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The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner & William Maxwell, 1938-1978
An instant classic in the literature of friendship: the witty, affectionate 40-year correspondence between a great story-writer and her New Yorker editor.
For forty years, until her death in 1978, Sylvia Townsend Warner (poet, novelist, and short-story writer) and her New Yorker editor William Maxwell (himself a fiction writer of great distinction) exchanged more than 1,300 letters. Their formal relationship quickly grew into a real, unshakable love, and their letters back and forth became the most significant and longest-lasting correspondence of their lives.
As Maxwell told the editor of these letters, "Sylvia needed to write for an audience, a specific person, in order to bring out her pleasure in enchanting," and Maxwell was that person, both as editor and as correspondent. Warner brought out the best in Maxwell too. "I suspect that of all the writers I edited, I was most influenced by Sylvia...I think that what you are infinitely charmed by you can't help unconsciously imitating. "
In these letters they wrote about everything that amused, moved, and perplexed them-the physical world, personal relationships, the New York City blackout, the Cuban missile crisis, their ceaseless reading, the coming of old age. Gratitude and love are on every page. Not to mention pleasure and delight.
For forty years, until her death in 1978, Sylvia Townsend Warner (poet, novelist, and short-story writer) and her New Yorker editor William Maxwell (himself a fiction writer of great distinction) exchanged more than 1,300 letters. Their formal relationship quickly grew into a real, unshakable love, and their letters back and forth became the most significant and longest-lasting correspondence of their lives.
As Maxwell told the editor of these letters, "Sylvia needed to write for an audience, a specific person, in order to bring out her pleasure in enchanting," and Maxwell was that person, both as editor and as correspondent. Warner brought out the best in Maxwell too. "I suspect that of all the writers I edited, I was most influenced by Sylvia...I think that what you are infinitely charmed by you can't help unconsciously imitating. "
In these letters they wrote about everything that amused, moved, and perplexed them-the physical world, personal relationships, the New York City blackout, the Cuban missile crisis, their ceaseless reading, the coming of old age. Gratitude and love are on every page. Not to mention pleasure and delight.
340 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 2000
15 people are currently reading
534 people want to read
About the author
Sylvia Townsend Warner
94 books440 followersSylvia Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanora (Nora) Hudleston. Her father was a house-master at Harrow School and was, for many years, associated with the prestigious Harrow History Prize which was renamed the Townsend Warner History Prize in his honor, after his death in 1916. As a child, Sylvia seemingly enjoyed an idyllic childhood in rural Devonshire, but was strongly affected by her father's death.
She moved to London and worked in a munitions factory at the outbreak of World War I. She was friendly with a number of the "Bright Young Things" of the 1920s. Her first major success was the novel Lolly Willowes. In 1923 Warner met T. F. Powys whose writing influenced her own and whose work she in turn encouraged. It was at T.F. Powys' house in 1930 that Warner first met Valentine Ackland, a young poet. The two women fell in love and settled at Frome Vauchurch in Dorset. Alarmed by the growing threat of fascism, they were active in the Communist Party of Great Britain, and visited Spain on behalf of the Red Cross during the Civil War. They lived together from 1930 until Ackland's death in 1969. Warner's political engagement continued for the rest of her life, even after her disillusionment with communism. She died on 1 May 1978.
She moved to London and worked in a munitions factory at the outbreak of World War I. She was friendly with a number of the "Bright Young Things" of the 1920s. Her first major success was the novel Lolly Willowes. In 1923 Warner met T. F. Powys whose writing influenced her own and whose work she in turn encouraged. It was at T.F. Powys' house in 1930 that Warner first met Valentine Ackland, a young poet. The two women fell in love and settled at Frome Vauchurch in Dorset. Alarmed by the growing threat of fascism, they were active in the Communist Party of Great Britain, and visited Spain on behalf of the Red Cross during the Civil War. They lived together from 1930 until Ackland's death in 1969. Warner's political engagement continued for the rest of her life, even after her disillusionment with communism. She died on 1 May 1978.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
December 29, 2024
There are few books that have given me more sustained pleasure from beginning to end than this one. The Element of Lavishness is a book of letters comprising the 40-year correspondence between Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell. In addition to the stunning literary panache of the letters themselves, taken together, they form a sort of epistolary novel with a proper beginning, middle, and end, one that represents the full expression of a magnificent friendship. This is a beautiful, moving, deeply satisfying book.
