A peek into the minds of great writers
April 1, 2007 | 12:00am
THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS, VOL.1
Picador Books, 510 pages
Available at Powerbooks
Holden Caulfield had his way of judging a good book. If it made him want to "call up the author on the phone, just to talk about things," then that was a good book.
Some books you don’t want to end. You find the characters so interesting, you just want to go on reading and reading.
You can’t get much more interesting than T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Rebecca West, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut and Joan Didion. Those are some of the writers who share their views on the literary craft in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1. And it’s the next best thing to discovering a new work by each of them.
Since the early ’50s, The Paris Review has published great fiction, but it’s also developed a reputation for probing, marathon-length interviews  a template that directly influenced Hefner’s Playboy interviews and Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. The Vol. 1 collection runs from Hemingway’s occasional posturing (he writes standing up, bobbing before his typewriter like a prizefighter) to his now-famous comparison of writing to an iceberg: you must gain deep knowledge about your characters, but reveal only the crucial, telling detail.
Truman Capote is shown, even before his huge literary fame from In Cold Blood, to be a precise and dedicated chronicler of himself. His comments seem etched into the air with a deliberate eye toward quotability. And he’s entertaining as hell, most of the time.
Dorothy Parker is discovered in her midtown New York apartment, circa 1957, still witty as a whip, but doubtful of her literary legacy. She regrets not leaving behind a greater body of work, but shares snappy anecdotes about her golden Algonquin Round Table days. On the alleged ruinous effect of Hollywood on writers, she says, "Nobody on earth writes down. Garbage though they turn out, Hollywood writers aren’t writing down. That is their best."
Indeed, Hollywood is a big, shadowy figure lurking behind many of these interviews  a place where writers claim to be slumming for money, and which often sucks the juice out of them, but also results sometimes in miraculous work. Crusty old director/screenwriter Billy Wilder reminisces about writing hits like Sabrina, Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard  and recalls bigshot writers on the studio lots like William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He notes they didn’t last in Hollywood because they never took the craft of writing movies seriously. "We would see Fitzgerald in the canteen every day, but he never asked a single question about the movies," Wilder recalls. (Oddly, Fitzgerald did produce two great books about Hollywood  the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, and the thin but hilarious collection, The Pat Hobby Stories, which, tellingly, he wrote as short magazine pieces for money.)
Other novelists who succumbed to Hollywood are Richard Price, who won an Oscar nod for his screenplay for The Color of Money before developing a serious cocaine addiction that stalled his writing ("I had to do a line to write a line"). Then there’s hard-boiled novelist James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, who says that "writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It’s not all inspirational."
What emerges in each interview is a kind of edited reality, yet one which often serves up unexpected insights. Saul Bellow talks about the inner "primitive communicator" within all writers, sounding almost schizophrenic, until you realize his deeply personal aesthetic has resulted in brilliant, resonant works. An interviewer asks Robert Stone, author of A Flag for Sunrise and Dog Soldiers, if writing is easy for him, and he blurts out, "It’s goddamn hard. Nobody really cares if you do it or not." The comment sounds self-pitying, but it strikes at the heart of the loneliness within each writer.
We learn in the introduction that the Paris Review interviews follow a somewhat unusual route: authors are interviewed, often without tape recorders (an assistant is on hand to take scrupulous notes); the first draft of the interview is then sent to the authors for correction or amplification, then goes back to the editors. This process can continue for years before the interviews see light of day, a method that brings gives new meaning to the idea of "literary journalism."
One of the most interesting interviews, surprisingly, is with Robert Gottlieb, a famous Knopf editor who birthed some of the biggest books of the last 40 years  everything from Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 to Katherine Graham’s Pulitzer-winning memoir. An avid reader, he has the instinct to correct any text ("There are bad lines in King Lear," he muses). His comments are interspersed with those of authors he’s worked with, and you begin to understand what he means about the "emotional transference" that takes place when writers submit themselves wholly to an editor. Such lifetime nurturing by editors is all but dead in today’s publishing world, Gottlieb says, replaced by lunch meetings and multimillion-dollar book deals.
A session with reclusive poet Jack Gilbert reveals his love of reading his work to audiences  and his unabashed ego. ("I didn’t care about the audience. It was a chance to be alive, to experience the importance of being alive.") Joan Didion reflects on her state of mind during the writing of Play It As It Lays, The White Album and her most recent best-seller, The Year of Magical Thinking, which documents the deaths of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter  both within the same year.
What comes through in all of this literary gabbing is a surging energy  the pulse of writers, their undisguised need to be understood, to be heard. It’s often true that writers are not gifted at public speaking; their interviews can reveal a paucity of self-knowledge, or an overabundance of ego. But the Paris Interviews, more often than not, capture something ephemeral: you feel yourself dipping into something buried and deep, perhaps akin to Bellow’s "primitive communicator"  something that might not be art by itself, but which creates a yearning and an appetite for art.
