The Paper Trail: A Recollection of Writers

As both an author in her own right and the wife of publisher Roger Straus, Dorothea Straus has spent a good deal of time with writers, and in this latest volume of her memoirs (Virgins and Other Endangered Species), she focuses on a number of them, including an owl-like Edmund Wilson, a bored T.S. Eliot (more willing to talk of editing than of writing), a sober and prim Charles Jackson (author of The Lost Weekend), Isaac Bashevis Singer (some of whose work she helped translate into English), the dying but still feisty Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy (""who can destroy in a single thrust""), Carlo Levi, Jerzy Kosinski and Colette. Most of them have been published at one time or another by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Straus is especially adept at bringing to life the physical surroundings the writers inhabit (Marguerite Yourcenar's Maine retreat, Bernard Malamud's New York City apartment, Alberto Moravia's Rome); her portraits of these are as evocative as those she paints of the writers themselves, sometimes more so. Straus is a master impressionist, a quick-sketch artist who catches her subjects-often bathed in shadows-at moments when they reveal more of themselves than they realize. Twelve of the 19 chapters have already appeared in her previous books. (Apr.)