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 ‘Norman Mailer and other public declaimers who dominated the literary scene at the moment.’” Kazin noted in his journal that “the Steegmullers had this gift of turning their dinner guests into replicas of their social graces.” He was entranced, in the early years of their friendship at least, by Shirley’s social energy, and after one dinner he wrote in his diary of “the magic of Shirley the Hazzard. When will we learn from a woman like this—with her incredible gentleness, the light that fills where she is, that love is a form of intelligence—a way of listening to the world, of taking it in, of rising above one’s angry heart…” He later changed his tune, enraged by the Steegmullers’ withdrawal in the face of the terrible rows they witnessed between him and Ann during the acrimonious breakdown of their marriage, and hating what he called “F’s snubs and little faggy airs of distaste.” The writer Steven M. L. Aronson recalled meeting Shirley and Francis for the first time in 1969 at a small dinner hosted by the poet William Meredith at his sister’s Manhattan home. Also at dinner were Lionel and Diana Trilling, Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, and his wife, Midge Decter. It was a literary gathering at which, Aronson observed, the Steegmullers stood out, not because they were less famous than the others, although that was true. But where the other guests, even in conversation, were somehow “out to gain advantage” over each other, like “literary politicians,” the Steegmullers exemplified a “gentler sensibility,” content to let their work speak for itself. There was a combination of connectedness—mixing with the most exclusive literary circles of New York—and reserve, a detachment, even aloofness, a decision, or choice, not to belong, and this combination would come, over the years, to define their social lives.