cover image ON THE WING: A Young American Abroad

ON THE WING: A Young American Abroad

Nora Sayre, ON THE WING: A Young American Abroad

With elegance and panache, Sayre (Previous Convictions) tells of her years in London during the second half of the 1950s, when she was 22 and looking for experience to use in a writing career. The daughter of parents who had been part of the New York literary scene in the 1920s and '30s, Sayre was soon taken under the wings of such figures among London's intelligentsia as Hungarian-born Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon), the New Yorker reporter A.J. Liebling, British literary critic John Davenport, British editor and critic Cyril Connolly and the leftists, dissidents and blacklisted Americans who gathered around screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart and journalist Ella Winter at their house in Hampstead. She also became friends with the actress Mai Zetterling and her lover, actor Tyrone Power. All these people became her extended family, and, she claims, gave her guidance, although often unintended. She paints colorful personal portraits—for example, Davenport fussing about what his young protégé should read, write and eat; the portly Liebling waddling down the street on his way to his next gourmet meal. But where she excels is in finding the connections, both then and now, between "the tidal waves of the 20th century and how they affected private life." As a child in America, she was largely unconscious of WWII, but in England, it was impossible to ignore its Cold War legacy. As she gains insight to the private Koestler, for example, she more keenly appreciates the relationship between his post-Communist indictments of Stalin's regime and his misogyny. But this is not a dark book; in fact, Sayre dislikes the tendency among memoirists to be "wretched," spewing "buckets of boohoo." Instead, she presents an entertaining and fluent coming-of-age story that will delight literary enthusiasts both young and old. (June)