Profession: writer

Behan was the gifted ‘bad boy’ of Irish literature. O’Faolain helped nurture his talent and get him published. O’Brien and Kavanagh were among a Dublin drinking set, Freud (who painted his portrait) among a London one. Behan met Wilder, Mailer and Thurber at the Algonquin, said that Kerouac was the most controversial person he met in Greenwich Village, and stuffed $80 into the impoverished Ginsberg’s pocket. Littlewood helped bring his work to the stage, doing her best to keep him sufficiently sober. Beckett bailed him out in Paris, lectured him on drink, bought him a double brandy and gave him 100 francs.

Koestler’s broad interests make him hard to categorise: his most influential work has a strong moral/political dimension. As a young man he struck Adorno as ‘shy, distraught, esoteric’. He met Eisler, Brecht and Huelsenbeck in Weimar Berlin, Hughes in Soviet Turkmenistan, and Auden during the Spanish Civil War. Correspondents included Gabor, Forster, Mann, Malraux and Spender. Orwell, József and Polanyi were friends. He took LSD with Leary, drank with Thomas, threw a glass at Sartre, gave Camus a black eye, and had a one-night-stand with de Beauvoir. Benjamin gave him half of his suicide pills, but they didn’t work.

Opinions vary greatly as to Burgess’ importance as a writer, but his books and personality made an undoubted impact, most widely through Kubrick’s controversial film A Clockwork Orange (which Burgess was ambivalent about). Burroughs, visited twice in Tangier, was a friend and drinking partner, Heller an academic colleague, Vidal a friend and fellow-gadfly. Greene, interviewed by Burgess, accused him of putting words in his mouth. Kubrick commissioned a script for an unrealised film about Napoleon, while Welles commissioned a libretto (Burgess always saw himself as a composer) for an unstaged musical about Houdini, with Welles improbably in the lead part.

Döblin is most widely known for his great novel ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’. As a young writer, he was an active in Walden’s ‘Der Sturm’ group, and met and was impressed by Marinetti. Involved in leftist literary circles in Berlin, he was a close and influential associate of Brecht; they joined Ehrenstein, Piscator, Tucholsky and Musil in the so-called ‘Gruppe 1925’. Musil, Kirchner and Schlichter were friends. He despised Thomas Mann (who with his brother Heinrich, Schoenberg and Eisler, attended his 65th birthday celebration in Santa Monica), and wrote to him that his books deserved to be burned (as his own had actually been).

Radiguet was a bright-burning meteorite. He was Cocteau’s inseparable protégé (though there is no proof that they were lovers). He fell in with the Montparnasse crowd — Salmon, Reverdy, Jacob, Picasso, Gris, Modigliani — and contributed to a journal of Breton’s and Tzara’s. Milhaud and he devised the entertainment ‘le Boeuf sur le Toit’ for the bar he frequented with the Groupe des Six. Auric composed for him, Chanel supported him. After a night on the town with Brancusi, they set off for Marseille and Corsica, chasing skirt. His death from typhoid shocked his friends; Poulenc could do nothing for two days.

Rushdie gained worldwide fame when publication of his fourth novel resulted in a condemnation to death from the hardline cleric Khomeini. Among fellow-authors, Carter and Auster were particular friends. He sought out Canetti whose attitude influenced him, and wrote admiringly to Hughes. He travelled with Chatwin in the Australian desert, and wrote a fan-letter to White (whose self-deprecating reply was misread by Rushdie as a grumpy brush-off). Said was a long-term friend with a shared interest in East-West relations. Vonnegut invited Rushdie to lunch, but later described him as burned-out (Rushdie felt like taking out a contract on him).

Dumas, Delacroix and Mérimée were Stendhal’s friends from among the salon de l’Arsenal côterie; Mérimée wrote of a visit to a brothel organised by Musset, with Stendhal and Delacroix. Stendhal met Byron in Milan and corresponded: he thought Byron’s eyes the most beautifully expressive he’d ever seen. Sand and Musset, travelling to Venice, met Stendhal, travelling to his consular duties in Civitavecchia, drinking too much and dancing around the table in his fur-lined boots. Although he loved his near-contemporary Rossini’s music and wrote a confabulated biography of the composer, it appears they never met.