Profession: writer

Brecht sparred with him, Huxley collaborated on film-scripts and Carver took him around sites from his fiction. Bradbury was met by chance in a bookshop — they became friends. Auden, known slightly at school, became a close friend, intermittent lover and trusted literary collaborator. Spender (met through Auden) spent time in Germany with him. He knew his publisher Woolf only slightly, but liked her. Forster, something of a mentor, entrusted him with getting ‘Maurice’ brought out posthumously. Stravinsky asked him if he’d like to hear his mass before they got drunk. Thomas Mann called him “the family pimp.”

Enzensberger worked as an assistant radio editor to Andersch, and was invited to join Andersch’s legendary and influential Gruppe 47 (which Enzensberger later memorably described as “the Café Central of a literature without a capital”). Among fellow-members, Bachmann was a friend, Walser became a continuing colleague, Grass was a neighbour — they saw each other all the time — while Weiss had a famous spat with him. Enzensberger helped put out Sebald’s first three prose books, and wrote a farewell poem to him on his death. Sachs was a correspondent, forgiving to post-war writers like him. He met Barnet in Cuba.

Deleuze and Butor became friends as philosophy students at the Sorbonne; Tournier was another fellow-student, and in later years admired his writing. Wahl employed Butor as his secretary. His friends Barthes and Klossowski both lived with their aged mothers in neighbouring streets; at parties, Barthes sometimes played piano duets, and Butor sometimes sang. Barthes was also the first critic to identify the aims of his writing. Butor collaborated extensively with musicians and artists, the composer Pousseur and the artist Kolář among those who worked regularly with him.

Ginzburg turned Levi’s first book down, though became a friend and described him as a touchstone, serene and ironic. Améry, another friend, was like Levi a concentration-camp survivor. Levi said the happiest episode of his friendship with Calvino was helping him translate a book by Queneau. He first met Roth in London, and described to him his factual, disinterested approach to writing (like the factory-reports he was used to compiling). Levi-Montalcini, a lifelong friend, pointed out the inconsistencies with the popular theory that his fall to death was an act of suicide.

Levi designed the cover for one of his great friend Soldati’s books. Pavese was a colleague at the publisher Einaudi — the two regularly kept company. Ehrenburg met him in Rome, Levi painting his portrait; Ehrenburg was surprised how so productive a man could appear so slow and lazy.

Grossman – still too little known – was novelist turned celebrated war-reporter turned documenter-in-chief of Soviet murder of its own Jewish population. Gorky encouraged Grossman in his writing (stressing the need for socialist realism), invited him to his house, and proved the key to entry into official recognition, later stripped. Ehrenburg and Grossman, friends and colleagues, undertook the great task of gathering testimonies of the massacring of Soviet Jews into what became their ‘Black Book’: publication in the USSR was perhaps unsurprisingly suppressed. Platonov was a close friend — Grossman tried to persuade his editor to give him literary refuge.