November 29, 2020
I have discovered William Maxwell as a writer in the past 6 years and have read a number of his books. Possibly the most surprising for me is how much I seem to like him as a person and particularly as a letter writer. I have never enjoyed reading collections of letters. However, before this book, I read his correspondence with Eudora Welty, because I like her so much too, and I couldn't put it down. Maxwell mentioned Sylvia Townsend Warner frequently to Welty which sparked my curiosity in her which led to this collection which I loved as well. They wrote to each other for 40 years and, after her death, he became her literary executor. It's a fascinating relationship between two accomplished, creative people who respected each other immensely.
October 30, 2016
I usually don't write reviews here. Nor do I usually mark up books I'm reading (I never seem to have a pen handy while reading). But this collection of the letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell, two terrific writers, is phenomenal. The writing is beautiful, funny, touching; and the story of their friendship, and their lives as reflected in their letters, moved me again and again. I highly recommend it, and highly recommend their novels and stories. It's a shame that so much of SWT's books are out of print or otherwise hard to get, but Maxwell's work is nicely collected by the Library of America.
December 13, 2015
So Beautiful! Now I'll re-read beloved Maxwell; read for the first time, Warner; read Letters of Maxwell and Frank O'Connor; read Letters of Maxwell and Eudora Welty, read everything Maxwell every touched. What a magnificent man...
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August 12, 2019New York, New York
Maiden Newton, Dorset, England
“‘I think what you are infinitely charmed by you can’t help unconsciously imitating’” (xix, Introduction, quote from Maxwell).
“. . . when you have been a writer as long as I have you will know how very reviving it is to hear such things. It is not merely one’s pride and vanity that is eased, but a queer sort of sense of responsibility, like finding that some tree one planted and care for an quitted is getting its proper pruning from a new owner” (8, Warner to Maxwell, January 31, 1940).
“I do admire you so much for begin able to write as a grown-up person about children. Too many people jump that problem by writing about children childishly; sometimes it’s not too bad but it’s never satisfying, one smells the expedient all the time like an oniony knife” (9, Warner to Maxwell, April 3, 1940).
“Valentine’s mother’s doctor has given a bad account of her heart, and combined with it an absolute demand that she should not be told how shaky it is . . . and so we are dancing among the incompatibles of not doing anything that might seem in the least bit out of the usual and doing a great many things we don’t ordinarily do . . .” (19, Warner to Maxwell, February 9, 1951).
“. . . I have come to the conclusion that . . . children experience terror however they are brought up; in some generations it is better and in other worse, but it always has to be gone through, and when it is put off in childhood it is only to pounce down on adolescence” (31, Warner to Maxwell, June 8, 1952).
“Modern life gets less and less worth living, is my solemn conclusion. Wherever you go there are always people” (48, Maxwell to Warner, March 1, 1954).
“Isn’t it curious that science never invents antidotes? There is no means of spreading darkness, or of spreading silence” (48, Warner to Maxwell, March 1954).
“. . . both children have had their hair cut, which always has the effect of putting them in quotation marks for a few days” (70, Maxwell to Warner, September 1958).
“There should be a symbol on the typewriter for a sigh and another for a deep sigh, from the heart, and one for the wringing of hands (70, Maxwell to Warner, October 1958).
“At such times, knowing, alas, that it isn’t true, I say to myself that all I ask of life is the privilege of being able to read” (71, Maxwell to Warner, December 30, 1958).
“How I rejoice that I will never go to school again. Middle age is the only time one ever has things the exact way one wants them . . .” (73, Maxwell to Warner, April 10, 1959).
“It is my belief that no one really & rationally enjoys school. The unanimity, the rhythmical tum ti tum of mass action & mass endurance, may beguile the young into thinking they are engaged in something they like; and then there is the thought of every day bringing one nearer the end of term; but I doubt if it goes further than that. It is a conscript experience” (73, Warner to Maxwell, April 13, 1959).
