That someone can write is no guarantee that they can talk or that meeting them would be worthwhile. “I think like a genius,” said Vladimir Nabokov, “I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.” And when Marcel Proust met James Joyce, their whole talk, the latter remembered, “consisted solely of the word ‘No.’ Proust asked me if I knew the duc du so-and-so. I said, ‘No.’” Asked if he had read Ulysses, Proust likewise replied, “No.” “The situation,” Joyce recalled, “was impossible.” But the literary scene has no shortage of Boswells, eager to hobnob with greater writers. John Walsh, the Sunday Times’s erstwhile literary editor, has now written Circus of Dreams, wherein he chronicles how he inserted himself into the finest literary circles of ‘80s London.
