New York Life: Of Friends and Others [Paperback]

Brendan Gill (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ranging in length from three pages (a piece on Padraic Colum) to 22 (Georges Simenon), these 41 genial articles elegantly recall 45 friends and acquaintances of New Yorker staff writer Gill. An Irish Catholic, he writes with wit and charm of Brendan Behan, Philip Barry, Eugene O'Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O'Hara, and equally appreciatively of Al Hirschfeld, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., Louise Nevelson, Dorothy Parker, Man Ray and Ben Sonnenberg. Gill's diverse circle encompasses as well architects William Adams Delano and Wallace K. Harrison, photographers Walker Evans and Andre Kertesz, comedians Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, writers Joseph Alsop, Maxwell Anderson, John Betjeman and Alec Waugh, impresario Ellen Stewart, grand dame Eleanor Roosevelt. Also included is Gill's notorious New Yorker piece about Joseph Campbell's anti-Semitism and championing of right-wing anti-humanitarianism. Drawings not seen by PW.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This amusing and intelligent volume of reminiscences offers a personal look at some of the 20th century's most successful writers, artists, and architects. Gill, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of several books, has been present on the New York art scene for decades and seems to have known nearly every important artist or intellectual who lived or visited there, from Joseph Alsop to Louise Nevelson. In this collection of 45 vignettes, Gill is frank and witty, yet sometimes critical, such as when he accuses Joseph Campbell of having bigoted and ultra-conservative views. This book provides entertaining reading for those wishing an intimate, backstage glimpse of Gill's famous friends and acquaintances. Recommended for general audiences.
-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 348 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (October 15, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671748017
• ISBN-13: 978-0671748012
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,361,816 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Conceptually, this book . . ., August 3, 2004

By 

William Apt (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: New York Life: Of Friends and Others (Paperback)

Conceptually, this book is ingenious. It is simultaneously a collection of forty-one portraits of New York City friends and "others" known to Gill during his tenure for over five decades, beginning in the mid-1930s, as a staff writer at The New Yorker, and a fragmentary portrait of the artist made visible only as the book progresses. It is when the reader finally stumbles upon Gill's disclosure of his birth year near the end that every other scrap of personal revelation, scattered here and there throughout previous pages, coalesces into a composite portrait.

Most if not all of Gill's subjects share three traits: they are enigmatic; they circumvent the onset of old age by youthful exhuberance; and they are rich - if not financially, spiritually, and usually both. (Gill, like his idol F. Scott Fitzgerald, was deeply intrigued by monetary wealth and its effect on the character of those who possess it). And what emerges about about his subjects was probably equally true about Gill. I suspect that he too was a colorful, enigmatic and, even into his 80s, youthful, friend himself.

Gill was a suberb writer, witty and eloquent, never afraid to articulate criticism where criticism was due. He could also turn a phrase. His description, for example, of the playwright Philip Barry's intense blue eyes as seeming to "gather up brightness like a burning glass" is unforgetable. Gill possessed an exceptional vocabulary which, at times, can be trying and can, after a while, appear to serve no purpose other than as a display of virtuosity. For example, is the preposterously obscure adjective "eleemosynary" to describe a public-interest organization really necessary when "charitable" will do?

Gill's pedigogical acrobatics aside, this lively book vividly captures remarkable personages - including Gill - now gone, who literally bubbled with enthusiam throughout their many years and who cannot, with the exception of the unflappable Harry Mali, be accused of having lived the unexamined life.