Many of the contributors to The New York Review of Books have written about deep and abiding relationships—both personal and intellectual—with fellow poets, writers, and artists. The Company
They Kept is a collection of twenty-eight accounts of these friendships that were always stimulating, often inspiring, and sometimes vexing.
There are historic moments—Isaiah Berlin’s conversations with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, Hector Bianciotti’s account of the death of Borges—as well as lighthearted ones—Bruce Chatwin’s
hilarious drunken evening with George Ortiz and Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale’s subway ride with George Balanchine.
Many of the portraits include vivid images that otherwise would have been lost forever: the poet Ossip Mandelstam, who Anna Akhmatova first glimpsed as “ . . . a thin young boy with a twig of
lily-of-the-valley in his button-hole”; the young Gore Vidal in Dawn Powell’s living room; twelve-year-old aspiring cartoonist John Updike writing Saul Steinberg to ask for a cartoon he had
seen in The New Yorker.
A sense of the intimacy and verve of the memoirs is captured in Darryl Pinckney’s description of the premises of The New York Review of Books itself, from whose offices these writings
were edited and in whose pages they first appeared:
“ . . . books were streaking across the ocean and galleys were zooming in from the West Coast or the East Side, nearly all by messenger, by overnight delivery, because everything was urgent . .
. . Incredible battles went on during press week as indescribable things rotted in the office refrigerator. Someone’s laughter in the typesetting studio would provoke to fury someone doing
layout next door and the storms, the slammed doors. It was a family.”