“. . . when a girl child reaches puberty, she gives herself a shake and all that kitten-fluff and kitten-airs are gone, gone! Mine is a ruthless sex” (91, Warner to Maxwell, November 25, 1960).
“It is not terribly long, maybe fifteen years, since I suddenly realized, with a sense of shock, that I was never going to be president of the United States” (91, Maxwell to Warner, December 12, 1960).
“Balzac’s material is Clay, human and otherwise. If one can only read him from time to time, the clay sets, and it is difficult to begin again. I have an idea, anyway, that one should aim to read at the tempo at which the author wrote. Balzac wrote fast and recklessly, and read that way he emerges very much himself” (96, Warner to Maxwell, February 6, 1961).
“Your faith in the power of statement, your refusal to account for why the wind, just at that moment, blew cold, why a burst of sunlight suddenly rested on one particular roof and nowhere else, is totally convincing. I had almost forgotten that the quality of conviction was still available, not shut up in the classics. . . .
Do you know one of the marks of real literature, one of the tests?—that when the reader recognises something known or experience, he feels, not a hark-back to his own life but a participation in the book. Valognes, I thought. I’ve been to this Valognes” (101, Warner to Maxwell, March 23, 1961).
“It can be a bore to describe things that you have enjoyed so fully at the time that you don’t need to describe them any more” (102, Maxwell to Warner, April 5, 1961).
“When you spoke, two or three letters back, of the congeniality of our two minds, the thought that went through my head was The only person I really see a great deal of, among all my friends, is Sylvia. And it is true” (102, Maxwell to Warner, April 5, 1961).
“I lay down and rolled in your praise of the Kilvert review. I have a feeling that that is what catnip does to cats—makes them feel so thoroughly praised that they cannot tell whether they are going to sneeze or burst” (107, Maxwell to Warner, June 1961).
“If it were me, I would choose the quiet life under a cloud, because, as it happens, that is the kind of life I prefer—by which I mean it exactly describes the climate of my childhood. My parents, resurrected from the grave, would have no difficulty proving that I was brought up in uninterrupted felicity, but that is not what it seemed like” (127, Maxwell to Warner, April 1963).
“I was and still am astonished as how exactly like a good deed in a naughty world the light of one candle shines” (152, Maxwell to Warner, November 17, 1965).
“Everywhere people were going about their business quietly in the dark. It was like another planet, where the sky, instead of being blue in the daytime, is black” (152, Maxwell to Warner, on the blackout, November 17, 1965).
“. . . New Yorkers are only attractive in a crisis, at which moment they get a light in their eye and a spring in their step, the years fall away, they become physically charming and well-dressed and, instead of pushy, gallant” (160, Maxwell to Warner, January 4, 1966).
“This is heavenly news. We shall see you and Emmy again, we shall meet Kate and Brookie. We shall all be overcome and tongue-tied for the first ten minutes, and after that it will be as if we had seen each other last week” (162, Warner to Maxwell, January 31, 1966).
“Don’t begin to act better till you feel better. Don’t begin even then. First, convalesce. Then recover from convalescence” (169, Warner to Maxwell, December 20, 1966).
“. . . I said not at all and told her and she didn’t turn a hair. Which is one, but only one, of the reasons I love England. It is almost impossible to imagine a circumstance in which somebody would turn a hair. . . . All the things one has to ignore, work one’s way around, or directly contend with in America seem to be absent in London. I felt among my own kind, which is more than I do at home” (188, Maxwell to Warner, after May 7, 1968).
“I looked so hard at the Irish landscape and the people in it that I almost wore out my eyes, such as they are” (189, Maxwell to Warner, July 8, 1968).
“. . . (have you not observed . . . that the moment one begins to study in any room it becomes everybody’s gangway?) . . .” (198, Warner to Maxwell, December 7, 1968).
“It is so cold that the cats say we must go to bed immediately” (214, Warner to Maxwell, November 5, 1970).
