Authors.- Incl. Bruce Chatwin Letters to Paul Bailey

Selection of typed and autograph letters from various authors to Paul Bailey, comprising: Harold Pinter (one card saying "Here's my piece about Quentin Crisp. Let me know if you have any comments", 1 March 2000; and a typed letter thanking Bailey for his card and adding "In the penultimate paragraph please change "wry and gracious" to "wryly amusing and gracious", 8 March 2000); Margaret Drabble (typed letter saying "How could you dash off a journalistic piece like that - inaccurate and ill-researched- and play in to the hands of Mrs Thatcher so eagerly? Of course she laughs when sees even the self-employed writers of the left rushing to savage one another before others have even open their mouths. Please, please think more carefully on this one. The left needs to unite: she wants us to quarrel", 6 July 1988); Christopher Isherwood (autograph letter thanking Paul for the reviews "They helped a lot and now the deed is done, though when you read my 'citation' you will find no trace of anything they said! Christ, how I hate trying to talk that kind of official smoke-language!, 3 April 1974); Iris Murdoch (brief note saying how pleased she was with the reviews of Paul's book, n.d.); Bruce Chatwin (autograph letter saying "I was very taken with your radio piece on Primo Levi. I couldn’t agree with you more. It's his testimony - or his kind of testimony- that counts. he has to be right up there in the Pantheon of the very few. I was also struck by your slight dig at the 'holocaust merchants'. Whenever I've met an Auschwitz survivor -as I did the other day in Australia- I've always been immensely moved [...] I've always hated the way 'holocaust' is bandied about, and was glad to learn that Levi thought the same", 1 December 1987); Nadine Gordimer (type letter saying "I admire so much the economy and swift impact of Old Soldiers. The narrative is distilled and so never thin; the two old men distressingly alive. I wrote somewhere of novel-writing as the exploration of alternative lives. Your Captain Standish is the perfect embodiment, wonderfully realized, of this exploration", 15 March 1980); Stephen Spender (autograph letter, saying in part "Christopher Ishewrwood who has been here, is responsible for the E.M. Forster Maurice royalties fund (quite a lot) which is to be destined to giving an annual bourse to a visiting young English writer in America. [...] I strongly recommended you and Chrstopher is quite taken with the idea", 13 February 1973); Frances Partridge (undated postcard concerning a biography of Francis Bacon that Paul was commissioned to write, "I would like to help, but fear I put all I knew or thought about Bacon into the diaries); Angus Wilson (undated postcard sent to Paul when he was at the University of North Dakota, c. 1978); Salman Rushdie (two postcards, one saying " This has been a saddening passage of days, I've always thought of you as a friend, and very much hope that these recent and too public differences can quickly be put behind us. I gather you were angered by my changes of agent and publisher, but there were good reasons for these things" 30 July 1988); Olivia Manning (typed letter discussing Paul's intention to write a biography of Henry Green "He is too little appreciated today and I hope your book will re-establish him in the position he held during the '30s", 15 March 1980, with a signed postcard); Beryl Bainbridge (autograph note referring to Paul’s heart failure in September 2002 while he was at a literary conference in the town of Neptun on the Black Sea coast in Romania, n.d. ); with two typed letters from primo Levi's widow Lucia and one letter from Livio Norzi, one of Primo Levi's closest, lifelong friends from their adolescence in Turin, thanking Bailey for his interest in Levi's works; v.s. (18)

Dimensions:v.s.

Provenance:

The estate of Paul Bailey.