INTERVIEWS AT WORK:

READING THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS 1953-1978

by

Kelley Penfield Lewis

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

at

Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia August 2008

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IV TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES viii

ABSTRACT x

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xi

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 ORGANIZATION AND METHODOLOGY 6

CHAPTER 2 THE EVOLUTION OF THE LITERARY INTERVIEW 14

2.1 WHY CONSIDER THE LITERARY INTERVIEW? 14

2.2 LITERARY INTERVIEW: TEXT, PARATEXT, EPITEXT 17

2.3 HISTORY OF THE LITERARY INTERVIEW 25 2.3.1 Classical Antiquity: Plato's Socratic Dialogues 27 2.3.2 Dialogue in the Enlightenment 35 2.3.3 The Literary Conversation as Life Story: Boswell & Johnson 37 2.3.4 The Growing Popularity of the Conversation 43 2.3.5 Beginnings of the Literary Interview: America and France 45 2.3.6 The Paris Review 49 2.3.7 Post-Paris Review and into the Twenty-first Century 51

CHAPTER 3 THE HISTORY OF THE PARIS REVIEW 63

3.1 HISTORIES OF THE PARIS REVIEW 63 3.1.1 Founding Anecdotes 66 3.1.2 Early Content and Attitude 69 3.1.3 The Paris Review Design 77 3.1.4 The Scene: Paris in the 1950s 81 3.1.5 Early Operations and Adventures 86 3.1.6 Change and Growing Pains 89 3.1.7 The New York Scene 91 3.2 THE PEOPLE OF THE PARIS REVIEW 95 3.2.1 George Plimpton: Larger than Life 99

3.3 ENTERPRISE IN THE SERVICE OF ART 104

3.4 THE CIA CONNECTION 114

3.5 THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS 124

V 3.6 HONOURS AND READER RECEPTION 128

3.7 THE NEW PARIS REVIEW 141

CHAPTER 4 INSIDE THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW 144

4.1 THE PROCESS OF THE MODERN LITERARY INTERVIEW 144

4.2 THE WRITER'S AGENDA: MYSTERY, MONEY, MYTH? 154

4.3 THE UNIQUE PROCESS OF THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW: COLLABORATION 161

4.4 CONSTRUCTING THE AUTHOR: EDITORIAL STRATEGIES 165 4.4.1 Collaboration or Counterfeit?: Norman Mailer 166 4.4.2 To Cut or Not to Cut: Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Ralph Ellison 172 4.4.3 What is Hidden: John Berryman 179 4.4.4 Interview as Domestic Drama: William Carlos Williams, Jack Kerouac 182 4.4.5 Interview with a Dead Man: John Steinbeck 189 4.4.6 Editors, Interviewers, Egos: W.H. Auden 192

4.5 CONTROL, CHARACTER AND THE CONFLICTED SUBJECT: VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND ERNEST HEMINGWAY 196

CHAPTER 5 THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW IN THE WORLD 218

5.1 THE NATURE AND LIMITATIONS OF THE MODERN LITERARY INTERVIEW 218

5.2 THE LITERARY INTERVIEW IN THE FIELD OF LITERARY PRODUCTION 225

5.3 CELEBRITY, POWER AND PERSONA 237

5.4 PERFORMING THE PUBLIC SELF: AUTHORIAL PERSONA AND THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW 245 5.4.1 An Ornery "Papa": Ernest Hemingway's 1958 Paris Review Interview 248 5.4.2 The Perfect Yankee: Robert Frost's 1960 Paris Review Interview 260 5.4.3 A Lady Composed: Marianne Moore's 1961 Paris Review Interview 278

CHAPTER 6 READING THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW: THE SEARCH FOR AUTHORIAL INTENTION 293

6.1 AUTHORIAL INTENTION AND THE WAY WE READ 293

6.2 THE INTENTION DEBATES 297 6.2.1 The Romantic Era: the Poet is the Poem 297 6.2.2 T. S. Eliot: A Move Towards Impersonality 301 6.2.3 Personality and Intention: C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard 305 6.2.4 An Absolute Prohibition: Wimsatt and Beardsley 310 6.2.5 New Criticism and Anti-Intentionalism 317

VI 6.2.6 Post-Structuralism and Intention 319 6.2.7 Intention and Meaning: The Hermeneutic Position 322 6.2.8 From the Author to the Reader 324 6.3 A RECONSIDERATION OF AUTHORIAL INTENTION THROUGH THE INTERVIEW 329 6.3.1 William Faulkner: "I don't know what inspiration is" 330 6.3.2 Ernest Hemingway: "Only death can stop it" 337 6.3.3 Marianne Moore: "I was just trying to be honourable" 344 6.3.4 William Burroughs "I had nothing else to do" 349 6.3.5 T. S. Eliot: "I don't know until I find I want to do it" 355

CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION 368

BIBLIOGRAPHY 378

vn LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1. "Public and Authorial Epitexts." Genette, Paratexts 352 19

Fig. 2. Cover of The Paris Review 1.1 (Spring 1953) 79

Fig. 3. The Paris Review booth at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair 108

Fig. 4. Untitled, Silkscreen print by Claes Oldenburg, 1965. Edition of 150. Untitled, by Willem deKooning, 1979. "The Paris Review Print Series." The Paris Review. 20 Jan. 2008 Ill

Fig. 5. Display Ad 1021 -No Title. The New York Times 6 Nov. 1966: 356 113

Fig. 6. Print advertisement for Peck & Peck Department Store. Undated. Rpt. in Anderson 140

Fig. 7. Edited Interview Draft, from Norman Mailer, Draft of Interview by Stephen Marcus. Corrected ts. (Corrections by Mailer). Mailer Interview file 1 part 2. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY 167

Fig. 8. Handwritten insertions by Mailer, from Norman Mailer, Draft of Interview by Stephen Marcus. Corrected ts. (Corrections by Mailer). Mailer Interview file 1 part 2. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY 169

Fig. 9. Handwritten insertions by Mailer, from Norman Mailer, Draft of Interview by Stephen Marcus. Corrected ts. (Corrections by Mailer). Mailer Interview file 1 part 2. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY 170

Fig. 10. Selected handwritten insertions by Malamud, from Bernard Malamud, Draft of Interview by Daniel Stern. Corrected ts. Malamud Interview file. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY 171

Fig. 11. Selected handwritten insertions by Malamud, from Bernard Malamud, Draft of Interview by Daniel Stern. Corrected ts. Malamud Interview file. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY 171

Fig. 12. Selected handwritten insertions by Malamud, from Bernard Malamud, Draft of Interview by Daniel Stern. Corrected ts. Malamud Interview file. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY 172

Fig. 13. p. 17. Selected handwritten deletions (hand unknown), from Charles Olson, Draft of Interview by Gerard Malanga. Corrected ts. Olson Interview file 2. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY 177

vm Fig. 14. p. 20. Selected handwritten deletions (hand unknown), from Charles Olson, Draft of Interview by Gerard Malanga. Corrected ts. Olson Interview file 2. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY 177

Fig. 15. Edited Interview Draft, from John Berryman, Draft of Interview by Peter Stitt. Corrected ts. Berryman Interview file 1. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY 180

Fig. 16. Edited Interview Draft, from John Berryman, Draft of Interview by Peter Stitt. Corrected ts. Berryman Interview file 1. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY 180

Fig. 17. Selected handwritten insertions by Plimpton, from Jack Kerouac, Draft of Interview by Ted Berrigan. Corrected ts. Kerouac Interview file 3. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY 188

Fig. 18. Selected handwritten insertions by Plimpton, from Jack Kerouac, Draft of Interview by Ted Berrigan. Corrected ts. Kerouac Interview file 3. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY 188

Fig. 19. Page 4 (numbered 3) of 4, from Ernest Hemingway, Letter to George Plimpton. "3/5/54." Ms. Hemingway Interview file 3. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY 205

IX ABSTRACT

Mid-twentieth-century literary culture was dominated by the specialized language and method of the New Critics with their unprecedented focus on the text and the ascendancy of the critic over the writer. Most literary magazines and journals were publishing criticism while turning away from the authority of the writer. Founded in 1953, The Paris Review stood out in its determination to return attention to the artist through masses of original poetry and fiction and a feature that soon made it famous: the Paris Review interviews. Best known today in the Writers at Work anthologies, these conversations with writers such as T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway are highly praised by academic and popular audiences alike. The official subject of these exchanges is "The Art of Writing;" however, the subtext of these encounters is the meaning of authorship and the way that influence, inspiration, and intention work together. The Paris Review interviews are sites of the construction and conflict of authorship, persona, and performance and can play a critical role in the production of culture and meaning. The popularity of the interviews raises questions about authorial intention and why, despite what is known about the limitations of intentionalism, readers are still consistently drawn to the perspective of the writer. This project offers a series of approaches to reading the Paris Review interviews that can be applied to literary conversations more generally. The form and history of the literary interview and the Paris Review example are considered in detail with a focus on both the Review's official and "unauthorized" history for its first twenty-five years and its popular and critical response. Using archival materials only recently made public, individual interviews are dissected to uncover the machinations at work and the larger implications of the process and content of these conversations. Ultimately, this project establishes that the Paris Review interview, far from being an exercise in, as W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe Beardsley suggest, "consulting the oracle," can be a unique and fertile site for learning about how authors construct themselves and how intention is negotiated between readers, writers and texts.

x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was made possible with the help of my tirelessly encouraging and whip-smart supervisor, Len Diepeveen and the love of my inspiring husband, Brent. Early brainstorming conversations with Karin Cope and the close reading and interest of readers Trevor Ross, David Evans, Kathleen Cawsey, and Edward Bishop were also instrumental. Also, a special thanks to Radhika Jones at The Paris Review for her insight and cooperation, to the staff of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City for their assistance, and to Mary-Beth Maclsaac, the English Graduate Secretary, for her resourcefulness and warmth. I recognize and appreciate the financial support of a Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC) and a Killam Predoctoral Scholarship. All interview and epistolary passages, both published and unpublished, are the intellectual property of The Paris Review.

XI 1

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

The climate of mid-twentieth-century literary culture is often characterized as

"The Age of Criticism," a time when academics and New Critics dominated the reception of literature with a dedicated attention to the text and a new complexity of method and language. In criticism, any mention of extra-textual factors, such as politics, biography or the personality of the writer was frowned upon. Essays with prescriptive and authoritative titles such as "The Personal Heresy" (1939) and "The Intentional Fallacy"

(1946), followed by the works of New Critics such as Cleanth Brooks and others, paved the way for a new approach to reading that denounced any mention of the author, his biography, and especially, his motives or intentions. In the minds of readers and critics, the authority of the writer and the relationship between the author and the text were forever changed.

It was into this climate of authorial questioning that The Paris Review intrepidly stepped out. Founded in 1953 by three young American expats, The Paris Review both looked and read differently from most of the literary magazines of the period. With bold art gracing its cover and masses of original poetry and fiction, the Review contrasted with the decidedly academic content and staid feel and design of its competitors. While literary journals such as the Kenyon, Hudson and Sewanee Reviews were focusing on

criticism and turning away from the perspective and authority of the writer, The Paris

Review was determined to return attention to the artist. This commitment translated into a feature that soon made the Review famous: the much celebrated Paris Review interviews. 2

In a Paris Review interview, the writer became the authority once again, and readers couldn't get enough.

The Paris Review was legendarily misnamed; edited by Americans and filled with mostly American and English writers, the Review featured neither reviews nor the critical essays that were the mainstay of contemporaneous publications.1 Invited to write a preface for the Review's first issue, William Styron responded with a cheeky "Letter to an

Editor" marking out The Paris Review's aims: to remove "criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines" and to favour "the fiction and poetry of both established and new writers" rather than writing by "people who use words like

Zeitgeist. " Styron bemoaned the educational and cultural preoccupation with critics and criticism at the cost of ideas and creators and worried that literary magazines were "on the verge of doing away with literature ... by smothering it under the weight of learned chatter" (Styron, "Letter" 10-11).

Despite a self-professed commercialism, the Review wasn't so different from another little magazine 40 years earlier, The Little Review, whose motto was "making no compromise with public taste." The Paris Review quickly achieved a highbrow status that was not all gimmick: it was tied to its consistent eye for new talent. It was the first periodical to publish the work of Philip Roth, Terry Southern and Samuel Beckett, and under the editorship of Donald Hall, the early poems of Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, John

Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg and many more. The Review featured never-before-published

1 While The Paris Review still exists today, most of my research focuses on the early years of the publication (1953-1978). Consequently, I use the past tense in many of my references to the magazine. 3 journals, letters, new art, and essays by well-known names such as Picasso, Ezra Pound

and e. e. cummings, to name a few. The editors were also willing to take a risk on new, unknown writers when they saw quality. And yet, it was the interviews that became legendary; they both legitimized a much-maligned genre and set a standard for the form that still holds a position of prestige today, over 50 years later. Being asked to do a Paris

Review interview is the literary equivalent of having your band get on the cover of

Rolling Stone Magazine. It means, 'you've made it.'

Since its first issue, writer interviews have been a regular feature in The Paris

Review and are today best known in their anthologized form as the Writers at Work

series. These collections, often readers' first introduction to the interviews, are highly praised by academic and popular audiences alike. They present conversations with most of the major writers of the twentieth-century, including modernist giants such as T.S.

Eliot, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Marianne

Moore, Vladimir Nabokov, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. A far cry from

celebrity interviews, so often either antagonistic ambushes or worshipping spectacles,

Paris Review interviews were (and still are) always a collaboration: interviewers granted their subjects advance input on questions, often spent several days in visiting and

conversation, and engaged in lengthy back-and-forth editing. Most surprisingly, writers were given final approval of the finished manuscript of the exchange, and in most cases,

every word and line is scrutinized, making these interviews composed self-portraits, no less crafted than any other art form. Interviews are always accompanied by an image, either a drawing or a photograph of the interviewee, as well as a hand-written or corrected manuscript page by the subject, reinforcing the ties among name, image, 4 signature, personality and work, elements at the heart of celebrity construction. The collaborative process of the literary interview, including its heavily-edited methods of self-fashioning, underline the performative aspects of the Paris Review interviews and further complicate how we are to make sense of their revelations.

My first encounter with a Paris Review interview came long before I learned that the perspective of the author should not be considered the Holy Grail of literary interpretation. During my teens, I discovered a crumpled Writers at Work paperback in the dusty reaches of my parents' bookcase. I remember looking at it and thinking it must be a dull study of the profession of writing, a kind of manual for a career in words. As it didn't appeal, I left it alone until one night, desperate for some new reading, I devoured it in a single marathon midnight session. This collection of conversations with some of my favourite writers ably lodged itself in the back acres of my brain. From there, it would call out from time to time throughout my academic career. Often, when I struggled to understand a piece of literature or get a grasp on the perspective of a given writer, my mind would drift back to the revelations imparted in those spirited interviews on the "The

Art of Writing." These exchanges seemed to me to be secret sources of insight and inspiration, precious reserves of information unlike anything to be found in a literature textbook. I have since learned that my experience is not unusual; the Paris Review interviews quite often dwell somewhere in the peripheral imaginations of many of those who care about literature in one capacity or another. Somewhat surprisingly, in the

critical reading of my undergraduate and graduate studies, I found that even scholars

frequently turned to those very same conversations as sources of biographical, philosophical, technical or creative information. 5

Although my education in critical theory taught me that looking to the author for a key to her own writing is generally considered taboo in serious scholarly study, I could never quite shake the suspicion that there was something valuable, something uniquely useful about those literary interviews. If not as reliable sources of factual information, these collaborative works still possessed a power all their own, perhaps the power of performance, of fiction, or of debate. I needed to investigate further to articulate exactly what the Paris Review interviews reflected. Where did these interviews come from and what were they trying to accomplish? How could one use the information imparted in these intimate moments with some of the great minds of the twentieth century? I began to search for a way into these interviews, a way of reading them that would uncover the essence of what occurs both inside and beyond the conversations, as well as yield useful information and insight for other areas of literary study.

My research establishes the value and uniqueness of the Paris Review interview, and literary interviews more generally, as sources of study. The official subject of the

Paris Review exchanges is "The Art of Fiction" or "The Art of Poetry;" however, the

subtext of these encounters is the meaning of authorship and the way that influence, inspiration, and intention work together. As such, these conversations are rich mines of information on how major twentieth-century writers understand these concepts. The

Paris Review interviews are also extraordinary sites of the conception, construction and, quite often, conflict of authorship, persona, and performance and as such, can play a

critical role in the production of culture and meaning. The mere existence and popularity of the interviews also raise questions about authorial intention and why, despite what is 6 known about the limitations of intentionalism, readers are still consistently drawn to the perspective of the writer.

This project offers a series of approaches to reading the Paris Review interviews that can be applied to literary exchanges and conversations more generally. Both the general form and the history of the interview, and the specific incarnation of the Paris

Review example are examined. My focus is on the Review's official as well as

"unauthorized" history for its first twenty-five years with the support of archival materials only recently made public (including correspondence, edited proofs, and interview transcripts) and the popular and critical response to the magazine and its anthologies. Individual interviews are dissected to discover the machinations at work, and to draw conclusions about the larger implications of the process and content of these conversations.

1.1 ORGANIZATION AND METHODOLOGY

This study begins by setting down the history of the genre of the literary interview

(Chapter 2: "The Evolution of the Literary Interview"). One of the many surprises, and indeed opportunities, in my research came with the discovery that there had been scant prior scholarly attention to the literary interview. While the discipline of literary criticism has explored areas that overlap with and bear upon the interview, such as autobiography, life-writing, memoirs, performance, and essays, there is relatively little research in existence focusing on the subject as a discrete form. My close readings of examples of the literary interview reveal it to be a hybrid genre combining elements of criticism, 7 memoir, dialogue, essay, and even, at times, fiction. Its genealogical roots spread in all directions. Ancestors of the interview can be found as far back as the Socratic dialogues, and likely many more examples will be found by future scholars interested in the genre.

In this work, I trace a historical development of the literary interview that reflects its unique status and suggests tools for productively reading it in its modern form. This historical and cultural trajectory, with selected literary precedents, illuminates key features of the modern literary interview form. In turn, the critical approaches used for genres like the philosophical dialogue and literary conversation inform my choice of reading practices and interpretive strategies for my subsequent close readings of Paris

Review interviews. In addition, the history of the literary interview functions as a literature review for a subject which lacks its own substantial critical history.

The next chapter turns to the history of my specific subject, The Paris Review.

Chapter 3, "The History of The Paris Review, " was developed with the help of archival documents, published historical and biographical accounts, and unpublished research conducted by Dutch scholar Usha Wilburs. I also survey the critical and popular reception of the interview anthologies (the Writers at Work Series) and several Paris

Review retrospectives to establish the place of the Review and, specifically, its interviews, in the popular imagination.

The history of The Paris Review is essential for several reasons. Most notably, the critical and reception history of my main subject establishes it as the seminal twentieth- century example of the literary interview form, and demonstrates the reasons that it was able to rise to popular and critical prominence. The magazine's cultural and critical history is also largely unwritten, while differing accounts of its genesis and early years 8 have circulated over the years, creating a kind of Paris Review legend, well-known in

American literary circles. The Paris Review's cultural history, in turns colloquial, humourous, academic and philosophical, is a narrative that parallels the interviews themselves, effectively combining the factual with the anecdotal, the empirical with the fantastical. The story of The Paris Review draws on myriad sources to achieve its full impact, just as individual interviews expand the boundaries of what readers may consider evidence in literary study. Also, both the historical narrative of the magazine and its interviews emphasize the power of anecdote and storytelling, and the personalities and performance of their characters, encouraging readers to reconsider the importance of histories and publications that may seem non-professional. The Paris Review interview reflects the spirit of the magazine and the personalities of its editors and contributors, and it commands prestige and popularity through its hybrid mix of approaches to literature and its makers.

While some of my findings on the history of The Paris Review are cobbled together from diverse sources from the scholarly to the anecdotal, substantial new material has been brought to light through archival inquiry. By looking behind the scenes and closely reading the unpublished drafts of interviews, I construct a previously untold narrative of the processes and personalities of this important literary review. Interviews are analyzed to determine the components of the Paris Review house style or formula, taking into account audio recordings, notes, correspondence, revisions, meetings and drafts.

The historical grounding of the interview genre and the Paris Review example provide a solid basis for sketching out the shape and sound of its modern incarnation. 9

Chapter 4, "Inside the Paris Review Interview," looks into the process of the interviews to discover their manifold editorial strategies and collaboration, focusing on what happens before the interviews are put out into the literary culture at large. A general discussion of the interview method informs my examination of the inside workings of the

Paris Review conversations. I question the role of the interviewer and the way the interviewee often attempts to perform literary criticism and reception control. A selection of interview case studies illustrates the range of ways that interviews are selected, conducted, edited, and crafted. Archival evidence demonstrates the intricacies of the process and the strategies employed to meet specific objectives of the interview subject

and the interviewer.

The fifth chapter, "The Paris Review Interview in the World," follows the interviews as they enter into the field of cultural production and considers the work they do in the arenas of celebrity, persona, and symbolic capital. This chapter moves beyond the margins of the interview to consider how it works in the larger world and how it functions within the sociological structures of art as imagined by Pierre Bourdieu and other recent cultural studies theorists. To use Bourdieu's terminology, these interviews exist within a field of cultural production with complex dynamics between the author, the text and the reader. The conversations contain tensions, contradictions and mediations that can be productively read to better understand the dynamics of this field. Because of their popularity both then and now, the Paris Review interviews play a crucial role in celebrity construction which, in turn, exerts pressure on literary reception. They are unparalleled sites for examining the power of celebrity, reputation, and fame and their interplay with biography, persona, and performance. Again, several interviews are closely 10 examined to trace how their participants grapple with persona, celebrity and reputation.

The literary interview and its place in public consciousness prove to play a key role in both authorial self-construction and reading practices.

Finally, the last section of this project tackles one of the key issues that underlies

each and every interview and draws readers to the Paris Review interviews again and

again: the question of authorial intention. While discussion topics in these interviews vary considerably, several questions are repeatedly implied or made explicit: "Who is the

writer?" and "What did the writer intend to do?" These questions necessarily beg another:

"Why does that matter so much?" The sixth chapter, "Reading the Paris Review

Interview: The Search for Authorial Intention," takes up a subject that bears upon all of

the previous chapters in that it addresses the question of why the author interview exists

and why readers are consistently drawn to it. The interviews are considered in light of the

shifting concepts of authorial intention and the role of the author in literary criticism. I

look at historical debates around the authority of the writer and consider how the Paris

Review interviews both reflect and complicate those conversations.

While the dominance of New Criticism in literary culture was certainly the

context out of which The Paris Review emerged, earlier attitudes towards intention and the authority of the writer can be detected throughout the interviews. My work takes up

some of the major texts to influence literary criticism and reading at the time, including the much earlier, germinal writings of T.S. Eliot, and the influential ideas of Cleanth

Brooks and other New Critics, focusing on their handling of the role of the author and issues of authorial intention. I also consider W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe Beardsley's

"The Intentional Fallacy." While its influence was mostly felt in later decades, Roland 11

Barthes' famous essay, "The Death of the Author" (1968), is another key text in any discussion of the role of the author. Again, I select key Paris Review interviews to illustrate the differing takes on authorial intention and to explore questions of authorial

identity and the writing process. By reading key moments in these interviews with an eye

for the authority of the writer, scholars can gain new perspectives on the traditional narrative of this period of literary history.

The originality of this research is twofold. First, the literary interview genre has historically been treated as a side note to literary history; here, it is given a position of prominence and unprecedented critical close reading. Second, my work exploits newly released archival material related to some of the biggest writers in twentieth-century

literature, much of which has never been subjected to scholarly study. However, the

strength of this project lies not only in the specific revelations brought about by the close readings of individual interviews, but by the incorporation of various reading practices

and critical approaches to develop a unique way of reading a long overlooked genre of

literary writing. Reading the Paris Review interviews is shown to be intellectually productive for a range of literary and authorial topics including the construction of the

author, the power of celebrity and persona, and the conceptualization of authorial

intention.

My selection of interview case studies for this project is informed by several

factors. Foremost, as one of my principal concerns is looking at how the Paris Review interviews reflect dynamics and issues inherent in the larger field of literary production

(i.e. celebrity, persona, intention, authorial self-construction), I have chosen primarily interview subjects that are familiar to both professional and general readers. These are 12 interviews that were, and continue to be, highly read and influential in the larger literary culture in part because their subjects had already entered a mainstream literary canon at the time of the interviews (1953-1978). While there are a few lesser-known examples included (e.g. Charles Olson), in most cases, even non-academic and non-professional readers would have been well enough acquainted with the names and even the works of the majority of these writers to be compelled to pick up the interview. As a result, many of my interview choices are Anglo-American Modernist writers; however, the observations and conclusions drawn from these examples are still relevant to more

experimental and non-mainstream writers. Considering how various types of writers choose to construct themselves and questioning if there are marked differences in perspectives on authorial intention among different groups would be an interesting avenue for research, not pursued in this project.

As literary history and criticism moves in the direction of looking to new materials and sources as valid subjects of inquiry, the literary interview will command greater attention in our field. Also, as literary culture, especially in the United States, becomes more and more entwined with popular culture and mass media, the relationships between literary writing and its processes of dissemination and consumption will need to

My brief analysis of a recent interview with Kazuo Ishiguro offered in the conclusion of this thesis suggests there is much to be gained by looking at writer interviews outside of the established Anglo-American literary canon. Although The Paris Review has always selected its subjects based on their high level of literary renown and success and has stuck mainly—though not exclusively—to writers working in English, it has consistently chosen its subjects from across the literary spectrum. Especially in the last few decades, the magazine has published interviews with writers from many different writing traditions: John Ashbery, William Gaddis, Paul Auster, Nadine Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, Hunter S. Thompson, Salman Rushdie, and A. S. Byatt (to name a few). 13 be taken into account with greater regularity. Already, we see a surge of interest in topics of book history, media history, material culture, biography and other issues related to the literary interview. One of the strengths of this project is its development of a way of reading the interview that can be borrowed by scholars who come across the form in their research. For example, biographers who use myriad sources to construct a life history of a given writer can gain insight into how to approach existing interviews with their subject through the examples in this study. Likewise, a literature scholar who focuses on the

construction of authorship may find a unique site of access to their topic in the literary

interview. Ultimately, this project establishes that the Paris Review interview, far from being an exercise in getting the "inside scoop," or, as believers in the "Intentional

Fallacy" would suggest, "consulting the oracle," can be, when read carefully, a unique

and fertile site for learning about writers and their work as well as the pervasive issues of

authorship and literary culture. 14

CHAPTER 2 THE EVOLUTION OF THE LITERARY INTERVIEW

2.1 WHY CONSIDER THE LITERARY INTERVIEW?

Those who have read a Paris Review interview, perhaps in the pages of a Writers at Work collection or as a supplement in an anthology of fiction or poetry, likely have a

distinct impression of the genre of the literary interview. Some, possibly aspiring writers, will remember the words offered by legendary moderns such as William Faulkner, Ernest

Hemingway or T. S. Eliot on the inspiration and sources for their art; the detailed advice

given on technical matters like beginnings, characters and style; intimate confessions on the loneliness and struggle of the vocation; or grumblings about the rigours of self-

evaluation and revision. Other readers may recall fascinating and elegantly told anecdotes

about a writer's personal life, her literary community, outrageous adventures and mournful tragedies. Some are moved by philosophical and political discourses which

shed new light on a writer's work, or the world more generally. Or, for some, the Paris

Review interview is simply a conversation filled with chemistry and intensity; a drama, if

you will; a meeting of two great minds on which the reader is allowed to eavesdrop.

From Faulkner's brutal vision of the true artist, "The writer's only responsibility is to his

art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.... Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of

old ladies"; to Hemingway's blunt declaration that "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great 15 writers have had it," the Paris Review interview commands our attention as readers, and, as I will argue, should also do so as literary scholars.

While less so among those who have carefully read a Paris Review interview, the idea of the literary interview as a subject for scholarly scrutiny has a tendency to raise some eyebrows in academia. For those unfamiliar with more refined incarnations of the form, the literary interview can conjure up associations of gossip, sensationalism, publicity, or simply, self-indulgent self promotion. However, in recent years, there has been a critical turn towards examining non-traditional sources in literary study. Book historians and bibliographers are starting to take a more interpretive and theoretical approach to "para-" textual elements of the book, such as the epigraph, the preface, marginalia, notes, and titles, elements traditionally treated cursorily or dismissed as merely utilitarian. At the same time, literary and cultural scholars are increasingly, and increasingly productively, examining materials such as correspondence, diaries, biographies and ephemera as important literary documents in their own right. Complex

sub fields of study have developed around these types of writing. One example is the

study of biographical and autobiographical writings, a field that has yielded a great deal of information about the construction of identity and narrative voice. The study of life

3 For influential publications on biography, autobiography and life narratives, see John Batchelor (The Art of Literary Biography), Diane Bjorklund (Interpreting the Self: Two Hundred Years of American Autobiography), Elizabeth W. Bruss (Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre), William H. Epstein (Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism), Robert Folkenflik (The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self- Representation), Richard Freadman (Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will), Diane P Freedman and Olivia Frey (Autobiographical Writing Across the Disciplines), Catherine Hobbs (Jhe Elements of Autobiography and Life Narratives), Philippe Lejeune (On Autobiography), James Olney (Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing, 16 narratives has focused attention on the way that the self is created through storytelling, and has fundamentally eroded the traditional idea of a unified, private self.

