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In New York, Shirley was deep in writing. She spent the weeks before leaving for Spain working frantically on The Evening of the Holiday, the first instalment of which had been scheduled for publication in The New Yorker the following month. At that stage it was still called “The Fountain”; it is p…

Back in New York that April, the amitié littéraire continued: Shirley sent Francis a clipping from Housman about the bodily ground of poetry, “a shiver down the spine … constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes”; they went to dinner and to the theatre; and Francis continue…

In the spring of 1963 Shirley was working on her first novel, set in Italy, a tale of romantic love eclipsed by its own waning. The Evening of the Holiday was contracted to Macmillan and Knopf after publication in full in The New Yorker: “On Monday I took my piece of writing to Bill [Maxwell] … and…

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…