Picador Books, 510 pages
Available at Powerbooks
Holden Caulfield had his way of judging a good book. If it made him want to "call up the author on the phone, just to talk about things," then that was a good book.
Some books you don’t want to end. You find the characters so interesting, you just want to go on reading and reading.
You can’t get much more interesting than T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Rebecca West, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut and Joan Didion. Those are some of the writers who share their views on the literary craft in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1. And it’s the next best thing to discovering a new work by each of them.
Since the early ’50s, The Paris Review has published great fiction, but it’s also developed a reputation for probing, marathon-length interviews  a template that directly influenced Hefner’s Playboy interviews and Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. The Vol. 1 collection runs from Hemingway’s occasional posturing (he writes standing up, bobbing before his typewriter like a prizefighter) to his now-famous comparison of writing to an iceberg: you must gain deep knowledge about your characters, but reveal only the crucial, telling detail.
Truman Capote is shown, even before his huge literary fame from In Cold Blood, to be a precise and dedicated chronicler of himself. His comments seem etched into the air with a deliberate eye toward quotability. And he’s entertaining as hell, most of the time.
Dorothy Parker is discovered in her midtown New York apartment, circa 1957, still witty as a whip, but doubtful of her literary legacy. She regrets not leaving behind a greater body of work, but shares snappy anecdotes about her golden Algonquin Round Table days. On the alleged ruinous effect of Hollywood on writers, she says, "Nobody on earth writes down. Garbage though they turn out, Hollywood writers aren’t writing down. That is their best."
Indeed, Hollywood is a big, shadowy figure lurking behind many of these interviews  a place where writers claim to be slumming for money, and which often sucks the juice out of them, but also results sometimes in miraculous work. Crusty old director/screenwriter Billy Wilder reminisces about writing hits like Sabrina, Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard  and recalls bigshot writers on the studio lots like William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He notes they didn’t last in Hollywood because they never took the craft of writing movies seriously. "We would see Fitzgerald in the canteen every day, but he never asked a single question about the movies," Wilder recalls. (Oddly, Fitzgerald did produce two great books about Hollywood  the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, and the thin but hilarious collection, The Pat Hobby Stories, which, tellingly, he wrote as short magazine pieces for money.)
Other novelists who succumbed to Hollywood are Richard Price, who won an Oscar nod for his screenplay for The Color of Money before developing a serious cocaine addiction that stalled his writing ("I had to do a line to write a line"). Then there’s hard-boiled novelist James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, who says that "writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It’s not all inspirational."
What emerges in each interview is a kind of edited reality, yet one which often serves up unexpected insights. Saul Bellow talks about the inner "primitive communicator" within all writers, sounding almost schizophrenic, until you realize his deeply personal aesthetic has resulted in brilliant, resonant works. An interviewer asks Robert Stone, author of A Flag for Sunrise and Dog Soldiers, if writing is easy for him, and he blurts out, "It’s goddamn hard. Nobody really cares if you do it or not." The comment sounds self-pitying, but it strikes at the heart of the loneliness within each writer.
We learn in the introduction that the Paris Review interviews follow a somewhat unusual route: authors are interviewed, often without tape recorders (an assistant is on hand to take scrupulous notes); the first draft of the interview is then sent to the authors for correction or amplification, then goes back to the editors. This process can continue for years before the interviews see light of day, a method that brings gives new meaning to the idea of "literary journalism."
One of the most interesting interviews, surprisingly, is with Robert Gottlieb, a famous Knopf editor who birthed some of the biggest books of the last 40 years  everything from Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 to Katherine Graham’s Pulitzer-winning memoir. An avid reader, he has the instinct to correct any text ("There are bad lines in King Lear," he muses). His comments are interspersed with those of authors he’s worked with, and you begin to understand what he means about the "emotional transference" that takes place when writers submit themselves wholly to an editor. Such lifetime nurturing by editors is all but dead in today’s publishing world, Gottlieb says, replaced by lunch meetings and multimillion-dollar book deals.
A session with reclusive poet Jack Gilbert reveals his love of reading his work to audiences  and his unabashed ego. ("I didn’t care about the audience. It was a chance to be alive, to experience the importance of being alive.") Joan Didion reflects on her state of mind during the writing of Play It As It Lays, The White Album and her most recent best-seller, The Year of Magical Thinking, which documents the deaths of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter  both within the same year.
What comes through in all of this literary gabbing is a surging energy  the pulse of writers, their undisguised need to be understood, to be heard. It’s often true that writers are not gifted at public speaking; their interviews can reveal a paucity of self-knowledge, or an overabundance of ego. But the Paris Interviews, more often than not, capture something ephemeral: you feel yourself dipping into something buried and deep, perhaps akin to Bellow’s "primitive communicator"  something that might not be art by itself, but which creates a yearning and an appetite for art.
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