To date, only a few scholars have looked closely at the literary interview other than as a secondary source of biographical or theoretical data for other studies. What would happen if we moved the interview from the margins of our vision into centre focus? What can we learn from the form itself, the revelations and evasions embodied in a very particular dialogic form? The expansion of scope for literary study in recent decades has yielded many new tools for the close examination of the literary interview.

While unique in form and content, the interview is a hybrid creature that contains components from many different genres and elements. Because of the primary role that self-description plays in literary interviews, the work of biography scholars can add insight into the components of the interview form. The participatory nature of the interview can be partially illuminated by discussion of both collaboration and performance. Also, because of the public function of the interview in literary culture, the work of book historians and cultural studies experts can be informative. More specifically, we must look at ways that the literary interview participates in processes of persona and celebrity construction and the building of cultural capital. My intention is to consider the literary interview as an important piece of the puzzle of book history, and in so doing, establish its viability as a focus of literary study.

Studies in Autobiography, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, and Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography), and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson {Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives). 17

2.2 LITERARY INTERVIEW: TEXT, PARATEXT, EPITEXT

In his 1987 book, Paratexts, Gerard Genette catalogues and analyzes a broad range of "those liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher, and reader" (i). He brings an unprecedented attention to the parts around the central text of a piece of literature, parts which support it and allow it to have its full impact in the world. Of these elements, from illustrations to interviews, Genette notes,

... although we do not always know whether these productions are to be

regarded as belonging to the text, in any case they surround it and extend

it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in

the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text's presence in the

world, its "reception" and consumption. (1)

Genette considers these elements as thresholds through which the reader encounters a text, gateways that necessarily influence the traveller's experience of the work. While his main focus is on the immediate and authorially-legitimated constructions of the text, such as titles, dedications, inscriptions, epigraphs, prefaces, and so on, Genette dedicates some space to a subset he calls "epitexts," both public and private. The epitext differs from the peritext (all other parts of the paratext) simply in its spatial placement: "The epitext is a paratextual element not materially appended to the text within the same volume but circulating, as it were, freely, in a virtually limitless physical and social space" (344).

Epitextual material can be produced concurrently with the main text or not, as in the case of an interview done after the fact or a journal entry about an author's literary vision

(345). Some epitexts will never physically join their peritextual counterparts; others may 18 some day be contained within the same vessel, for example, when an interview or letter is printed within an edition of a literary work.

Genette points out that consumers of epitexts are not the same as a text's readers, though their populations overlap substantially. The interview reader may never pick up the book in question; likewise, many of a literary text's readers will never be exposed to all of the paratextual material in existence. Unlike peritextual materials bound to the text itself, epitexts are often only marginally paratextual; that is, the information of the epitext may only have a peripheral bearing on the text. Genette notes both the restrictive as well as potentially unlimited scope of the material of the epitext:

The epitext is a whole whose paratextual function has no precise limits and

in which comment on the work is endlessly diffused in a biographical,

critical, or other discourse whose relation to the work may be at best

indirect and at worst indiscernible. Everything a writer says or writes about

his life, about the world around him, about the works of others, may have

paratextual relevance. . . . our study of the epitext confronts us with its lack

of external limits: the epitext, a fringe of the fringe, gradually disappears

into, among other things, the totality of authorial discourse. (346)

Genette's perceptive awareness of "this potential for indefinite diffusion" is instructive; the relevance of any given epitext is only what can be duly and empirically justified; its value should never be taken for granted. Taking his cue, I propose that the significance of the literary interview form cannot be assumed based solely on its topical proximity to any given writer or text. The power of the Paris Review interview, for example, cannot be simply accepted without a close examination of how the form functions, both internally 19

(how its parts work together) and externally (how it works in the larger literary culture).

Several of these practical and theoretical functions of the form will be the subject of later chapters.

Genette differentiates between private and public epitexts. According to him, all forms of letters, drafts and proofs, oral confidences, journals, and logbooks qualify as private while the most common public epitexts include printed articles, lectures, colloquia, performances, recordings, interviews, conversations, proceedings, published correspondence and journal entries relevant to the text in question. They can be as commercial as a book poster or press release ("publishers' epitexts") or as instructive as a critical article endorsed, or participated in, by either the author or publisher ("semiofficial allographic epitexts")- The largest category of epitexts is both public and authorial, and is broken down by Genette into myriad subtypes (see

Fig. 1).

^\^ Time Original Later Delayed

Regime ^-^ Autonomous Auto-review Public Response Autocommentary

Mediated Interview Conversations Colloquia

Fig. 1. "Public and Authorial Epitexts." Genette, Paratexts 352.

Genette carefully teases apart the ways that paratextual materials operate, and how they conform to or frustrate the intentions of a given author. While he recognizes the inability of such a concrete division to capture the complexity of these concepts, his matrix helps to illuminate the relationship and even affinities between these "canonical forms" (352). Genette provides a range of examples and analysis for each subtype:

Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes is an "auto-review"; Flaubert's written defences of his own works are "public responses"; Edgar Allan Poe's essay "The Philosophy of

Composition" is an "autocommentary" (a fairly modern form in which an author discusses his own theory of writing in general); the others are mostly self-explanatory.

While some may quibble with the semantics of these conventions, Genette's schema provides a useful vocabulary for talking about the literary interview as a distinct form with its own standards, rules and powers. Genette's emphasis on the relevance of paratexts to a text's reception is particularly applicable to my own understanding of the role of the literary interview. While the interview is often read as a discrete and singular entity, the work it performs on the reader can, and most often does, have a significant effect on the reception of not only a singular text in question, but the general reception and consumption of the writer herself, and, in turn, her entire oeuvre.

Most relevant to my study of The Paris Review is Genette's take on interviews and conversations, both of which fall into the category of mediated epitexts, a type in which the author does not have complete control but must share it with the transcriber, interviewer and editor. Genette makes a notable distinction between the interview and the conversation. For his purposes, he considers an interview to be a single journalistic event, most often on the occasion of a book's publication, with a narrowed scope of content usually focusing on a single work. The conversation, in contrast, is a broader

I do not mean to imply that the author has absolute control in any genre. Certainly, the hand of the editor, publisher, translator, etc., as well as the problem of the divided or fragmented self, must always be recognized. 21 exchange, sometimes taking place over several visits, covering as much as the entire oeuvre of a writer, in which the interviewer is often more intimate with the subject than a journalist; "the conversation—as a rule more delayed, more thorough, conducted by an intermediary whose motivation is more personal, fulfilling a less popularizing and less sales-oriented function—has a more prestigious pedigree than the interview" (Genette

363). For example, conversations most often take place between peers or a writer and an expert on her work (358). Under Genette's criteria, the Paris Review interviews would, for the most part, be considered conversations.

Even within the interview category, differences of control exist as well. For example, the live oral conversation "is by definition unfalsifiable" (357); however, even in audio formats, one can often miss visual cues and misinterpret silences. Transcribed and edited conversations generate more room for change and error: commentary can be added and phrases taken out of context. In the case of the Paris Review interview, the heavy collaboration and editing returns some of that control to the author while its presumed status as a direct and unproblematic record of a conversation must be questioned.

This leads us to reconsider how we should think of the transparency of the interview form. Genette looks to Philippe Lejeune's description of the interview as a

"false dialogue" (in that it performs a dialogue for a third external addressee, the reader):

"The dialogue between subject and interviewer is not a true dialogue in the first degree but is the construction of a message meant by both jointly for a potential addressee [the public]" (Lejeune, Questions et reponses 14 qtd in Genette 357). In the more traditional literary interview, the interviewer often effaces himself to the point of invisibility to 22 allow a clear focus on the author-subject. In these cases, while the interlocutor seems to be genuinely addressing the author, he is, in effect, "transmitting to the writer a question from the public" (357). One might even say that he is standing in for the inquisitive reader who wants to know more of the author. Similarly, the author is most often not speaking to the immediate questioner before her; instead, she is performing her response.

She speaks to the public, the eventual reader or listener, not the interviewer; however, she speaks through her questioner. And so the role of the interviewer becomes rather unusual; while he may seem to both guide and style the conversation, he is more of a surrogate than an active agent in his own right. Depending on the approach of the interviewer, his role can potentially be that of a messenger.

However, as in the case of several of the Paris Review interviews, sometimes the personality and intellect of the interviewer are allowed a presence in the exchange. The very charisma and energy of the interlocutor are, in fact, a great part of such an interview's appeal. More often than not, in a Paris Review interview, we sense a meeting of the minds, if not between equals, at least between mutually sympathetic intelligent individuals. Perhaps even more appealing are those instances when there is some tension or competition between the questioner and his subject. In both cases, it is the chemistry, even the alchemy, of two strong personalities that adds interest to the exchange.5

Genette makes a similar observation of this phenomenon; however, it is not restricted to the Paris Review interviews: "The special relation between the author and his interlocutor (who then stops being a pure "nonperson" and becomes an accomplice or an inquisitor) sometimes contributes powerfully to the conversation's usefulness as a source of paratextual evidence, whether through the intermediary's insistence, or the excellent rapport between the two men, or—even better, perhaps—their disagreement. [In these cases] the drawback of the genre (its situation of dialogue) turns into an advantage, so 23

The internal workings of the Paris Review interview will be more closely examined throughout this study. I introduce the terminology and structure of Gerard

Genette and Philip Lejeune to provide a context for my choice of historical trajectory for the form. Their categorical definitions and concern with genre help us to adequately appreciate the uniqueness and hybridity of the form.

While little scholarly work has been done specifically on the subject of the literary interview, there are a few notable exceptions. In his 2001 book Performing the

Literary Interview: How Writers Craft Their Public Selves, John Rodden makes an argument for the consideration of the literary interview as a distinct and research-worthy literary genre. While the bulk of his book is dedicated to reprinting interviews with contemporary authors, the introductory section makes an earnest stab at establishing the form as a kind of public performance that operates by its own rules and can be subjected to a typology of both interviewer and interviewee. He places the interview in the space between performance and biography and approaches his subjects by looking at their modes of self-representation such as their gestures, rhetoric and tone. By cataloguing and analyzing these traits, Rodden proposes three categories (each with distinctive subtypes and functions) of the literary interviewee: traditionalists (professional, writing-centred), raconteurs (storytellers, entertainers) and advertisers (self-promoting, domineering).

Rodden's approach works well for the latter two categories but falls somewhat short for the traditionalists, whose interviews often yield little to either biographical or performance theory criticism. While posing some interesting questions about the validity

that a well-managed conversation (which sometimes means: one that appears to be badly managed) becomes an irreplaceable form of the paratext." (Genette 365) 24 of the interview as a literary genre, by not developing a theory that can account for the mainstay of most interview examples but only for the most "performative" of the types,

Rodden's work fails to draw any convincing conclusions on these questions.

The strength of Rodden's work lies in his accessible roundup of interview history that draws a plausible trajectory from the late nineteenth century to the present day. In addition, useful to my tracing of the development of the literary interview form is

Rodden's distillation of the form down to its central defining quality of conversation. If we consider the literary interview as a unique kind of conversation that has developed out of the specific demands and opportunities in the field of literary production, a distinct and identifiable history begins to emerge.

In a 1983 article for the International Journal of Oral History, Stephen Arkin also inquires into the history of the form of the literary interview. He considers the modern incarnation of the form as "a child of romantic concerns" (13) in that it takes after the

Romantic conception of the "artist as hero." Looking back to James Boswell's Life of

Johnson, Arkin considers how the eighteenth-century focus on the "morally instructive aspects" of the interviewee and his or her work have been replaced by a preoccupation with the "dashing originality" of the writer (12).6 While Arkin's attention is mainly on the current interview form, he uses its historical development to make a point about the way readers continue to treat writers as exceptional creatures. The inimitably unique

6 Like Rodden, Arkin is focused on the performative aspects of the interview subject. While readers gather at writers' feet to hear of their secrets, the key to their uniqueness, they are given instead another tale, a construction as personally evasive as any of their work. Arkin concludes that, for the literary interview subject, "the fictive self is the truest self (18). The performance of persona and its effect on cultural capital will be examined in closer detail in Chapter 5. 25 status of the writer in our popular culture has made the interview an important cultural form. Arkin also observes how writers tend to create personae for themselves in their interviews that resemble, even mirror, their fictional creations. Using the examples of

Henry Green, Dorothy Parker, Evelyn Waugh and John Cheever, Arkin demonstrates how these writers perform selves that either would exist comfortably within, or reflect already existing characters of, their writing.

My history of the literary interview is informed by both Rodden's and Arkin's take on the form's traditions. Certainly, as closer examination of specific interviews in the following chapters will show, some literary interviews contain the kind of fawning over greatness reminiscent of the "Cult of the Author." Other interviews function much more as performative platforms for authors, fully commanded by their direction and will.

Still others can be described as true collaborations: sometimes playful, sometimes intense, now and then combative meetings of great minds. All of these incarnations can be better understood by looking back to historical forms that precede and can be seen to influence the modern literary interview form.

2.3 HISTORY OF THE LITERARY INTERVIEW

In order to understand the modern literary interview and determine the best way to approach this rarely studied literary form and The Paris Review's unique incarnation of it, it is necessary to trace the roots of the genre. It is useful to begin by exploring some of the ways that the form may have come to be and the various shapes and contortions it has gone through. While the literary interview in its current incarnation is a relatively recent literary genre, the form as practiced by The Paris Review can be understood as a

composite of more established genres. The well-written and intimate interview can often read much like a correspondence between two writers. A heavily researched interview may begin with a headnote that looks like biography, and the interview itself may even

follow this chronological model of narrative. Individual interviews contain elements of literary conversation, biography (and autobiography), personal correspondence, fictional

narrative, dramatic performance, life writing and the personal essay. In consideration of

the multiple histories that combine to create the literary interview, and the influence of so

many genres in its formal composition, it makes good sense to look at the literary

interview as a hybrid form. The vast terrain of the contributing genres' respective histories would make an exhaustive account of the interview's evolution unwieldy; however, there are moments in the development of these forms that are relevant to the

structure and style of The Paris Review literary interview. By considering select moments

in the evolution of these forms, we can construct a selective history of the literary

interview that will assist us in reading its modern incarnation.

n Ted Lyon agrees and cites postmodernists Marjorie Perloff, Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida for their interest in blurred generic categories (76). Certainly, Derrida's "Law of Genre" supports the participation of a single text in multiple genres, without exclusively "belonging" to any individual form (Derrida 65). 2.3.1 Classical Antiquity: Plato s Socratic Dialogues

Dialogue as a form of communication and thought has received a great deal of

o scholarly attention, both by rhetoricians and philosophers. While a dialogue, in its ideal sense, is quite different from an interview, the forms share many characteristics. The contemporary meaning of the word dialogue —"a conversation carried on between two or more persons, a colloquy, a verbal exchange" (OED)—captures only certain aspects of the form's classical sense. While we still sometimes use the term to refer to a "literary work in the form of a conversation between two or more persons" or "a conversation written for and spoken by actors on the stage," the more instructive and philosophic qualities of the form are often overlooked in today's parlance.

In his introduction to an historical overview of the dialogue from antiquity to present day, Tullio Maranhao details the formal qualities of the genre by contrasting it to the traditional form of narratives:

In contrast to the logic of narrative, which is temporal, sequential, and

mimetic (speech events describing actual events), represented dialogue is

characterized by atemporality, by the logic of argument and

counterargument, and by the central speaker who weaves coherence into

the text for the reader. Also mimetic, instead of describing, represented

dialogue simulates actual events.... As in the case of narrative, in which

the narrated story was composed by someone else or was present in the

8 See David Bohm ("On Dialogue"), Gregory Clark {Dialogue, Dialectic, and Conversation), Nicholas Hudson ("Dialogue and the Origins of Language"), and Tullio Maranhao {The Interpretation of Dialogue) for overviews of the study of dialogue. 28

collective memory of the tradition, represented dialogue also depends on a

deus ex machina: the author as superspeaker. (14)

While not a seamless correlation, the interview (especially the Paris Review interview) also has a kind of "superspeaker," that is, the interviewer or editor who has edited, revised, selected and rearranged the content of the conversation for the reader. Unlike fictional dialogue, there are two "intelligences" at work in the interview; however, there is still a single designing impulse that controls the final version of the exchange, and in most cases, it is not the author-subject. In some ways, the interview format makes plain the implied dialogue that exists whenever a writer is asked to speak on her work. It reveals, through the figure of the interviewer, the presence of the reader, literally voicing the questions that trigger the writer's comments.

Twentieth-century thinker David Bohm has written extensively on the potential of dialogue for pedagogy, knowledge and cultural change. His definition of the term refers to its etymological roots: the Greek logos (word) and dia (through) (6). While many misinterpret dia to mean "two," by looking accurately at the usage of "through," a more profound meaning of the term can be found. Bohm argues that a dialogue can be between

any number of people, from two on up, as long as it contains the "spirit" of dialogue:

... a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us.

This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of

which may emerge some new understanding. It's something new, which

may not have been in the starting point at all. It's something creative. And

this shared meaning is the "glue" or "cement" that holds people and

societies together. (6) 29

Bohm's definition points to the creative potential of dialogue, the productivity of the form. In this sense, the exchange of ideas is not simply cumulative. That is, one idea added to another idea does not equate to two ideas. A third, or a fourth or fifth, may be created in the process. It is this aspect of the dialogue that is most pertinent to my study of the interview form. The literary interview is a uniquely collaborative venture which has a value greater than its contingent parts. There is the intelligence, experience, performance and creativity (or, of course, lack thereof) of the author subject, which, when stimulated by another sympathetic creative force, can yield results impossible in a solitary exercise.

However, Bohm's "ideal dialogue" differs from the traditional interview in several respects. For one, in theory, a dialogue should be among equals in all senses.

Bohm is not alone in this standard for dialogue. In a historical overview of the form,

Tullio Maranhao observes that,

From Socrates to Gadamer, symmetry of participation and goodwill have

been regarded as indispensable conditions for the ideal of dialogue.

However, equality among subjects refers not to their physical, linguistic,

psychological, social, cultural, or political characteristics, but to the

participation in the process of dialogue itself, which should overshadow all

traces of individuation. (Maranhao 8).

Most readers will note that, in contrast to Maranhao's concept of dialogue, in the Paris

Review (and other literary) interviews, individuation is king; that is, the quality of being a unique creative individual is one of the major subtexts, even themes of the interview exchange. While both parties may be working towards a common goal, that goal is not 30 necessarily mutual understanding so much as good copy, publicity, entertainment, book sales, etc.

Another difference is that, in the ideal dialogue, there is no individual who leads or conducts the exchange (Bohm 15). However, in most interviews, one person generally takes the lead in terms of form, tone and even content by directing the questions and the other may or may not struggle to regain the lead in terms of content or tone by supplying the answers. Also, most readers would agree that the voice of the author-subject should dominate the content of the exchange. Ironically, in most modern literary interviews, it is the interrogator who exerts final control since it is he who navigates the course of the

session, and ultimately, usually he who edits and drafts the final version of the exchange.

There are variations on this pattern, as I will discuss later; however, in a Paris Review interview, while both participants may exert control in terms of content and tone, the two roles are markedly different in other ways. In most cases, the literary interview is not a

synchronicity of ideas, although there are certainly moments when the interviewer and the interviewee's minds seem to connect and in those places, one might argue that true

dialogue occurs. Bohm describes the object of dialogue in both negative and positive terms:

[The object] is not to analyze things, or to win an argument, or to exchange

opinions. Rather, it is to suspend your opinions and to look at the

opinions—to listen to everybody's opinions, to suspend them, and to see

what all that means.

For more on the impetus for participation in the interview, see the later section in Chapter 4 on the purpose of the literary interview. 31

... if we can see them all, we may then move more creatively in a

different direction. (Bohm 26).

In most cases, the dialogue of the literary interview does not meet all these criteria;

certainly, few interview subjects are interested in suspending their opinions since the occasion privileges their perspective and the point of the interview is often to reveal those

opinions as they are.

Western culture has some very early examples of the use of the dialogue for literary, philosophical and pedagogical purposes. Most well-known, perhaps, are Plato's

Socratic Dialogues, probably written in the 4 century BC (Griswold, Mittelstrass,

Desjardins). The Greek philosopher invented (or transcribed, depending on whom you believe) conversations between participants (including Socrates) and yet never included himself in these exchanges. This was his method of teaching others to think for themselves and not simply adopt his ideas. Plato's Dialogues are written in several ways:

sometimes with no narrator, sometimes with narration in the first person by Socrates, and

sometimes with narration by Socratic disciples in the past tense, as if from memory.

These conversations often include Socrates; however, Plato rarely refers to having

directly heard the exchanges themselves. It is often overlooked that Plato was, in fact, not

an intimate of Socrates, but reported on conversations of the Socratic inner circle. In

some Dialogues, it is suggested that the oral dialogues were simply remembered and passed from individual to individual until they reached Plato himself.

The Socratic Dialogues can be considered through multiple lenses. In some ways,

they read like classical drama, with a trio of characters and an implied "chorus" as

audience. One might also look to them as a biography of Socrates, covering various 32

critical times in his life, including his trial (in The Apology) and his execution (referred to in The Crito and The Phaedo). The most common way of understanding the Dialogues is

as political and philosophical tracts written in dialogic form as an effective way of

teaching. The ancient Greek world valued intellectual debate and the ideas that were produced in conversation.

Perhaps the most well-known of the Dialogues, the Symposium, is really more a

series of speeches delivered by participants at an Athenian drinking gathering on the

subject of the nature of love than a dialogue in the modern sense. Likewise, Plato's

Phaedrus (not to be confused with The Phaedo) also deals with love; however, this time

it is much more of a conversation (between Socrates and Phaedrus), and as such has more

of a spontaneous, immediate feel to it. To some extent, in all of the Dialogues, the give-

and-take of the conversational form contributes to both the content and persuasiveness of

the material presented. One example, however, stands apart: The Ion may very well be an

early predecessor to the literary interview. In this Dialogue, Socrates and Ion discuss

poetry, creative inspiration and performance. Their lengthy discussion on the art of poetry

touches on many themes that would be at home in a Paris Review interview, namely, the

nature of inspiration and creative influence, the value of criticism, the importance of

reception, and the corruption of money and the marketplace on art (LaDriere). In fact,

some classical scholars feel that the central debate in The Ion is about the true source of

creativity, whether it is knowledge and talent or a more nebulous kind of "genius," one

that is non-rational and difficult to describe (A.E. Taylor qtd. in LaDriere 26). This is the

very same focus of many twentieth-century literary interviews which try to delve into the

origins of creative inspiration. 33

Socrates' own attitude towards the dialogue form is telling. Many believe that he

chose the conversation as a way of getting at truth because it was the closest language

could get to true knowledge, an unattainable ideal. The exchange of ideas between

sympathetic individuals allowed a proximity to truth that went beyond what a single

lecture or essay could possibly attain: "Socrates subordinated speech to man and steered

his dialogues as encounters among souls.... Truth was uncovered neither by poetics nor by eloquence, but by the sincere and dialectic analysis of ideas" (Maranhao 7).

There is still debate on the reasons for the dialogic form having been chosen by

Plato; however, its utility as a genre for teaching and entertaining is demonstrated by the

endurance of the Dialogues' legacy. Perhaps the power of the form lies precisely in its

"indirection," that is, in its ability to embody truth and wisdom without directly or

explicitly addressing it. The personal essay or speech, for example, projects its subject

and tone in a fairly straightforward way; the reader must early on decide whether she

should accept or refuse the information offered. The conversational form, on the other

hand, often presents multiple perspectives simultaneously. These views can quarrel with

one another; they might, conversely, collaborate and invent something new together. The

reader (or audience), often without knowing it, becomes a more active participant in the

process by having to negotiate which views she agrees with. Likewise, having witnessed

cooperation, she may even engage in the collaborative process by taking a line of

questioning to its next level. When the train of thought is complex or convoluted, the

reader is not asked to make those leaps of logic alone. She has a surrogate reader present

in the discussion who can ask questions and move towards an understanding in stages. 34

All of these elements are equally present in the Paris Review interview, tying the modern form to its classical predecessor.

Classics scholar Rosemary Desjardins expresses a related view that the power of the Socratic Dialogues can be attributed to the ancients' methods of "concealment" of meaning (113). She claims that Plato was born into a cultural tradition that emphasized the indirection of communication, be it through imagery or other symbolic forms. Plato inherited these values and adopted them into his own, ingenious form. Her argument

about the ancient world is twofold:

First, that teaching seems not to have been automatically, nor even

primarily, via straightforward statements of plain language but frequently

through modes of indirect discourse; second . .. that meaning often proves

to be multileveled, yielding layers of interpretation normally requiring ...

that one be led from one level of understanding to another. In other words,

to be able—even correctly—to report beliefs or recite doctrines is not

sufficient for understanding. (113)

According to Desjardins, the way we learn and understand ideas was uniquely addressed by the Dialogues' structure and form.

Could this emphasis on the indirection of meaning help to explain the singular

attraction that modern audiences have for the interview form? Certainly, in finer

examples of the literary interview, the reader is not simply spoon-fed the writer's ideas

and experiences. Instead, he follows an often winding path towards various revelations, hopefully entertained by some funny, tragic or touching anecdotes along the way, to make the journey a pleasure. Despite the marked differences between classical dialogues 35 and the modern literary interview, there are ample shared qualities that help illuminate the power of the Paris Review conversations. Like the dialogues of antiquity, in most

Paris Review interviews, the value of the exchange is greater than the sum of its individual parts. The insight of a given writer is made more palpable, even accessible, through the dialogic format. The dynamics of an "encounter among souls" add important drama, performance and interest to the presentation of what might otherwise be tedious technical or biographical information. Like the Socratic dialogues, the conversational format of the Paris Review interview contributes to its persuasiveness, in part through the illusion of spontaneity, of ideas "stumbled upon" serendipitously. And yet, also like the dialogues, the exchanges of The Paris Review are, in fact, quite constructed and polished, and their power is increased through the crafting of a kind of a superspeaker, the interviewer, a single designing intelligence that works the final piece into a convincing, compelling narrative. The impulse to approach "truth"—whether genuine or illusion— through indirection and collaboration continues to have a great impact through the example of the modern literary interview form.

2.3.2 Dialogue in the Enlightenment

The subject of dialogue has had moments in the spotlight in the course of literary history. For example, Enlightenment thinkers like Abbe de Condillac, Bernard

Mandeville and Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the very existence of language is indebted to dialogue (Hudson 3). In the foreword to a collection on dialogue in the early

Enlightenment, Kevin L. Cope describes dialogue as "didactical and deceiving, 36 functional and free, informative and asystematic," offering a "place [for scholars] to begin their inquiries into the textual redactions of freedom, disorder, chaos, and asystematicity" (xiii).

In an exploration of social and linguistic origins and evolution, Nicholas Hudson points to the centrality of dialogue for Enlightenment thinkers. Looking back to the

original couple, Adam and Eve, Mandeville argued that the first speech was social and dialogic (as opposed to solitary expression) and was meant "to frighten or seduce others into complying with the speaker's desires" (Hudson 5). According to Mandeville, language's primary function is always in interaction with others and "its principal modern

function is not intelligibility... but rather artful persuasion and the ordering of social relations" (Hudson 6). Condillac took this concept a step further and argued that not only

language, but even the ideas of all humanity, come from our verbal interaction with

others. Rousseau agreed on many points but also argued that the "the mutual sympathy

which inspired the birth of speech" has been lost (11). In any case, these Enlightenment

thinkers agreed that the "history of civilisation and of reason are inseparable from the history of dialogue" (12).10

This public function of language has never gone away, and even the most private

of words are meant as some kind of dialogue, even if the reader is simply another self-as-

other, that is, the self as reader rather than writer (perhaps as in the case of a diary entry).

