There was another side to this generosity. Shirley’s sociability, the alacrity with which she shared her learning and her enthusiasms, could turn at times to intractability, particularly about the UN. And there was the matter of her tendency to monologue, noted by many, and even for good friends sometimes a problem. Annabel heard before she met Shirley of her capacity to monopolise and found that conversation generally involved “finding a moment when you could interrupt.” Most people really did not mind. Benjamin Taylor memorably described her as “more cataract than woman once she got going, and everything she has to say is of interest.” Ann Goldstein, impressed with Shirley’s range of reference, also felt she had “this very hard intellect” that involved speaking her opinions but not listening. After attempting at first to present alternative views, “I realised there was no point. So I was content just to listen to her.” Michael Mallon felt that “what she had to say was so much more interesting than what most other people have to say that I was happy to let her discourse.” People felt that it wasn’t about Shirley wanting to dominate. It had, Alison West said, “nothing to do with pride. Just the tidal waves of knowledge that she had stored up and that she was eager to share.” And it was of a piece with the authority of her bearing. Evan Cornog made the point that Shirley “wouldn’t let stuff pass if she thought it was intellectually or in character shoddy in some way. She would call people out on it. Not in a throw down the gauntlet way but you’d know it had been noticed.” Alec Wilkinson felt that this quality made her something of “an assassin.” She was “not judging so much as measuring, observing,” and this was part of her sharp focus on the world: “She was paying attention. Ferociously. It was her habit of mind to pay attention.” Francis carried similar authority, although he tended to defer socially to her. In company, many friends observed, “it would be Shirley being vivacious and lively, doing most of the talking, protecting Francis. He was always quieter, she much more the dazzling one.” Akeel Bilgrami recalled one dinner at the Steegmullers’ apartment with Edward Said, an occasion both guests felt to have been “marred” by Shirley dominating the conversation, talking endlessly about the UN. “She wouldn’t give Francis a chance to talk because she was so incensed—about Waldheim, about bureaucracy, about everything to do with the UN.” At the same time, Bilgrami found that one-on-one she was notably less garrulous, was indeed an attentive conversationalist, completely charming, “keen on probing what you thought.”

Such courtesy was, for Shirley, of a piece with local respect for the arts. She recalled sending, in 1973, a congratulatory telegram from the Capri post office to Patrick White on hearing of his Nobel Prize: “The cable boys (far from the imposing stern professional ethics of indifference to message) were thrilled, having just read the news in the papers. ‘Dev’esser bravissimo! Auguri!’ Auguri indeed.” In early 1984 Francis recorded in his diary an episode in Rome when their taxi driver began reciting poetry as he drove them back to the Hassler hotel one evening. Shirley of course joined him, and together they recited works by “Palazzeschi, Pascoli, Foscolo,” and then, inevitably, Leopardi: “all of Silvia, much of La Sera, L’Infinito, La Ginestra, Pastore Errante, Vaghe Stelle. Beautiful. His name Ernesto. (Spoke of Wilde). Refuses payment absolutely. Boy at Hassler door says, ‘It is only among simple people that there is poetry now.’ Both, all three, near tears.” There were many such moments: “Lively, youngish taxi driver, finding we were writers: I write too, but with my mouth. And with my hands.” They consulted a doctor in Naples about a sprained arm, “a charming elderly orthopaedist, man of culture, who has remained faithful to the Futurists and himself paints in that manner.” They found that he had come to meet their ferry from Capri, and then refused payment. Francis observed, “These experiences make you feel you never want to leave this place.”

In September she marked the deaths, three days apart, of Alberto Moravia in Rome and Patrick White in Sydney. The news, not unexpected in either case, was nonetheless “somehow shocking.” Both were, she wrote Donald Keene, “difficult men, and both, I’d say, writers who had lost impetus in later years. But, in part because of formidability, they were the kind who don’t die, don’t appear subject to death.” The following month, “Graham Greene, on phone, tells us he is living from constant transfusions. (He sounded very ill; but livened up as he developed antagonism.) This strange procession, as Barbara Pym calls it.” Greene died six months later; Shirley remarked that after Moravia’s death, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica had the headline “Senza Moravia,” and added, “For Graham too, there were hardly any English-speaking people who had not grown up aware of him and somehow counting on him to be there always.” A few months after Greene it was the turn of her old friend Sumner Locke Elliott, of cancer. Red Warren had died the previous year. Shirley and Francis had gone to Vermont for the usual Christmas visit in 1988; Warren’s biographer, Joseph Blotner, writes that Shirley sat with Red looking out at the winter scene. “She thought of Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ and intoned the lines ‘Winter’s dregs made desolate / The weakening eye of day.’ And he, without missing a beat, took up the next line: ‘The tangled bine-stems scored the sky / Like strings from [sic] broken lyres…’”

Unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable, Alec’s death, the persistent and reiterated loss prompted endless recollection, reflection: “As if one had swallowed a stone. The compulsive blighting.” Inexpressible—not simply because the right to the expression of grief remained with his widow and family, but, this perhaps most of all, because grief’s object was itself impossibly past. As well as the “centre, gone,” there was also completeness, forestalling understanding. And once again she voiced a criticism, the sense of some falling short on Alec’s part, some “incapacity—not for love, exactly, he was affectionate—but for passion, for great love, for intimacy sustained; for imaginative love. Compared with mine, what was his love? Strange but it was passive.” Alongside this she felt, if not anger, then the burden of her husband’s increasing frailty and her boundedness:

The wish to be away, to regain my being, to matter, to give pleasure. To matter. What use to enumerate episodes, words? Nothing is but what those represent. And that is the world, in essence, for humans. For the present, no wish to live, that is to be lively. Yet, always the life struggling up, wanting to cast off the blight. Rebellious, the impulse to be alive, oddly different from “wish to live.” Waste … The typewriter clicking, rattling, pounding on, the machine running ahead like a locomotive over every appeal for love, for company. The reciprocal time to do my own work, think my thoughts, live in my appropriate state (cannot express this—return to the realm of spontaneity, of poetry, to the centre). Clicking, clicking, rattling, pounding on.