Description
Book SynopsisThis is a memoiristic book and a dual portrait, built around intense friendships with two leading public intellectuals who achieved celebrity status—Susan Sontag on a global scale, George Steiner principally in Europe, though also for a time in the US. For audiences at Woody Allen movies Sontag was the prime embodiment of the term “intellectual,” whose famous 1965 essay “Notes on Camp” won her an enormous following. For viewers of French, German and British television over decades Steiner was the primary interview show talking head, igniting controversy on many fronts, while also commanding a loyal audience for thirty years as a book critic at
The New Yorker. To know Sontag and Steiner, as this memoir suggests, was often to feel overmatched and yet also bemused and awe-struck. Both of them gave off an air of omniscience and self-confidence, as if they had taken to heart the words of the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, who wrote, “I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me.”
Maestros & Monsters is the work of a well-known public intellectual who was close to Sontag and Steiner over a half century, and who managed to bring them together on several occasions—the only times they ever met. Those encounters are among the most bizarre episodes in this narrative, which also features extended encounters with such literary figures as Arthur Koestler, Edward Said, Phillip Rieff, James Wood and others.
Trade ReviewA delicious portrait of two difficult, brilliant intellectuals, and a spirited vindication of criticism as a noble calling.--Garth Greenwell
This superb book takes us back to the last moments of the golden age of American letters. --Cornel West
Robert Boyers has been in close contact with every seismic shift in literary, intellectual, artistic, and academic quarters.--Joyce Carol Oates
A moving contribution to the history of our intellectual culture.--Darryl Pinckney
A thrillingly generous book ... in the grand tradition of Samuel Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," Sainte-Beuve's biographical sketches, and Turgenev's "Literary Reminiscences."--Philip Lopate
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Part One: The Fascination of What's Difficult: Susan Sontag
Chapter 1 Seriously Uncool? 21
Chapter 2 Is This Rude? 34
Chapter 3 Disappointments and Dismissals 44
Chapter 4 Authority Figure. 58
Chapter 5 Turn of the Cultural Wheel 70
Chapter 6 The Therapeutic 80
Chapter 7 To Teach or Not 90
Chapter 8 Motherhood and Sexuality. 99
Chapter 9 Rhapsode 106
Part Two: Impossible to Tell: George Steiner
Chapter 1 A First Meeting. 113
Chapter 2 I Had a Good Time 120
Chapter 3 Under Attack 128
Chapter 4 Master Teacher 139
Chapter 5 An Evening with Arthur Koestler. 151
Chapter 6 A Brave Beginning 162
Chapter 7 Creative Distortion. 170
Chapter 8 I Wish You Hadn't Done That. 182
Chapter 9. An Academy of One 195
Part Three
Afterword 203
Notes 209
Names Index 217
About The Author 219
Photographs 221