Mikhail Bakhtin's Theory of Dialogue echoes this approach to language in asserting that "our language creates rather than conveys our reality" (Clark, Dialogue 9). Bakhtin also asserts that all communication is essentially collaborative and all statements function within dialogue, making each of us answerable by nature: "Life is dialogical by its very nature. To live means to engage in dialogue, to question, to listen, to answer, to agree" (Todorov 97). 37

Even conventional non-fiction prose can be seen as dialogic if we consider the reader as a

(silent) participant in a conversation. The reader's questions may still have some power in the exchange, in the form of the topic chosen for the discourse and the concessions made for understanding (the writer aims to meet the reader's needs and adapts to the reader's limitations). In this way, we might reason that the interview format simply makes plain the implicit conversation that exists in all writers' comments, with the interviewer standing in for the reader and explicitly voicing the questions a reader might bring to the table.

2.3.3 The Literary Conversation as Life Story: Boswell & Johnson

Literary conversation, in its various forms, is another compelling generic ancestor of the literary interview. For example, James Boswell's famous 1791 biography The Life of Johnson shares many characteristics with the modern day literary interview in the sense that it is an early hybrid form of dialogue, biography, and memoir. While BoswelPs

Life contains extensive action, reflection and description, at the heart of the book are one- on-one and group conversations with "the Great Man." The book is generally considered one of the finest biographies ever written in English and an example of how biography can often prevail over autobiography since, as an early critic noted, "the fact that a man knows himself better than anybody else can know him does not necessarily imply that he can write the best story about himself (Thayer 84).u Just as the unmediated revelations

11 Early biography scholar William Thayer analyzes Boswell's approach: "What is the secret of Boswell's mastery? First, and second, and third, he was a highly sensitized 38 of a writer may pale in comparison to a well-orchestrated interview, the role of a good biographer is to carve and construct a narrative out of a seemingly shapeless mass of life experience and opinions.

Literary conversations are precursors to literary interviews in that both seek to reveal heretofore unknown aspects of a literary subject through oral intercourse. In the case of Boswell's Life, Boswell relentlessly pursued Johnson—against great initial resistance—until he was finally granted permission to spend time in Johnson's company, during which he asked all variety of questions and attempted to access a kind of essential

Johnson that he could share with his reader: "Boswell's authority... lies in this notion of his penetration to an invisible center, in his constant reminders that the Johnson of his story is a Johnson his readers can know only through him" (Dowling, "Biographer, Hero, and Audience" 479). In this way, Boswell also has a kind of authority with the reader, the

authority gained through unique, perhaps exclusive, access to a great mind.

The conversations in Life of Johnson often deal with topics of moral, religious and literary import, and Boswell takes a unique approach to the role of questioner. Unlike late twentieth-century interviewers, Boswell is an unapologetically devout disciple of

photographic plate, receptive to the most delicate impressions from Johnson. He saw everything, he preserved everything, but his sympathy kept him from misinterpreting the old Doctor's words and gestures and acts. Boswell is there as a transparent glass through which you look at the real Johnson. . . . Next to his gifts of transparency and of receptivity and of sympathy comes his gift of selection. This is the distinctive talent of the artist, and with him it seems to have been intuitive. He knew just what to choose among his mass of materials, and he chose so naturally that there seems to be no art at all. He had, too, the gift of emphasis, which is only another form of proportion. . . . The wise Boswell does not use Johnson as a figure on whom to drape any theory or his own prejudices. His vision penetrates, not because he has an eager and keen mind which delights to exercise itself in such analysis, but because he has sympathy and love which not only see but understand" (96-100). 39

Johnson. His admiration, one might even say devotion, is made plain in both the content and the phrasing of his questions put to Johnson. Boswell is clearly in awe of his subject,

and assumes such sympathy and an equal devotion on the part of his audience. His veneration is not simply based on Johnson as writer and thinker, but as a "moral hero"

(Dowling, "Biographer, Hero and Audience" 475). When Boswell extensively

interviewed Samuel Johnson for his famous biography, he held Johnson up as an

exemplar of moral and correct behaviour.

Clearly, this is not the same reason we turn to the words and life of authors in the twentieth century. Stephen Arkin writes, "within fifty years of [Dr. Johnson's] death the romantic preoccupation with the artist as hero had shifted popular attention from the morally instructive aspects of a writer's life to the dashing originality, the uniqueness of a writer's personality" (Arkin 12). Also, in Life of Johnson, Boswell quite often plays the role of the naif asking basic questions about moral and ethical issues in order to get his

subject talking. This strategy is not unlike that of the Paris Review founding editor

George Plimpton, who would also feign a kind of ignorance and innocence in order to get his subject to set the record straight, as I will argue in the next chapter (on the history of

The Paris Review).

Boswell chose the term "conversations" to describe the bulk of his thirty years'

collection of observation and thoughts about Johnson. His 1791 edition of Life of Samuel

Johnson is described as "comprehending ... A Series of His Epistolary Correspondence

and Conversations with Many Eminent Persons" (qtd in Korshin 174-5). However, some

argue that while these talks are described as occurring between Johnson and notable

friends including, most prolifically, Boswell himself, they are far from dialogic. In many 40 cases, the exchanges would be better described as a collection of "sayings," "wit and wisdom," or even "bons mots'''' (Korshin 174-77). In earlier writings, Boswell expressed just such an understanding of this material, referring to Johnson's speech as "sayings,"

"showing that he originally thought of Johnson as embodying the older maxim-like tradition of talk" (176). At the time of the Life's first publication, collections of such

sayings were quite popular, even starting to be considered dated. Korshin points out that these compendiums worked in a tradition ofAdagia, that is, Renaissance collections of

adages appropriated from classical sources, from the profound (dulce helium inexpertis -

"war is sweet to those who have not tried it") to the familiar (qualis pater, talis filius -

"like father, like son") (Erasmus 308, 7). While there are arguably a few Johnsonian quips that might qualify for this tradition, most will observe that the average Johnson quotation goes beyond the simplicity and banality of such sayings.

However, it would be wrong to think of Johnson's conversations as true

dialogues. Even in those situations where Boswell is describing an actual exchange between two or more people, Johnson most often does the lion's share of the talking, usually in response to a single question. Often, these questions seem to be composed with just such a monologue or diatribe in mind, instead of true dialogue. This dynamic appears to make these talks more akin to certain kinds of modern interviews wherein the

interviewer truly effaces herself; however, there is an additional question: How much of the speech attributed to Johnson was truly his own?

Johnsonian and Boswellian scholarship has long debated the exact nature of these men's conversations and the relative measures of fact, fiction, memory and invention that

comprise their rich content. Certainly, unlike in a Paris Review interview, Johnson had 41 limited input in the final form and content of the exchanges documented in the Life. We know that BoswelPs practice was to recreate the conversations from memory, not to transcribe them or even take notes while the exchange occurred. The likelihood of

accuracy in such a situation is slim; however, "Boswell's advocates simply assume that he had a one-time memory so strong and accurate that he could perfectly recall Johnson's

elaborate sayings and complicated dialogues several days after hearing or taking part in them" (Korshin 178-180). While there is little debate that such conversations did occur in

some form, their precise content and expression is hotly contended. By examining other writers' accounts of Johnson's talk, Paul J. Korshin finds that Boswell's conversations

show stylistic marks unique to Boswell, leading him to argue that he "did more than merely rephrase and alter Johnson's talk; he invented it as well" (185).

While some Johnson scholars have criticized the liberties Boswell took in his version of events, others argue that Boswell took pains to restrict his own presence in his

accounts of meetings with Johnson, at least officially. While admitting that Boswell did

add many comments "after the fact," Boswell scholar Marlies K. Danziger argues that

Boswell's private concerns were consistently muted in favour of amplifying those of

Johnson (163). In those moments when Boswell did express personal opinion or

experience, he usually apologized for his lapse (163). While we can never know for

certain, there is a good chance that Boswell's role went beyond that of faithful observer

and interrogator. Depending on the level of his involvement, we might consider

Boswell's role to be anywhere between that of a faithful transcriber (albeit with

commentary), to an all-powerful superspeaker, a designing agent who creates two participants in a dialogue actually composed by one. On the one hand, the contested nature of the actual events depicted m the Life makes it a problematic model for the early interview form. From another perspective, the myriad negotiations, revisions, performances and potentially fictionalized occasions make it the perfect predecessor for the hybrid form of the Paris Review interview. While

Paris Review interrogators usually had a tape recorder or at least a scribbling note-taker at their disposal during the interview sessions, extensive revisions, rearrangements,

additions and deletions oftentimes took the final draft a far distance from any original,

accurate transcription. Likewise, interviewers and editors of The Paris Review were

equally interested in a good story and the same kind of drama, wit and even pathos that

James Boswell sought out in his interactions and creations of Dr. Johnson.

The Life of Samuel Johnson, with its emphasis on revelation of character and wisdom through conversation, certainly qualifies as an early predecessor of the literary interview. Not only did the process of interrogation share qualities with The Paris

Review's later exchanges, the final product and its subsequent impact on the imagination of Johnson's readers show a striking resemblance to its later successors. Many readers

(myself included) had their first exposure to Samuel Johnson through these conversations. For those who never go further into Johnson's own literary oeuvre, their understanding of his persona and attitudes is entirely shaped by these exchanges. Even those who do continue with their reading will retain the filter of Boswell's take on the

"Great Man," colouring their interpretations and judgements of his own writing. 43

2.3.4 The Growing Popularity of the Conversation

Another early influence on the literary interview is Johann Peter Eckermann's

1836 publication (in German) of Conversations with Goethe (Gespraeche mit Goethe).

Eckermann's "dialogues" have much in common with other studies of "Great Men" from around the same period, a format which included studies of Schopenhauer, Schiller and

Lessing but is best known by The Life of Johnson (Rodden 229; Royer, 119).

Eckermann's work is worth considering because of its widespread success, especially

among international audiences, which may have piqued the public's interest in reading the lives and thoughts of great writers.

Though over forty years Goethe's junior, Eckermann initially sought out Goethe as a writing mentor and poetic guide and came to revere him; he felt passionately drawn to his intellect and perceptiveness and even considered him his "lodestar" (Kohn ix). We might consider Eckermann to be a disciple of Goethe. Much like Boswell with Johnson,

Eckermann sought to uncover the great truths and wisdoms his hero could offer. In the

early days of their acquaintance, Eckermann was more of an assistant to Goethe—

"surveying, gathering, and rounding out his life's work" (Kohn ix)—but Goethe soon realized how valuable Eckermann could be for cementing Goethe's literary legacy.

Eckermann's conversations with Goethe share several qualities with later interviews including those in the Paris Review. For example, Eckermann provides prefatory comments to the conversations, setting the scene with contextual details about the place, event and physicality of his subject. Eckermann's timing with his subject is also echoed in The Paris Review's later interviews. Eckermann was with Goethe during the final years of his life, a period of old age (between the ages of 74 and 83) during 44 which Goethe was able to look back and reassess his life and ideas. The Paris Review interviews make similar interventions, especially in those with the High Modernists such as T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Marianne Moore and Ernest Hemingway, who by the mid-twentieth century were looking back over their careers with a distance

(and sometimes, a refined persona) absent in their youth. We could argue that many Paris

Review subjects, much like Goethe, are eager to put their literary and philosophical affairs in order, to have their views heard before they are silenced in death, to polish their literary legacy and "set the record straight" on any misunderstandings.

Certainly, several of the individual Eckermann-Goethe conversations might be considered antecedents to the literary interview. For example, there are many exchanges about Goethe's own literary works and his feelings about the brilliance of his many influences including Shakespeare (Eckermann 20-21) and Byron (58-9), his poetic

aspirations (29), dramatic influences, and French poetry (180-5)—all subjects that would be appropriate in later literary interviews. However, as a collection, the volume of

conversations is constructed more like a diary of meetings from Eckermann's perspective, each dated chronologically, and heavily mediated by Eckermann's

experience of the exchanges. While presented in a "question-and-answer" format,

Eckermann's Conversations also contains long lectures more reminiscent of lectures than true dialogues. Eckermann's conversations are elevated in tone and content and cover a broad range of political, literary, historical, and scientific topics, making them read like portraits of the man, however self-sketched. Absent is the spontaneous energy, the sense 45 of intimacy and candidness, and the often casual, even gossipy tone that becomes so popular in later journalist interviews.

Eckermann's conversations were not immediately popular upon their publication

in 1836. It wasn't until the 1850 English translation and the 1883 full chronological volume that the book reached its full success (Kohn xiv-v). Like later interviews, these

conversations became hugely popular, especially among international audiences, many who came to know Goethe through this personalized introduction. The volume is

described as reaching its full impact when published in France (Rodden, Performing

229).

2.3.5 Beginnings of the Literary Interview: America and France

In an analysis of the interviews of Jorge Luis Borges, Ted Lyon briefly considers the history of dialogue as the roots of the interview genre but declares its modern form to be a uniquely "American phenomenon" (75). Lyon identifies the first print source of the

"interview" (not the literary interview, as I will come to) as an 1836 New York Herald interview with a woman about a crime (75). This fits in with other historians who argue that the interview was first associated with crime reporting and was generally considered

John Rodden points out that these exchanges lacked the "quick, colourful, give-and- take style" that popularized the French interviews which followed. 46 strictly as a reporting tool. Despite its journalistic roots, the form was hardly thought of as a respectable enterprise at the time. By the 1860s, the interview had a distinctly shady reputation in America. Melvin Lasky describes the form's negative reception with evidence from the (New York) Nation in 1869 ("The interview, as at present managed, is generally the joint production of some humbug or a hack politician and another humbug of a newspaper reporter") (also qtd. in Christ 112) and the (New York) Daily News ("A portion of the daily newspapers are bringing the profession of journalism into contempt, so far as they can, by a kind of toadyism or flunkeyism which they call 'interviewing'")

(61). Clearly, the interview during this period was hardly the literate meeting of minds we see in the Paris Review interviews.

While difficult to identify the singularly first example of the literary interview form, there are several early cases which can help us trace the development of the form.

While little research exists about this subject, several examples of the early form are mentioned again and again by writers. Dorothy Speirs argues that the magazine interviews in nineteenth-century France were the earliest examples, though these were used largely as a marketing tool to draw a "floating mass" of readers who were increasingly literate and interested in a growing body of subjects and their token personalities (302).

For the first appearance of a literary interview, John Rodden looks to the Parisian daily Le Petit Journal which featured a writer interview in 1884 (writer unknown).14

John Rodden identifies the roots of the literary interview in American newspaper journalism of the early 1830s {Performing 3).

14 Le Petit Journal was published daily in Paris from 1863 to 1944 and reached around a million readers at its peak in the late 19th century. Rodden's reference is uncited in his 47

Dorothy Speirs also traces the form's origins to early French interviews and points to the first appearance of the word entrevue with its modern sense in French dictionaries by

1890 (301); however, Lyon observes that the French {entrevue), Spanish (entrevista) and

German (interview) terms are translations of an English original.

Shortly after, French journalist Jules Huret published a much-celebrated series of interviews with writers, artists and actors in the French daily Le Figaro, starting in 1891.

This series, entitled "Enquete sur revolution litteraire," featured conversations with 64 writers, including Zola, on the state of French literary expression and specifically on the conflicts between the psychologists and the naturalists, and the symbolists versus the

Parnassians. The underlying objective of Huret's discourse seems to have been to convince his subjects of the applicability of the Darwinian principle to literature

(according to Huret, another field of conflict).

Huret, by most accounts, polished the interview form by effectively capturing the personalities and spirits of his interview subjects with tact and flair ("Jules Huret"

[translation mine]). Philippe Lejeune, in his survey of French-language interviews, describes Huret as the inventor of the "writing style of the literary interview" by mixing questions with personality, biography and theory and out of the conversation, "creating an event" (109). This is an interesting way of separating the traditional journalistic question-and-answer session from the literary interview, and most in-depth interviews as we now know them. The environment of the exchange, the personality of the subject, his past and present, his loves and hates, his dreams and fears, the clash of ideas, the

work and impossible to verify with a daily publication published in that period. See Royer, Genette. questions at hand—all combine to a sum greater than its parts. Perhaps part of the allure

of the modern literary interview form is due to the sense of "event" it creates; it is a moment that promises unprecedented intimacy, candidness and revelation that readers

cannot expect from any other source.

Possibly the earliest English example of the form comes from the British Strand

Magazine (1891-1950) which, in 1895, featured a lengthy interview by journalist Marie

A. Belloc with Jules Verne. Stephen Gray sees this as the first recorded example of the

form since it "started a new picture of the writer as creator" (Durix 3). In many ways, this

interview takes advantage of many of the same components later present the Paris

Review interview. For example, it begins with a lengthy headnote that contextualizes the

interview by providing a bit of biographical information about Verne, a verbal sketch of his home, a narrative of the meeting itself, illustrative details of the setting to strengthen

characterization, and a physical bodily description of the man. Also, the conversation is

quite lengthy and nimbly shifts between topics such as Verne's detailed compositional

process and his thoughts on the craft of writing, influences, inspiration, biography,

thematic patterns in his own work, travel, and friendships. Notably, the interview also

employs the use of photographs and a handwriting facsimile, elements akin to the author photo and manuscript of the Paris Review which are often considered unique to the magazine. However, unlike the Paris Review's Q-and-A format, Belloc's style is more

akin to a fictional dialogue. She uses descriptive detail in her reporting of the action of

the conversation, such as "cried M. Verne, deprecatingly," and commentary such as "An

approving glance from my kindly hostess showed me that she agreed with the truth of my

observation" (Verne). There is some minimal action in the piece, including a detailed account of Verne's wife's tour of the home, yet, the bulk of the work is the (ostensibly) verbatim dialogue of Belloc and her subject, and the overall effect is strikingly analogous

to the Paris Review conversations half a century later.

2.3.6 The Paris Review

There is a critical consensus on the integral role of The Paris Review in bringing

the literary interview to its current popular modern status (Adams, Boddy, Breit, Johnson,

Kazin, Lapham, Lehmann-Haupt, Lyon, Wilbers, etc.). Ted Lyon states that "the modern

literary interview owes its highest success to George Plimpton and his Paris Review"

(75). David Fenza, editor of The Writer's Chronicle, notes:

The Paris Review has set the standard for what a literary interview should

be, and all editors can only hope to publish interviews as thought-

provoking. If you read an interview in The Paris Review, chances are you

will want to revisit that writer's work; the really great interview will help

you read a writer with greater sensitivity and appreciation, (qtd. in

Johnson, The Art of the Author Interview 155)

For both interviewers and their subjects, the Paris Review interviews have become "the

standard by which all other author interviews are measured" (Johnson 155).

Founded in 1953 by three young American expatriates,15 from the very first issue

The Paris Review tried to distinguish itself from other literary magazines of its day by

15 See the next chapter for a full history of The Paris Review. refusing to print critical essays and choosing instead to return attention to the artist by going directly to the source through the much celebrated Paris Review Interviews. These

writer interviews have been a regular fixture in The Paris Review for over 50 years and

are today best known in their anthologized form as the Writers at Work series, published

in more than 13 volumes over the last fifty years, and now as digital files downloadable

from an internet database entitled The DNA of Literature. These conversations with most

of the major writers of the twentieth-century, including Eliot, Ellison, Faulkner, Frost,

Hemingway, Moore, Nabokov, Pound, and Williams, are unlike anything that came before or since. The official topic for these interviews is "The Art of Fiction (or Poetry or

Drama, etc.)"16; they delve into the meaning of authorship and the way that influence,

inspiration, and intention work together. As such, these conversations are rich mines of

information on how major modernist figures understood these concepts. As I will explore

in the next chapter, a Paris Review interview places the authority of the writer on centre

stage, and the result is an enduring document of cultural, historical and literary import.

The Paris Review revolutionized the form by polishing, some say perfecting, the

interview format. They did this by working collaboratively with their subjects to craft

intimate and well-written pieces that soon became popular with writers, academics and

general readers. Writers are given advance input on questions and often spend several

days in personal conversation, and then later in cooperative editing by correspondence.

Most attractive to writers, they are given final approval of the finished product. In most

cases, these interviews develop as carefully constructed self-portraits of the writer,

16 For the purposes of clarity, I will use the phrase "The Art of Writing" to refer to the collective subjects of fiction, drama, poetry, criticism and biography, the core subjects explored in Paris Review interviews. 51

accomplished with all the skill and style of any of their published work. Also, Paris

Review interviews are always published with an image of the subject along with a manuscript page, lending a sense of privileged access and intimacy to the final version.

The early success of the Paris Review interview may have been due to its effort to understand the literary subject, unlike the critical articles of its counterparts, which strove to criticize and often decode literary work. While markedly unique from the philosophical and religious instruction of forbears such as the Platonic Dialogues, and

certainly briefer than biographical portraits like The Life of Johnson, the Paris Review

interview, a seminal example of modern literary interview form, nevertheless contains

elements of all of these precursors, with its own narrative drive and personal focus that makes the form all its own. The next chapter will present an overview of how The Paris

Review attained this pinnacle of success and respect. In order to complete the historical trajectory of the literary interview to the present day, there are, however, other, later

incarnations of the modern interview form to consider.

2.3.7 Post-Paris Review and into the Twenty-first Century

Since the mid-century, interviews have grown in popularity worldwide; however, in the early 1950s, literary interviews were still not common. It is important to note that

although The Paris Review first appeared during an active time in magazine publishing history, during the rise of the small press, its magazine contemporaries were not really doing literary interviews for the first few decades of its publication. Within its publishing context, The Paris Review was a unique project. In some ways, it can be considered a 52

"little" or literary magazine, with its emphasis on publishing original creative writing, especially poetry and fiction. For the most part, The Paris Review should be considered within the American literary context, since although it was first published in Paris, later

Amsterdam, and presently New York City, the magazine was always created predominantly by American writers and editors for a largely American audience. In mid- century America, some little magazines such as The Anvil and Origin carried strictly

creative writing, often with a specific stylistic bent, while some, such as Parnassus:

Poetry in Review (1973+), carried only reviews and essays, accompanied by original art work. Others, like The Quarterly Review of Literature (QRL) (1943+), The Partisan

Review (1934-2003), the short-lived Black Mountain Review (1954-57) and The

Evergreen Review (late 1957-1973) were a mix of intellectual, critical and creative material. By calling itself a "Review," The Paris Review intentionally drew comparisons to more academic and critical publications that aimed to treat (or "review") what was happening in literature through analysis. This kind of "little magazine," including The

Northwest Review (late 1950s-), The Sewanee Review (1892+), The Chicago Review

(1946+) and The Kenyon Review (1939-1970), was often published out of universities

and while sometimes featuring some original literature, creative writing was usually overshadowed by a great deal of criticism (Robinson "Academia and the Little Magazine

The Paris Review early on considered itself analogous to an earlier, much lauded, little magazine, The Little Review (1914-29), a publication that focused on quality new work for "discriminating tastes." It might also be compared to Poetry, founded in 1912 by the American Harriet Monroe and still around today, for its independence, persistence (most little magazines only last a few years) and high quality standards.

The Kenyon Review was revived in 1979 and in recent years has begun featuring interviews. 53

32"). In my research, while these magazines included a range of materials from reviews to essays to correspondence, not one of these contemporaneous publications featured interviews until much later (Anderson and Kinzie).

In the 1960s, one strain of interviewing rose to prominence in poetry circles.

Bruce Bawer calls it the "interview verite:" a transcribed exchange which records every gesture, sound and stutter of the subject, believing that there is meaning and import to be found in the subject's presence as well as her words. While this type of interview seems to have gone the way of the dodo, we still see its remnants in the parenthetical remarks often included in interviews to indicate a writer's oral ticks and physical gestures. Bawer looks to remarks by Wendell Berry to explain this style of interviewing that treats the poet as a unique creature worth observing, much like an exotic animal in the zoo. Berry suggests that the current interest in poets is due to an "implied premise, that poets are of a different kind from other people; hence in the interest in what they say as opposed to what they write. [This type of interview's purpose is] to examine the poet, to study unobtrusively as possible whatever privacies may be disclosed by the inadvertencies of conversation" (Berry, qtd in Bawer 423).

The idea of "interview verite," while quite different from the typical Paris Review interview, can shed some light on the public's draw to other types of the form. Clearly, this kind of form highlights the fact that the words exchanged in an interview are only one part of its allure. Readers are equally, or in some cases more, drawn to the energy of the writer as a personality. They want more than just their words, which is often why people are not satisfied simply with the writer's published literary output. They want something more intimate, personal, seemingly hidden. Bruce Bawer calls this a kind of "writer-worship" "symptomatic of that perverse post-Beat Generation mentality that views the poet less as an artist—a human being using his craft, intelligence and talent to create an ordered, controlled work of art—than as a prophet, a visionary, a seer, whose every act and utterance is taken to be of nearly scriptural significance" (Bawer 423).

With its relatively robust subscription numbers compared to little magazines, one might also choose to compare The Paris Review to its more popular counterparts.

America's early to mid-century "Smart Magazines"19 such as Esquire, Vanity Fair, and

Life featured profiles and first-person essays; however, they did not do interviews until

after The Paris Review had popularized the form, and even then, rarely chose writers as their subjects. In more recent years, publications like Vanity Fair and Esquire have whole-heartedly embraced the interview form, but prefer Hollywood types and politicians for their conversations. That said, many early magazines used interviews to gather information for an article or opinion piece, and even included quoted material in articles.

For example, as early as 1935, we see The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" covering a meeting with author William Saroyan which describes their encounter and includes, both paraphrased and verbatim, several comments by Saroyan:

We interviewed William Saroyan last week with the greatest of ease,

luring him from the plushy reception-rooms of Random House to have

some tea. He drank it strong, with four lumps of sugar. We found him a

brash but likable young man, on excellent terms with himself and the rest

of the world. He apologized for not having shaved that day, but not as if it

Defined as those magazines that were "stylish, witty and intelligent without having to posture and pretend" by George H. Douglas (206). 55

worried him very much; he probably wouldn't have mentioned it if there

hadn't been a young lad with us.... He doesn't, he said, bear any special

malice against Ernest Hemingway, even though Hemingway said a number

of forceful and derogatory things about his writing. "A little drunk, a little

sore because he's through," he remarked. (Maloney and Ross 11)

As the above selection demonstrates, The New Yorker typically took a distanced tone

from its interviews, treating its subjects and their words much more lightly than did the

editors of The Paris Review. The New Yorker still doesn't use the interview as a discrete

form; it does, however, often incorporate interview material into its longer features, using

a subject's words as evidence in opinion pieces. Specifically, its "A Reporter (at Large/at

Sea/in China etc.)," "Comment" and "The Talk of the Town" series often use passages of interviews to round out their coverage; however, the interview is not published in its typical format, but instead often borrows sayings and quotations as "talk." Likewise,

audio and online components of the magazine are starting to delve into interview territory in recent years.

Perhaps the one historical exception is hardly a "Smart Magazine" at all, but a men's magazine with aspirations to respectability in its early days: Playboy Magazine?®

Formed in Chicago in the late 1950s by Hugh Hefner (who once wrote copy for Esquire),

Playboy endeavoured to mix titillation with smarts by inserting articles on culture and

science alongside nude photography (Douglas 206). In 1962, Hefner, determined to raise

In Usha Wilbers' critical history of The Paris Review, she argues that "after The Paris Review had restyled the literary interview, other magazines copied the format" (204). She points to Rolling Stone and Playboy as its most notable successors, but also describes how many other literary publications began working around the critic and going directly to the writer after The Paris Review showed them how it was done (204; also Bawer). 56 the reputation of his magazine to seriousness, asked Roots author Alex Haley to interview

Miles Davis. Haley went on to interview other major figures such as Malcolm X, Martin

Luther King, Jr., and American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell. While the magazine has featured several interviews with writers over the years (Truman Capote,

Ayn Rand, Kurt Vonnegut, Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Heller, Henry Miller, and Vladimir

Nabokov, to name a few), it has mainly focused on celebrities, cult figures, athletes and leaders including the likes of Fidel Castro, Bob Dylan, Mae West, Muhammad Ali, Frank

Sinatra, Jimmy Hoffa (his last interview), and John Lennon (see Wallechinsky).

