Esther

1954 · réf. 3618 — London: W. H. Allen 1954. FIRST UK EDITION INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR. 8vo. pp. 541. Original red cloth spine lettered in gilt. White marks to front board. Edges gently tobacco-toned faint liquid stain to top and leading edges plus top corner of front pastedown. Inscribed by Wilson in blue biro to ffep: "To Esther Arthur with the love & admiration of Edmund W. April 24 1954 Paris." Else clean and tight. Very good Very good An affectionately inscribed first UK edition copy of Edmund Wilson's Five Plays presented in Paris in the year of publication to his close friend and key but now little known queer figure of the New York intelligentsia: "To Esther Arthur with the love & admiration of Edmund W."; a copy that speaks to an important mid-century American literary friendship with Wilson "one of the few people who could match her Arthur in both learned wit and alcohol intake" indeed according to the scintillating Terry Castle "one of the odd things about Murphy and Wilson . is how much they looked like each other: the same penetrating separated-at-birth expression tight small mouths and grapey dark eyes" Castle 2012. Alongside Dorothy Parker Edmund Wilson and Esther Arthur formerly Murphy and Strachey 1897-1962 were fixtures of 1950s New York intelligentsia: "A profusely erudite New York intellectual she Arthur talked and talked dazzling her listeners with her vast memory her extravagant verbal style and her inventive renderings of the past" yet her brilliance rather like Dorothy Wilde's was of the moment and mostly failed to materialise in written form: her "particular tragedy was to have an alcohol-saturated writer's block of mammoth proportions and lifelong duration" Castle 2012. Like Wilde Esther Murphy as she was then spent much of the interwar period in France living the high life on the French Riviera alongside her brother and sister-in-law the models and dedicatees of Tender is the Night and the Fitzgeralds as well as frequenting the salons of Natalie Clifford Barney and Gertrude Stein: she featured as Bounding Bess in Djuna Barnes' acerbic satire of Sapphic Parisian circles Ladies Almanack 1928. Arthur followed her first marriage to the British Labour politician John Strachey with a second to Chester Arthur III the "notoriously gay" grandson of the 21st American president who had appeared as Thorne in POOL's Borderline in 1930 and later became an astrologist and gay rights activist with connections to the Beat generation. Wilson observed of the match: "for Esther to have married the grandson of Arthur means almost what it would have meant for Proust to have made an alliance with the Guermantes". Terry Castle 2012 'You better not tell me you forgot' London Review of Books vol. 34: no. 18. W. H. Allen hardcover