Chumship

James Lasdun: Upper West Side Cult, 27 July 2023

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy and the Wild Life of an American Commune 
by Alexander Stille.
Farrar, Straus, 418 pp., $30, June, 978 0 374 60039 6
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... which time it had attracted some notable members, including Jackson Pollock, Richard Price and Judy Collins. But its more disturbing practices had passed unnoticed by the wider world until the Voice ran its exposé. Even then, as members defected and word spread of the grotesque cruelties perpetrated in the name of its supposedly utopian ideals, it ...

Alas! Deceived

Alan Bennett: Larkin the Librarian, 25 March 1993

Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life 
by Andrew Motion.
Faber, 570 pp., £20, April 1993, 0 571 15174 4
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... the way different from ‘Those antique negroes’ who blew their ‘flock of notes’ out of ‘Chicago air into/A huge remembering pre-electric horn/The year after I was born’? Well, they were in Chicago for a start, not Loughborough. Wanting so much for him to be other, one is forced against every inclination to ...

Emily of Fire & Violence

Paul Keegan: Eliot’s Letters, 22 October 2020

... of readings and public talks over the next nine months, in California, Washington, Minnesota, Chicago, Buffalo and Providence – in all, between seventy and eighty engagements. And he wrote as many letters to Hale. Like Henry James and Henry Adams, Eliot returned after a long spell in Europe and felt – hauntedly – that coming back was the real rite ...