In its early years, the Playboy interview was often lauded as the best part of the magazine and ranged in tone from traditional questions about a subject's view on literature, influences, language, religion, politics and philosophy, to pop culture concerns like fame and wealth, to more risque topics such as gender roles, sexuality, sexual mores,

and hedonism (e.g., interviews with Rand and Nabokov). The vastness of the range of topics was undoubtedly part of its allure; readers enjoyed the mix of the serious with the racy, and could always justify their choice of reading material for its more intellectual bits. A cursory reading of the early interviews (1960s-70s) shows a marked similarity in

style to the Paris Review interviews; however, the subject of conversation more often

steers into the intimate, personal and sensational and away from the literary. Also, the presence of the interviewer is more keenly felt. According to Plimpton, Playboy founder

Hugh Heffher acknowledges the influence of the Paris Review interviews on his own house style (Plimpton, "Interview with David Applefield"). Individual interviews,

especially those with writers, have often been picked up by other publishers for inclusion 57

in collections dedicated to a single writer, a testament to the quality of the original

exchanges.21

Perhaps the best counterparts to The Paris Review interviews can be found not in

strictly literary magazines but in the more progressive interdisciplinary publications. In her research, Kasia Boddy positions Andy Warhol's Interview (magazine) in opposition

to the Paris Review interviews. In contrast to the extensive preparation and research of

the Paris Review approach, Warhol did little to no research, and rarely even prepared

questions for the interview. His idea was to remove any preconceptions and allow the

chemistry of the meeting, and of course, his own personality or that of another celebrity

interviewer, to come to the fore (Boddy 60). Like The Paris Review, Interview uses

extensive visual materials. In fact, art and visually striking ads make the publication stand

out from its counterparts. Unlike The Paris Review, Warhol and his successors only

choose authors as their subjects if they are truly famous; the magazine is more interested

in the celebrity status of its subjects, most often filmmakers, designers, musicians and

99

artists. The topics of fame and pop culture are often equally important as the creative

output of their subject.

These interviews have since been collected in themed anthologies and are available as a complete archive on CD-ROM.

99 Interview was created in 1969 by Andy Warhol as a pop-culture magazine. On the magazine's website, the current editor-in-chief, Ingrid Sisely, describes it as "famous for presenting intriguing one-of-a-kind conversations, often between celebrity peers.... Interview is a safe haven for creative spirits to meet and talk freely about their work and their lives. Artists trust the magazine and thus reveal more of themselves than they would in a typical interview. As a result, readers are privy to real insider information across all realms of popular culture." 58

Similarly, the interdisciplinary art magazine Bomb (1981-present) puts even more emphasis on the interviewer, presenting the exchanges as conversations among peers

(Boddy 61). Instead of focusing on the wisdom that might be drawn from an individual creative writer, Bomb Magazine delights in the art of conversation and what happens when great thinkers get together (the power of such a meeting is implied in the title itself): "Revelations happen in conversations. They make art more accessible, not only to the reader, but to the artists themselves" (Sussler). The magazine is still thriving today, with each issue containing around nine or ten lengthy, illustrated interviews between writers, visual artists, musicians, architects, filmmakers and performers. Bomb Magazine

claims that these conversations have had a very concrete political and cultural effect.

They feel that by promoting the voices and dialogues of artists, the power of the critics over art in all its forms is being challenged, "[changing] the way contemporary culture is understood" (Sussler). They claim that their advocacy on behalf of the artist (and writer,

designer, etc.) has actually changed the way that universities, institutions and museums

do their work. A similar claim might be made of the widespread use of Paris Review interviews on literature and creative writing class reading lists. Like The Paris Review,

Bomb's co-founder, publisher and editor-in-chief Betsy Sussler describes the magazine's mission: uBomb Magazine was founded in 1981 as an artists' and writers' quarterly dedicated to presenting work in its own light, and artists' and writers' conversations in their own words.... [In 26 years] more than 800 visual artists, writers, musicians, directors, architects, and actors have taken that idea and run with it. Their voices comprise an ongoing conversation—published in the pages of Bomb—that has changed the nature of cultural discourse. . . . Focusing on ideas rather than personalities, Bomb interviews delve into discussions of process and aesthetics, allowing for the emergence of complex and varied positions on art making and life throughout editorial revisions . . ." While the bulk of Bomb magazine is interviews, it also contains new writing and art, selected reviews, and essays on art by artists. Bomb has, in recent years, collected its interviews into anthologies which command a larger audience than the original magazine issues ever did.

Another place we find the literary interview in abundance is in author-themed collections, often published by university presses. For example, the University Press of

Mississippi puts out an impressive series of books called the Literary Conversations

Series (edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw) that feature interviews with dozens of

American and international authors, including Ann Beattie, Audre Lorde, Bernard

Malamud, Don DeLillo, Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, and F. Scott

Fitzgerald. These conversations are culled from all kinds of sources, including The Paris

Review; they effectively highlight, through juxtaposition, the radically different ways to interview the same subject.

Especially in the last few decades, literary interviews have found a home on television and radio. Today, we find them on almost every major network and station, from NPR to the BBC, from ABC to PBS; however, it is worth noting some of the early, most influential pioneers of the audio and visual form of the literary interview. From

1975 to 1990, the French late-night television program Apostrophes featured authors of recent books in conversation with host Bernard Pivot. An author's appearance on the program practically guaranteed high sales of his or her work (Genette 359). A similar phenomenon can be observed more recently with the internationally successful Oprah's

Book Club, which virtually secures wealth and fame for any author she chooses to select.

Every novel that has been selected for Oprah's Book Club has become a bestseller; she is

"the King Midas of modern letters—what she touches turns to sales" (Anft). The book discussion—televised and assisted with online guides—is the main component of the 60 club. Each month, from 1996 to 2002, Oprah invited a chosen author and several readers onto the show for a book conversation and a meal (all televised, of course). Unlike the

Paris Review interviews, Oprah's author interviews centre on emotional elements in their books' contents instead of issues of literary inspiration, style or philosophy. The influence of Oprah's selection choices on cultural tastes and even book sales is unprecedented; however, the author interview plays only one part in a book-promoting machine that seems to be moving further and further away from the author towards the reader. Recently, with her move towards classics, Oprah travels with several readers to an international locale with some connection to the chosen novel for dinner and book chat, and has abandoned the literary interview for the most part, perhaps because many of her recent choices are classics by long-dead writers.

Similarly, radio interviews with authors have become a standard step in launching a new book and have a charm all their own when the voice of the interviewer becomes successful in its own right. One example is Canada's Eleanor Wachtel, whose weekly

CBC program Writers and Company is internationally renowned and available both live and in podcast form. Her popularity and acclaim are due to her extensive research in preparation for her interviews and her obvious and genuine love of literature, which translate to listeners both in the content and tone of her engagements. Unlike the Paris

Review interviews, Wachtel's conversations do not go through the kind of extensive editing and revisions subjected to their written counterparts, although certainly some omissions and deletions are expected. Like The Paris Review, it is Wachtel's personality and rapport with her subjects that put them at ease enough to open up liberally to their audiences. 61

The above audio and visual examples of the literary interview are noted simply to give a context for the massive popularity of the form today. The process and final product of the live or edited audio-visual format can be markedly different from the printed form of the Paris Review interviews, and so, for the purposes of this project, my observations are generally meant to be applied to the printed and published version of the form.

The author interview has maintained a central place in the circulation of literary culture throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Today, we find interviews in all kinds of media, from online sources, to radio, to television, to popular magazines, to newspapers to literary journals. In fact, the interview has become so ubiquitous it is now one of the primary avenues for readers to come to know of a new book or an up-and-coming writer. We might read an early interview with the author on an online magazine like Litminds, Spikemagazine or the hugely popular Salon; turn on the television to catch an author discussing her latest release in sound bites; read an ad hominem attack on a writer in the pages of The New York Times; or hear a lengthy, quiet, touching tete-a-tete with a poet on a public radio program while driving home from work.

With the rise of the author to celebrity status, the public interview has an audience that reaches far beyond any individual author's readers.

The place of the Paris Review interviews in the history of the genre is an issue that can be considered through various lenses of cultural history. I have chosen to present a historical trajectory that reveals some of the essential qualities of the form, and the importance of its many incarnations in literary history. This is not the only historical narrative that could be developed; it is, however, one productive way of looking at the 62 literary interview genre through its contextualization with other, similar forms. By looking at the modern literary interview as a variation on the historical examples of dialogue, conversation, and life story, it becomes easier to see these manifestations on a continuum of collaboration, and to give the interview its deserved scholarly attention.

Each incarnation I have chosen to discuss sheds light on different aspects of the Paris

Review interview. In the Socratic Dialogues, we see the powerful use of indirection and the persuasiveness of collaboration, appearing to be spontaneous and yet crafted together by a single intelligence with a fine grasp of narrative and pedagogy. In Boswell's Life of

Johnson, we see the enshrinement of a kind of literary giant—with an equally grand persona—through the construction of "wisdom" via the well-phrased sentiments of much-loved literary figure. In the late 1 ^-century writer interviews of France and

England, we get the beginnings of the modern literary interview's dependence on context

and background to create an "event" that conveys intimacy and urgency. On the other hand, the literary interview's more popular contemporary counterparts exploit gossip,

scandal, current events and philosophical ideas in ways that are only sometimes shared by the examples in The Paris Review. While my choice of predecessors (and descendents)

certainly doesn't represent an incontestable genealogical path for the interview form, I have selected moments in an historical trajectory as they provide a balanced context to the phenomenon of the Paris Review interviews, a unique and critical moment all its own,

as I will explore in depth in the coming chapters. 63

CHAPTER 3 THE HISTORY OF THE PARIS REVIEW

3.1 HISTORIES OF THE PARIS REVIEW

The history of the Paris Review is a living, breathing story, a tale that, to this day, is still being transmitted and retransmitted, orally, visually and textually, part anecdote and part historical document. Until recently, a history of the magazine could only be drawn from first person accounts of the people who worked on the Review, interviews, and the odd retrospective done by the magazine for an anniversary or other landmark.

Because of the powerful aura surrounding the magazine—which I will discuss below— personal anecdotes tended to romanticize and sensationalize the history of The Paris

Review, exaggerating certain aspects while playing down others. The Paris Review and its

staff cultivated several different images—literary, debauched, elitist, romantic, genius, bohemian, insouciant, rebellious, clandestine—and storytellers chose tales that would

support their image of choice. Within a few years of its launch, romanticized, nostalgic

stories about the "early days" of The Paris Review were already being recounted in

articles about the magazine, stories that are still being retold in descriptions of the magazine's history today.24 Even the press accounts of the early years tend to encourage

In two early articles in Newsweek and Time on The Paris Review ("Advance-Guard Advance" and "Big Little Magazine"), as well as countless pieces from the 50s to the 70s that deal with The Paris Review or its publications, a great deal of information is lifted directly from Styron's 1953 "Letter to the Editor" or comes from editors' anecdotes told with nearly verbatim phrasing to the kind Plimpton and other Paris Review spokespeople would use to describe the history of The Paris Review for the next 50 years. Such anecdotes are often about early adventures of the magazine (i.e. editors hanging from windowsills to get out of their own offices, asking favours while running from the bulls 64 one myth or another, focusing less on the content of The Paris Review and more on the social lives and famous friends of the Review staff.

There have been partial histories of the magazine written over the years, including a 1978 short recollected history by George Plimpton included in The Little Magazine in

America: A Modern Documentary History (Plimpton, "Enterprise"); a 1981 collection of memories and anecdotes published for the Review's 25 anniversary, entitled The Paris

Review Sketchbook (Fuller et al.); a 1990 creative history of its published pieces called

The Paris Review Anthology (Plimpton); a conversation among former and current editors published in 2002 in Publishing Research Quarterly to mark its 40* anniversary

(Linville et al.); a 2001 documentary about the early years of The Paris Review {The

Paris Review: The Early Chapters); and a brief historical overview published in the New

York Times Book Review in 2004 (Miller, "Keep Talking"). As well, many of the introductions written for editions of the Writers at Work interview series contain brief historical overviews. In most of these cases, the history recounted is largely anecdotal; it would be impossible to verify the accuracy of many of the stories related by former

editors and contributors. It wasn't until 2006 that a formal critical history of the magazine was attempted, by Dutch doctoral student Usha Wilbers. Wilbers' version of the Paris

Review's "official history" is a useful source for dates and names as it was written based on the concrete archival documents and not simply individuals' memories. For the

in Pamplona, subscription salesmen taking off with collections, editing the Review from a barge on the Seine, etc.).

Early in her research, Wilbers observes the lack of concrete evidence or consensus on the early years of The Paris Review: "Anecdotal material is available in profusion and in their accounts of the journal's origin the editors of favor nostalgic glances towards the founding period in Paris over historical accuracy" (21). 65 purposes of this project, I do not wish to reinvent or reproduce all of these historical findings here, only to use the available research and other historical accounts of the magazine to set the stage for the focus of my project: the Paris Review Interviews.

My research sources reflect the varied cultural history of The Paris Review. The

Paris Review archives were made available to the public only recently, in 2006. In 1999, shortly before his death, founding editor George Plimpton sold the archives to an anonymous friend for a healthy sum (rumoured to be $500,000), in order to create an endowment that would keep The Paris Review alive for years to come. This patron

(thought to be Paris Review publisher Drue Heinz), in turn, donated the archives to the

Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City (Gussow, "Morgan Acquires" El). The Paris

Review archival papers are currently still in the process of being catalogued and processed; however, some scholarly interest has already been shown in them. Usha

Wilbers gained access to the unsorted materials in 2001 and her dissertation, a history of the early years of The Paris Review, was completed in 2006 ("Enterprise in the Service of

Art: A Critical History of The Paris Review, 1953-1973"). Her work details the internal and external histories of the magazine, including an extensive account of its editorial, organizational and commercial development.

My research takes into account the relativism of all these various historical sources, while attempting to tell a narrative that is accurate, coherent and, hopefully, interesting. My interest in the history of The Paris Review is insofar as it provides the context for the Paris Review interviews, my central object of study. The cultural background to The Paris Review, and the lives and attitudes of the key figures that created it, are important because they set the tone for the interviews and help us to understand the creative and philosophical roots of the interview project. With that in mind, I will present a brief overview of The Paris Review's history, with an eye to the limits of that history in explaining the interview phenomenon.

3.1.1 Founding Anecdotes

The Paris Review was founded in 1953 by Peter Matthiessen and Harold L. (Doc)

Humes, two young American expatriates living in Paris (Wilbers 19). Harold "Doc"

Humes, an M.I.T. graduate trying to establish himself in Paris, originally came up with an idea to start a review for tourists that would list events and eateries in Paris; he called this

"8 rate imitation of The New Yorker" the Paris News-Post ("Paris Review Sketchbook"

309). Humes was an eccentric figure, with a cape, a silver-headed cane and a beret. He was known for his strong, even arrogant opinions mixed with a creative and curious mind. The commonly accepted story goes that, after a few issues, Humes brought his old friend and Yale graduate Peter Matthiessen on as fiction editor. When they solicited literary submissions to fill out the publication, they were amazed at the quality of the material received, including one of Terry Southern's early stories, "The Sun and the

Stillborn Star." They decided to "put to death" the News-Post idea and instead publish a true literary magazine (Fuller et al. 309).

The Paris Review founders' accounts of the magazine's genesis vary in detail, especially over who thought of what first and why.26 Doc Humes' account of the origin

For example, in a 1963 article "Looking for Hemingway," Gay Talese states that Humes purchased and later sold a pre-existing publication called The Paris News Post, 67 of the idea, taken from a letter written to George Plimpton in 1952 (before a single issue had been published), illustrates the complex dynamics at work. Humes claims to have manipulated Matthiessen into believing that The Paris Review was Matthiessen's own idea in order to ensure its reality:

... We [Matthiessen and Humes] discussed possible titles and with, I'll

admit, a certain deft maneuvering, (I remember with unashamed

satisfaction) Peter finally suggested the "Paris American Review" would

make a good title.... I knew that if he could see the vision I had—could

arrive at it by himself, then the PR would become a reality. Peter speaks of

The Paris Review (then the Paris American Review until we agreed later to

clip the moniker) being born after a night long discussion ending in an

intoxicating ride in the country as dawn came over France. But dawn

broke over Peter too. Reluctantly, I agreed to turn my energies from the

Paris News Post to a new and headier enterprise. Reluctantly. Ha! If Peter

had any inkling of the wild elation that was popping inside me, he never

showed it. He was hooked. And he hooked you [Plimpton]—and you

hooked Hall. Bravo! We're in business. And now, George old bodkin I

declare avoir I'intention to make The Paris Review a major influence in

the history of American (maybe World) literature. (Humes, Letter to

George Plimpton, 25 Feb. 1952)

which folded almost immediately. Shortly after, The Paris Review was founded by Humes, Matthiessen and Plimpton, and Humes felt slighted for not getting the editor post and withdrew from the operations, choosing instead to travel and leave the work to his co-founders (869). 68

I quote this letter at length because it nicely sums up the kind of energy present in those early days, even while further muddling the roles and credits of those involved. We see the great, almost hyperbolic ambition of Humes as well as the need for collaboration to make it happen. So, how did Doc Humes "hook" George Plimpton? Peter Matthiessen knew George Plimpton, an affluent Harvard and Cambridge graduate with connections to many prominent American families, from their school days and immediately thought of him for the editor post (Plimpton, "Interview with David Applefield" 1). Plimpton, only recently graduated with a MA from Cambridge, had gone to Paris to try to figure out what kind of career he wanted; he got caught up in the excitement of Humes and

Matthiessen and quickly got on board. Due to Plimpton's early involvement and key role in The Paris Review's creation, he is often credited with being one of the original three

co-founders of the magazine.

Despite the fact that Humes had the most practical experience in publishing of

any of the founding editors, by most accounts, Doc was an absentee editor. More

concerned with his own writing, he left the staff to fend for themselves and learn how to run a magazine (Plimpton, "Interview with David Applefield"). The team scrambled and made it happen, even with little money and a piecework administrative infrastructure.

After shifting his name around on the masthead for the first few issues, the rest of the

Paris Review team finally named Humes "advisory editor" (a generous label given his negligible contribution) and went on to find someone to do the real organizing. Legend has it that when Humes found out about his demotion on the masthead, he met the 69 shipment of first issues in New York and manually stamped his name (in red!) on each and every Paris Review issue (Talese 870). 27

Quite soon, John Train, who had edited the Harvard Lampoon while a graduate student there, assumed most of the managing editor's responsibilities (Fuller et al. 311); he ably fulfilled his duties until 1954. Train's organization and discipline is credited for getting the magazine on track in the early days, and it was Plimpton's consistent enthusiasm and dedication to the task that gave The Paris Review the continuity it needed to survive. Another early member to set the tone of the Review was poet Donald Hall, who, although lacking the financial connections of Plimpton and Train, had the creative contacts and knowledge to make him a respected poetry editor.

3.1.2 Early Content and Attitude

At The Paris Review, the aim was simply to emphasize good creative writing of all stripes, with politics and literary "positions" kept to a minimum. All parties agreed that theoretical and political pronouncements were not part of their vision for the magazine; as Plimpton put it, the magazine intentionally avoided cultivating any "isms"

(Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 17). So, while issues inevitably appeared over the years (The Paris Review occasionally published symposia on topics such as "the death of

Within a few years, Humes exited from the Paris Review operations altogether. He went on to write two well-received novels {The Underground City and Men Die) and become somewhat of a legend as a free speech militant and LSD experimenter, what Paul Auster called a "hipster visionary neo-prophet" (McGee), a cultural hero and, by most accounts, a deeply mentally ill genius. Humes died in 1992 after many years in mental institutions. Harold "Doc" Humes is the subject of the recently released documentary Doc, written and produced by his daughter, Immy Humes. the novel"), they intentionally avoided any explicit support for a particular "school" of thought. While some saw this position as being a little anti-professional, others viewed it as one that favoured the artist over those who would try to label and limit the artist.

When invited to write a preface for the Review's first issue, William Styron wrote a sardonic "Letter to an Editor" outlining The Paris Review's position. He begins,

"Prefaces, I'll admit, are a bore and consequently, more often than not, go unread." He goes on to refer to his first draft of the letter, in which he had asserted,

Literarily speaking, we live in what has been described as the Age of

Criticism. Full of articles on Kafka and James, on Melville, or whatever

writer is in momentary ascendancy; laden with terms like "architectonic,"

"Zeitgeist," and "dichotomous," the literary magazines seem today on the

verge of doing away with literature, not with any philistine bludgeon but

by smothering it under the weight of learned chatter. (Styron, "Letter" 10)

Styron proclaims that the goal of The Paris Review will be to "remov[e] criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines," and to favour creative writing itself (11). The mission was simply one of literary excellence, and Styron's self- referential, intelligent and yet playful approach set the tone for the magazine. Rejecting the traditional preface-as-manifesto, Styron proudly declares that the Review has no "axes to grind" or "drums to beat," only a sincere desire to focus on the artist and present a memorable and worthy literature. In 1993, managing editor James Linville echoed this

It should be mentioned that this "Letter of the Editor" has, in fact, been treated as a manifesto by literary and cultural commentators in reference to The Paris Review for over 50 years. Within months of its publication, Styron's comments were discussed both 71 sentiment by quipping, "You could say that we [the Paris Review editors] are logocentric because the word is at the center of what we do and we do believe that the author exists"

(Linville 61). For these reasons, the Review editors determined to keep the critical material at the back of the magazine, if anywhere. This is where The Paris Review really

separates itself from its competitors: instead of consulting with experts and critics about literary value, the quarterly sticks with the literature itself, and, for good measure, regularly goes to the "source," the writer.

This position reflected the personal attitudes of the early editors. While most were highly educated and well-read, they reflected a literary community which, in response to the power and volume of the New Critical movement, had developed a growing impatience with literary criticism. Many felt that literature itself was being silenced by the booming voices of vocal and authoritative critics. John Train, an early managing

editor, describes how his own feelings about the role of literary criticism and theory were

formed after his work in Comparative Literature at Cambridge convinced him that

"theories, both literary and political, are the enemy of art" (Fuller et al. 311):

My eyes were opened on this subject by [art historian] Bernard Berenson..

.. I was describing my objective of getting a doctorate in comparative

literature when I noticed that B.B.'s expression seemed to have clouded

slightly. "What do you think of Comp. Lit?" I asked a bit anxiously. B.B.

frowned and reflected, clutched my elbow, spun me around, and bayed

hoarsely, "comp. lit. is dead as cold mutton /" He meant that to deflect

in terms of the goals of The Paris Review and with regards to the state of literature and criticism more generally (Adams, 4 Oct 1953). 72

one's gaze—in one's all too limited time from art itself to forms of words

about art was a big step down from the juicy reality toward the dry and

derivative. (Fuller et al. 312)

From the beginning, the founding editors wanted The Paris Review to be different

from other literary magazines, both in content and design. A 1953 Time article on the

state of "little magazines" took stock of the current state of affairs:

The surviving quarterlies [after the experimenters had shut down], usually

backed by rich men or foundations and run by professors, have taken on

the ivy-clad tone of a graduate faculty tea. Critics quarrel with critics in

thin, querulous prose, and authors are made to feel unwelcome. ("Big

Little Magazine" 57)

And so, the tone as well as the content of The Paris Review was a departure from literary journals being published at the time. With of its focus on original poetry and fiction,

literary interviews with the biggest names of the day, and willingness to print

photographs and art liberally throughout its pages, the Review separated itself from the

cold, academic feel of its American competitors, such as the The Kenyon Review and The

Sewanee Review. These publications devoted the lion's share of their pages to criticism,

whether it be literary, cultural or political. The voice of that writing was mostly New

Criticism, which had held a dominant position in American literary culture since the 30s.

Many of these magazines were also self-consciously political; for example, the Partisan

Review was recognized as Marxist in both perspective and content. Other magazines

tended to align themselves with a single movement or style of writing, such as The

Evergreen Review and its support of the Beat writers (Remnick). Contemporaneous 73

publications edited by Americans living in Paris, such as Merlin, were unabashedly

engage, that is, concerned with all things avant-garde, from the political to the cultural.

Merlin's editors, who included Alex Trocchi, Patrick Bowles, and Christopher Logue,

made plain their positions by regularly publishing "pungent and all-encompassing

manifestoes" (Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 16). Likewise, French literary

magazines such as Les Temps Modernes were as committed to promoting the ideas of the

day (i.e. existentialism) as the quality of the writing being featured (Plimpton, Paris

Review Anthology 16).29

The first issue of The Paris Review reflected this intentional departure from the

norm. Contrast The Paris Review's disenchantment with critical authority in both the

language and message of Styron's "Letter to an Editor," above, with the much more

serious editorial statement written for The Kenyon Review a few years earlier, in which

the founders, including such pre-eminent New Critics as R.P. Blackmur, Allen Tate and

John Crowe Ransom, declared,

Now it is the Age of Criticism . . . The living art decays. . . . But the love

of it quickens . . . We shall have other ages in which the criticism relaxes,

and poetry spontaneously increases, but not now. Our age is critical, and it

has its own passionate enjoyments. (Chielens 166-67)

The editors of The Paris Review did not believe that art could or should be delayed, or

that the Age of Criticism was absolute. Instead, they were determined to give a voice the

best new writers, to return attention to the artist, and to use all means necessary to do so.

There are some exceptions to this pattern such as La Parisienne and La Table Ronde, a publication that eventually worked quite closely with The Paris Review (see n36). This commitment to the voice of the writer also translated into a feature that soon made the Review famous: the much celebrated Paris Review Interviews.

The Paris Review founders had good timing: they were not the only ones starting to rebel against this "Age of Criticism." Especially among non-academic, public intellectuals and professional readers (i.e. journalists, reviewers, writers), there was a growing weariness with literary criticism and theory. A Time article bemoaning the environment for literary quarterlies had this to say of the emergence of The Paris Review:

"In this dimming constellation [of theory-heavy journals], a bright new light is a little- known publication called the Paris Review—a magazine dedicated to the proposition that authors are more interesting than critics" ("Big Little Magazine" 57). An article in The

Chicago Tribune expressed a similar despair:

When you read the self-conscious literary reviews—Kenyon Review,

Hudson Review, even Partisan Review, which is the best of the lot—you

get interminable discussions of ideas and methods and little vital

imaginative writing. The boys are in a dreadful dead end, expounding,

unravelling, teasing a psychological quirk; discovering new facets of

Henry James, Franz Kafka, and Herman Melville, and proving quite

conclusively that criticism, far from encouraging creation, overwhelms it

with formulas and blights it with didacticism. (Hansen G13)

J. Donald Adams, in his weekly column for The New York Times at the time, regularly bemoaned the excess of criticism and its tendency to use concepts not fully understood.

In one article, he complains about the "scientific vocabulary" of modern criticism that "is used to connote depths of meaning which actually are not there" (Adams 28 Feb. 1954). 75

It might be tempting to dismiss this attitude as amateurish; however, that isn't an accurate assessment of the Paris Review vision. Consider the specialized education of the key players of the Paris Review and their substantial combined literary accomplishments.

Also consider the ever-growing respect afforded to the quarterly by its often academic, deeply literary readers and writers, both groups that appreciated the space given to new, quality literature. It may have taken The Paris Review some time to reach beyond its small, rarefied audience; however, the consistently positive reception in the press and the praise of critics demonstrates that The Paris Review had struck a chord. The Paris

Review, despite publishing writers of all stripes and styles, usually young and talented and often unheard-of, also managed to slowly build an increasingly mainstream readership. In 1959, The New York Times claimed that the Review had "published the work of nearly every important young American Fiction writer" and estimated that it was selling 8,000 to 10,000 of each issue (with some, such as the 1958 issue with the

Hemingway interview, selling closer to 36,000) (Walters).30

The Paris Review established a reputation early on for recognizing high quality writing by hitherto unknown writers. The Review still takes great pride in the many, now quite famous, authors that it initially discovered; great finds include the first published work of Philip Roth, Evan S. Connell, Mary Lee Settle, Mona Simpson, T. Coraghessan

Boyle, Joy Williams, Edward Hoagland, Robert Shacochis, Jay Mclnerney, Charlie

Smith, and Rick Bass; Samuel Beckett's first novels; and Italo Calvino's first translations. Perhaps in part because of the lure of their generous "Aga Khan Prize for

In this same laudatory article, Raymond Walters Jr. states that "if the Review folded now, it would have a secure niche in post-war literary history." Fiction"—judged by such notables as Saul Bellow and Brendan Gills—The Paris Review

was able to receive—and publish—early excerpts from Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and

Evan S. Connell's Mrs. Bridge (Fuller et al. 364). As Usha Wilbers observes, only two

years after the magazine started, seven Paris Review contributors had their first novels

successfully published, and in the first two decades, six stories from The Paris Review

had won the O. Henry Award for short fiction (Wilbers 179). The 1955 collection, The

Best American Short Stories, featured two entries previously published in The Paris

Review (Sullivan). The New York Times and other large American publications regularly

reprinted poems and interviews first published in The Paris Review, a testament to its

consistently-respected editorial decisions. Of course, there have been mistakes over the

years, among them, the rejected work of several great writers like Allen Ginsberg, Frank

O'Hara and Cynthia Ozick; the refusal to print Edward Albee's The Sandbox; and the

rejection of part of John living's The World According to Garp. Overall, The Paris

Review's track record is impressive and earns the magazine's continued status as a journal of discriminating literary taste.

