons I like to be illuminating and heart-warming although those on persons I do not know much (such as Jerome Lindon and Djuna Barnes) invoked in me a latent curiosity; and Lindon's words (quoted by Richard Seaver, the contributor) had a universal ring: "..if one is lucky enough to live in a free country, to enjoy the extraordinary privilege of total freedom of expression, you have to speak out when that freedom is threatened." (sic)

This is a deeply personal book, written by thoughtful writers about thoughtful men and women.