From the moment he met her, the English actor, writer and director, Simon Callow, was enthralled by Peggy Ramsay, theatrical literary agent, patron, muse and seminal figure in London theatre from the 1950s to 1980s. Their mutual fascination rapidly became "a passionate friendship", in which shared artistic enthusiasms transcended their age difference (he in his 30s, she in her 70s) and his homosexuality.
While not consummated, their relationship had all the obsessive elements of a grand sexual affair, fuelled by showerings of gifts and daily correspondence. Peggy Ramsay had fallen heavily in love with Callow and was jealous of his partnerhips with men. Yet Callow never deceived or manipulated her, or exploited her love for him; he received it as an unexpected, humbling, gift. At first his memoir of their friendship threatens to be unbearably lush, luvvie and self-regarding, but as it progresses, taking the form of a delicately wrought epistolary novel (using real letters), the mirrored surface cracks, pierced by Callow's capacity for unflinching self-examination. Despite the fact that he placed Ramsay's packed life and extraordinary, diva-like persona at the centre of this book, it is Callow's own generosity of spirit that lingers in the memory.
"There was no sense in her life of a continuity of love; no figure in it for her like my grandmother, who had drawn me to her great warm bosom during all those crucial years of infancy and childhood. Peggy held her parents and her brother in scant regard. For her mother she reserved her particular scorn: she was vain, inconsistent, pretentious. `The thing I shall never, never forgive her for,' Peggy would say, `is that she made out that we got our clothes at Marshall and Snelgrove, whereas actually they came from Swan and Edgar. Such a small lie, so petty. I despised her for it.' "
From Love is Where it Falls, by Simon Callow