The New York Times reprinted two pieces from the very first issue of The Paris Review: a George Steiner poem ("Fish Story") and a translation of a non-fiction piece about the Pantin Cemetary (de Montherlant). Interviews were also regularly excerpted in large American newspapers (i.e. Wilder, "Fiction and Drama;" Frost, "The Poet as Performer;" "How They Do It," "The Paris Review Talks to Writers"). 77

3.1.3 The Paris Review Design

The Paris Review's material form also stood out from its counterparts. Great attention was paid to the Review's appearance, with the goal to make it "look less like a law school journal" (Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 17) than other literary magazines of its time. The Paris Review enlisted artist William Pene du Bois to come up with a visual concept for both the cover and the art content of the magazine and to continue on as a regular art editor. Du Bois, known for illustrating children's books, was the son of

Ash-Can School artist Guy Pene du Bois. Du Bois came with not only great skill and vision, but fantastic connections to other artists. He was able to get his father to contribute a line-drawing, and most memorably, came up with the idea of raiding the

Livres d'Or of Paris—the restaurant scrapbooks kept for signatures of dignitaries which also often included hand sketches by dining artists, sometimes offered in exchange for a meal. Du Bois found a few gems in these large guest books, including a Toulouse-

Lautrec which was later reprinted by Life Magazine (Fuller et al. 337) and impromptu sketches by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Andre Derain and even Jean

Cocteau and Charlie Chaplin.

Du Bois also did many of the early cover drawings and created the cover design which included the uParis Review bird"—an American eagle with a pen wearing the

Phrygian hat (see top left of cover, below). In ancient times, this hat was given as a symbol of freedom to a slave on his or her release (Fuller et al. 308). The Paris Review was most interested in the cap's history as "the bonnet rouge worn by the French revolutionists of the 18th century" (Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 18). Since that 78 time, it had remained a symbol of liberty, later picked up by other anti-colonial movements and even hung on a liberty pole during the American Revolutionary War

("Phrygian cap"). As thoroughly rebellious and insurgent as The Paris Review was trying

to be (from the norms of literary periodicals, that is!), it was the perfect symbol, loaded

with both French and American associations. The bird stayed on the cover for the first

few years and then disappeared until only recently, with the Review's redesign after

Plimpton's death.32

The Paris Review Eagle made a brief appearance at the 1964-65 New York World's Fairs where it graced two metal pennants on the Paris Review Booth. Sadly, these blew away in a summer storm (Fuller et al. 308). 79

Fig. 2. Cover of The Paris Review 1.1 (Spring 1953).

Overall, The Paris Review presented a more colourful and vibrant face to its reader than did its contemporaries. As Wilbers notes, the rich appearance of the Review was in fact cause for suspicion during the cultural cold war:

When [The Paris Review] presented itself to the literary community in

Paris, eyebrows were raised in surprise. Whereas little magazines are

notoriously poor and often have the meagre exterior to show for it, the first 80

issue of The Paris Review came in paperback format and was wrapped in a

sprightly, colourful cover. It was fat (with 120 pages, twice the size of

Merlin's early issues), reasonably well-bound and decorated with various

illustrations. All in all, it seemed as if "a silver thread ran through the

pages of the magazine" (Campbell 65).... The Paris Review's glamorous

exterior ... left people in wonderment. This resulted in persistent rumors,

hard to shake off even more than fifty years after the fact: the CIA must

have sponsored The Paris Review to help it make such a flashy start.

(Wilbers 44-5)

These rumours and the controversy around The Paris Review's connections to the CIA

are discussed later in this chapter.

The magazine was also adamant about maintaining editorial autonomy in its

literary choices, or, "making no compromise with the public taste," as the The Little

Review put it in the twenties. In its first issue, The Paris Review was a slim volume of

carefully selected pieces; it featured only three poets (including Donald Hall, the first

poetry editor, Robert Bly and George Steiner), four short stories, a non-fiction piece

about the paupers' common grave in the Pantin cemetery, and the interview with E.M.

Forster. Subsequent issues followed a similar pattern.

Clearly, the name The Paris Review is now a complete misnomer; the material

that the magazine "reviews" or covers is in no way limited to (or directed at) Paris, nor

has it even been published in Paris for the last 30 years. However, in the early days, the

Review did try to reflect at least part of its label by including as much material with references to Paris, France, and even Europe as possible. Many of the early non-fiction 81 pieces had a distinctive Parisian theme or flavour, for example: the first issue had "The

Year in French Literature" (C. Chesnaie) and the piece on the Pantin Cemetary for paupers (Henry De Montherlant); the fifth issue contained a portfolio of drawings from

the Livres d'Or of the bars and restaurants of Paris; and the sixth issue had a piece on the

Cafe du Dome ("A bohemian paradise in 1920s Paris") by Nathan Asch and a story about

the Paris Theatre (Thomas Quinn Curtiss). Other "features" included profiles of famous

(and infamous) Paris characters, such as a portrait of the muse / waif Vali Meyers,

famous on the streets of Paris for her flaming red hair and haunted dances, written by

George Plimpton (Issue 18). Part of the Parisian content grew naturally out of the fact

that many of the contributors were writers the editors had met in Paris, living locally and

writing about the culture around them. Even today, there is still an effort to publish works

with an international sensibility (Plimpton, "Interview with David Applefield" 1).

3.1.4 The Scene: Paris in the 1950s

At the time Humes, Matthiessen and Plimpton sat down to dream up The Paris

Review, post-war Paris still had some of the literary cachet of the 1920s, with a new

generation of writers and wanderers flocking there, including many army veterans using

the support of the GI bill to attend the Sorbonne. It wasn't just the literary mythology of

Paris that made it a good spot for American writers to spend some time. In the early

1950s, Paris was still a relatively inexpensive place to live, aided by a flourishing black

market and a high exchange of French francs for US currency. One could find a decent

meal for around a dollar and rent a room for around $ 15/month. These conditions 82 attracted writers and artists from around the globe, making it increasingly attractive to other creative types (The Paris Review Early Chapters). On any given day, one might run into James Baldwin, James Jones, Terry Southern or Bill Styron in a cafe, writing alone or chatting up a circle of creative types.

However, after the Second World War, it was also a bittersweet time for

Americans to live in Paris. There was a renewed sense of energy and relief after the horror of the previous years of war and loss, and yet, there was still a lingering feeling of political unrest. Communist groups painted "U.S. Go Home" on the walls, but that didn't

seem to deter the young expats flocking there for adventure and freedom from the increasingly conservative American cultural scene (Fuller et al. 315). Certainly, there is a long tradition of young Americans going to Paris to gain culture, perspective and experience. Some might argue that the early Paris Review crowd was chasing the myth of the "Lost Generation," post-WWI writers like Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, who made Paris their home in the 1920s. One observer noted such a parallel and wrote

critically of it in 1959:

many of those Americans who since World War II have come [to Paris] in

the wake of the expatriates of the Twenties have done so to live the part

described by their elders—in short they really are lost. The creative spirit

that helped the previous generation to elaborate the myth of Expatria has

now become part of that myth. And a tyrannical one it is. (Schneider 37)

The myth was "tyrannical" because it demanded a simultaneously high level of despair and illusion in addition to a high literary output. P.E. Schneider goes on to point out that most of those that were able to stay did so only thanks to the largesse of their families, for 83 work was hard to come by, largely illegal, and poorly paid (39). Those without such

familial connections could succeed only at the expense of the bohemian lifestyle that

drew them there in the first place, many taking government jobs. This inevitability led

Schneider to complain that "respectability [had] overtaken the American literati" (39), a trend marked by the turn in little magazine publishing:

The shift [from bohemia to seriousness] is eminently symbolized by the

contrast between transition [an experimental literary journal of the 20s-

30s, published in Paris, that featured sections of James Joyce's Finnegan 's

Wake] and the most important expatriate magazine since the war, The

Paris Review. Its tone is smooth and unadvenrurous (39).

Still, by some accounts, the early Paris Review group managed to create their own reincarnated version of that famous expatriate literary scene. Several histories of the magazine refer to "The Paris Review Salon:" a loose grouping of writers who got

together regularly with editors and publishers to discuss ideas and literature. Some even

compared the regular get-togethers at Peter Matthiessen's studio to Gertrude Stein's

famous salon (Talese, "Looking" 869). It appears that The Paris Review encouraged,

even cultivated, such comparisons to their literary forbears. Like Hemingway and

Fitzgerald before them, Plimpton and his pals would take trips to Pamplona to run with

the bulls; and Plimpton himself, with his flowing scarf and cape, cut a "figure reminiscent

of Toulouse-Lautrec's famous lithograph of Aristide Bruant, that dashing litterateur of

This juxtaposition of transition and The Paris Review illuminates the tensions in what the latter was trying to do and succeeded in being known for. While The Paris Review promoted itself as revolutionary in its rejection of criticism, it came to be seen by some as too safe because of its polished quality and preference for "readable" material. 84 the nineteenth century" (Talese 864). Thomas Guinzburg, an early editor of The Paris

Review, described frequent contributor Irwin Shaw retrospectively as "a tough, tennis playing, hard-drinking writer with a good-looking wife—the closest thing we had to

Hemingway" (Talese 867). Perhaps this all worked, for as late as 1965, one journalist referred to the group as "the exuberant post-Hemingwayfarers of The Paris Review"

(Poore, 8 April 1965).

However, the early days of The Paris Review were different from those of their predecessors thirty years earlier in many important ways. First, The Paris Review was

self-consciously anti-intellectual in a way that the Lost Generation was not. Their political insouciance might be traced back to their class and social background; the Paris

Review gang came, almost exclusively, from wealthy, highly-educated and connected

American families. They never suffered the physical hardship of expatriate life that so many before them had faced, nor did they express the intellectual rebellion of their predecessors. In many ways, these privileged young expatriates were on a kind of

extended vacation, enjoying adventurous larks within a relatively safe and comfortable terrain (Wilbers 31). One journalist described this group as "gilded Bohemians" with

"Right Bank jobs and Left Bank hearts" (Schneider 40).34 Also, the environment of 1950s

Paris was not one of revolution. The radical artistic experiments (in music, art and

fiction) of the 20s were over and there really wasn't a large number of English-speaking

writers living there anymore.

There are several anecdotes that attest to the generosity of this privileged crowd, going as far as to act as informal patrons to struggling writers in Paris. For example, Gay Talese recounts how Plimpton and his colleagues provided a monthly allowance to French poet Christopher Logue during a particularly poverty and despair-filled period of Logue's life in the early 1950s ("Looking" 874). 85

There are some who would go as far as consider the early Paris Review crowd nothing more than rich literary poseurs. In a sometimes scathing, although overall balanced, article written in 1963 for Esquire magazine, Gay Talese paints this deft portrait of Plimpton and his colleagues:

Early in the fifties another young generation of American expatriates in

Paris became twenty-six years old, but they were not Sad Young Men, nor

were they Lost; they were the witty, irreverent sons of a conquering nation

and, though they came mostly from wealthy parents and had been

graduated from Harvard or Yale, they seemed endlessly delighted in

posing as paupers and dodging the bill collectors, possibly because it

seemed challenging and distinguished them from American tourists, whom

they despised, and also because it was another way of having fun with the

French, who despised them. Nevertheless, they lived in happy squalor on

the Left Bank for two or three years amid the whores, jazz musicians, and

pederast poets, and became involved with people both tragic and mad ....

(863)

In the same article, James Baldwin's memories of the Paris Review crowd are recounted.

He found the Paris Review gang somewhat trite, out of touch, and overly striving for a bygone era: "They used to go to Montparnasse, where all the painters and writers went,

and where I hardly went. And they used to go there and hang around at the cafes for

hours and hours looking for Hemingway. They didn't seem to realize ... that

Hemingway was long gone" (Talese, "Looking" 877). 86

All said, the ghosts of the Lost Generation would haunt the people of The Paris

Review during their tenure in Paris, and continue to affect the impression the public holds of the magazine and its origins. The power of myth may be stronger than historical fact,

as many readers conflate the two post-war periods in their mind, and might even place the origin of The Paris Review much further back in time than is true. The inclusion of the works of, and interviews with, early high modernists such as Eliot and Pound and the well-publicized friendship between Plimpton and Hemingway does nothing to deflate that misimpression. The persistent, almost timeless, literary aura of Paris might lead one to imagine the likes of Plimpton and Styron telling stories late into the night at one of

Gertrude Stein's salons.

3.1.5 Early Operations and Adventures

The early operations of the Paris Review were patchwork at best. The start up budget of $1500 came from $500 donations from the families of Plimpton, Train and

Matthiessen (Wilbers 43). An office was arranged in Les Editions de la Table Ronde, a publishing subsidiary to Plon, ("a solemn, conservative, very austere publishing concern" that also published Charles de Gaulle [Fuller et al. 317; Plimpton, Paris Review

Anthology 97]) and a sponsorship was secured from the French magazine, La Table

Ronde, for legal and housekeeping purposes.35 Unfortunately, as one anecdote goes, the

La Table Ronde also sought out new writers and was interested in freedom of speech. Like The Paris Review, La Table Ronde did not want to attach itself to any particular political group or literary movement. The Paris Review and La Table Ronde shared materials in the early years, and originally, they intended to publish some of the same 87

Review staff were never entrusted with their own set of keys, so they had to leave by the windows late at night, hanging from the ledge before dropping to the darkened street below, more than once attracting the attention of passers-by or gendarmes (Fuller et al.

318).

In the early days of the Review, the editors would often meet in cafes or one of the editor's homes or studios because the rented (or borrowed) offices for the magazine were too small for a crowd of any size. This was how the Paris Review crowd became associated early on with a bar, The Chaplain, in Montparnasse and then, later, the Cafe de

Tournon. The Chaplain, according to William Styron, was so smoke-filled you "could write your name in the cigarette haze with your finger," but it had a grand piano and its share of music students willing to try their hand at pleasing the crowd, though there was apparently little applause even for the best or bravest amateur; silence was the most one could hope for (Fuller et al. 315). Both of these establishments had the requisite literary

Parisian ambience with lots of writers and not many tourists. The Tournon was somewhat seedy and thread-worn but considered a secret treasure: "Regulars did not talk about the

Cafe de Tournon too much ... for fear it would be overrun and 'spoiled.' Those who went there had an almost proprietary attitude about it" (Fuller et al 318). Many would go to the Tournon to write, if only letters, since the post office was at the corner. The high- quality coffee attracted an international crowd, including many Brazilian customers. works in translation. This was an advantage to La Table Ronde in the thriving French literary scene of the time, with quarterlies competing for the attention of a relatively small audience. It is notable that many of the Paris quarterlies described themselves in similar terms as did The Paris Review. For example, the editor of La Parisienne named the characteristics of his review as "insolence and impudence" and explained that "not only have we no axe to grind but we mean to be deliberately capricious, whimsical and, like our symbol, the Parisienne, temperamental" (Maurois, "Letter from Paris" BR24). 88

Other publishing types hung out there, including Merlin's editors such as Alex Trocchi and Jane Lougee (who often brought along her Siamese cat); writers like Colette, Max

Steele, Francine du Plessix and Evan Connell Jr.; poets like Christopher Logue, and notables from the other arts, including cabaret performers on break and even such stars as

Stravinsky (Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 97-99; Fuller et al. 323-5).

The earliest Paris Review "gang" included editors Plimpton and Matthiessen (who both concentrated on fiction); John Train and Tom Guinzburg (Managing Editors);

Robert Silvers (first Paris Editor); Donald Hall (first Poetry Editor); advisory editors John

Marquand Jr. (son of novelist John Marquand, writing under the pen-name John Phillips)

and Eugene Walters; and writers William Styron (who had written the highly acclaimed

Lie Down in Darkness but was relatively unknown in Europe), Pati Hill (an ex-model and

frequent contributor to the Review), Eugene Walter (an Alabama native who signed his

letters, "millefleurs, Professor James B. Willoughby") and James Jones, all "shabby-

genteel young expatriates" (Singer 28). Most of the editorial staff knew each other from

college days and past acquaintances. Many had gone to Paris for adventure or vacation

and had been seduced by the ambience and social life of the place. Eager for intellectual

stimulation, impromptu literary gatherings sprung up, many held in the tiny apartment of

Peter Matthiessen or in one of their bars or cafes.

Media coverage of the early years of the Paris Review suggests that there was a

certain type of literature that was created by people in these groups during this time. For

example, a 1962 review of Philip Roth's Letting Go attacks it for its "sense of life" which

The Paris Review's 25 anniversary "Sketchbook" contains a great many wild memories from these early days and the characters and adventures of this unique time. 89 is "oddly self-conscious and limited," a problem shared by others of his generation

(including Saul Bellow) that might be blamed on spending too much time with "the Paris

Review crowd or in Iowa City or some similar 'creative writing' center," suggesting that

The Paris Review's entourage was itself some kind of institution (Mizener, "Bumblers"

204). Another review, this time of Colin Wilson's novel The Outsider, indicates that time

spent at The Paris Review was a formative influence for the writer in the same way time in the air force or on a commune might be (Poore 4 Sept. 1956). These disparate references to The Paris Review indicate the high profile of The Paris Review for literary readers. Simple mention of The Paris Review was a gesture that indicated specific values of literature, social cliques and ways of thinking.

3.1.6 Change and Growing Pains

By 1955, the French franc had sharply inflated and Paris was rapidly losing its

allure for struggling writers and artists. Paris Review founders Matthiessen and Humes

and editors Hall and Guinzburg had all gone home and even Plimpton and Train were in the process of moving their primary residence back to American shores ("Editor to Teach

at Barnard"), leaving Paris Editor Robert Silvers to take care of most of the day-to-day business of the Review, with the help of Train during periodic visits over the next few years. The arrangement with Plon for offices and printing was coming to an end and The

Paris Review needed to find both a new home and a new printer. By all accounts, this period of operations at the Paris Review was characterized by "a certain slovenliness of procedure;" manuscripts regularly went missing and bills went unpaid (Fuller et al. 347). Several issues during this time were printed in Paris, at a "gloomy plant" with "an ancient flat-bed printing-press that looked like a steam locomotive lying on its side" on Rue de la

Sabliere. Perhaps the dim light of the single light bulb can be blamed for the sloppy proofreading that allowed too many typos to slip by. In the fifth issue, an entire

Christopher Logue poem was printed squarely in between two lines of an epic poem by

Patrick Bowles, drawing the ire of both contributors. Paying advertisers fared no better: the ad copy for the Alliance Francaise came out claiming that it was "the oldest and last

expensive" (instead of least expensive) language school in Paris (Fuller et al. 359).

In 1956, printing operations were moved to Nijmegen, Holland, under the

direction of Silvers, a move that created its own set of complications that were to dog the magazine for the next few years. Despite the language problems, the extended effort its

distant location required, and its archaic rules (including no women allowed in the printing machine rooms), as long as the exchange rate was good, the choice of a Dutch press made financial sense (Fuller et al. 360).

Silvers also moved the editorial offices to the loft of the Editions Stock offices in

Rue Casimir-Delavigne. For a brief time, the magazine took an office on the Right Bank

(Fuller et al. 367). During his editorship, Silvers often edited the magazine from a river barge on La Seine which he shared with musician Peter Duchin. Silvers and visiting musicians battled for airtime on the barge as there was always lots of noise from the piano and gathered musicians, who included Chet Baker and Alan Eager. The story goes

that tenants of the barge shaved each morning with Perrier because there was no running

water (Talese 874). This location had other drawbacks: in the spring of 1956 (the year of the greatest flood since 1910), flood waters covered the quays. They were forced to 91 anchor the barge midstream and use a system of breeches buoys to get ashore. There was no phone on the barge, and every time a delivery or meeting was needed, visitors had to use a dinghy and pull themselves along to the office. There are great anecdotes of Paris

Review editors dangling from the cable when their craft got swept away in the current.

Even in the early years, the majority of the work published in The Paris Review

came from the United States; however, Silvers' role in Paris included securing the drawing portfolios of European artists as well as translated work by European writers

such as Jean Genet (Fuller et al. 363). The Paris headquarters of the magazine gave an international aura to the whole enterprise, and Plimpton pushed hard to keep a presence

for the magazine there even when much of the work was being performed in New York.

He succeeded in keeping the Paris office afloat until the early 1970s when the magazine

finally packed up and moved everything into Plimpton's home in New York City.

3.1.7 The New York Scene

While George Plimpton left Paris to set up a New York office in the mid-1950's, the Review kept a base of operations in Paris until 1973, when everything moved to New

York, and into the crowded ground-floor and basement of Plimpton's home at East 72nd

Street. Long before the Paris Review headquarters officially moved to New York City, the social and literary hub of the magazine had already relocated to Plimpton's flat. This remained the centre of operations until Plimpton's death, when the Review moved

downtown to a larger Soho space. Word is that a lion-trainer's chair still hangs from

ceiling of the 72° street office, echoing Plimpton's early and daring adventures. 92

The Paris Review had (and still has) a distinctive and powerful role in the New

York literary scene. Its presence was carved out both by its published issues and its

social influence in the form of its regularly wild and memorable parties. These parties were legendary; filled with big names and memorable shenanigans (including scandalous verbal and physical clashes) all presided over by the increasingly larger-than-life George

Plimpton, known as an extraordinary host (Dundy, Paris Review Anthology 302). In

1963, Esquire featured a double page photo spread of a Paris Review party in New York

City. Recognizable guests included William Styron, Norman Mailer, Jimmy Baldwin,

Irwin Shaw, Allen Ginsberg, Jackie Kennedy, (her sister) Lee Radziwill, James Jones,

Lillian Hellman, Terry Southern, Philip Roth, Gregory Corso and more. The article also

called the "Paris Review crowd" the "'red-hot' center of the New York literary

'Establishment'" (Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 301). Working for, or being

associated with, The Paris Review had its advantages. It was a membership with privileges; Gay Talese explained that such connections meant "a kind of membership in

what Elaine Dundee [sic] once called the 'Quality Lit Set" ... for more than a decade

some of the staff have been equally at home in the Social Register, in jail, in a shack behind the house of Gertrude Stein's nephew or in a sloop in the lesser Antilles" (Talese,

"Paris Review"). It was this combination of talent, debauchery, adventure and

connections that drew this motley crew together, at least in the public imagination. In a

description of New York cliques in 1976, cultural commentator John Cony names the

"people who once worked on the Paris Review" as a distinct, identifiable social group

familiar to New Yorkers ("About New York"). Even "Looking for Hemingway,"

Talese's satirically critical 1963 article on the early days of The Paris Review scene for 93

Esquire, probably only served to increase the aura around the Review''?, staff by detailing the famous friends and wild parties of the staff.

Not everyone saw the cultural status of the Paris Review and its gang as a positive thing, although opinions vary on what that status exactly was, and is. Eventually, even

some of the Paris Review team was forced to admit that the mythology around the magazine had overgrown its reality; early editor Harold Humes called [their image of

debauchery and scandal] a "grotesque and dangerous lie" (Polsgrove 76; also qtd in

Wilbers 98). Others saw the Paris Review hangers-on as "obsessed" with "how the other

half lives" so much so that they "befriend the more interesting of the odd, avoid the

downtown dullards on Wall Street and dip into the world of the junkie, the pederast, the

prizefighter, and the adventurer in pursuit of kicks and literature" (Talese 867). Some

complain that, in later years, the Review "evolved into an elitist journal that was run out

of the editor's apartment and not particularly well-read, even by its own 4000

subscribers," while others maintained that "it was eclectic, it was odd, but it was not

snotty or pretentious or desperately hip" (Cotts 38). There were also complaints that The

Paris Review often functioned like an Old Boys' Club. From the beginning, with only rare exceptions, the key players in The Paris Review have been highly educated, wealthy,

well-connected American men, the majority Harvard, Yale, Cambridge and M.I.T.

graduates. Comments in the press about the Paris Review indicate that the editorial team was understood to be strictly rich and male. For example, in a review of William

Saroyan's semi-autobiographical book Not Dying, reviewer Orville Prescott comments that "the rich young men from The Paris Review do not have to tape-record William

Saroyan for posterity; he is doing so himself. . ." (41). This casual remark suggests both the high familiarity that the average New York Times reader would have had with the

Paris Review interviews and the general impression held of the people behind the publication.

One early staff member mentions the lack of "serious literary ladies" in the early

days; one never ran into women like Flannery O'Connnor, Katherine Anne Porter, Mary

McCarthy, or Eudora Welty at Paris Review functions, only wives, mistresses, and

girlfriends (Elaine Dundy qtd. in Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 302). Patsy

Matthiessen, wife of founder Peter Matthiessen, remembers her interminable servings of

tea and sandwiches for the boys and being on the outside of the inner circle. No great

loss, it seems, for she had this to say in retrospect: "the whole life seemed after a while to be utterly meaningless ... And there was something very manque about them" (qtd. in

Talese, "Looking" 877). After Plimpton passed away in 2003, there were rumblings in

the literary community about how the Review had "often been perceived as a bastion of

male authorial output" and that there was a need for a new editor with more equitable

tastes (Smith B7). Some thought that the magazine would die with Plimpton, and are

surely surprised to see its reinvention and revival in the last few years. 95

3.2 THE PEOPLE OF THE PARIS REVIEW

Over the years, The Paris Review has been known to have one of the lengthiest

mastheads in the business, often containing the names of people for years after their minimal involvement with the publication. The recognition of being counted in the masthead became a form of compensation for the low pay (or no pay) that the Review

could offer to people who helped in some way, whether it was for getting submissions or

subscriptions or just lending a hand around the office (Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology

203). A detailed accounting of the editorship of The Paris Review is beyond the reach of

this study; Wilbers' critical history supplies ample detail on the many brave souls who

helmed the ship (with varying degrees of success) over the first few decades. In order to personalize the history of the magazine, I will focus a few of the key creative and

administrative members of the Paris Review team.

In the first decade alone, The Paris Review profited from the leadership of

individuals such as writer Nelson Aldrich (1958-1960), Blair Fuller (1961-2), and South

African poet Patrick Bowles (1962-4) (Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 299). George

Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen continued to do the lion's share of the fiction editing

from New York, with Plimpton as the central "tastemaker" in terms of the feel and style

of The Paris Review (Wilbers 55). The last Paris editor, Maxine Groffsky, enjoyed a long term—from 1966-1973—finishing off her time in the last Paris office on rue Vernet off the Champs-Elysees. Donald Hall, the first poetry editor of The Paris Review, saw the

In 1993, the masthead listed over 60 names. magazine's purpose as "represent[mgj a generation of writers" (Plimpton, Paris Review

Anthology 71), and was responsible for bringing out the work of poets including Robert

Bly, Adrienne Rich, Louis Simpson, James Wright, W.D. Snodgrass, W.S. Merwin,

Thorn Gunn, Ted Hughes, and Philip Larkin. While he admitted to having missed out in

his rejection of Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg, Hall was generally considered to have

an exceptional eye for talent and the connections to get the best new work published in

the magazine. Hall departed The Paris Review in 1961, choosing his own replacement,

X.J. Kennedy, a young poet at the time (Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 177). Within

a couple of years, Kennedy found the combination of graduate studies, teaching, new

parenthood and editing too demanding and went his own way (Kennedy has since

become a well-known editor of English textbooks and anthologies). While some accused

Kennedy of printing "only stuff by curmudgeonly formalists" (Kennedy qtd. in Plimpton,

Paris Review Anthology 178), his selections actually included the work of Robert

Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich and many more. Kennedy was

replaced by Tom Clark (also recommended by Hall). Clark was Hall's student (Plimpton,

Paris Review Anthology 229) and he inherited a file of a "hundred accepted poems from

every English professor in America" (Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 229). It was

Clark's job to send these pieces back to their contributors, along with new letters of

rejection, a move that led to a lot of anger and ill will towards the magazine. Clark went

on to put out the work of a lot of previously unpublished poets, alongside new

contributors to The Paris Review such as "Objectivist" poets like Louis Zukofsky and

George Oppen; "Black Mountain" writers like Charles Olson and John Wieners; "New

York" poets like John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Frank O'Hara, Amiri Baraka, and Kenneth Koch; the Beats and "San Francisco Renaissance" poets like Ginsberg, Gary

Snyder, and Michael McClure. Plimpton has said of this period that Clark "made up for modernist lost time" ("Paris Review Sketchbook" 385).

The Paris Review got by with the help of a constant stream of willing volunteers, many Americans traveling abroad, looking for an entry into the literary scene. Behind their backs, the Review staff had nicknames for these earnest helpers: Apothecker (from

TO the German for "pharmacist") for the women, Musinsky (named after Frank Musinsky, their first volunteer) for the men. There is little information about these early female volunteers, or the source of their moniker (only that there were too many to remember the names of; hence, a single, all-purpose nickname was invented); however, among their numbers was Jane Fonda (who did a line-drawing for issue #18) and Lena Home's daughter, Gail Jones. The men were mostly aspiring writers, who sometimes exploited the magazine's innocence by misrepresenting the spirit of the magazine (i.e. making it seem more risque than it really was) or making off with subscription money (Fuller et al.

