Brushes With The Great and Near-Great

Recently I happened across a file folder of letters granting me permission for the use in two of my previous books, Great Beginnings and Great Endings, of reproductions of the first and last pages of a number of classic works of literature. Somehow I had forgotten that in the 1990s I had corresponded with such notable figures as Merlin Holland, the grandson of Oscar Wilde; Quentin Bell, the son of Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa and her artist husband, Clive Bell; Jill Faulkner Summers, the daughter of William Faulkner; the author Joseph Heller; and Stephen J. Joyce, James Joyce's executor and the only grandson of an only son, who had written me three letters and two cards, including one chastising me for the inadvertent insertion of an apostrophe into the mention of Finnegans Wake. It recalled to me an earlier time in my life, in the 1970s, when I had interviewed for another book not only the great British theatre actress Dame Sybil Thorndike, but the surviving relatives of famous writers, like Joseph Conrad's son; Rudyard Kipling's daughter; John Galsworthy's nephew; and Sir James Barrie's "adopted" son, Nicholas Llewelyn Davies. These memories and others, which have remained alive in my mind throughout the years, have inspired Brushes with The Great and Near-Great. In later years, William Graves made it possible for me to visit with him the house of his father, poet Robert Graves, in Deià, Majorca, and has remained a friend in the Robert Graves Society since then. Through his efforts, four letters to the author from Robert Graves, the fourth written for him by Beryl Graves, and the 1922 Robert Graves poem A Crusader, are reproduced by permission from United Agents Ltd on behalf of The Trustees of the Robert Graves Copyright Trust. Besides others from that glorious…