Books Briefly
Books Briefly A Special Friendship DARLINGHISSIMA: Letters to a Friend by Janet Flanner Edited and with commentary by Natalia Danesi Murray Random House. 507 pp. $24.95. For fifty years, from...
...They would both go on about each other's excellences at what seemed wearisome length when we were young, but this mutual star-struck quality was the dynamo that made the whole thing work, family, publishing house, and all...
...17.95...
...16.95...
...While her story is interesting—in particular, her relief work in post-World War I Europe—a feeling of remoteness is never transcended...
...Thriving Singly THE MAGNIFICENT SPINSTER by May Sarton W.W...
...Like some of Sarton's other books, this one is at times restrained to the point of obscurity...
...This collection of Flanner's letters mirrors their shared interests in cultural, artistic, and political fields...
...296 pp...
...The narrator's own life, however, is much more fully realized, possibly because it so closely resembles the author's...
...Norton...
...By the time Flanner returned to Paris in 1944, they had established an intimate friendship that was to last until Flanner's death in 1978...
...384 pp...
...In one paragraph he can be irreverent about Fulton Sheen ("the ultimate show-biz priest"), and then in the next paragraph be tender about a human foible...
...Books Briefly A Special Friendship DARLINGHISSIMA: Letters to a Friend by Janet Flanner Edited and with commentary by Natalia Danesi Murray Random House...
...In an interlude during World War II in New York, she met Italian-born Natalia Danesi Murray, a shortwave broadcaster to fascist Italy...
...Nevertheless, it sensitively portrays a community of women thriving singly while sustaining each other in an era when women alone were more often the object of pity than of respect...
...After their marriage in 1925 they embarked on a joint career of street-corner proselytizing, writing, and traveling...
...The narrator, also a teacher, forms a longstanding relationship with a psychologist that is the emotional center of the book...
...For fifty years, from 1925 to 1975, Janet Flanner was the Paris correspondent for The New Yorker, under the pseudonym "Genet...
...Maisie Ward, his mother, came from an English family of intellectuals...
...Her observations on France in transition during the postwar years, on Charles de Gaulle, and on McCarthyism in America are social history of a high order...
...Tender and Irreverent FRANK & MAISIE: A Memoir with Parents by Wilfrid Sheed Simon and Schuster...
...This novel really portrays the lives of many spinsters who are satellites around the "magnificent" one, an independently wealthy asexual private-school teacher who lives a life of old-fashioned liberal activism...
...In between his reminiscences about his parents, the reader learns a good deal about Wilfrid Sheed himself...
...They founded the publishing house of Sheed & Ward...
...Flanner's large circle of friends included Ernest Hemingway, Alice B. Toklas, Anna Magnani, Colette, and Carson McCullers...
...In this affectionate memoir, novelist Wilfrid Sheed recreates his unusual parents as he recalls them from boyhood days through their deaths...
...Outstanding in this vivid self-portrait is Flanner's devotion to her reporting and writing...
...Of Irish descent, his father was born and grew up in Australia...
...Their fervid mission of Catholicism was tempered with wit and warmth...
Vol. 50 • May 1986 • No. 5
