9*17*02

Presently reading two books by Edmund W.... here are some excerpts:

I was struck by the enormous reverence that the Algonquinites felt for Ring Lardner. He never mingled with them. He lived at Great Neck, Long Island, and came into town only for business; I never saw him at the Algonquin. He was somehow aloof and inscrutable, by nature rather saturnine, but a master whom all admired, though he was never present in person. It may be that all any such circle demands is such a presiding but invisible deity, who is assumed to regard them with a certain scorn.
Edmund Wilson, The Twenties, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975, 48-49.

In Jean-Paul Sartre's words, his work habits with Simone de Beauvoir:

We worked from 9 a.m. till noon, when we went out to lunch. At 2 we came back and talked with our friends till four, when we got down to work again till eight. And after dinner people came to see us by appointment. It may seem strange, all this, but the Flore was like home to us: even when the air-raid alarm went off we would merely feign to leave and then climb up to the first floor and go on working...
Edmund White, The Flaneur, New York & London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2001. 20-21.