Profession: writer

D’Épinay was very fond of Rousseau and lent him a cottage on her estate, where he wrote some of his most notable works. But relations deteriorated when he introduced her to Grimm, who became her long-term lover. D’Alembert, Holbach, Marivaux and other major figures of the Enlightenment were regular guests, as was Galiani, who corresponded for twelve years. Mozart was welcomed into Grimm’s and d’Épinay’s home. Diderot, Rousseau and Grimm feature fictionally in her memoirs. It is for her ideas about women and education that she is now probably best known.

Durrell wrote to Miller admiring his writing, and joined Miller and Anaïs Nin in Paris as the self-styled ‘Three Musketeers.’ With Alfred Perlès they formed a close-knit literary group, Durrell counting among Nin’s lovers. The friendship with Miller was close, lasting 45 years, and bound by common passions and a comradely resistance to the world’s pitfalls. Barker used to borrow his typewriter, Katsimbalis and Seferis talked literary politics and gave “modern lit a bashing” with him, while Eliot stood up for him in London. Leigh Fermor (befriended in wartime Cairo), Macaulay and Stark all stayed with him in Cyprus.

Garrick was the first in London to pick up on Sterne and became a lifelong friend, though he teased him for saying one thing and doing another. Hume knew Sterne in Paris and in London; d’Holbach helped him stay in France, where he and Crébillon hatched plans to issue a brochure where each would hold up the other’s work to ridicule, thus gaining publicity for both (it came to nothing). Smollett often had him over to lunch in Chelsea with Johnson and Garrick; Garrick was dining with Hume when they heard of Sterne’s death, though neither went to the funeral.

Swift, Gay and Pope, devoted friends, formed the Scriblerus Club together with Arbuthnot, whose house the club met in; Congreve (who had been a school-mate) was also a member. Pope helped Swift get ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ published; Voltaire, a correspondent and great admirer, translated it into French. Montesquieu was Swift’s guest on a visit to England. Among other writers, Addison and Steele particularly liked Swift. He told Young, gazing at a tree, that like the tree, he’d die from the top down.

Anderson — a formative influence — only met Steinbeck once, but liked him. Steinbeck toured the USSR with Capa, supported his friend Arthur Miller during witch-hunts in America, and had an idea to collaborate with Cage that came to nothing. He based a character on Ricketts, a lasting close friend and influential companion. He had supper in Moscow with Caldwell, and hung out in California with Chaplin and Jeffers. He insisted the little-known Albee accompany him on another USSR trip, initiating a lasting trusting friendship, and sparred with his friend Yevtushenko. Kazan felt he was out of place in New York.

Miller and Powys were great correspondents, writing warmly and extravagantly. Richardson was another correspondent. Dreiser was an intimate friend from the years he spent in the U.S. Duncan sent him roses by the roomful — he based a novel partly on their friendship. Cummings and Powys were Greenwich Village neighbours.