“The last cluster of letters set me to thinking how there are two fears and most people have one or the other and maybe they are the same fear: that they are afraid to call their soul their own, or that they are afraid it will be seen” (214, Maxwell to Warner, November 1970).
“[My book (Ancestors: A Family History)] gave me a chance to relive a part of my life that mattered emotionally very much. I don’t feel that I am about to die, but say that I were called out of the room, so to speak, it is all right; I have rescued the things that mattered to me” (219, Maxwell to Warner, March 19, 1971).
“However one glosses it over with assumption of relief, however much water one washes one’s hands with, it is miserable work, isn’t it, to go away from a book?” (219, Warner to Maxwell, March 26, 1971).
“Champagne for everything above the waist, brandy for anything below it, was the medicinal way; and I am still a credit to his theory) (219, Warner to Maxwell, March 26, 1971).
“. . . she could never love in the present . . .” (223, Warner to Maxwell, July 20, 1971).
“A grudge is a safe investment, and she managed her grudges competently . . .” (223, Warner to Maxwell, July 20, 1971).
“One of the emotions of old age is amazement that one was alive so long ago. I suppose that is why so many people write autobiographies. They are trying to convince themselves that they really were” (230, Warner to Maxwell, April 17, 1972).
“It is, of course, why you slipped on the stairs. You cannot write like that and not be a danger to oneself, the mind being not in the body” (248, Maxwell to Warner, 1973).
“I don’t thank you enough for writing so much of my stories for me. There they sit in The New Yorker, looking so polished and erudite. I read them, and see your hand, held out to save, in almost every paragraph” (291).
“When I look back on my youth, I see it glittering with maniacs” (293, Warner to Maxwell, December 7, 1975).
“What is man’s chief end?
Death, I would suppose, since we practise for it every night of our lives” (293, Warner to Maxwell, December 7, 1975).
“It is one of the ironies of old age—that one longs to be made a fuss of, when one has built up a reputation that one doesn’t care for fuss” (332, Warner to Maxwell, February 17, 1978).
Maiden Newton, Dorset, England
“‘I think what you are infinitely charmed by you can’t help unconsciously imitating’” (xix, Introduction, quote from Maxwell).
“. . . when you have been a writer as long as I have you will know how very reviving it is to hear such things. It is not merely one’s pride and vanity that is eased, but a queer sort of sense of responsibility, like finding that some tree one planted and care for an quitted is getting its proper pruning from a new owner” (8, Warner to Maxwell, January 31, 1940).
“I do admire you so much for begin able to write as a grown-up person about children. Too many people jump that problem by writing about children childishly; sometimes it’s not too bad but it’s never satisfying, one smells the expedient all the time like an oniony knife” (9, Warner to Maxwell, April 3, 1940).
“Valentine’s mother’s doctor has given a bad account of her heart, and combined with it an absolute demand that she should not be told how shaky it is . . . and so we are dancing among the incompatibles of not doing anything that might seem in the least bit out of the usual and doing a great many things we don’t ordinarily do . . .” (19, Warner to Maxwell, February 9, 1951).
“. . . I have come to the conclusion that . . . children experience terror however they are brought up; in some generations it is better and in other worse, but it always has to be gone through, and when it is put off in childhood it is only to pounce down on adolescence” (31, Warner to Maxwell, June 8, 1952).
“Modern life gets less and less worth living, is my solemn conclusion. Wherever you go there are always people” (48, Maxwell to Warner, March 1, 1954).
“Isn’t it curious that science never invents antidotes? There is no means of spreading darkness, or of spreading silence” (48, Warner to Maxwell, March 1954).
“. . . both children have had their hair cut, which always has the effect of putting them in quotation marks for a few days” (70, Maxwell to Warner, September 1958).
“There should be a symbol on the typewriter for a sigh and another for a deep sigh, from the heart, and one for the wringing of hands (70, Maxwell to Warner, October 1958).
“At such times, knowing, alas, that it isn’t true, I say to myself that all I ask of life is the privilege of being able to read” (71, Maxwell to Warner, December 30, 1958).
