Topic: Literary people who met one another

[Retinend]

Rousseau sends Voltaire a copy of his book, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes. You'll remember that in it Rousseau advocates for the virtues of the classless man of nature.

Voltaire reads it and responds in a letter:

"I believe no one has ever brought so much intelligence to bear in order to persuade us all to be stupid.
After reading your book one feels one ought to rightly walk on all fours.
But unfortunately in the course of the last 60 years somewhere I seem to have lost the habit."

Burn. I laughed at the part about walking on all fours.

Have you got any good anecdotes about famous meetings of minds?

[bgmnts]

Edit - my dementia is getting crazy.

[pigamus]

And what did Mailer say back?

[buttgammon]

Joyce and Proust met, but they found they had little to say to each other and kept it mostly to small talk.

[pigamus]

Craig Brown's written books about this kind of stuff. I read one but tbh it was a bit dull.

[JaDanketies]

William Burroughs and Allan Ginsberg were bezzie mates and wrote a series of letters to each other about their attempts to take Ayahuasca, published in the Yage Letters. Fortunately they didn't write about how they are both terrible pedos much

[Inspector Norse]

Pretty sure all writers active in the 1920s had sex with one another at some point, usually in a Paris apartment owned by a third party who was a painter or composer.

[Keebleman]

The young and unknown Thomas Hardy saw the middle-aged and world famous Charles Dickens in, I think, a cafe but was too shy to introduce himself.

[Retinend]

What I find endlessly curious about Hemingway is the contradiction at the heart of his writing. The contradiction between his "gruff" attitudes, and his feminine, literary attitudes. Dearer to him than any bullfight or african hunting safari were the memories of nicely pronounced French streets; of the atmosphere of bustling parisian restaurants and of glimpses of literary royalty. These were all written of in the autobiographical "A Moveable Feast".

In this following passage, Hemingway inserts his memory of seeing Joyce from afar into an a seemingly unrelated anecdote[1]. The latter concerns a deep conversation with his wife in the summertime. He includes the image of Joyce "peering" at words, with his family around him, an impossibly cosmopolitan and learned being. What is he implying about how he felt about Joyce, who was 17 years his senior? Perhaps, as usual, more than he literally says...


<sub>We looked and there it all was: our river and our city and the island of our city.
“We’re too lucky,” she said.
We walked across the bridge and were on our own side of the river.
“Are you hungry?" I said. Let’s go to a wonderful place and have a truly grand dinner. Michaud’s?”

So we walked up the rue des Saints-Pères to the corner of the rue Jacob stopping and looking in the windows at pictures and at furniture. We were hungry again from walking and Michaud’s was an exciting and expensive restaurant for us. We stood outside of Michaud’s and we waited for people to come out, watching the tables where people already had their coffee, waiting for our chance.

It was where Joyce ate with his family then, he and his wife against the wall. Joyce was peering at the menu through his thick glasses and holding the menu up in one hand. Nora was by him, a hearty but delicate eater; Giorgio; thin, foppish, sleek-headed seen from the back; Lucia with heavy curly hair; a girl not quite yet grown; all of them talking Italian.

Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was mere hunger. I asked my wife. And she said:

“I don’t know, Tatie.
There are so many sorts of hunger. 
In the spring there are more. 
But that’s gone now. 
...Memory is hunger.”

Seeing two tournedos being served I knew I was hungry in a simple way.

“On the bridge you said we were lucky today. Of course we were. But to get there we had very good advice and information,” I responded</sub>

Disclaimer: I have edited Hemingway's words somewhat to my liking.

1.	though it is possible that it simply happened the way he described, I somehow doubt it all the same

[Hand Solo]

Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley met, I believe.

[Glebe]

Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley met, I believe.

Didn't she write a book about a francenstien?

[Captain Crunch]

William Burroughs and Allan Ginsberg were bezzie mates and wrote a series of letters to each other about their attempts to take Ayahuasca, published in the Yage Letters.

They had their massive network of writer and artist fiends too including Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan and Brion Gysin.  They all got on really well and there was never a cross word and no-one ever set their Mum on anyone or made snide comments about the other one’s knob. 

[mr. logic]

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/remembering-updike-richard-ford/amp

A lovely obituary to John Updike on this very topic.

[pigamus]

They had their massive network of writer and artist fiends too including Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan and Brion Gysin.  They all got on really well and there was never a cross word and no-one ever set their Mum on anyone or made snide comments about the other one’s knob. 

I did read one story somewhere about Dylan turning up at Ginsberg's house for a party and Ginsberg comes out of the house with his cock out - "Hi Bob!" - and Dylan just turns the car round and fucks straight off. V funny if true.

[Captain Crunch]

There’s a similar one with John Lennon – Ginsberg gets all tipsy at a party and starts messing about with the hotel ‘do not disturb’ sign hanging from his cock.  Lennon gets all uppity and says something along the lines of “I’m all for a bit of fun but not in front of the ladies” before leaving. 

[kngen]

There was a painful GQ (i think) article when someone there thought it would be a good idea to have Brett Easton Ellis and Irvine Welsh hang out together (in Dublin, IIRC). Welsh turns up hours late, totally pished with some random bam in tow, and proceeds to shout over everyone and then puts BEE in a 'playful' headlock (something he definitely deserved later on in life, but perhaps not at this precise moment).

There's an amazing picture of Ellis slumped on the pavement (presumably outside the pub where this encounter took place), looking utterly bereft and haunted. It stuck with me, because I've seen that expression a few times, usually when I've taken non-Scottish friends out on the town in Glasgow, and they end up in playful headlocks performed by aggressively friendly, shouty nutters.

It made Mailer vs Vidal seem very civilised by comparison, which is pretty amusing considering that the article starts off with the pair talking about how much they respect each other's work.

[Twonty Gostelow]

https://twitter.com/BretEastonEllis/status/275161819604197377

They're currently writing a TV drama together. Sweet.

[Mister Six]

Hemingway once had to reassure F Scott Fitzgerald that Fitz's cock was of "normal" size after Zelda Fitzgerald told him it would never satisfy any woman.