317).

The first publisher of the Review (from 1954-1975), was Prince Sadruddin Aga

Khan (2nd son of potentate H.R.H. Aga Khan, known as Sadri to his friends) ("Aga

Khan's Son"). The honour of publishing the Paris Review was a dubious one to say the least. The chief requirement of the position seems to have been an endless supply of funds, since the publisher's role was most often that of a benefactor, one who had to

"rescue the magazine from its frequent flirtations with insolvency" (Singer 28). Aga

Khan had a publishing background, having worked on the Harvard Lampoon, and knew

Gay Talese refers to these women as Apeteckers ("Looking for Hemingway" 868). 98

many writers and artists from that time. He started with the eighth issue, in 1954, after being persuaded by Plimpton at the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona (or, as legend has

it, literally while running from the bulls) (Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 409; Talese,

"Paris Review" 49). Although he rarely showed up at the office, Aga Khan took on the

small financial obligations of Review (such as the $500 owing to the printer), and his

presence generally "gave a sense of stability to the magazine." During his tenure, he also

convinced his father to start an annual fiction prize, awarded (almost) annually for the

best short story published in the Review. The Aga Khan Prize for Fiction was valued at

$1000 and continued until 2004. Because its winners included such writers as Philip Roth

(1958), T. Coraghessan Boyle (1982), Ben Okri (1987), Jeffrey Eugenides (1991), A. S.

Byatt (1995), David Foster Wallace (1997), Michael Chabon (2003) and Annie Proulx

(2004), it always carried more prestige than monetary value.

In 1975, the soft drink distribution giant Bernard F. Conners took over the role of

publisher ("Notes on People" 18). He established a reputation for hosting lavish parties

with rich neighbours at his home and insisted that all those who attended had to

subscribe. While few resubscribed, he surely brought the Review to a whole new

audience. In 1981, the Bernard F. Conners Prize for Poetry, also worth $1000, was

created "for the finest poem over 200 lines published in The Paris Review in a given

year." This prize was also awarded until 2004 and its winners included Jorie Graham

(1989), Christopher Logue (1990), and Donald Hall (1991) ("Bernard F. Conners").

Ron Dante took over publishing responsibilities in 1978. Dante was a singer and

record producer who lived close by the New York office and had made his fortune

singing "Sugar Sugar" in the twelve different voices which made up the fictional "band" The Archies. The single sold ten million copies and left him with enough wealth to help the forever cash-strapped Paris Review. Like his predecessors, Dante carried a great deal of the financial burden, and certainly most of the risk, for The Paris Review in its early years; however, the Paris Review publishers were far from alone in the task of keeping the magazine going.

3.2.1 George Plimpton: Larger than Life

While it is important to mention the many names associated with the Paris

Review, and the hard work of the masses who have kept it alive for over half a century, the one person who certainly has earned more than a passing note in the history of the

Paris Review is its founder and editor for fifty years, George Plimpton. To fully understand the character of The Paris Review, one must understand the character of

Plimpton, who sat at its helm as its editor and general guide from the first issue, in 1953, until his death in 2003. The Paris Review was a publication perfectly suited to Plimpton, a man utterly fascinated by American culture and the ties between high and low, a man on a search for where they overlapped and collided in beautiful colours:

Throughout his career, Plimpton cut a nearly 191 -century figure—like one

of those unflappable, polymathic Victorian explorers, only in this case one

who happens to have paddled along the turbulent river of ZO^-century

America. He arrives exuberantly, at the muddy confluence where politics,

media, sports and celebrity all churn together. Plimpton was already putting high and low culture in a blender long before academia found such

mixing fashionable. (Blythe 18)

It was Plimpton's unique sense of the romanticism of the literary life—a romanticism

often described as "infectious" (Talese 867)—that defined The Paris Review and

significantly contributed to the allure of both the magazine and its people.

Born in 1927 to a wealthy East coast family, Plimpton grew up counting the

Kennedys among his friends. In fact, in later years, Muhammad Ali was heard to call

Plimpton "Kennedy" because of his Northeastern accent and aristocratic bearing

(Remnick 46). Both his pedigree and education were solidly upper class. Plimpton's

grandfather founded the Ginn publishing company and was a renowned philanthropist;

his father was a lawyer with Debevoise & Plimpton. As a young man, Plimpton attended

Phillips Exeter and went on to study at Harvard and Cambridge before taking up the post

of Paris Review editor in 1952.

While reports vary, many credit Plimpton with the idea to use interviews instead

of critical articles in The Paris Review (Remnick 46). Besides his heavy engagement in

the workings of the Review, Plimpton developed another career as a "participatory journalist." Long before Hunter S. Thompson was living the life he reported on, Plimpton

garnered jeers, applause and laughter for his escapades in the name of a good tale. He is

best known for his work in sports writing, but he did it in a wholly new and wide-eyed

way: by training and competing alongside his athletic subjects. Starting in 1961 with Out

of My League, an account of his time pitching to Willie Mays and Ernie Banks, Plimpton

wrote a series of well-received athletic larks. The series included a 1963 piece for Sports

Illustrated about his rounds in the ring with Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson, his 101

1966 Paper Lions about his experience quarterbacking with the Detroit Lions (later made into a movie), and The Bogey Man (1968) about golfing with Sam Snead. The books

were as much about the personalities of the other players he met along the way as the

sporting challenges themselves. His approach to his subjects echoed the attitude of the

Paris Review interview: they were always respectful collaborations marked by gentleness

and a consistent deferral to his subjects. This habit could read like authorial self-

effacement to some readers:

(Plimpton) made a habit of deferring to his subjects, rarely if ever

shouldering them out of the way so that he could deliver the bon mot—a

courtesy rare since the advent of the so-called New Journalism. Plimpton's

work never leaves you queasy or makes you want to turn away from some

vainglorious self-revelation; but in its courtliness it's also true that he

seldom sounds the harrowing depths. Plimpton's persona serves ... to

elicit, even to stand a bit stiffly as a Yankee straight man, sacrificing

himself for the good of the subject. (Blythe 17)

Plimpton's infamous exploits also include playing basketball under Red Auerbach in

Boston, goaltending for the Boston Bruins against the Philadelphia Flyers, and many non-

sports adventures such as playing triangle for Mahler's Fourth under Leonard Bernstein,

flying on a trapeze with the Flying Apollos and appearing in various television and film

cameos from Lawrence of Arabia to The Simpsons (Blythe).

Not all of Plimpton's exploits were victory tales; Plimpton was more often than not a lousy competitor (he lost ten yards as the Lions' quarterback), and when he

succeeded, it was equal parts luck and good humour that got him there. However, 102

Plimpton's work set out to show the grace and hilarity that could accompany failure. As

Will Blythe put it in a portrait of the man, "it was in failure and daydreaming that he

found his calling. Eventually, it would be Plimpton's fate as the most urbane of pranksters to turn underachievement into an art, and all of life into the equivalent of a prep school insurrection" (Blythe 17).

Other critics have observed the similarities between Plimpton's approach and that

of his 18 century forebear, James Boswell. As Alan Nadel argues, both Boswell and

Plimpton shared a "half-self-conscious but thoroughly impervious naivete" (Nadel 375)

that made for great conversation. As an interviewer (which Plimpton was, both for the

Review and other magazines ), Plimpton either escaped or refused to acknowledge any

intimidation by his subjects. He was at times an exasperating ingenu, asking even the

awkward questions, and at other times an ingratiating protege—bowing down before the

great literary legends before him. Nagel writes that "both Boswell and Plimpton suffer

from a kind of naughty intrusiveness. They want to put themselves where they don't belong, desire to see it all first hand" (Nadel 377). Nadel goes on to suggest that Plimpton

cultivated his persona as a way of making the adventure of the interview part of the story

itself. Also, by performing the nai'f, Plimpton had a kind of advantage; he likely put his

subject more at ease than would an aggressive, all-knowing inquisitor. As Malcolm

Cowley notes in his introduction to the first Writers at Work interview collection,

Some of The Paris Review's most memorable interviews were conducted by George Plimpton, including James Thurber (1955), Ernest Hemingway (1958), Joseph Heller ((1974), John Barth (1985), EX. Doctorow (1986), Louis Auchincloss (1994), John Gregory Dunne (1996), William Styron (1999), Hunter S. Thompson (2000), and Robert Giroux (2000). Plimpton also freelanced his interviewing talent to other publications, including interviews with Truman Capote (1966), Bobby Orr (1980), and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones (2003) "Authors are sometimes like tomcats: they distrust all the other toms, but they are kind to kittens" (9). In this way, as the interviewer, Plimpton performed as much as any of his subjects. His approach was, at times, to gain the upper hand through affected self- effacement.

Plimpton's personality is legendary in cultural circles, especially the elite New

York literary society. In a reminiscence written upon Plimpton's death in 2003, New

Yorker editor David Remnick suggests that Plimpton had a cultlike following. Remnick remembers Plimpton as "a serious man of serious accomplishments who just happened to have more fun than a van full of jugglers and clowns. He was game for anything and made a comic art of his Walter Mitty dreams and inevitable failures" (Remnick 46).

Plimpton's wildest legacy, at least the one he's probably most likely to be remembered for, is his success as a party host. In New York at least, Plimpton was known for throwing wild, glamorous parties, often involving fireworks, dancers, all sorts of celebrities and other eye candy. His flair for the outrageous may have been one of the reasons so many of the Paris Review fundraisers ("Revels") made so little money. He also was a prolific party guest; Plimpton was said to sometimes attend four or five parties in a single night, where, according to one scenester, "His tall beaky presence and booming Brahmin voice enlivened every gathering," staying into the wee hours with boundless energy (McGrath, "Plimpton Bash" Bl). At a 1966 bash held by Truman

Capote, George Plimpton partied until dawn with the likes of Ralph Ellison, Norman

Mailer, Lauren Bacall, Philip Roth, and hundreds of hangers-on drinking champagne, tossing napkins and dancing until dawn (Curtis, "David Merrick" 90). 104

George Plimpton died just 18 days before the Paris Review's giant 50th

anniversary party, in 2003. The party, which Plimpton helped to plan, included can-can

girls, a jazz band, spoken word poetry and pyrotechnics. With the news of his death, the

guest list doubled, including many celebrities (literary and otherwise) such as Kurt

Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Walter Cronkite (Welch 18). Vonnegut delivered a short

toast to George: "If anybody can come back from the dead, and then write about it, it will

have to be George Plimpton . . . ." ("Toast to George"). The money raised, combined

with the payment for the archives, created a massive endowment that has set The Paris

Review on a more financially stable course than ever before.

After his death, the Paris Review established a "Hadada Prize" named after the

Paris Review eagle in honour of Plimpton, who was a "passionate ornithologist" and

liked the bird's name. The award is presently granted each year to "a distinguished

member of the literary community who has demonstrated a strong and unique

commitment to the craft of writing" (McGrath, "Plimpton Bash" Bl). However Plimpton

is remembered, his love for and commitment to the Paris Review is undeniable. Terry

McDonnell called the magazine Plimpton's "spiritual hideout" (Cotts 38). During his

fifty years of service to the magazine, Plimpton never drew a salary.

3.3 ENTERPRISE IN THE SERVICE OF ART

Keeping the magazine afloat financially was always a struggle for The Paris

Review. The initial $1500 in start-up funds did not last long beyond the first issue.

According to most accounts, the Review lost money for its first forty years, with a very 105 small circulation, heavy dependence on volunteers, and tiny to non-existent salaries.

Research of the first 25 years of The Paris Review uncovers a kind of pride in the poverty

and hard-scrabble existence of the magazine's early years. While arguably better-funded than many of its counterparts, The Paris Review revelled (sometimes literally) in presenting itself as a bohemian enterprise, willing to engage in outlandish larks in order to put each issue out. For example, a backgrounder on The Paris Review in an article on

its fundraising activities had this to say:

The Paris Review, a literary quarterly that, since 1952, has been edited,

variously, on a barge in the Seine; atop a pinball machine at the Cafe

Tournon; within a smart Manhattan salon on East 72nd Street and under a

"veritable hive of cockroaches" on East 82 Street, held a fund-raising party

last night in Greenwich Village. (Talese, "Paris Review" 49)

The description is equal parts absurdity and starving artist; the point is that we should

consider these people dedicated.

It is true that in order to keep going, editors and contributors came up with an

endless supply of outrageous fundraising and marketing ideas. Despite the prestige of

their stamp of cultural capital, from the beginning, contributors and editors had to do a lot

of work for very little pay, a fact that perhaps contributed to the "art-for-art's sake allure"

of the publication (Singer 28). However, while The Paris Review occupied a unique place in literary culture, catering to a small and highly literate audience, it ironically used means considered "popular" by many, such as commercial advertising, publicity stunts,

and various revenue-generating operations such as limited edition print sales and gala 106 events, practices that Malcolm Cowley termed "Enterprise in the Service of Art"

(Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 131).

The Paris Review's fundraising efforts ranged from the coolly practical to the bizarre. Everyone involved in the magazine had to do their share of promoting the magazine, either through subscription sales or word-of-mouth publicity. Since

subscription fees and numbers have never been high enough to support publication,

advertising revenue was instrumental in keeping the Review afloat, and the Paris Review

staff did not shy from accepting almost any advertiser. Advertisers in the first ten issues included ones for rival magazines and publishers, and even one for the Democratic

Digest, a decision the Review regretted for having compromised its proclaimed apolitical position (Wilbers 44). Several issues in the first few years also ran listings for restaurants, bars, hotels, bookstores, galleries and shopping in Paris at the back of the magazine, a

feature titled "Sous les Toits de Paris."

For marketing pushes, staffers and volunteers put up posters and did door-to-door

sales all over Paris:

From the first, Review's editors waved away stuffy illusions about the

dignity expected of "pure" literature, promoted Paris Review as if it were

Paris Confidential. Review-men dashed about Paris after dark armed with

gluepot and brush, illegally plastered posters on handy walls (one ended up

on the lavatory ceiling of the Cafe du Dome). ("Big Little Magazine" 57)

These "Review-men" were themselves a motley crowd: a "nocturnal squad of flying poster plasterers, a union of Yale men and Arab youths who ran through Paris at night 107 sticking large Paris Review advertising posters on every lamppost, bus and pissoir they could" (Talese 870).

The Paris Review also targeted wealthy American entrepreneurs and corporations for patronage. Several of their ventures were for both fundraising and publicity. For example, in 1964, The Paris Review operated a booth at the New York World Fair, staffed by attractive young women. The intention was to sell a range of literary magazines (mostly literary magazines like the Hudson, Sewanee, Partisan and their own), as well as "quality paperbacks" (MacKenzie, "Topics"). Unfortunately, the bestselling items were Paris Review T-shirts and shopping bags, and all kinds of pseudo-'Trench" paraphernalia such as miniature Eiffel Towers, French flags, French cigarettes, posters,

Charles de Gaulle face-masks, and Statue of Liberty trinkets (with red light bulbs) (see

Fig. 3 below). 108

Fig. 3. The Paris Review booth at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair

In later years, when The Paris Review was operating mostly out of its New York office, the magazine attempted to raise funds through regular "revels," large parties which often involved dancing and the use of mixed-media such as films and projected imagery. These parties were distinguished by their innovative visual decoration, for example, running big reels of old film backwards. These events required a huge amount of effort, were very expensive, and often raised little money when all the dust settled. For example, a 1969 Revel on Welfare Island ended with enormous bills for electricity and water and two rented pianos left in the rain; it earned a mere $14 for the magazine

(Tolchin). More successful parties worked because people were (and still are) happy to pay great sums for the privilege of mixing with the famous, a weakness that The Paris 109

Review has always been able to exploit. At their 1965 fundraising bash, 800 people paid

$12.50 (equivalent to about $90 today40) each to sip cocktails in the same room as literary giants and living legends such as Marianne Moore, star athletes like John Gordy, musicians and rich (and beautiful) socialites (Talese, "Paris Review"). The money raised went towards increasing story fees for its contributors. The following year's bash was

called "one of the most unusual benefit parties of the season" in the society column of

The New York Times. This time, each of the more than 1,000 guests paid $17.50 a head,

and while Marianne Moore was once again present, the list of attendees had decidedly gone up a notch. Big stars such as Frank Sinatra, politicians including Senator Robert F.

Kennedy, minor royalty, actors, oil heiresses, models, designers, artists, and even a few writers filled the guest list. The description of the event in the press emphasizes the sex

appeal of the party, explaining how editor Plimpton had spent the day telling his callers to

"bring the prettiest girl you can find":

Most of them did. There were girls in pajamas, girls in long dresses, girls

in mid-thigh skirts, girls with long flowing hair and girls with short crops,

girls who write and girls who read and a lot of girls Mr. Plimpton

describes as "Judas goats—they go places and everybody follows them"

(Taylor, "The Prettiest Girls" 33).

What all this has to do with literature is hard to say, but the appeal of the Paris Review

crowd and its environment was steadily growing, its cachet both intelligent and salacious.

In 1973, Plimpton sponsored a massive pyrotechnics show from a barge on the East River

See http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/ for comparing historical dollar amounts. 110 for the Paris Review Ball and in celebration of the 90th birthday of the Brooklyn Bridge; the show was accompanied by a brass musical ensemble playing, appropriately, Handel's

"Music for the Royal Fireworks" and "Water Music" (Lieberman 109).

Other fundraising efforts were more serious-minded. Because of its small, paperback form, the Review itself was not a great place for art, and restricted itself mostly to line drawings, black and white sketches and photographs, and cartoons, which worked best in that physical format. However, art editor Pene du Bois came up with the idea to

start a Poster Program, "an imaginative publicity stunt, meant to stir up more interest in

The Review and to boost circulation" (Shirey LI 14). The Paris Review was able to launch the program in 1965 with a grant from Drue Heinz. The vision was to commission artists to design posters using The Paris Review title in some way (however minor) that could be

sold to raise funds for the quarterly. The program started with a show of the prints,

created by mostly established artists and printed by Chiron Press, at the Bryon Gallery

(New York City) (Glueck, "Art Notes;" "Posters for the Paris Review."). By 1976, the magazine had put out 42 posters by 35 artists and the collected prints were shown in a

critically acclaimed show at the Benson Gallery in New York City (Shirey LI 14). Over the years, the Review has been able to commission artists such as David Hockney,

Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise

Bourgeois, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and others to create pieces to be sold as limited

edition prints (see figure below). They are all available to be viewed online at www.parisreview.com. This program continues to the present and has been a successful

fundraiser for the Paris Review. These ventures allowed the magazine to remain Ill independent from the often conservative universities and individuals that many other successful literary periodicals were sponsored by and therefore depended on.41

I'-VilS.liSVJJftv

Fig. 4. Untitled, Silkscreen print by Claes Oldenburg, 1965. Edition of 150. Untitled, by Willem deKooning, 1979. "The Paris Review Print Series." The Paris Review. 20 Jan. 2008 .

Finally, while not exactly a fundraising adventure, another Paris Review

"enterprise" was the Paris Review Editions, a subsidiary of Doubleday & Company.

Started in 1965, The Paris Review "lent its literary luster" to a line of books of "high literary quality by interesting new writers" (Pace 94). According to Doubleday senior editor Walter I. Bradbury, his large publishing firm sought out the partnership with The

Paris Review because of their reputation "for discovering and encouraging exciting new

Contemporaneous American literary magazines such as The Partisan Review, The Kenyon Review and The Sewanee Review were all funded by universities. 112 writers" (Pace 94) and relied upon George Plimpton and his colleagues to select manuscripts. While few details are known about this series (Plimpton's own books and the Writers at Work interview anthologies were published with other companies), it

appears that the first few books were less than enthusiastically received. Their first publication, the unpronounceable Tlooth by Harry Mathews, got a lukewarm reception in

The New York Times (Buitenuis BR37; Fremont-Smith 37), despite its creative marketing plan. Plimpton planned to launch the book with a skywriting of its title ("Tlooth") over

New York City; it is not known if he went through with it (Gilroy 52). Print

advertisements for the first book drew heavily on the reputation of the Paris Review (see

figure below). Some of the key descriptors in the advertisement, such as "exciting,"

"unstereotyped," "wildly unconventional," "inventive," and "extraordinary" are qualities

long pursued by and associated with The Paris Review. The endorsement of the magazine, along with the "stamp" of the eagle in Phrygian cap, was meant to be a

testament of quality. This association is mentioned by several reviewers: one states that the name "Paris Review Editions" "implies literary, sometimes mildly avant-garde,

quality" (Fremont-Smith, 21 Dec. 1966, 37), and another book review describes the Paris

Review Editions as a "promising imprimatur" (Fremont-Smith, 3 March 1967, 33). 113

The irst of Doubleday's new'Taris Review Editions" is not for the little old lady from Dubuque

Unless she swings. If you know the kind of exciting, on-stereotyped writing The Paris. Review itself publishes, Harry Matnew's TLOOTH may not come as too much of a surprise. TUWWH is just wildly unconventional. In­ ventive, Extraordinary on any account In the words of John Asnbery, "an enthralling, beautiful, and sometimes horrifying book [that] buttonholes the reader more effectively than the Ancient Mariner buttonholed the wedding gaest."

Fig. 5. Display Ad 1021 - No Title. The New York Times 6 Nov. 1966: 356.

All things considered, The Paris Review's practice of "Enterprise in the Service of Art" has contributed as much to the adventurous and eccentric reputation of the magazine as it has to its bottom line. Plimpton's commitment to having fun while making money set a light-hearted and sometimes outrageous tone to the magazine's public activities that

Review staff attempt to maintain even today. Like the magazine and the interviews themselves, The Paris Review has never been afraid to mix up the serious with the artistic 114 and the profound with the superficial, and it has proven to be a balance that resonates with its many readers and followers.

3.4 THE CIA CONNECTION

While brushed aside by most devotees of The Paris Review, since its earliest years there has been a persistent rumour that The Paris Review was initially connected with the

CIA. The rumour has taken several versions over the years, but usually includes the claim that The Paris Review received funding from the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-

communist advocacy group later revealed (through declassified documents) to have been

established by the CIA (Saunders, Warner). While the existence and operations of the

Congress for Cultural Freedom are confirmed public knowledge, there are, at present, no

official declassified documents linking the organization to The Paris Review. Until recently, this connection was thought by most scholars to be either a wholesale

fabrication, an elaboration on Harold Humes' alleged paranoia about the CIA, or an

exaggeration based on acquaintance and association. However, in recent years—indeed,

even in recent months—new revelations have surfaced which lend greater credence to

The Paris Review I CIA connection.

Whispers of CIA involvement thread through many early anecdotes of the Paris

Review crowd; however, these accounts are mostly offered in a tone of hilarity and

flippancy that could hardly be verified. According to early contributing writer Terry

Southern, one senior Review staffer worked as "a top operative in Paris with both the

KGB and the CIA-—using the Review and its literary activities as his 'cover'" (Fuller et 115 al. 349). Several other contributors mention the rumours but fail to either verify or discount the veracity of such tales.

The last couple of years have seen a renewed interest in the history of The Paris

Review and its people, perhaps triggered by the passing of founder (and gatekeeper)

George Plimpton, and certainly aided by the persistent research of documentary filmmaker Immy Humes, daughter of Paris Review founder Harold "Doc" Humes.

Humes' new documentary Doc, about the life of her father, features interview footage in which Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen reveals that it was he, Matthiessen, who was, in fact, a young CIA operative and started the magazine as a cover for his role

(McGee, "The Burgeoning Birth"). He claims that his involvement lasted for a couple of years, "right after the war," at a time when the CIA "wasn't into assassinations."

Matthiessen also points out that, in that era, working with the CIA wasn't considered the politically compromising act it might be seen to be in retrospect.

Matthiessen explains that Humes did not know of this CIA connection until the mid-1960s when Matthiessen confessed it to Humes as a way of "coming clean"

(Donadio). Allegedly, Matthiessen also came clean to George Plimpton around the same time; in response, Plimpton was "outraged." In another recent interview, Matthiessen stresses that his own involvement with the CIA should not be equated with the complicity of The Paris Review as a whole. He insists that the magazine wasn't a front (although this contradicts earlier statements that it was precisely that) and that it never received any funding from the CIA: he states "I used The Paris Review as a cover, there's no question of that, but the C.I.A. had nothing to do with The Paris Review" (qtd in Donadio). 116

Another early Paris Review contributor, Nelson Aldrich (editor 1957-9), also had

CIA ties by way of his later work with the Congress for Cultural Freedom as a "public relations functionary." Aldrich is currently putting together an oral biography of George

Plimpton for Random House (working title George Being George) and is quite forthright

about his own CIA involvements while maintaining that The Paris Review was always

autonomous. Like Matthiessen, Aldrich also insists that the magazine never was funded by the CIA (Donadio). The revelations made in the Humes documentary, now released

and widely available, as well as subsequent press interest and renewed journalistic

attention, continue to shed a new light of legitimacy on the claims of CIA association that have been circulating for decades.

In order to understand how and why the CIA might have worked through The

Paris Review, we need to consider briefly the operations of the Congress for Cultural

Freedom (CCF). In her book The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders discusses

the CCF in detail as the cultural propaganda arm of the CIA, essentially "America's

Ministry of Culture" (Saunders 129). The CCF was started in 1950 by the US Central

Intelligence Agency (CIA) as the central project of their cultural propaganda wing. It had

operations in 35 countries, managing projects such as magazines, art exhibitions, news

and features services, conferences, music and art prizes and performances. One of its first

successes was the Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century Festival in Paris. The festival

ran for a month and featured the work of many composers (i.e. Stravinsky, Schoenberg,

Debussy, Copland) whose works had been banned, or who had personally been persecuted by Nazi Germany or the USSR. Many of those who worked for the CCF had no idea of its CIA connection, and the projects supported ran the gamut from explicitly 117

pro-American works to "progressive artists" associated with the Non-Communist Left

(NCL); the point was to show the cultural liberty and progressiveness of the West

(compared to the Soviet Union) and to fight communism by encouraging and supporting

those that were either against it or in competition with it (i.e. "free enterprise art"). In

general, the CCF favoured freedom and individuality over the collective or any limits on

freedom. The Congress funded projects including atonal music and Abstract

Expressionism, for example, as well as numerous literary journals—Encounter (UK),

Preuves (France), Der Monat (Germany), and Tempo Presente (Italy)—that were critical

of international intellectuals sympathetic to communism (including Jean-Paul Sartre,

Charlie Chaplin, Arthur Miller, Pablo Neruda) (Osgood 101). The idea was that such

artists could not be discredited to the general public on political bases; therefore, it was best to criticize their artistic value. Because these publications had such generous

funding, they were both able to pay contributors more than their competitors and still to be exempt from the usual controls of market demand. Ostensibly promoting "freedom"

for writers and artists to say and do and as they pleased, the enforced position of "no

ideology" (including no criticism of the United States) was in itself a political imperative.

Many critics argue that the CCF attempted to alter the intellectual and political

climate in Cold War Europe by supporting work that explicitly held the ideology of "no

ideology." The problem was compounded by the fact that artists and writers usually

participated in these projects with no awareness that they were unwittingly playing a part

in a larger political agenda. When, in 1967, it was disclosed that the CIA (via the CCF)

had funded the British periodical Encounter, among others, there was "a tremendous uproar among left-wing writers, artists and intellectuals who believed that being enlisted 118

as unwitting tools in a government propaganda war had compromised their status as free

thinkers" (Donadio). Likewise, in 2002, the public learned that two literary scouts for

Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the 1940s were undercover CIA officers (Donadio). In 1967

the Congress was quickly dismantled when its full activities were revealed; however,

other forms of state subsidy of the arts through covert intelligence services still continue.

One of the many factors clouding accounts of The Paris Review's early CIA ties

is the mental health history of Harold "Doc" Humes. According to a recent essay in The

New York Times, by the 1960s, Humes was consumed by paranoia and believed the CIA

and the government were after him (Donadio). He ranted to friends about wiretaps and

"cloud-shaped FBI monitors" and was briefly institutionalized, enhancing his long­

standing reputation as an insane genius (McGee, "Paris Review"). However, recent

research suggests that his fears should not be too easily dismissed as madness. In 2006,

Doc's daughter, Immy Humes, obtained documents proving that the government did

indeed keep tabs on Humes from as early as 1948 until the late 1970s. These documents,

accessed through the Freedom of Information Act, include a note from J. Edgar Hoover

"advising someone to check the files on Humes" (Donadio). Whether his insistence on

the government conspiracies around him was an exaggerated delusion, or was the clear

understandings of a man truly besieged by CIA operatives, is a matter that is still being

debated in the press and, especially, in online blogs.42

The controversy about The Paris Review's connections with the CIA and the implications of that connection is currently a subject of great debate on literary and cultural weblogs and online forums. As new information comes available almost weekly, these immediate online sources are best able to respond to and debate the implications of developments. For a sampling of recent discussions on the issue, see: http://imomus.livejournal.com/247163 .html; 119

There are considerable ramifications to any claims that the Review was actually

funded with CIA monies, and not simply with family donations and the largesse of

publisher Sadruddin Aga Khan, as had always been reported. Such allegations lead to

(the cynical and somewhat paranoid) speculation that The Paris Review was an

organization set up entirely in order to co-opt cultural opposition to American interests. If

this is true, then The Paris Review's political position of "no-politics" and its belief in

"art-for-art's-sake" take on a whole new meaning. It also suggests that the absence of

social action or politics in The Paris Review selections was not simply an artistic

position, but a covert intervention in the cultural cold war. This may have filtered down

in the tendency to publish "apolitical" writers over, say, social realist writers. Some argue

that it led to the preference for modernism (of sometimes marginal quality) over realism.