“How I rejoice that I will never go to school again. Middle age is the only time one ever has things the exact way one wants them . . .” (73, Maxwell to Warner, April 10, 1959).
“It is my belief that no one really & rationally enjoys school. The unanimity, the rhythmical tum ti tum of mass action & mass endurance, may beguile the young into thinking they are engaged in something they like; and then there is the thought of every day bringing one nearer the end of term; but I doubt if it goes further than that. It is a conscript experience” (73, Warner to Maxwell, April 13, 1959).
“. . . when a girl child reaches puberty, she gives herself a shake and all that kitten-fluff and kitten-airs are gone, gone! Mine is a ruthless sex” (91, Warner to Maxwell, November 25, 1960).
“It is not terribly long, maybe fifteen years, since I suddenly realized, with a sense of shock, that I was never going to be president of the United States” (91, Maxwell to Warner, December 12, 1960).
“Balzac’s material is Clay, human and otherwise. If one can only read him from time to time, the clay sets, and it is difficult to begin again. I have an idea, anyway, that one should aim to read at the tempo at which the author wrote. Balzac wrote fast and recklessly, and read that way he emerges very much himself” (96, Warner to Maxwell, February 6, 1961).
“Your faith in the power of statement, your refusal to account for why the wind, just at that moment, blew cold, why a burst of sunlight suddenly rested on one particular roof and nowhere else, is totally convincing. I had almost forgotten that the quality of conviction was still available, not shut up in the classics. . . .
Do you know one of the marks of real literature, one of the tests?—that when the reader recognises something known or experience, he feels, not a hark-back to his own life but a participation in the book. Valognes, I thought. I’ve been to this Valognes” (101, Warner to Maxwell, March 23, 1961).
“It can be a bore to describe things that you have enjoyed so fully at the time that you don’t need to describe them any more” (102, Maxwell to Warner, April 5, 1961).
“When you spoke, two or three letters back, of the congeniality of our two minds, the thought that went through my head was The only person I really see a great deal of, among all my friends, is Sylvia. And it is true” (102, Maxwell to Warner, April 5, 1961).
“I lay down and rolled in your praise of the Kilvert review. I have a feeling that that is what catnip does to cats—makes them feel so thoroughly praised that they cannot tell whether they are going to sneeze or burst” (107, Maxwell to Warner, June 1961).
“If it were me, I would choose the quiet life under a cloud, because, as it happens, that is the kind of life I prefer—by which I mean it exactly describes the climate of my childhood. My parents, resurrected from the grave, would have no difficulty proving that I was brought up in uninterrupted felicity, but that is not what it seemed like” (127, Maxwell to Warner, April 1963).
“I was and still am astonished as how exactly like a good deed in a naughty world the light of one candle shines” (152, Maxwell to Warner, November 17, 1965).
“Everywhere people were going about their business quietly in the dark. It was like another planet, where the sky, instead of being blue in the daytime, is black” (152, Maxwell to Warner, on the blackout, November 17, 1965).
“. . . New Yorkers are only attractive in a crisis, at which moment they get a light in their eye and a spring in their step, the years fall away, they become physically charming and well-dressed and, instead of pushy, gallant” (160, Maxwell to Warner, January 4, 1966).
“This is heavenly news. We shall see you and Emmy again, we shall meet Kate and Brookie. We shall all be overcome and tongue-tied for the first ten minutes, and after that it will be as if we had seen each other last week” (162, Warner to Maxwell, January 31, 1966).
“Don’t begin to act better till you feel better. Don’t begin even then. First, convalesce. Then recover from convalescence” (169, Warner to Maxwell, December 20, 1966).
“. . . I said not at all and told her and she didn’t turn a hair. Which is one, but only one, of the reasons I love England. It is almost impossible to imagine a circumstance in which somebody would turn a hair. . . . All the things one has to ignore, work one’s way around, or directly contend with in America seem to be absent in London. I felt among my own kind, which is more than I do at home” (188, Maxwell to Warner, after May 7, 1968).
“I looked so hard at the Irish landscape and the people in it that I almost wore out my eyes, such as they are” (189, Maxwell to Warner, July 8, 1968).
