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Maxwell was, Edward Hirsch observed, “the most present of anyone I’ve ever known as a person. He immediately, if he liked you, started talking to you about your childhood. It sort of dismantled everything else. For me with him it was love at first sight. Friendship was immediate. When he spoke to y…

Within these circles the Steegmullers were distinctive figures. Alfred Kazin’s biographer wrote that Alfred and his then wife, Ann Birstein, had always found Francis charming, “a figure of intellectual grace out of a different era who had survived into ‘overheated New York,’ quietly coexisting with…

When they travelled to Rome that spring of 1964, she found Francis introspective and self-absorbed. On May 30, recalling how she had the previous year so much imagined their “combined presence” there, she recorded her disappointment, her sense of prospects thwarted:

Borghese Gardens. Here I sit …

In their arguments, she was distressed to find her behaviour echoing her mother’s:

Lean on sink, after days of feigning unawareness or of showing concern; think “I could always die.” Comes, is furious to find tears. We sit down, on floor and sofa. “I asked you if you would look after me” (Hars…

They were back in New York at the end of January, and Francis decided, “even after Fez and Meknes,” not to proceed with Delacroix. Shirley moved into Manhattan House and, as spring approached, sat through the day in the building’s elegant garden, working on her novel. In February she heard of the d…