Brushes with the Literary

"In 1943 the painter Marcella Comes Winslow, who was later to gain an international reputation for her portraits, moved with her two young children to Washington, D.C., to live there until her husband, Colonel Randolph Winslow, returned from the war in Europe. That same year Allen Tate became the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress, and in the years that followed, Washington turned into an increasingly active cultural center. Largely through her friendship with Tate and his...
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"In 1943 the painter Marcella Comes Winslow, who was later to gain an international reputation for her portraits, moved with her two young children to Washington, D.C., to live there until her husband, Colonel Randolph Winslow, returned from the war in Europe. That same year Allen Tate became the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress, and in the years that followed, Washington turned into an increasingly active cultural center. Largely through her friendship with Tate and his wife, the novelist Caroline Gordon, both of whom she had met some years earlier at the Memphis estate of her mother-in-law, Winslow came to know an astonishing array of poets, novelists, and critics, among them W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, Ezra Pound, John Crowe Ransom, Karl Shapiro, Peter Taylor, Dylan Thomas, Robert Penn Warren, and Eudora Welty. Many ended up sitting for Winslow." "Winslow revealed her impressions of those luminaries - and her impressions of much more besides - in frequent letters to her beloved mother-inlaw, Anne Goodwin Winslow, herself a widely read novelist and poet. Those letters, more than two hundred in all, are gathered in Brushes with the Literary. As gifted a correspondent as she was a painter, Winslow wrote letters that sparkle with telling details and shrewd comments about the personalities and activities of her acquaintances, who included not only literary figures but others prominent in the dry's social and political circles. They provide a special insight into life in Washington during the war years, when scarcities and relentless worries about loved ones abroad were made somewhat more bearable by the lively social life and small-town charm of the nation's capital." "But it is the observations about the writers who became her friends and whose portraits she painted that lend these letters their overriding significance. Through the years we follow Winslow's friendship with the mercurial Katherine Anne Porter - whose eyes, Winslow writes, sometimes "look blue or blue gray, or almost a violet, and are deep set, so I try everything, getting very frustrated when they elude me." We observe the tempestuous marriage, and remarriage, of Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon. We accompany Winslow to St. Elizabeth's Hospital to sketch Ezra Pound, and to Vermont, where she paints Robert Frost. Of Eudora Welty she writes, "She has invisible feelers and imparts a power that one is not conscious of until she leaves and then there is the realization that other people are awfully busy and talk too much."" "Filled with warmth and self-deprecating humor, as vivid and colorful as her own paintings, these letters are a superb evocation of an important time and place in our cultural history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved