Nora Sayre

Nora Clemens Sayre, writer: born Hamilton, Bermuda 20 September 1932; married 1957 Robert Neild (marriage dissolved 1961); died New York 8 August 2001.

A critic of culture, a reviewer of movies (for The New York Times in the 1970s), a teacher of writing (at Columbia from 1981 for many years), but above all a writer of very particular prose, the American commentator Nora Sayre – by descending on England with potent letters of introduction – established in her twenties an observation post in mid-Atlantic of unique purview.

She was born in Bermuda. She lived high in Cheyne Walk. Her Manhattan apartment was in the East 70s without an elevator. On no money, valiantly getting by, in a chaos of documents and books and teabags, she worked on pieces that spanned, if they did not reconcile, the differences between the two countries: politics, social issues, but mostly the feel of things. The books of engagingly mingled recollection and commentary which she later wrote – Sixties Going on Seventies (1973), Previous Convictions (1995) – distinctly helped to define the special relationship.

Devoted to New York, with which complex metropolis she enjoyed a lifelong marriage, Sayre made an intermittent home in London, with the literary brotherhood of which she engaged in a lifetime's affair. She was as heartily at ease with the New Statesman, whose American correspondent she was between 1965 and 1970, as with such paragons of radical journalism as the Nation and the Progressive in the United States, which were the outlets of her analysis in later years, as her leftish inheritance of view bit even more deeply into her middle age than it had dominated her youth.

The generation of her parents had bequeathed her McCarthyism. In London she was magnetised by the Hampstead house, once occupied by Ramsay MacDonald, where the banished Donald Ogden Stewart (the screenwriter whose prime credit was The Philadelphia Story) lived with his journalist wife Ella Winter. Here was socialism in exile. Here at lunch every Sunday she sat next to notoriety, if not enlightenment: a Mitford sister, a man imitating Tynan who turned out to be Ken, Katharine Hepburn dashing out to weed flower-beds, the Berliner Ensemble eating fruit-cake.

Meanwhile, not all of them altruistic, her other mentors in England were Arthur Koestler ("London is the salvation of Americans") and Cyril Connolly, who puffily asked her in a taxi what her surname meant and was told "soothsayer": collapse of stout party. Her nippy prose gives these giants short but fair shrift. Sayre's nutshell of the 1950s is well worth cracking by this century's readers. She also endeared herself by doting on gossip.

An able reporter, having learnt the hard end of the business from her father, The New Yorker's Joel Sayre, and such influential friends of her girlhood as A.J. Liebling and Edmund Wilson, Sayre was a well-trained exemplar of writing it the way it was, tough and true. In her lighter manner, also inherited, sparkled the wit and gaiety of the round table at the Algonquin.

She always had style, which rose above deadlines while always meeting them. Yet her books came at long intervals, often fuelled by the peace of the writers' retreat at Yaddo, in upstate New York. All her work including the latest – On the Wing (2001), an account of her 1950s brush with the famous in London (Sayre dripped names but never dropped them) – springs from being torn between two uncommon cultures, and creating oneself out of the clash.

She had the gift which she attributed to Edmund Wilson: a "talent for pursuing a topic until it was driven into a corner". She also had that degree of professional dash which James Thurber, for whom she worked as a researcher, characterised in an unforgettable bit of poker-work for any writer's wall: "Don't get it right, get it written."

Between the lines of Nora Sayre's work is a history of mid-century attitudes, the blocks and disorders that hit both writing and politics, the alcohol of power and fame, the few spots where sanity might sometimes be found – and reported on. Somewhere Sayre quotes S.J. Perelman, that prince of New Yorker New Yorkers, as sending these lines to friends one Christmas: "Beware of dogmas backed by faith, / Steer clear of conflict until death. / Keep going; never stop; sit tight; / Read something luminous at night."

Those humorous and tolerant lines bring her at once back to life.

David Hughes