Literary Criticism: A series of close encounters with authors provides a direct route to the heart of the writing process
Chances are that George Plimpton, when he died in his sleep in September 2003, drifted away mid-chat with Ernest Hemingway. Or with Dorothy Parker. Or with Bishop, Bellow or Borges. He might have been asking a novelist exactly how many pencils they sharpened in the morning before getting down to work, or quizzing a poet about the shadow of Ezra Pound, or tapping a screenwriter for Hollywood scandal.
The Paris Review, which Plimpton had founded 50 years previously (he had just put the finishing touches on the anniversary issue), was a magazine born of, and devoted to, the fullest and frankest of conversations about writing; through its lengthy question-and-answer sessions with the most important writers of the day, it had ultimately shaped the emergence of such discussions as a distinctive literary genre. Plimpton's literary parties in his Upper East Side apartment (he moved the magazine to New York in the early years) were the stuff of legend; the interview pages of the Review often brimmed with the same raucous spirit, with the same glorious irreverence, while remaining ultimately serious pieces of writing.
Forster, Faulkner, O'Connor and Capote were among the interviewees within the magazine's first five years; by 2003, an invaluable archive of encounters had been built. With Plimpton's death, it seemed likely that this rich vein of conversation had been abruptly stilled. Who could match his thumbprint, swirling with what the magazine itself, referring to that archive of interviews, dubbed the very "DNA of literature"? Nobody, of course. Nobody can replace Plimpton. And, thankfully, Philip Gourevitch, the author and journalist who was appointed editor of the magazine in 2005, hasn't tried. Instead, he has sustained the spirit of the Review while attuning both its energy and its discernment to the contemporary literary and political scenes. The format has been revitalised; a graphic novella is now as likely to appear as a John Ashbery poem. And as for interviews, Gourevitch has not just continued the tradition but expanded and arguably enriched it; alongside the longer interviews, the magazine now features a shorter Q&A session with unusual figures outside the literary world. And then there is this book.
A COLLECTION OF 16 Paris Review interviews from 1956 to 2005, this first volume in what is planned, by Gourevitch, as a three-volume compilation, is indispensable, not so much because of the quality of the authors it includes - although that quality is very high - or because of the intelligence of the conversations it recreates on the page. It is indispensable because of two things: the uncluttered route it provides straight to the nervous heart of the writerly process, and the deep, warming, indulgent pleasure to be had from the encounters that it shares with its reader.
These are long, satisfying encounters, with none of the agitated distraction that can sometimes come across in the question and answer format, as questioner struggles to keep subject on topic, and with none of the sense of clipped or out-of-context quotes that can sometimes characterise the more traditional profile style of interview, in which the voice of the journalist can often overpower the voice of the subject. From these interviews, whether through digression or directness, the subject's voice emanates so vividly and so memorably it's as though they were in the reader's own room. Closer, in fact - as though they were talking and thinking and laughing and sniping through the echo-chambers of the reader's own dreams.
That the timbre of these voices, the essence of these characters, comes through so crisply, each one unique - the wackiness of Parker, the grouchiness of Hemingway, the mischievousness of Borges, the calmness of Eliot, the openness of Bishop, the earnestness of Capote, the seriousness of Bellow and Didion - is perhaps surprising given that, as Gourevitch points out in his introduction, the Paris Review interviews are conducted as collaborations with the interviewees, in a departure from typical journalistic practice. Before the interview goes to press, the writer is given the text to review and revise if they wish; the intent, says Gourevitch "is not to catch writers off guard", saying something untrue or unconsidered out of awkwardness or anxiety, out of the need to fend off silence or the impression of uncertainty.
A JOURNALIST OF Gourevitch's seriousness (he wrote We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, the award-winning account of the Rwandan genocide) must, one imagines, have felt some resistance to this system, with its apparent vulnerability to tinkering by image-conscious authors. Yet, excepting one case, its pawprints are nowhere visible on the interviews gathered here; the rhythms of speech, the tics and hesitancies and little indiscretions of conversation, reach us in all their tarnished glory. And, of course, in their bluntness: asked what the source of her work is, Parker says simply, "need of money, dear". "Heavens, girl, can't you see I like to talk?" blurts Capote. "The better the writers, the less they will speak about what they have written themselves," says Hemingway, who is wonderfully spiky and resistant in interview with Plimpton himself.
As for that one exception to the self-editing rule, it is strangely - and pleasingly - just as revealing of its subject as are any of its less stage-managed counterparts. Having been interviewed four times by Review editors over the course of a decade (many of the Review interviews take place in more than one sitting), Kurt Vonnegut decides, eventually, "with utmost tenderness", to interview himself. But he is not easy on himself; he does not let himself away with any shoddy answers. He tells himself his own jokes were rubbish, for one thing. He also coaxes out of himself an unforgettable account of the bombing of Dresden, where he was a prisoner of war. And he talks about his craft, and about questions of form and style, as do all of the writers gathered in this volume, in the plainest, most lucid, way, in a way that is an education in itself.
Read Bellow on realism, read Capote on style, read former New Yorker and Knopf editor Robert Gottlieb and his authors (interviewed in tandem with him) on the fascinating mechanics of editing and rewriting, or Billy Wilder on the trials of the screen, or Didion on the tension between research and creation. Read them all. Then read them again. You'll want to; you'll already be missing their company.
Belinda McKeon is a writer and journalist based in New York. She teaches on the Undergraduate Writing Programme at Columbia University, where she is taking an MFA in Fiction
The Paris Review Interviews, Vol I By the Editors of the Paris Review. Introduction by Philip Gourevitch Picador, 510pp. £16.99