Jonathan Taylor writes:
Last Thursday, the Paris Review hosted a convivial reading from the works of novelist, memoirist and journalist—of author—Sybille Bedford, who would have turned 100 this year (and came closer than most; an Alan Hollinghurst article headlines her as a “Child of the Century“). The event was organized by Lisa Cohen, the author of the forthcoming All We Know—”portraits of the neglected modernist figures Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland”—and a friend of Bedford.
Cohen called Bedford a “sympathetic, vulnerable mind,” exhibiting something of the gift for “compression” she also noted in Bedford’s writing. To wit: Courtney Hodell read from the opening of Bedford’s travelogue of Mexico, A Visit to Don Otavio, which includes the observation that “Arrival and Departure are the two great pivots of American social intercourse…. What counts is that you are new. In Europe where human relations like clothes are supposed to last, one’s got to be wearable.”
And in an assessment of her protagonist’s first sexual encounter with a man, in the novel Jigsaw, Bedford wrote, and novelist Sylvia Brownrigg read, “There were no delicious sensations.”
Poet and memoirist Honor Moore read climactically from the opening of Bedford’s last book, Quicksands, in which Bedford plunges back through the decades to resurrect that vulnerability in her formation as a writer.
These were all passages I knew, but a dramatic reading of Bedford’s account of the British Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial, by Cohen and Caleb Crain, revealed to me for the first time the felicitous role of Richard Hoggart, the British pioneer of cultural studies and author of the wondrous The Uses of Literacy in 1957. (I also just learned that Hoggart assembled the words “Death-Cab for Cutie”—as a made-up title for a type of “sex and violence novel,” as part of The Uses of Literacy‘s study of the encroachment of mass popular culture on traditional working-class culture.)
Born in 1918, Hoggart is not much younger than Bedford would have been (yes, is—still alive!). He argued that Lawrence’s novel was essentially “puritanical” in its sense of exceedingly stringent responsibility to conscience. Bedford recorded prosecutors’ smug attempts to mock his hypothesis by reading him passages laden with four-letter words (or five, in the pertinent case of “balls”). As played by Cohen, he responded as an enthusiastic teacher might to eager students thirstily requesting further demonstrations of his wisdom.
The reading had a little bit of a feel of a private party, a slumber party in Lorin Stein’s rec room. It was not inappropriate to the esprit of the friends you might find gathered, in her books, in a Provence farmhouse; nor to the consequent sense of being in good company one feels privy to, once you’ve started reading Bedford. I read her books at the same time as I did a number of her contemporary authors of travel and discovery, like Lawrence Durrell and Patrick Leigh Fermor. More than theirs do Bedford’s books crackle with the formation of thought amid the unpredictable eventfulness of company.
Thus it was a bit disappointing that the podium was limited strictly to readings, with no further discussion or reminiscence, what with Cohen in the house, as well as (if I understood correctly) Bedford’s friend and literary executor, Aliette Martin. Fortunately, the Paris Review‘s site promises to post a series of “essays and archival finds” on Bedford, beginning with this post by Cohen, this by Brenda Wineapple, and a 1963 Review interview.

Martin Schneider writes:
Last Sunday 92Y perpetrated a switcheroo. Longtime TV analyst Jeff Greenfield has hosted a recurring series of interviews at 92Y for (if I heard the intro right) something like 30 years, a forum he has used to interview people like Newt Gingrich and presumably also people whose opinion is worth a damn. (Although, to be fair, Greenfield referred to that interview in a way that made it sound worth watching.)
At the moment Greenfield has a new book to flog, Then Everything Changed, an entertaining exercise in alternate history from the sound of it. So for this one night, Greenfield was the subject of the interview, and 92Y enlisted longtime friend Charlie Rose to host the proceedings.
In short, the event featured two of America’s best and smartest professional talkers, although perhaps not the most exciting two people in the world. Not surprisingly, Rose and Greenfield are such fluent talkers/thinkers and also such political junkies that the event was highly amusing and entertaining.
Rose, whose affable drone has occupied the 11pm slot on PBS for a generation now, was remarkably amusing and fluid as the host on this night. Greenfield spoke at length about two former bosses, Robert F. Kennedy and John Lindsay, both of which feature in the book to some extent. It was fun to hear Greenfiled explore the possibilities of an RFK presidency (and therefore no Nixon presidency, no Watergate) and similar scenarios.
Late in the session, Greenfield made some quite critical remarks about President Obama for not making the urgency of the economic crisis of 2008-09 (and ongoing) the central theme of his presidency. Greenfield ventured that he “may have been overtaken by events.” He also noted the political wisdom of “acknowledging the elephant in the room,” a move that voters appreciate and that Obama has not done sufficiently.
I was a little surprised that Greenfield had swallowed the conventional wisdom about the election of 2010 to that extent, but then again, he works for a major news network — as smart as he is, it’s not his role to push a big alternate version of events (given his book, ironic) in which most of what Obama did worked fairly well and so forth. But I’m picking nits. It was a good time!