For many, revelations of CIA involvement confirm suspicions that The Paris Review was

only ever interested in reproducing the literary status quo.

Perhaps equally disturbing is the possibility that CIA-favoured writers received an

artificial elevation through The Paris Review. Publication in The Paris Review increased

the prestige of a given writer, and if that judgment was made with covert, state-

sanctioned influence, the quality of the entire project is thrown into question. The

complex implications of CIA involvement in The Paris Review are, perhaps surprisingly,

nicely captured in a letter written from Harold Humes to George Plimpton in 1966,

shortly after Matthiessen made his (private) CIA confession. This letter, only recently http://apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com/2008/02/12/karl-wenclas-the-cia-the-paris- review-ray-carver/; https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7983462&postID=7219731476800112356 ; http://kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2008/02/more-cia-fun-stuff.html; and http ://www.redfez .net/thoughtinterrupted/?p=8 3. unearthed in a suitcase of old correspondence, contains a passionate plea to Plimpton to reveal all to readers of The Paris Review, in order to maintain the integrity of the publication. However we judge Humes' mental state, the letter—here excerpted in great

length—points out many of the potential ramifications of such ties, especially when kept

from the public.

March 4, 1966 (Oxford)

Dear George, Peter Mattfhiessen] was through town the other day and we

had a long heart-to-heart chat during which he informed me that, in his

words, the Paris Review was originally set up and used as a cover for his

activities as an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency.... He further

said that you knew nothing about this until recently, that in fact when he

told you your face "turned the color of (my) sweater" which I hasten to

inform you is neither red nor blue but a very dirty grey-white, my having

worn nothing else since my wife left. It precisely matches my spirits; they

get greyer every day.

I believe Peter when he says he is properly ashamed of involving the PR

in his youthful folly, and, true, this was all 15 years ago. BUT...

Since this was apparently a formal arrangement, involving his being

trained in a New York safehouse and being paid through a cover name,

then without doubt the fact is recorded in some or several dusty

functionarys' [sic] files in Washington or around the world that our

hapless magazine was created and used as an engine in the damned cold

war; and although Peter is not be blamed for a paranoid system that makes 121 victims of its instruments, nevertheless what of Styron? What of

Marquand? What of half the young writers in America who have been netted in our basket? What color would their faces turn? May the saints preserve us from a counter-McCarthy witch hunt, but who can guarantee that those files may not someday be paraded before some publicity-seeking congressional committee looking for well-known names to burn?

It is not my purpose in writing this letter to instruct my betters, nor am I seeking to nudge your conscience, but I do sense that the situation contains a distinct element of danger. Think of Sadri's position at the UN, for example; Peter says he is totally ignorant of the whole business. However, what's past is past, and far from blaming Peter I think at this juncture he deserves full marks for having had the guts to speak up.

... However much one might agree with Peter that "in those days the

CIA was just a collection of college kids", judging from today's newspapers it would appear that the activities of this Kollection of Kollege

Kids is inKreasingly Kriminal in nature. I don't believe that the principles of freedom and justice and respect for Law—which after all are the very foundation of western civilization—are best upheld by raping those principles on the pretext of defending their honor; but, as history repeatedly teaches, this is what any unchecked secret organization invariably ends in doing.

In any event, I have suggested to Peter (on the theory that it's always best to clean up one's own vomit) that he immortalize his otherwise quite 122

comical recollections in an article for Esquire, the Post, or (Heaven help us

and defend us from error) in the PR itself. It still shocks me that Peter,

again in his own words, used you as he used me and frankly I am still sore

as hell about it. More precisely, I'm hurt, but never mind ....

I have deeply believed in the Review and all that we hoped it stood for,

but until this matter is righted I feel I have no honorable choice but to

resolutely resign. Even if I have to split an infinitive to do it.

On the other hand, if Peter is willing to laugh the matter off in print in a

manner calculated to restore our tarnished escutcheon, then I will listen to

alternative argument. For the nonce, however, I should like my name

removed from the masthead.

... I know I am regarded as an impractical clown or a troublemaker, but

I don't make trouble, I simply point out trouble where it threatens. ... if

you take steps now there will be no trouble now or in the future; but if you

turn your back on what is after all a serious matter, then only trouble can

issue. I hope you will forgive me for pointing this out.

In any event, I remain,

Most always yours,

HL Humes (Humes, "Letter")

Until recently, most of the reports of CIA involvement relied heavily on personal testimony and often took the tone of paranoid conspiracy theory. However, Humes'

See Richard Cummings; "An American in Paris: How George Plimpton Waged the Literary Cold War" and "The Fiction of the State: The Paris Review and the Invisible 123 newly released papers and the first-person confession of Peter Matthiessen (documented on video, reported in the NY Times) should give pause, and reopen the question of the funding connection to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Ultimately, the significance of the CIA connection depends upon whether any of the policies and decisions of The Paris

Review were influenced—intentionally or not—by the objectives of the CCF. If we believe that Peter Matthiessen was a lone player, simply using The Paris Review as a cover but in no way allowing his silent employer to influence his creative project, we can relegate the whole issue to an interesting footnote in the history of The Paris Review. If, however, we are convinced that the CIA's mandate of "no politics" and insistent anti- communism was manifested through the publication decisions of The Paris Review, the direction and integrity of the magazine is open to challenge. Evidence available to date, however, suggests that, at most, the interests of The Paris Review and the CIA may have converged, and that there was no direct political influence on editorial decisions. Most relevant is that my close readings of the interviews and the archives have revealed little political relevance of these new developments to the content of the Paris Review interviews. While such interference may have conceivably influenced who did and did not get a chance to participate in the esteemed interview series, the focus and machinations of these exchanges—the subject of this project—remain independent of these (admittedly considerable) concerns. The archival history of The Paris Review clearly demonstrates that it was Plimpton (and not Matthiessen, except in the rarest cases) who oversaw the interview series. Plimpton's selective taste, curious mind, creative flair,

World of American Letters;" Bob Feldman's "West-Bloc Dissident;" and the anonymous "1950-today: Corporate and State Intervention in the Arts." 124 intelligence and ideas shaped the lion's share of the interviews in the first two decades,

and recent evidence only serves to further assure us of his innocence in CIA matters.

3.5 THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS

Since the first issue of The Paris Review, interviews have been a regular fixture

and huge drawing card for the magazine. According to editors' anecdotes, the interviews

were initially conceived as a low-cost gimmick to get people to buy the magazine.

Editors hoped that people would pick up the little magazine to see what Robert Frost or

William Burroughs had to say, and stick around to read the whole issue, discovering new

writers and poets by accident. Some might even buy a subscription to see what would

come next. The first issue featured a conversation with novelist E.M. Forster conducted

by P.N. Furbank and F.J.H. Haskell. Forster was at the time the writer-in-residence at

Cambridge where George Plimpton had just come from studying. Forster was a character

and a legend on campus; he was known as "Morgan," the "somewhat rumpled, shy

personage who ... was then considered the greatest living novelist in the English

language," though his last novel had been published almost thirty years earlier (Plimpton,

Paris Review Anthology 281). Plimpton credits Cambridge's environment of "intellectual

curiosity" for Forster's easy consent to the interview. Forster asked to see the questions in

advance, a step that set the pattern for the way almost all of the Paris Review interviews

would hence be conducted (Cowley, "Introduction" 9). The two interviewers worked together, taking turns writing answers and speaking, trying to capture everything in a time before tape recorders were readily available. This process of speed writing continued until the 1957 interview with Frank O'Connor, the first one captured on a tape recorder, according to Malcolm Cowley.

The idea behind the interview was that authors knew more about their own work than a third party, and that they were the best ones to consult with on the subject of writing instead of referring to a critic or other "expert."44 Operating on what was arguably a nai've premise, the editors decided that "if we were going to do criticism at all, rather than getting X to write on E.M. Forster, we would go to E. M. Forster himself and ask him about his writing process" (Linville 56).

E. M. Forster's interview set the tone for the whole series, which continues today, by focusing discussion on matters of craft, or, as Forster called it, "fiction technicalities"

(Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 282).45 Since Forster had not written much in almost thirty years, the obvious question readers would want to know, was "why not?" In the course of the interview, Forster revealed that he had, in effect, lost control of his characters, prompting a fascinating conversation about the pitfalls of novel writing, an exchange that set a new standard in literary interviewing (Linville 57).

The premise of the interview, which rests on the notion of the importance of authorial intention, will be examined in greater detail in Chapter 6. For the time being, my purpose is merely to describe the process and its productions without evaluation of its tenability.

Many of the Paris Review interviews have been reprinted numerous times: in original Paris Review issues and subsequent reprints, in anthology form, in author-specific collections and online for The Paris Review's database of interviews for their online magazine ("The DNA of literature"). After consulting with The Paris Review's current managing editor, Radhika Jones, I chose the digital versions of the interviews as copy texts for my selected interviews. These were supplied by the magazine for my use with the assurance that no major revisions had been made from the original to the digital versions, other than the correction of minor typos or spelling errors, unless specifically noted. 126

In the early years, before The Paris Review could claim the kind of status it does today, authors consented to be interviewed most often out of a sense of friendship with the interviewer or the editor, or a feeling of kinship with and generosity to aspiring

writers who might gain some insight from their words (Cowley, "Introduction" 9). Over

time, the prestige of The Paris Review has grown to the point that it almost guarantees the

willing participation of a selected author.46 Being asked to do a Paris Review interview is

now, and has been for almost half a decade, the literary equivalent of a band getting its

photo on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine. Because of both its track record of

prestigious interview subjects,47 and the quality and readability of the interviews

themselves, the Paris Review interview has come to be "considered a certification of an

author's importance" (Gussow El). The status of the interviewees has created a kind of

"revered club, exhuming the aura of a pantheon" and this stature further guarantees the

In general, the length of the interviews has also increased over time (Forster's interview in 1953 was twelve pages long; Elie Wiesel's 1984 interview covered 46 pages).

47 While a full list of interviewees is available on the Paris Review website, a survey of some of the biggest names of the first 25 years would include E. M. Forster (1953); Ralph Ellison (1955); Dorothy Parker (1956); William Faulkner (1956); Truman Capote (1957); Robert Perm Warren (1957); Ernest Hemingway (1958); T. S. Eliot (1959); Robert Frost (1960); Aldous Huxley (1960); Boris Pasternak (1960); Marianne Moore (1961); Robert Lowell (1961); Henry Miller (1962); Evelyn Waugh (1963); William Carlos Williams (1964); Simone de Beauvoir (1965); William Burroughs (1965); Lillian Hellman (1965); Jorge Luis Borges (1967); Edward Albee (1966); Arthur Miller (1966); Saul Bellow (1966); Allen Ginsberg (1966); Vladimir Nabokov (1967); Jack Kerouac (1968); John Dos Passos (1969); Harold Pinter (1966); Katherine Anne Porter (1963); Ezra Pound (1962); John Steinbeck (1969); Charles Olson (1970); Pablo Neruda (1971); Anne Sexton (1971); John Berryman (1972); Eudora Welty (1972); W. H. Auden (1974); Joseph Heller (1974); Archibald MacLeish (1974); Bernard Malamud (1975); Kingsley Amis (1975); Kurt Vonnegut (1977) William Gass (1977); Margaret Drabble (1978); and Joyce Carol Oates (1978). Many, although not all, of these interviews will be examined in the course of this study of the Paris Review interviews. elevation of the reputations of authors who are invited to participate (Wilbers 213). As in the fiction and prose sections, editors haven't always chosen their subjects ideally for the interview section. As Plimpton put it, "the Review missed many writers by not being more dedicated to the task and less contemptuous of the notion that time passes and opportunities are lost" (Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 602). Among those "lost"

chances, Plimpton considered Colette and Paul Claudel, who both died in the mid-1950s

and would have been great interviews. There is also an anecdote that a Paris Review

interviewer was knocking on the door below as Thomas Mann expired on the second

floor. Of course, not all those approached for an interview have agreed, despite the prestige associated with the review since its early years. For example, notoriously private writers like J. D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon were asked and declined more than once.

Despite having Samuel Beckett's translator, Patrick Bowles, as the Paris Editor, the

Review could not convince Beckett to consent to an interview. One subject, Mark

Helprin, initially refused because of a bad prior experience with an interview but finally

agreed because he had studied the Paris Review interviews as a young teen wanting to

learn to write and couldn't resist the chance to continue to pass on wisdom to the next

generation of writers (Plimpton, Anthology 58). It seems that there is a unique status and

a certain mystique to the Paris Review interviews which encourages even normally reticent subjects to agree to engage with an interviewer. 3.6 HONOURS AND READER RECEPTION

The prestige of the Paris Review extends beyond its interview series. It has become an important hub for literary activities and production. When George Plimpton passed away in 2003, there was "an uprising of anxiety about the magazine's future—the consensus that it had to go on" from writers and editors. Writers felt that the Paris

Review did more than just publish works; it also helped to build community by creating an ongoing dialogue about writing, both within and between issues. By supporting the work of new, unknown writers (by publishing their first piece), then encouraging their work into new territory and finally, asking them questions about their career and thoughts about the craft of writing, the Paris Review really follows writers through their lifecycle.

One frequent Paris Review contributor expressed the significance of publishing in the

Review: "When I see my work in the magazine ... It makes me feel like I'm a part of something" ("Notice" 2004).

Ample evidence exists to demonstrate the favourable reception of The Paris

Review from quite early on in its run. Usha Wilbers, in her critical history of the magazine, identified early favourable reviews in Time and The New York Times that helped create "an aura of 'prestige'" around the magazine (Wilbers 97). In its very first year, a 1953 Newsweek article declared that The Paris Review was "the first really promising development in youthful, advance guard, or experimental writing in a long time" ("Advance-Guard Advance" 94). Most reviews of the magazine from the first decade emphasize the youth and bravado of the editorial team, and mention the importance of the interviews. In 1958, Time magazine declared that "in an age of 129 painfully intense analysis of fiction and poetry, the Paris Review has scored a solid beat by the simple device of getting away from the library and talking to the authors themselves" and declared it "biggest little magazine in history" ("Big Little Magazine"

57). In a column for The New York Times, J. Donald Adams echoed those sentiments, praising the Paris Review's focus on writing: "The tail has been wagging the dog much too long; is it too much to hope that their stand may have some effect on the older literary quarterlies?" (Adams, 3 May 1953). Dropping the names of major players (who showed up in interviews and at parties) also gave The Paris Review an unparalleled advantage.

The critical praise of arts writers such as J. Donald Adams and Harvey Breit represents a distinct segment of reader reception deserving of some description. While highly educated professional readers, Adams and Breit still represent a kind of (upper?) middlebrow reading public. Their interest was in distilling the masses of new literature and publications for readers of the relatively mainstream New York Times. While perhaps more eclectic in their reading tastes than readers of popular magazines or smaller daily presses, readers of The New York Times would still have been primarily interested in relatively accessible literary magazines, not the truly avant garde. The writer interview may have appealed for similar reasons: while not every reader had (or has) the patience to get through The Sound and the Fury (never mind to get through a critical article about it), most would love to find out what made Faulkner tick and get some inside information on the "meaning" of the elusive text.

Even among such mainstream critics, however, some complained that the early work in The Paris Review could not keep up to the innovation of modernism around it

("Big Little Magazine" 57). Usha Wilbers agrees with some of these early assessments of 130 the magazine, arguing that the first two decades featured somewhat conservative fiction; it was "mainstream avant-garde" (178). She quotes critic John Leonard as complaining that The Paris Review was too "civilized and rather tame," although he tempers his remarks with the question, "Is there anything wrong with licking modernism as if it were an ice-cream cone? [The Paris Review's] excuse is quality" (Leonard 26 qtd in Wilbers

178).

Wilbers also points out the important role that The Paris Review played in the consistent and continued publication of short fiction during a time when critical writing dominated the little magazines, prompting one critic to go so far as to credit the Review for a kind of assault on the "Age of Criticism" (Kirby 11). By 1965, a New York Times piece called The Paris Review a "living legend" with a stable roster of the best new writers (Nichols, "In and Out" BR8). In an exhaustive collection of critical studies of

American literary magazines, Leonard Butts describes the way The Paris Review gained and maintained its prestige by regularly featuring both major names in poetry and prose, as well as publishing the work of writers who went on to achieve great fame. According to Butts, this eye for quality "established a certain 'classiness'" for the Review, especially in its poetry section (Chielens 242).

The Paris Review archives are filled with letters of praise from readers both prominent and unknown. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Ernest Hemingway are a few notable fans mentioned by Wilbers (211-12). Fan letters alone, however, do not adequately reflect the reader reception of a publication. Another way to measure the impact of any publication is to survey its official response, in the form of honours and critical reception.

For The Paris Review, accolades started early. In 1968, The Paris Review received the 131 highly esteemed George Polk Memorial Award for "showing great enterprise" in its Art

of Fiction interview series (Plimpton, Letter to Maxine Groffsky). This is a journalism

award usually given to news and documentary writers and publications, but granted to

The Paris Review for its use of questions and answers to provide "new awareness" ("2

Times Writers Win" 23). The Review's greatest recognition came later, in 1972, when the

entire Writers at Work series (six volumes at the time) was nominated for the Pulitzer

Prize. While it did not, in the end, win this award, a letter in support of its nomination is

ample testimony to the great creative—and critical—import of the Paris Review

interviews. Here is an excerpt of one letter of support written by Harper's editor and

author Lewis H. Lapham:

No equivalent collection of texts exists in the canon of contemporary

writing ... [in these six volumes] everybody who is anybody in the

literary sphere of influence talks, candidly and at length, about the joys and

sorrows attendant upon the practice of their art. Taken together the six

volumes constitute an incomparable anthology of literary news, gossip,

inspiration, example, wit and technical advice. The conversations also

make truly wonderful reading. [They] have proved invaluable to at least

two generations of aspiring writers, and I expect that they will continue to

prove invaluable to as many future generations of critics and historians as

care to indulge their passion for literature. If I had it in my power to do so,

I would confer the prize at once, without further quibble or delay. About

no other set of modern books could I make so heartfelt or peremptory a

judgment. (Lapham) As Usha Wilbers also notes, the inclusion of critics and historians in Lapham's list of benefactors of the Paris Review interviews is somewhat ironic. The Paris Review set out

to provide an alternative to criticism, and ended up providing new material for the critics

themselves.

In general, newspapers and magazines kept a close eye on the interviews coming

out with The Paris Review. Over the years, individual interviews published in The Paris

Review have garnered media attention for the revelations made by the interviewed

writers. Columns such as "Speaking of Books" and "In and Out of Books" in The New

York Times regularly covered the interviews and many interviews were later excerpted in

large American newspapers and then reprinted in volumes collecting the interviews of a

single author. Quite often, within these single subject collections, it is the Paris Review

interview that is praised as the standout (Poore, 21 Dec. 1961). One regular columnist

commented on the content of the first Paris Review interview with E. M. Forster in 1953,

went on to discuss William Styron's preface in great detail in another column, and then

made a habit of responding to the interviews as they were published over the years,

reprinting the best bits and commenting on the significance of the revelations, a kind of

serial review of The Paris Review (Adams). Book reviewers, when evaluating books by

authors who had been Paris Review interview subjects, regularly referred to the

conversations for information and insight to round out, or even justify, their reviews.49

48Seen31.

49 This practice continues to the present. While it is a difficult thing to empirically measure, a survey of early New York Times book reviews contained several references to Paris Review interviews (Mizener, "Out of Vassar" [on Mary McCarthy]; Rhodes, "Cutting-Up" [on William Burroughs]; Jonas, "The Estate" [on Isaac Bashevis Singer] Some Paris Review interviews generated more excitement than others, most notably, Jean Stein's 1956 interview with Faulkner (described as a "coup" [Breit 293])

and George Plimpton's 1958 Ernest Hemingway interview. In Faulkner's case, it was the

first really lengthy interview he had consented to, and long excerpts were reprinted in various magazines; the revelations of Faulkner were treated as "world news" (Wilbers

207). Although Faulkner had given some interviews before, and participated in some

afterwards, the Paris Review interview was exceptional. A New York Times reviewer of the interview gushed that "Never was a celebrity famous for his taciturnity led to be more

eloquent on the dark beginnings and the fair rewards of art" (Poore 1 April 1958). Other reviewers raved about the range of topics covered and the clarity of Faulkner's

communication. Perhaps most importantly, the Faulkner interview went on to become primary source material for Faulkner scholars. Wilbers looks to the use of the interview by critics and biographers alike and concludes that the interview "has proved to be vital

in the understanding of William Faulkner and his intentions towards his work" (208).51 It

was later reprinted in its entirety in Frederick John Hoffmann and Olga W. Vickery's

William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism (1960) and James Meriwether and

Michael Millgate's 1968 collection Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William

See Usha Wilbers' case studies in 7.3 The Impact of the Interview Section in her historical dissertation. Also, see Breit, Blotner, and Wain.

51 Wilbers names Michael Grimwood's Heart in Conflict: Faulkner's Struggles with Vocation, James Wood's review of Frederick Karl's 1989 Faulkner Biography, and Michael Millgate's Faulkner's Place as examples that cite the importance of the Paris Review interview with Faulkner. For more on Faulkner's attitude towards intention, the role of the interview in the assessment of authorial intention is the subject of Chapter 6. 134

Faulkner 1926-1962, among others. Likewise, the Hemingway interview quickly became

gospel on Hemingway's thoughts on writing and creativity.

The influence of the Paris Review interviews on other interviewers and interviews

was detailed in Chapter 2; however, the interviews also had a significant effect on early

readers and critics. Perhaps one way to measure the long-term reception of the Paris

Review interviews is to consider the reaction to the interview collections, published as the

Writers at Work series starting in 1958. In a review of the first Writers at Work

anthology, Alfred Kazin praises the delicacy and skill of the interviewers: "The book

itself is a unique and wonderful document of the writer's passion. The art of the literary

interview, so little known off the European mainland, has been practiced here with a

subtlety that I have never seen before in an American context" (Kazin, "Novelists and

Storytellers" 37). New York Times reviewer Harvey Breit also commends the collection

for "its overwhelming diversity [which] destroys any caricature, or any simplified notion

for that matter, of what a writer is" ("Differences"). He goes on to praise the qualities of

the interviews, many of which he had read previously in single issues of The Paris

Review:

[The interviews] were invariably distinguished both by the lightness of

subject (a good writer who was at the center of critical interest) and the

conduct of the discourse (decorous, in excellent taste, scrupulous). As

monologues—or as disguised dialogues—they were uniformly

enlightening, if not uniformly true and convincing. ("Differences")

See Chapter 5 on the Paris Review interview in the World for a more detailed examination of the uses made of the Hemingway interview. 135

Breit's only complaint with the first anthology is the introduction, written by Malcolm

Cowley, which he describes as "eighteen pages of pointless trifles."

The second volume of Paris Review interviews was also highly acclaimed. One review describes the collection as "wonderfully revealing," its contents carefully categorized and examined as precious, newly uncovered jewels (Poore, "Books of the

Times" 16 May 1963). Arthur Mizener describes the volume as "personal history at its best" and "even more fascinating than the first series." He observes that "all sorts of half- mythical literary stories ... get made into history in these conversations." Like many of the anthologies' reviewers, Mizener attempts to make sense of what use such a collection could be put to, what importance readers should afford to the insight gained. He concludes that the material gives us a "fresh vision . . . from a new perspective," but one that requires the writers' central literary output to contextualize it:

its main value is what [this collection] contributes to our understanding of

that work—of the place of literature, of its "glory," in these intensely

human lives. It authenticates the work of these writers in a way that,

though it is probably not strictly necessary, is nevertheless useful—like all

revelation. ("Men and Woman" 183)

Of the third volume in the series, reviewer John Wain predicts that because the interviews have enjoyed "such a succes d'estime, been so frequently cited and discussed .

. . it may easily be that The Paris Review will be remembered in the future, not for the literary careers it has launched ... but for these interviews" (Wain). This edition, while featuring fewer of the "living legends" than the previous two volumes, was chosen as one often "new and outstanding books" in the field of literature by The New York Times ("English and American Literature" BRA6). On this same volume, reviewer Thomas

Lask details what separates the Paris Review interviews from other similar conversations

in print:

... through extended first person quotations the buyer feels that he is

hearing the veritable voice of the speaker and not one extracted by and

filtered through the mind of another. The ambiance, the tone that is part of

and yet above what is being said have not been lost. Paraphrases, ellipses,

unfinished sentences, bad grammar, images and language that in other

cases would be reduced to a euphemism by the interviewer are permitted

to stand in their inviting originality. (Lask, "Books of the Times" 45)

As we know, Lask is incorrect in his assumption that these conversations are in a raw, unedited form; however, it is the illusion of spontaneity that has worked its influence on

this reader, has convinced him of its authenticity.

A few years later, when the fourth volume of interviews was published, New York

Times journalist Christopher Lehmann-Haupt praised the "single intelligence presiding

over [the] entire volume, over the complete series" for drawing out the reticent and

supplying writers' revelations to the masses ("Books of the Times" 17 Dec. 1976, 77).

Lehmann-Haupt rightfully draws attention to the consistency of quality and vision in the

interviews, something made possible by the presiding editor, George Plimpton. He also

expresses an awareness of the crafted nature of these interviews. Wondering aloud how they are able to get so much "juice" from the likes of even the shyest subjects, Lehmann-

Haupt explains that "these are not spontaneous effusions, but rather painstakingly

constructed edifices built brick by cement by gargoyle . .. refined by polishing, 137

elaborating and rearranging until the subject is satisfied with his or her appearance and

the editors are persuaded that the truth has been served." This review is typical of those

that recognize the skill with which these interviews have been crafted; that they should

not be treated simply as wells of information about a given writer. Again and again, we

see reviewers who recognize the creative and editorial skill that has gone into

constructing a certain style and voice, an interview that is much more than a record of an

event but a fully worked art form in itself.

Of course, it would be remiss not to mention some of the criticisms levelled

against The Paris Review over the years. While difficult to find, the complaints tended to

be footnotes in generally positive reviews, often related to the limitations of the genre

itself; for example, that they engage in too much gossip or spend too much time on trivial

matters. Some critics disparage the choice of subjects or lack of spontaneity of the

interview questions (Wilbers 212-213). Wilbers noted that The Paris Review collected the

clippings of such negative attention in their archives.

The Writers at Work anthologies survive in far greater number than individual

Paris Review issues, and new collections are constantly being published. As recently as

2006 and 2007, two new collections of interviews were published in hardcover and

paperback by The Paris Review. Over 500 pages each, The Paris Review Interviews I and

// were collected by current editor Philip Gourevitch and feature both new and previously published interviews from the magazine. Almost half of these interviews (including

Capote, Greene, Hemingway, Eliot, Bellow, Vonnegut, Thurber, Lowell, Faulkner, etc.)

can be traced back to the first 25 years of the magazine, suggesting that some of the finest

53 See Chapter 5 for limitations of the Modern Literary Interview. 138 conversations came from those early years. The inclusion of these early exchanges and the enthusiastically positive reviews of these volumes are testament to the longevity of the interviews and the continued interest they hold for writers and readers alike. A brief

sampling of reader and critical responses to the newest collections provides evidence to the interviews' enduring relevance to today's readers. Richard Eder at The New York

Times gushes, calling it "The most remarkable and extensive interviewing project we possess" ("Books of the Times" Pursuing Writers"); Katherine Powers at The Boston

Globe calls the collection "utterly absorbing" and observes that the interviews are "all

fascinating and often quite funny—if sometimes bleakly so" ("Revealing literary performances"); and Rob Wilner of The San Francisco Chronicle has this to say, "There

are so many potential points of entry to The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1 — this jewel box of a collection of in-depth chats on the craft of writing ... that one hardly knows where to begin.... [The] candid comments ... are well worth the price of admission...

