I lived in Chicago for 20 years and it seems like half the people I knew were either in jail or about to go to jail and that included governors, judges, insurance execs (see the Emperor Pat Ryan on hot seat; he and his wife Shirley were royalty in the provinces).

I never followed up on the book proposals following the James Beard nomination because au fond food writing so simple minded, even the best!

My idea is to do a Barzun approach to BB, Fry and KC....a synthesis of a L'Homme and L'Oeuvre approach, general and meaningful. I love the period up to the beginning of WW II....the Oxbridge intellectual life of the 20s and 30s .I had a tangential relationship to these men and women. More about that later but it was aninherited treasure from my father that was never valued until now.

We do love gargoyles and grotesqueries and here is one for the books. As if we had not been exposed enough to her gruesomeness, Martha Stewart is writing a memoir. The narcissicism knows no bounds. A freak show personality.

The difference between Kenneth Clark's own charming memoirs (I laugh out loud in the train, so relieved to find, if only in print, a fellow spirit) and the biography of Secrest is 1000%. She should cease and desist from writing since she makes outstanding men so petty and mundane, no doubt like herself.

Only read primary sources henceforth and skip the middlemen, those yeomen of footnotes and mindlessness.

Just when I am skeptical about ESP something occurs. During this recent attack of the flu I picked up Norman Sherry's first 2 volumes on Greene. This morning Paul Theroux has a strange review of his work in the Times on the occasion of the third volume's debut. Of course I have not read it yet but hope the book is not so sex-oriented as the review. The reproductive urge incidental to achievement in man, but for some reason the press feels obliged to focus on it.

Finally read Meryle Secrest on Berenson. Her contempt for him so blatant one wonders why she wrote the bloody book. We all know he was a circus vaudevillian to be sure but he did provide entertainment for Sunday intellectuals and this was harmless. I went back to read some of his "seminal" works. They are appalling; such word spinning!


Scanned Norman Sherry's first 2 volumes of Greene. As he notes from Updike, "Writing criticism is to writing fiction as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea." Perfect hagiographer is Norman. I must read Greene's film criticism.

I think what I have always missed is the camaraderie of the intellectual elite; it is why I idealized Bloomsbury, why it feels like coming home to read all these familiar stories, to see all these familiar names. Academia would have provided a facsimile, though according to friends who stayed in the ranks they now regret having done so.

Actually the intellectual elite really did exist and do so no more..the Salman Rushdie's are media sillies and would have appalled Greene or Waugh.

The portrait of Duveen in this biography is so unutterably distasteful it appears to be anti-Semitic. His wildly gesticulating while haggling with Wildenstein, and both loudly shouting above each ---what does that say? Middle Eastern rug dealers. Baksheesh.

I have decided that the only interesting and meaningful approach to the subject of Roger Fry is not more facts but a "look at" his aesthetics, the debt to Berenson, the continuation of the lure of the Renaissance by Clark. As a teenager my father suggested I read John Addington Symonds, an odd suggestion when I preferred Archie and Veronica, but he is worth looking at after forty years. Peculiar to modern sensibilities is that infatuation with the Renaisssance.