ILB Brief Encounters: Literary Figures Appearing in Interesting Situations

I'm not entirely sure whether this is what you're after, but I was delighted by this paragraph on the later life of Djuna Barnes (from wikipedia):

During her Patchin Place years, Barnes became a notorious recluse, intensely suspicious of anyone she did not know well. E. E. Cummings, who lived across the street, would check on her periodically by shouting out his window, "Are you still alive, Djuna?" Bertha Harris put roses in her mailbox, but never succeeded in meeting her; Carson McCullers camped on her doorstep, but Barnes only called down, "Whoever is ringing this bell, please go the hell away."

Yes! That is exactly the kind of thing I am after here.

Isn't there a book or a movie or something about Buckley Jr. vs. Vidal? V/Mailer so much more gratifying, because I like both well enough, and here's a couple more worthies along for the show:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/in-this-corner-norman-mailer/?_r=0

But wrassling aside, though still w zings:
http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/interviews/a15145/gore-vidal-norman-mailer-0591/

Wish I could find the interview where he says, "I thought (whoever it was) was throwing Mailer at me," Mailer being much shorter ysee.

There is some good stuff about a Mailer beef in Leiber and Stoller's memoir, Hound Dog.

I really want to go back and finish PF's The Knox Brothers and read xpost Lee's PF bio, having greatly enjoyed James Wood's take, especially when "James is gettin' upset!", as they say on Seinfeld (well George says it about himself, but still) http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/late-bloom

Some funny stuff about visiting Anthony Powell to interview him for the Hartley bio that I may post later on

Please do!

Oh! Here's a fact that completely made me go WUT when I found it out: Ann Quin, my beloved tragic experimentalist, had an affair with... the guy who wrote Tarka the Otter. Who was 39 years older than her. And a weird army dude who hung out with Oswald Mosley.

WHAAAAT?!?!?!

that would be the unapologetically fascistic henry williamson (whose son was involved with gong and hawkwind!)

& speaking of fascists, pretty sure gottfried benn shows up in george grosz's autobiography in his role as a doctor.

Two entertaining books in this vein: One on One by Craig Brown (the review at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/20/one-on-one-craig-brown-review explains the conceit well)

and 'February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof in Brooklyn' by Sherill Tippins, which is full of weird stories from a deeply unusual sharehouse

if i remember right, anna kavan was also a resident there? she also has a few brief appearances in biographies of various forties era nz writers due to her war-time stay in auckland... not aware of any of their works featuring a fictionalised version of her, though. also brings to mind john mulgan and adorno conversing while sharing either a train journey or ferry trip to somewhere or other.

In a similar vein again, A Ring of Conspirators by Miranda Seymour, about Henry James' final years in Rye and his encounters with local rivals like Rudyard Kipling and Stephen Crane.

This is all good stuff, but please please please no fan fic team ups in which Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche join forces to solve crimes etc.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-fifth-heart-by-dan-simmons/2015/06/02/69ebbefa-ffe2-11e4-833c-a2de05b6b2a4_story.html

Ha, exactly

From the Julie Phillips Sheldon/Tiptree bio:

It was true: writers did like it. Answering an admiring note from Tiptree in 1970, Italo Calvino wrote, “A letter like yours is actually the best present a postman can put down in my mail-box. It is for the unknown reader that any author writes, but it is a rare chance to meet him, even by letter, and to discover that he is such a nice and witty person.”

As they set off in Odilon's taxi Joyce obliviously opened a window and lit a cigarette, and Sydney Schiff hurriedly shut the one and asked Joyce to throw away the other. Joyce complained of his eyes, Proust of his stomach. Did M. Joyce like truffles? He did. Had he met the Duchesse de X? He had not. 'I regret that I do not know M. Joyce's work,' remarked Proust. 'I have never read M. Proust,' replied Joyce. When they reached 44 Rue Hamelin Proust said to Schiff, politely but firmly: 'Please ask M. Joyce to let my taxi drive him home.' Thus the two greatest novelists of the twentieth century met and parted.

The one and only exchange between Michael Dummett and Ludwig Wittgenstein, recounted in Williamson's "How did we get here from there? The transformation of analytic philosophy":

Dummett was going for a tutorial at Anscombe’s house. She kept the door unlocked. As was the practice, Dummett went in, and sat down to await her summons. An elderly man in a dressing-gown came downstairs and asked ‘Where’s the milk?’; Dummett replied ‘Don’t ask me’. That was the extent of his conversation with Wittgenstein.

TIL that Shizuo Kakutani was the thesis advisor of Saul Bellow's fourth wife, Alexandra. I wonder if this created a conflict of interest for Shizuo's daughter, Michiko.