The New York Times has announced the death of Robert Craft at the age of 92. Craft was, “adviser and steward” to composer Igor Stravinsky and arranged a meeting between Stravinsky and Waugh in 1949. The wives of both men as well as Craft himself were in attendance. This took place in New York City at the beginning of Waugh’s lecture tour of North America. The meeting, which was an eventful one, was later described by Craft in an article in Harper’s Bazaar (December 1968) that was summarized by Martin Stannard in Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966, pp. 286-87. Craft later included his description of the encounter in a memoir in Down a Path of Wonder (2006), including some details about his subsequent correspondence with Waugh. See review from EWNS, 39.2, pp. 25-27. Craft also attended Waugh’s lecture at the New York Town Hall venue, the first of the 1949 tour, and described it in his memoir. The obituary in the Sunday Telegraph quotes Craft’s description of Waugh (“ruddy, pudgy, smooth-skinned and surprisingly short”) as one of several colorful anecdotes of the celebrities he had met.
