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In her reply, Shirley set out her concerns at some length. Francis’s behaviour had been, from the start, confusing; there was “a sort of detachment that did not fit at all with the fact that he wanted to see me constantly.” The invitation to travel to Spain had been made at a dinner party, “obvious…

Francis’s other projects did not always proceed on the same basis of familiarity. Some would take time to reveal themselves to him. He recorded his thoughts on this in the notes he made of an interview made during lunch at the Café d’Orsay in late 1957 with the poet Pierre Reverdy, whom he had appr…

Bill Maxwell also wrote with enthusiasm:

Dear Francis, it’s absolutely marvelous … The effect is of a layer of callous peeled off, leaving something luminous and alive. You can, for the first time, eat the food and touch the people and smell and see everything. And reading it, I am continually…

The following spring, when the Steegmullers left for Paris, Francis gave Ralph the keys to the office he kept in a building at 608 Fifth Avenue so he would have a quiet place to work. The office was on the eighth floor in a suite of rooms belonging to the jewellers Samuel and Augusta Mann, who guar…

[...] In the face of this he decided to abandon writing novels. In 1934 he began writing for The New Yorker, mainly “casuals” and Talk of the Town pieces. Soon this undemanding writing also palled; he felt it did not provide him with the opportunity for “accomplishment” that fiction had offered. He…