This is a memoiristic book and a dual portrait, built around intense friendships with two leading public intellectuals who achieved celebrity status—Susan Sontag on a global scale, George Steiner principally in Europe, though also for a time in the US. For audiences at Woody Allen movies Sontag was the prime embodiment of the term “intellectual, ” whose famous 1965 essay “Notes on Camp” won her an enormous following. For viewers of French, German and British television over decades Steiner was the primary interview show talking head, igniting controversy on many fronts, while also commanding a loyal audience for thirty years as a book critic at The New Yorker. To know them, as this memoir suggests, was often to feel overmatched and yet also bemused and awe-struck. Both of them gave off an air of omniscience and self-confidence, as if they had taken to heart the words of the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, who wrote, “I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me.”
Maestros & Monsters is the work of a well-known public intellectual who was close to Sontag and Steiner over a half century, and who managed to bring them together on several occasions—the only times they ever met. Those encounters are among the most bizarre episodes in this narrative, which also features extended encounters with such literary figures as Arthur Koestler, Edward Said, Phillip Rieff, James Wood and others.
Tabella dei contenuti
Introduction 1
Part One: The Fascination of What’s Difficult: Susan Sontag
Chapter 1 Seriously Uncool? 21
Chapter 2 Is This Rude? 34
Chapter 3 Disappointments and Dismissals 44
Chapter 4 Authority Figure 58
Chapter 5 Turn of the Cultural Wheel. 70
Chapter 6 The Therapeutic 80
Chapter 7 To Teach or Not 90
Chapter 8 Motherhood and Sexuality. 99
Chapter 9 Rhapsode. 106
Part Two: Impossible to Tell: George Steiner
Chapter 1 A First Meeting. 115
Chapter 2 I Had a Good Time 120
Chapter 3 Under Attack. 128
Chapter 4 Master Teacher 139
Chapter 5 An Evening with Arthur Koestler 151
Chapter 6 A Brave Beginning 162
Chapter 7 Creative Distortion 170
Chapter 8 I Wish You Hadn’t Done That. 182
Chapter 9 An Academy of One. 195
Part Three
Afterword 203
Notes 209
Names Index 217
About the Author 219
22 Photographs Insert Section 16 pages
Circa l’autore
Robert Boyers, born in Brooklyn NY in 1842 and educated at Queens College of the City of New York (BA 1963) and New York University (MA 1965), founded Salmagundi, an international quarterly, in 1965 and continues to edit the journal, to teach at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, and to direct the New York Sate Summer Writers Institute, which he founded in 1987. Boyers is the author of hundreds of periodical essays and reviews in publications such as The New Republic, Dissent, Partisan Review, Harpers, Granta, The Times Literary Supplement, among many other literary and political magazines. He is also the author of a dozen books, most recently, The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy and the Hunt for Political Heresies. His other books include The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals, The Dictator’s Dictation: The Politics of Novels and Novelists, and a volume of short stories, Excitable Women, Damaged Men. In 2009 he edited and wrote the introduction for George Steiner at The New Yorker, a volume that has been published in more than twenty languages.
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