Living Well Is the Best Revenge - By Calvin Tomkins
signed first edition
1971 · New York
by MURPHY, GERALD & CALVIN TOMKINS
New York: Viking Press, 1971. First Edition, First Printing with an original Gerald Murphy letter. The book is the story of Gerald and Sara Murphy, the noted American expatriates. Review copy with the publisher’s dated notice, information sheet, and two photographs of Gerald and Sara Murphy. Ownership signature of Madge Clancy. Fine in a very good dust jacket with a couple of tears. Laid in is an excellent Autograph Letter Signed from Gerald Murphy on his printed Palisades, New York stationery with matching printed envelope. Dated March 23, 1953, Murphy writes to Madge Clancy discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins and Archibald MacLeish. “It is so gratifying to that you enjoyed the books on [Gerard Manley] Hopkins. Mine has been lonely enthusiasm as with one’s imagination, is caught by him or not, - and there is no interpreting him for another person. Moreover, I dislike founding a cult on a poet. Certainly there is not all the nourishment one needs in his poetry, - but I am so grateful for the test he puts our language to and the freshness he brings to words...” Murphy then goes on to discuss his long time friend poet Archibald MacLeish, “...Mr. MacLeish read us his new poems last summer but I have not yet read them to myself. I shall be interested in doing so in light of what you say about two of them. In a way, having lived through him: his persistence through the lean years that followed; his seductions into politics, and now his enthusiasm for teaching the aspiring writer through his Boylston Professorship; I find it hard to judge his poetry as such. Sometimes I feel it isn’t poetry really (except in flashes) - but rather almost a synthetic intellectual equivalent....” (Inventory #: 16332J)