“. . . (have you not observed . . . that the moment one begins to study in any room it becomes everybody’s gangway?) . . .” (198, Warner to Maxwell, December 7, 1968).
“It is so cold that the cats say we must go to bed immediately” (214, Warner to Maxwell, November 5, 1970).
“The last cluster of letters set me to thinking how there are two fears and most people have one or the other and maybe they are the same fear: that they are afraid to call their soul their own, or that they are afraid it will be seen” (214, Maxwell to Warner, November 1970).
“[My book (Ancestors: A Family History)] gave me a chance to relive a part of my life that mattered emotionally very much. I don’t feel that I am about to die, but say that I were called out of the room, so to speak, it is all right; I have rescued the things that mattered to me” (219, Maxwell to Warner, March 19, 1971).
“However one glosses it over with assumption of relief, however much water one washes one’s hands with, it is miserable work, isn’t it, to go away from a book?” (219, Warner to Maxwell, March 26, 1971).
“Champagne for everything above the waist, brandy for anything below it, was the medicinal way; and I am still a credit to his theory) (219, Warner to Maxwell, March 26, 1971).
“. . . she could never love in the present . . .” (223, Warner to Maxwell, July 20, 1971).
“A grudge is a safe investment, and she managed her grudges competently . . .” (223, Warner to Maxwell, July 20, 1971).
“One of the emotions of old age is amazement that one was alive so long ago. I suppose that is why so many people write autobiographies. They are trying to convince themselves that they really were” (230, Warner to Maxwell, April 17, 1972).
“It is, of course, why you slipped on the stairs. You cannot write like that and not be a danger to oneself, the mind being not in the body” (248, Maxwell to Warner, 1973).
“I don’t thank you enough for writing so much of my stories for me. There they sit in The New Yorker, looking so polished and erudite. I read them, and see your hand, held out to save, in almost every paragraph” (291).
“When I look back on my youth, I see it glittering with maniacs” (293, Warner to Maxwell, December 7, 1975).
“What is man’s chief end?
Death, I would suppose, since we practise for it every night of our lives” (293, Warner to Maxwell, December 7, 1975).
“It is one of the ironies of old age—that one longs to be made a fuss of, when one has built up a reputation that one doesn’t care for fuss” (332, Warner to Maxwell, February 17, 1978).
May 7, 2007
I simply adored this book. Although I had not read either author's fiction, I found myself instantly in love with Maxwell and Warner. Their letters were deeply personal without being too obscure for somebody elese to jump into. I've actually purchased two copies of this book for some friends, which is something I rarely do. But seriously, this is such a wonderful correspondence-- everyone will find themselves or their inner self in these letters, I believe that 100%.
I slowed down reading it after the first 2/3... only bc I didn't want it to end! The thought of their correspondence stopping was too much for me. I did finish, but now have no idea how to follow this book up.
I slowed down reading it after the first 2/3... only bc I didn't want it to end! The thought of their correspondence stopping was too much for me. I did finish, but now have no idea how to follow this book up.
April 16, 2011
I loved these letters and I love the people who wrote them. I'll miss them now that I've finally finished the last letter. It took me a while to finish the book, but to read two letters every other day or every three days was, perhaps, conducive to the experience of old-fashioned correspondence. One feels a bit of the voyeur in reading private letters, but Maxwell and Townsend Warner knew they'd be published. Such civility and grace is here. I feel the need to buy a good heavy pen and some onion skin paper and scratch off some warm gorgeous words to a former lover.
November 3, 2025
How I wish letter writing had survived as an art form, and how I wish I could write letters such as these. The title alone...
As their friendship grows, the letters become ever so increasingly beautiful, full of charm and serendipity. Random passages I had to stop to copy, descriptions of places, and books, storms and human nature, et al.
As their friendship grows, the letters become ever so increasingly beautiful, full of charm and serendipity. Random passages I had to stop to copy, descriptions of places, and books, storms and human nature, et al.
November 14, 2012
Letters between two of America's most under-appreciated great writers.
Want to read
May 29, 2015While this is great, one should not underestimate the difficulty of reading an entire lifetime's worth of letters in a reasonable amount of time.
