Profession: writer

Gorky published his early work, gave him good advice, and protected him against persecution. Ehrenburg, who called Babel a wise rabbi, was first met in Paris — they remained friends for life. Babel contributed to Mayakovsky’s magazine ‘Lef’, collaborated with Eisenstein on a film, and suggested a good haven to Mandelstam (under investigation by the secret police), giving him the train-fare. Pasternak was a neighbour outside Moscow, and a depressing companion travelling to Paris for a conference organised by Malraux (whom Babel was later falsely accused of passing aviation secrets to, and shot).

She was involved as a teenager with Mayakovsky, who proceeded to fall in love with her married sister Lilya Brik (Triolet later translated his work into French). Rodchenko photographed her. She married Aragon, and was a powerful influence on his writing (Cummings, a friend of both, took magazines and perfume to her sister in Moscow). She (and Aragon) met Paz at an anti-fascist writers’ conference. Jakobson was a close friend from childhood, and another who fell for her. The writer and critic Shklovsky, also in love with her, passed her work on to Gorky, who encouraged her to get published.

Picasso, Léger, Apollinaire and Modigliani became friends in Paris before WWI (he organised Picasso’s first show in Russia). He travelled to Georgia together with his friend Mandelstam; other Moscow friends included Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva and Pasternak (whose work he later criticised.) He met Neruda in Chile, Hemingway — whom he desribed as thin — in Spain and Steinbeck in the U.S. He persuaded Malraux to go to the USSR, and worked with Grossman to document the oppression of Soviet Jews. An early supporter of Akhmatova’s poetry, he tried to get her son freed from political imprisonment in Siberia.

Proust attended Mallarmé’s salons, and was connected with Bergson through family, though denied being influenced by his ideas about time and memory. Proust and Colette met as young writers, she finding his polite persistence overweening. Gide (a noted correspondent) had advised Gallimard against publishing him, then later completely changed his mind and ensured the work appeared; Cocteau, Mauriac and Fauré (whose music he admired) were other correspondents. Proust asked Jammes to pray for him. He shared a cab with Joyce, but they had never read each other’s work, and grumbled about their bodily ailments.

Yeats, an early influence, put him up in London en route to Paris, later turning down his only play and trying to entice him back to Ireland. Pound met him through Yeats, and energetically championed his work. Synge was a supportive companion in Paris, Svevo a student in Trieste. Joyce’s dinner with Proust, Picasso, Stravinsky and Diaghilev was disappointing: he and Proust hardly spoke, though Proust’s day was just starting as his own ended. Beckett assisted, Brancusi drew, Eliot and Shaw corresponded, Jung treated his daughter, while Claudel, appalled, returned the signed copy of Finnegan’s Wake Joyce had given him.

Rexroth met Wright in a Chicago communist club, and argued with him — as a friend — for a lifetime. Auden lived in the same Brooklyn house as Wright, Welles collaborated on a stage production, and Ellison asked Hughes, a mutual friend, to introduce him (they became close friends). In Paris, Wright befriended Camus and Sartre, met Stein, Gide, Fanon (an admirer), Senghor and Césaire, and assisted with the launch of Diop’s journal. He helped and influenced black writers like Himes, Baldwin, and Ellison (also Algren, a good friend). Parks was inspired by him. Grierson, McLaren, Boas and Lévi-Strauss were all correspondents.

Genet introduced himself to Cocteau, who helped get published the novel Genet had started in prison (Cocteau with Sartre helped save their friend from a life sentence). He modelled for and wrote eloquently about Giacometti, worked with Foucault opposing police brutality, reported on political shenanigans with Southern and Burroughs, and demonstrated with Duras. De Beauvoir, Derrida, Moravia, Goytisolo, Boulez and Stravinsky were all friends. Sartre’s long anonymous study of Genet, ‘Saint Genet’, stopped him writing for 5 years; as someone put it, “Cocteau inaugurated Genet’s career, Sartre consecrated it.”