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Bloomsbury nights: being, food, and love.

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We'd already spoken earlier, but the conversation gave me little sense of who she was. I'd found some people who knew of her but no one who'd met her in person. On the phone she'd been high-spirited but guarded, informative but furtive, too. Normally, when someone spends more than a couple of minutes on the phone with you they drop some sort of hint as to where you stand with them. Nora Josephson gave me no such hint. I was also dying to know what she looked like.

I'd emailed her some sample questions from the interview I'd conduct when we finally met face to face. She replied soon after:

From: Nora Josephson To: Peter Garnett Date: Sept 8, 2005 Subject: re More questions On September 6, 2005, Peter Garnett wrote: > As he's been described to me, your > great-grandfather knew many of his prominent > contemporaries. Can you tell me some of > the famous people you're reasonably sure > he knew? Dear Mr. Garnett: Well, the media do love famous names, and I'm determined that my great-great-grandfather (yes, it's 2 greats) will finally receive the recognition he deserves. I detest name-dropping, but if that's what I need to do to secure his place in history I'm prepared to bite the bit. Fritz Josephson's friends and acquaintances included Brecht, Stravinsky, Thomas Mann, Niels Bohr, and George Grosz. Through Grosz he came to know Kathe Koll-witz, Edvard Munch, and other well-known expressionists. Twice he had coffee with Sigmund Freud. Virginia Woolf introduced him to Bertrand Russell, and Lord Russell soon passed him along to John Maynard Keynes. Fritz read Keynes's books avidly and was greatly influenced by them. He also knew the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein quite well and, less well, Ludwig's older brother, Paul. You may remember that Paul Wittgenstein was a celebrated concert pianist who lost his right arm in the Great War. It's widely known that Paul personally commissioned Ravel's Concerto for the Left Hand, but what's little known is that Fritz Josephson was the one who brought Ravel and Wittgenstein together. Fritz attended the Concerto's premiere in Paris, at which an audience that included a virtual Who's Who of The Arts shed copious tears over the desolation that the Great War had left in its wake. > Why did Fritz remain in relative > obscurity? You're generous in saying "relative." At isolated moments in his life Fritz might have stumbled into the outermost perimeter of the limelight, but as far as history is concerned he's a nonentity. What held him back? Partly timidity, partly an intense aversion to self-promotion. Perhaps more than anything it was fear of being labeled a quack. He saw what was becoming of people like Wilhelm Reich and decided he preferred no fame at all to the kind of fame that Reich achieved by touting orgone boxes. Remember: Fritz lived in an era in which theories, systems--what everyone today calls "paradigms"--were sprouting up all over the place. I think he felt his own work would be seen as marginal at best and probably wanted to spare himself the indignity of appearing ridiculous. > How's the weather in London? Better today than in New York (courtesy of the Internet). But for the most part London's been London. Yours, Nora Josephson

I called Bill Van Home, who'd put me onto Fritz Josephson in the first place. When I let him know that I'd contacted Nora Josephson, he was delighted. "I never imagined this would interest you so much," he said. He recalled the dinner party last month at which Josephson's name had come up only incidentally.

"As did any number of other names," I said. "I wish I'd had a pad to write them down."

"And do what with them?" From his phone voice one would never guess Van Home was pushing ninety.

"I'd figure something out," I said. "I've worked in the print media all my life. We're trained to name a lot of names."

"Print media? Is that what you call it now? Back when I worked for Time-Life and the Britannica, it was still called 'publishing.' Even magazines were publishing. In...

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