December 25, 2018
I would give this book ten stars if I could.
September 27, 2019
First-rate collection of letters revealing a great literary friendship and a great love of literature.
August 15, 2010
Sylvia Townsend Warner counted herself very lucky to have William Maxwell as her New Yorker editor and readers of this volume of their correspondence would agree Warner wrote 153 stories between 1936 and 1977 and found a devoted and discering fan in Maxwell. Many of the letters deal with both Warner's and Maxwell's writing. On occasion Maxwell has to gracefully reject one of Warner's stories (usually with the reassurance that the story is wonderful "but not for The New Yorker"). But what the reader comes to appreciate are the writers' accounts of momentous occasions and everyday life. Maxwell gives us wonderful accounts of an Adlai Stevenson rally and the Vietnam Moratorium. His account of the NYC blackout (in a letter dated November 17, 1965)is one of the best things I've ever read and worth the price of the book. It's such a seamless piece of writing, with each detail depending on what came before, that to quote bits of it would be to trivialize it.
Maxwell, who lived with his wife and two daughters in NYC, is also good with domestic detail and affecting and funny observations. He relates a conversation in which his small daughter laments that he is bald."'Would you trade me in for a daddy with more hair?'" 'Yes," she says, teaching me a lesson."
And on his resuming piano lessons in middle age: ". . .And Mozart is sustaining though I cannot do it. I would rather not be able to do Mozart than any composer I can think of."
Townsend who lived in England with her companion, Valentine Ackland offers a number of home remedies for illness, my favorite being champagne for any ailment above the waist, brandy for anything below. And she writes with droll humor of her life in an English village: "Poor Niou (a Siamese cat) has just had her first affair of the heart, and of course it was a tragedy. As a rule he flies from strange men, cursing under his breath, and keeping very low to the ground. Yesterday an electrician came; a grave mackintoshed man, but to Niou all that was romantic and lovely. He gazed at him, he rubbed against him, he lay in an ecstasy on the tool-bag. The electrician felt much the same, and gave him little washers to play with. He said he would come again today to to finish off properly. Niou understands everything awaited him in dreamy transports and practising his best and most amorous squint. The electrician came, Niou was waiting him on the windowsill. A paroxysm of stage-fright came over him, and he rushed into the garden and disappeared.
He'll get over it in time; but just now he's terribly downcast."
The volume is filled with fine writing and the reader wants very much to know these two people personally.
Maxwell, who lived with his wife and two daughters in NYC, is also good with domestic detail and affecting and funny observations. He relates a conversation in which his small daughter laments that he is bald."'Would you trade me in for a daddy with more hair?'" 'Yes," she says, teaching me a lesson."
And on his resuming piano lessons in middle age: ". . .And Mozart is sustaining though I cannot do it. I would rather not be able to do Mozart than any composer I can think of."
Townsend who lived in England with her companion, Valentine Ackland offers a number of home remedies for illness, my favorite being champagne for any ailment above the waist, brandy for anything below. And she writes with droll humor of her life in an English village: "Poor Niou (a Siamese cat) has just had her first affair of the heart, and of course it was a tragedy. As a rule he flies from strange men, cursing under his breath, and keeping very low to the ground. Yesterday an electrician came; a grave mackintoshed man, but to Niou all that was romantic and lovely. He gazed at him, he rubbed against him, he lay in an ecstasy on the tool-bag. The electrician felt much the same, and gave him little washers to play with. He said he would come again today to to finish off properly. Niou understands everything awaited him in dreamy transports and practising his best and most amorous squint. The electrician came, Niou was waiting him on the windowsill. A paroxysm of stage-fright came over him, and he rushed into the garden and disappeared.
He'll get over it in time; but just now he's terribly downcast."
The volume is filled with fine writing and the reader wants very much to know these two people personally.
March 7, 2007
I guess I was a little nuts--that is, depressed--when I read this book of letters, because I literally slept with this book next for me for the few weeks I read it. It was one of those books that I read a little of each night before bed, but wouldn't bring it out into the world with me.
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