. [An] indispensable collection." ("Chats with Big Writers of Our Age"). Established

authors also chime in, and their words are quoted extensively in promotional materials for the set: "The Paris Review interviews are objects of wonder that formed my first and

fiercest impression of what it was to be an author. I still ascribe any vivid remembered

quote to their pages, even when it didn't appear there" (Jonathan Lethem); "I have been

fascinated by the Paris Review interviews for as long as I can remember. Taken together, they form perhaps the finest available inquiry into the 'how' of literature, in many ways a more interesting question than the 'why.'" (Salman Rushdie); and "The Paris Review interviews have always provided the best look into the minds and work ethics of great writers and when read together constitute the closest thing to an MFA that you can get while sitting alone on your couch. Every page of this collection affords a ludicrous

amount of pleasure" (Dave Eggers) ("The Paris Review Interviews Vol. I."). Poet Billy

Collins added to the praise for the volumes with, "At their best, the Paris Review

interviews remove the veils of literary personae to reveal the flesh-and-blood writer at the

source. By exposing the inner workings of writing, they place the reader in the driver's

seat of literature." ("The Paris Review Interviews Vol. I."). The kudos go on and on,

somewhat surprisingly so, considering most of these interviews have been previously

published, then collected, then republished; some interviews have been published by The

Paris Review itself three or more times. Perhaps it is, in part, their appearing together, en

masse, that gives them such an impact on their reader.

The usefulness and pleasure offered by these collections is varied. Creative

writing courses regularly use interviews to illustrate technical matters on the craft of

writing; literature courses exploit them for their thematic and biographical points;

biographers and cultural historians can refer to them for detailed matters of dates, etc.;

casual readers may enjoy them for the anecdote and storytelling within them; and

aspiring writers may obsess over their details as they construct their own practice and

persona.

The high demand for the Paris Review interviews, if not always for the individual

issues themselves, was and is a testament to The Paris Review's ever-growing cachet.

Even while readers of the interview collections may never pick up an issue of The Paris

Review itself, the prestige of the magazine lends an additional aura of respectability and privileged access to their more popular publications. The name alone signifies a

discriminating taste that its more scholarly competitors have never achieved. The Paris Review early on became a shorthand way of referring to highbrow, and yet not obscurely

experimental, literature. This association is well illustrated by a simple ad for Peck &

Peck department store (a high-priced specialty store in New York City) in the figure

below.

O

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HRIHIlliHrl

Fig. 6. Print advertisement for Peck & Peck Department Store. Undated. Rpt. in Anderson.

The Paris Review has operated, and continues to operate in what Bourdieu calls a "field of restricted production," gaining symbolic capital through its elite audience, and using 141 that power to reach out to a larger public audience. The irreverent Paris Review has claimed its unique place in high literary culture in America and abroad.

3.7 THE NEW PARIS REVIEW

The Paris Review goes on. After Plimpton's death in 2003, it took a couple of years for the magazine to adjust from the vision of a single man to working with a ten- person board (a condition of the nonprofit foundation formation), a new editorial committee (including past editors), new employees and the daunting task of finding the right new editor for the magazine (the first replacement editor, Brigid Hughes, was quickly replaced by novelist Philip Gourevitch in 2005) (Wyatt, "New Editor"). Today,

The Paris Review has what is described as a "new look and old soul" ("Notice" 2004).

Editorial changes include the introduction of graphic novel excerpts, more non-fiction articles, photography portfolios and a greater international flavour (i.e. more international writers and themes) (Wyatt "Plimpton's Big Shoes"). In 2006, Gourevitch launched a new feature called "Encounter," "a short Q& A with interesting, obscure people" such as a professional mourner, a Serb assassin and a Chinese public toilet manager (Carlson

C04). The physical format of the magazine is now a little wider and thinner, with brighter pages and a new typeface (Carlson C04; Lee 9). The old eagle from the early years is back, in the upper left corner of the cover. Of course, the Paris Review headquarters are no longer in Plimpton's home; after thirty years in his Upper East Side brownstone, the magazine moved its office downtown to more suitable quarters (Williams, "Moving

Day"). 142

The online version of The Paris Review boasts a massive "DNA of Literature"

database of writer interviews, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts

("Notice" 2004). Both subscriptions and submissions are rising, and The Paris Review is

determined to fill a need for fiction in magazines since the mainstream outlets are moving

away from printing longer pieces. New editor Philip Gourevitch has said that the Review

is "for people with a longer attention span. It's the 'anti-blog,' publishing writing in the

long form, stuff that's worth your time" (Hoover). The Paris Review standard for the

literary interview remains the same, even while the environment for literary journals has

changed dramatically in the last fifty years.

With the rise of the internet and online blogging, keeping a literary magazine

afloat has taken on new challenges. According to one commentator, "serious" literary

magazines are "the antithesis of blogsphere" (Swanson). The Paris Review, like other

magazines such as The Atlantic, The New Republic and Harper's, is expensive and

difficult to reproduce and requires extensive research and editing. The costs of production

are not equalled by the readership and so such magazines are notorious money-losers.

Carl Swanson describes these literary publications as "self-consciously pedigreed heirs to

a tradition that can seem ... quaint amid the kicky assertional blur of the internet."

The Paris Review interview is also out of sync with the current mania for

celebrity stalking. Gourevitch explains that The Paris Review "doesn't do 'gotcha journalism,'" doesn't "confront writers with questions about their private lives." Instead,

as always, the interview aims to be a "masterful essay," a " kind of apprenticeship for

young writers, an exciting and liberating way to understand the process, to learn the way 143 the masters do it" (Hoover). Finally, by all accounts, the Paris Review is still not very interested in publishing literary criticism, only literature itself.

Despite the slipperiness of any kind of history of The Paris Review, it is important to have a sense of the narrative of the publication as a context for examining the interview series. Utterly unique in its beginnings and its vision, The Paris Review has done and continues to do things differently than its peers and competitors. While vague and incredible at moments, the history of The Paris Review is very much reflected in the spirit of the Paris Review interviews. Both are comprised of equal parts fact and fiction, the mundane and the mythical, concerned with matters of character, style, plot, and adventure. Both are hybrid creatures, perhaps impure, even corrupted, and yet still innovative in their ability to combine the literary with the spontaneous. The Paris Review history echoes the mid-twentieth-century history of American literary culture, its stars and its rebels, with all their glory and their many, many flaws. 144

CHAPTER 4 INSIDE THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW

4.1 THE PROCESS OF THE MODERN LITERARY INTERVIEW

In order to investigate the operations, both explicit and covert, of the Paris

Review interview, it helps to begin with a bird's eye view of the interview form more generally. While it may seem obvious, the full process of interviewing contains numerous

stages, many of which can be quite involved. The hybridity of the literary interview form is not simply because of its evolutionary history. The process combines multiple often

contradictory approaches. Typical literary interviews (not only those in The Paris

Review) begin with a journalist or editor identifying a writer worth questioning. This

selection of subject matter is often influenced by cultural norms and trends, perhaps recent publications or awards given, or even the realization that an aging writer has wisdom to share with his readers (and may not have much time left in which to do it).

While the choice of subject in a literary interview may seem self-evident, the selection of

the interviewee is, in fact, an important moment of composition.

In the case of The Paris Review, simply being selected for an interview signals a

singular and noteworthy assignation of status. Deciding who is worthy of such an honour

is, today, a collaborative process at The Paris Review; however, in the early years, the

selection could be influenced by quite arbitrary factors, such as who was personal friends

with an editor or who had proposed the interview (often friends with connections or a

"way in" to an elusive subject). Interviewers have tended to seek out their favourite

writers, those about whom they have a personal interest in finding out more. Successful

contributing interviewers to the Review would often pitch interview ideas to Plimpton 145 upon the completion of their last project. Archival correspondence shows Gerard

Malanga (who interviewed Charles Olson in 1970) pitching a Leonard Cohen interview

(Malanga, Letter to Plimpton, 31 Oct. 1969) and Thomas LeClair (who interviewed

William Gass in 1977) proposing conversations with Larry Flynt and others. While no records of refusal could be found, none of these interviews was ever published in The

Paris Review.

A survey of the first 25 years of The Paris Review shows that many of the interviews with major authors, such as T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway,

John dos Passos, Robert Frost, Jack Kerouac, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Pablo

Neruda, and Anne Sexton were conducted in the final years of the writer's life.

Conversations with Jean Cocteau, Boris Pasternak, William Carlos Williams, Charles

Olson, W. H. Auden, John Berryman and James M. Cain were conducted in, literally, their final days, while the interviews for John Steinbeck and Blaise Cendrars were assembled after their deaths.54 It may be tempting to read a kind of "Paris Review kiss of death" into this pattern; however, in most cases, the subject's advanced age and/or

Dates are as follows: William Faulkner (interviewed 1956, died 1962), Ernest Hemingway (interviewed 1958, died 1961 by suicide), T.S. Eliot (interviewed 1959, died 1965), Boris Pasternak (interviewed and died 1960), Robert Frost (interviewed 1960, died 1963), Aldous Huxley (interviewed 1960, died 1963), Blaise Cendrars (died 1961, interview published posthumously 1966), Evelyn Waugh (interviewed 1963, died 1966), Jean Cocteau (interviewed and died 1963), William Carlos Williams (interviewed and died 1964), Jack Kerouac (interviewed 1968, died 1969), John Steinbeck (died 1968, interview assembled posthumously and published 1969), John dos Passos (interviewed 1969, died 1970), Charles Olson (interviewed and died 1970), Anne Sexton (interviewed 1970, died 1974 by suicide), Pablo Neruda (interviewed 1971, died 1973), John Berryman (interviewed and died 1972 by suicide), W. H. Auden (interviewed and died 1973), and James M. Cain (interviewed and died 1978). 146 deteriorating state (i.e. Berryman and Kerouac) likely signalled the necessity of an interview before it was too late.

The Paris Review also fashions its interviews less as "events" that signal a new publication or emerging writer than well-earned post-mortems on a writer's career, from the perspective of the older and wiser side. Subjects are, after all, invited to speak on

"The Art of Fiction (or Poetry or Drama)," and they are expected to have both the success and the experience to be able to give credence to their craft. Other literary magazines tend to look for new and even cutting-edge writers who can herald a new style of writing or their own newfound fame. Interviewers can catch their subjects at that crucial, often naive moment when she is on the cusp of success or literary recognition, and the recorded document preserves that time for later reference (and often, renunciation). Still other publications select writers at benchmarks in their careers, such as the receipt of a major writing award or the publication of a bestselling novel. For The Paris Review, the interview is itself the landmark; being asked to participate in a Paris Review interview recognizes the writer's membership among the literary elite. Quite often this moment comes late, well after the subject has passed the stage of her life when she are producing her best work. The Paris Review often finds its writers in their days of retrospect, when they are looking to contemplate what they have done and, in many cases, solidify a very specific version of themselves for posterity. Many are looking to buttress their literary and celebrity legacy for all time.

To continue with the stages of the literary interview form, after the editors or interviewers have chosen their subject, research is conducted, questions are composed, 147 and an agreement is made with the interview subject about the terms of the exchange.55

Until the actual verbal exchange occurs, the preparatory stages are as crafted and planned as any literary form. The initial contact is usually made by correspondence (electronic or otherwise); however, even in this digital age, in-depth interviews still most often feature a face-to-face conversation conducted over one or more days during which a tape recorder

(or digital sound device) captures the revelations offered for future transcription. This personal meeting provides material about context and the physicality of the subject and her surroundings that add texture and interest to the final product.

In most senses, the interview is, aufond, an oral genre. However, it is an oral genre that requires the support of writing at every step. As Ted Lyon points out, the oral stage of the process can be quite spontaneous; however, as soon as the conversation is over, the spontaneity is largely replaced by more structured forms of composition and revision on the part of the interviewer, interviewee, or both. Post-interview, the textual record of the exchange normally goes through extensive modifications. Material maybe reordered for thematic flow, dialogue cleaned up for the target audience, headnotes and explanations added, questions rephrased. With some publications, this stage is carried out strictly by the interviewer, perhaps with the assistance of an editor; however, it is increasingly popular for both participants to engage in this process collaboratively.

Certainly, in the case of The Paris Review, this step is highly cooperative (or, in rare cases, combative), as I will discuss later in greater detail.

See Pico Iyer's "Parallel Lives" in The Guardian for a contemporary discussion of the demise of the well-researched interview. 148

In the final draft, an interview can take many forms. For many in-depth

newspaper and magazine interviews, the final product is really more of a personal essay

about a subject, sprinkled with quotations but rounded out by observations and opinions

of the interviewer. Quite often, the reader has little idea exactly what questions were

posed to the subject; his words alone are given as an almost spontaneous monologue. The

Paris Review uses the Question-and-Answer format for its interviews, showing both the

words of the interviewer and interviewee, as well as (usually) some commentary about

their interaction in the head-note. Unlike some more egalitarian successors, the Paris

Review interviewers are nearly anonymous throughout the process, their names appearing

only at the end of the piece or the headnote, with the questions labelled simply

"INTERVIEWER" throughout. The presence or absence of the interviewer can have a

significant impact on the tone of the interview. However, especially in the early

interviews, the personality and identity of the interviewer can come to the forefront in

cases when there is a personal relationship between the two parties (as in the example of

Plimpton and Hemingway). If there is a friendly rapport or a subtle hostility between the

parties, intimacy or tension can be increased or decreased. While the charisma of the

interviewer can add interest to the printed exchange, a complete absence of interviewer

keeps the focus firmly on the subject (Swander 14).

The interviewer has a unique role in twentieth-century literary culture that has yet

to be fully investigated. Several cultural commentators have observed that the United

States has historically had an exceptionally permissive attitude towards the freedom of

the interviewer. Denis Brian opened his 1973 critical expose on interviewers, Murderers

and Other Friendly People: the Public and Private Worlds of Interviewers, with the 149 reminder that Truman Capote had access to death row inmates in America while such a practice was unheard of in Britain. He also notes that American authors who resist interviews (i.e. J.D. Salinger) are generally considered cultural oddities. Brian points to the American dogma of "the public's right to know" and freedom of the press as the twin

"quasi-religious beliefs" that keep the interviewer busy asking questions, and usually, getting answers (viii). The explosion of reality television and the increasing aggression of

British and American paparazzi in recent years further highlight the allure of the celebrity and media exposure for large portions of the American population. The pervasive expectation is that we should have access to the private lives of the famous, as well as welcome the opportunity to reveal our secrets to as great an audience as possible.

In his book, Brian takes the unusual step of questioning the questioners

(interviewers) and assesses their value as the mediums through which the public comes to know its public figures.56 He considers a range of interviewers and their work, from the disastrous to the almost magical, with a focus on those who pursued writers like

Hemingway and Capote, and politicians like the Kennedys. Brian's assessment of the

Hemingway interviews is that Malcolm Cowley's 1948 Life interview served to first make Hemingway into a celebrity by creating an accessible image of the man as a "tough, brave, friendly, cat-loving man who pursued the mot juste with as much enthusiasm and dedication as he stalked his living prey." Conversely, Lillian Ross' New Yorker interview

Brian extensively interviews the major interviewers of several figures; however, in some ways, it seems that his focus is still often more on the original author subject than on the interviewers' perspectives or strategies, per se. While there are some original observations within the interviews themselves, Brian fails to draw any conclusions on what holds the interviewers together. He neglects to trace the patterns that exist in these exchanges, leaving his work more a series of isolated reflections and commentary. 150 with Hemingway only two years later did the complete opposite by showing him as "a man who talked to himself, used semiliterate phrases, [and] carried alcohol with him

everywhere, like a baby with a bottle" (1-2). It was George Plimpton's 1958 interview with Hemingway that was the most beneficial in restoring his reputation. Through this intense collaboration, Hemingway was able to reassert his image as a "serious, absorbed

craftsman" in the eye of the reader.

It is worth considering the technical and creative responsibilities of the

interviewer as an artist in her own right when considering the characteristics of the form.

Understanding the process and appreciating the potential literary nuances in its

composition will increase our ability to analyze the final product. In her essay on the

"The Art of the Interview," Mary Swander delineates some standard components of the

(not necessarily literary) form. Swander's interview writing style tends more towards the

essay than the Paris Review type; however, as a writing teacher, her observations are

instructive on the form itself. She emphasizes the importance of the editing process and

insists on the necessity of starting with a full transcript. Though time-consuming, this

transcript should be produced by the interviewer herself, for it is she who has the clearest

notion of the context and meaning of the subject's words and is therefore least likely to

make errors. The arduous process of transcribing an interview also benefits the final text

in other ways:

When you transcribe, stopping and starting the tape with the speech

patterns of your subjects, straining for their inflections, catching their

every aside, you establish closer relationships to the rhythms of your

interviewees. You get used to their slang, the cadences of their voices, they way they form sentences, they way they think. You are drawn more

intimately inside the personality of your people, and you re-live the

interview in a more experiential way. (Swander 11)

S wander credits this stage of the process, combined with the visual record of the

conversation, with helping the writer "find the heart of their piece" (11). As we will later

see in correspondence from The Paris Review archives, many interviewers had this

experience, and expressed a kind of attachment to their subject, after many long painstaking hours of transcribing a tape-recorded conversation. The editing of the

transcript requires both creativity and analysis, for what the writer is doing is actually

looking for the narrative of the interview, the underlying theme or point that will elevate

the exchange above a simple, even tedious, list of questions. Swander suggests that this

"key" can often be found in some initially overlooked, perhaps underplayed comment or

"off-hand revelation," something with emotional or moral impact. At this point, the

interviewer may want to return to her subject to further pursue this moment or obtain

supporting information from other sources.

Swander notes how a good interview uses many literary strategies; for example,

the Paris Review dialogues "imitate stage techniques and contain their own inherent

tension" while other more in-depth profiles contain ample summary and scene to build a

compelling narrative (13). In both cases, the use of visual description of both character

and setting, even using standard short-story techniques such as choosing an idiosyncratic

gesture or speech habit, can greatly increase the potency of the piece (14). The point is

that the interviewer or editor's job is markedly creative, akin to that of the writer in the

need to create tension and interest, not just deliver information. 152

At this point, one should distinguish between short, superficial journalistic pieces which tend to focus more readily on anecdotes, biography, current events, and gossip, and lengthy, researched scholarly interviews (often by readers who are both familiar with the subject's work and educated more generally in the field). Differentiation should also be made between spontaneous interviews and those, like The Paris Review, which allow the subject to engage in the editing process and therefore polish and even censor their initial responses. Interviews exist all along these continuums; however, the Paris Review interview is certainly at the latter end, typifying the most literary and crafted incarnation of the interview genre.

In the final stage of the interview process, once a final version has been agreed upon and the interview is printed, its reception changes the constitution of the form itself.

As Ted Lyon perceives, "at this point [when it is read] the author and her/his interviewer blend into a single entity, and the reader establishes her/his dialogic relationship with them as if they were merely two characters in a novel. Heteroglossia is thus confirmed, between the reader and those who are interviewing each other" (77). At this stage, the interview can seem to belong, in the mind of the reader, to one of many generic categories. Depending on the quality and style of the interview, the reader may approach it as simply a non-fictional essay, presenting the opinions and facts of a notable writer. If the approach is highly theoretical or critical, the reader may see the exchange as a dialogic form of literary criticism. Or, perhaps, she will instead read the interview as a record of a dramatic performance between two writers, each with their own designs and goals. Or, with more seamless and literary conversations, a reader may consider the exchange in terms of a fictional dialogue, no different from that composed by a single creative originator. Like the creative process of the interview, the reading of it is another

act of making meaning, highly collaborative and drawing on multiple genres and

expectations.

While we know that The Paris Review initially used literary interviews as a

marketing tool to get more people interested in the magazine, that premise presupposes

that there is something inherently appealing about the interview to readers. Historical

examples of literary conversations give us some clue as to why that may be, but there are

still other reasons for the appeal of the Paris Review interview. The literary interview is

ostensibly a forum for getting information about a writer's own views on a given subject.

In many cases, that subject is simply the author himself; in the case of The Paris Review,

the subject is "The Art of Writing." So, on the surface, the reader may approach the

literary interview with the foremost desire to find out about how individual writers view

their craft. That, however, is only one of several impetuses that bring readers to this

genre. As I will consider in this chapter and the next, in addition to specific commentary

on "The Art of Writing," readers of literary interviews are privy to a unique form of

mythmaking, the creation and maintenance of authorial personae that infuse our cultural understandings of individual authors and literature in general.

The process of the modern literary interview is unique and deserving of further

scholarly inquiry. While the focus of my project is the Paris Review interviews, it would be a useful research exercise to compare and contrast the different interviewing

approaches to the many stages of the form. Certainly, the final interview transcripts

scholars frequently read and refer to in literary research often mask complex and even problematic processes that lie beneath. The astute researcher using interview materials 154 ought to begin to ask such questions as: In what environment did the conversation occur?

How much of the encounter was oral and how much was written? Why was the subject chosen and why did she agree to sit for this interview? How did the interviewer organize and edit the materials? What role did the subject play in the final draft? What was the process of this exchange? Many of these questions will be considered in my close reading of the Paris Review interviews in the following chapters, oftentimes revealing information as pertinent to the study of the author as the explicit content of the interviews.

4.2 THE WRITER'S AGENDA: MYSTERY, MONEY, MYTH?

Writers agree to participate in interviews for a variety of reasons. The Paris

Review interview is atypical in that it confers such status on its subject that few authors

decline to participate. However, writers regularly agree to sit for all kinds of interviews, both scholarly and journalistic, and their experiences yield a range of results. Authors are known to complain about the literary interview process, and yet most recognize that in today's literary climate, the interview is a "necessary evil" (Durix 1).

Especially in the last half-century, the author interview has become one of the primary means of publicity for a book tour. Even when a writer doesn't have a new volume to hawk, getting readers interested in reading more works is often one of the aims of the literary interview, at least from the writer's perspective (5). When an author is launching a new book, the interview can afford an opportunity to advise readers on how to approach the work, perhaps by offering some background or a philosophical lens 155 through which to view it. Gerard Genette gives the example of Proust's interview for Le

Temps in 1913 in which his comments function almost as a preface to Du cote de chez

Swann (360). In it, Proust advises his readers to view the volume as an introduction to a

longer work that will come, and by its length, express the passage of time and the role of memory. Such remarks are clearly introductory to his works as a whole and would

function equally well in another paratextual environment such as a preface or an

introduction.

Genette also points out that authors may engage in interviews to compensate for

what they feel is critical indifference or incompetence towards their own work, a

complaint that may simply be triggered by a difference of opinion or resentment over poor reviews. Genette quotes Balzac's preface for Beatrix in which he states "it is not

always pointless to explain the personal meaning of a literary composition, in a time

when criticism no longer exists" (in Genette 361). In these cases, authors may set specific

criteria they wish to be used for the evaluation of their work, supply influences or precedents, or otherwise define the standards by which they expect to be judged.

The motivations of writers who choose to engage in interviews are complex. As

Bruce Bawer explains in his 1988 article about the genre, writers have historically been more than happy to sit for a Paris Review conversation because it "gave them an

opportunity to promote their work, to settle old scores, to get their opinions into print without having to write about them" and, perhaps most of all, to "talk about themselves—

and what could appeal more strongly to the average writer's ego" (Bawer 422).

From another perspective, many writers view the interview as an integral part of literary culture, a part of the machinery that keeps both the community and the industry 156 moving and growing. I will consider the intricacies of this machinery later when I discuss

Bourdieu's concept of the field of literary production; however, most authors understand the system of literary culture in far less theoretical terms. The author interview has benefits and costs for its subject; it can be a risk and a performance. It can be a soapbox

or a minefield. Roland Barthes described it in 1979 thus:

The interview is a practice that is fairly complex if not to analyze, then at

the very least to judge. Generally speaking, I find interviews fairly trying

and at one time I wanted to give them up. . . . And then I realized that my

attitude was excessive: the interview is—to put it lightly—part of a social

game that no one can evade, or, to put it more seriously, part of a

collaborative intellectual venture between writers on the one hand and the

media on the other hand. There are meshing gears that have to be accepted:

from the moment one writes, one expects eventual publication, and from

the moment one is published, one must accept what society asks of books

and what it turns them into. . .. Your question comes under the heading of

a general study that is lacking of a subject I have always wanted to teach a

course on: a vast panorama, long reflected on, of the practices of

intellectual life in our day. (Barthes, Le Grain de la voix 300 qtd. in

Genette361)

As "practices of intellectual life," interviews and conversations can exert a significant

pressure on the way critics and general readers understand authors and their works.

Teasing apart the nuances of this pressure and the way such influence is carried from

author to public to text is one goal of this study. 157

Still, the problems the interview can pose for its subject are unsurprising. In 1988,

a panel of Commonwealth authors and poets was asked for their opinions on the literary interview; the results were published in Commonwealth Essays and Studies. The most

common complaint was the oversimplification and even misrepresentation of the writer or his ideas in the interview form. One writer expressed concerns about how his stated intentions could be applied to the interpretation of his work and felt that the entire

enterprise should be approached with "caution" (Durix 1). This anxiety relates to the use

of biographical information in the analysis of literature, an exercise often dismissed as

inappropriate in the belief that "authors are often not the authoritative guide to the

interpretation of [their own] work" (1). This question of the relevance of authorial

intention to critical interpretation is an issue that will be explored deeply in Chapter 6; however, this use of the interview as a way to help understand the author and his work is

a sensitive issue for many writers. For example, as Ted Lyon has pointed out, there are

often parallels between the narrative strategies used in a writer's interviews and in their

literature. Another problem for writers is the fear of being caught off-guard, since there

are many writers who are less comfortable with speaking and performing than writing.

There is the very real apprehension that one might haplessly divulge too much information and "give away her secrets," a fear that is expressed, and sometimes fulfilled, by writers as accomplished as Hemingway.

Other writers seem to have no trouble taking control of the literary interview. For

some, it is an opportunity to don new masks, to "create a whole series of personas that are designed to baffle the people who are reading the interview" (Aritha Van Herk in Durix

6). This willingness to play the game of the interview—albeit on one's own terms, and 158 perhaps even when the intention of "winning"—can produce unexpected results, and can be quite frustrating to the unwitting interviewer. While many writers appreciate a well- read and prepared interviewer, some prefer a complete nai'f, that is, someone who simply

opens the microphone (or page) up for the writer to discuss whatever he chooses.

Heavily edited interviews come with their own set of limitations. With too much revision, the interviewee has ample opportunity to construct a seamless facade that can make the entire interview end up being "devoid of interest" (Durix 2). When a writer is

given free range to exercise all her defences, the vulnerability and insight that the

interview promises are lost. In contrast, some writers appreciate the chance to revise or

even have their interrogator do some polishing for them; the results may make them seem more articulate than they come across in conversation.

John Rodden points out that the interview is one of the only literary genres that has traditionally gone without compensation for the subject {Performing 230). He credits

the interview's "traditionally inferior status" for the fact that the main artist involved goes unpaid. For many, the literary interview, however carefully composed and polished, will

never attain the status of art, but will be considered merely "talk" (230 n.25). Rodden

suggests that the tradition of considering the oral as inferior to the written is used as justification for the stigma against paying the interviewee, while the interviewer is regularly compensated for doing the professional work of questioning. As a rule, The

Paris Review does not pay its interview subjects; however, there are a few interesting

exceptions on record. For example, when Herbert Gold interviewed Nabokov in 1967, Mrs. Nabokov arranged for her husband to be paid $500. This sum was agreed to by

Editor George Plimpton who wrote to Gold that "[Nabokov] is the first author we've ever

slipped money to, but the circumstances are different here, I think. After all, he writes the

answers himself, which is a type of composition for which he should be paid" (Plimpton,

Letter to Herbert Gold). There is also a record of W. H. Auden being paid the same

sum58; his interview was also conducted through meetings (with no tape recorder present)

and written correspondence (Newman; Auden).

Writers, on the whole, express an ambivalent attitude towards the literary

interview. Even those who enjoy the process and appreciate the results often feel

conflicted about the interview's ability to truly represent the role of the author and her

writing process. Fiction writer Thaisa Frank discusses this uneasiness in her essay

"Deconstructing the Interview: the Myth of the Literary Persona." Her concern is for the

inevitable gap between her true self and the self represented through the pages of the

author interview. The myth, according to Frank, is that "the writer is a fixed and solid

entity, someone who can describe a map, if not the territory, of a working day" (45). One might say the same thing of any attempt to represent anyone or anything in print; however, Frank goes on to explore why the act of writing is uniquely difficult to

In a letter to George Plimpton, Herbert Gold describes a scene from his meeting with Nabokov in 1967: "midair in a dive at the Montreaux-Palace pool, I saw Vera Nabokov bending instructionally toward Uncle Valodya's ear; and when I came out of the water, he said, '[The] Paris Review must give you $500 and me $500 for the interview.' I doubt if you ever paid any other interviewee. Probably you won't want this known, but if word gets out, I'll volunteer to be interviewed by you at a cut rate."

See letter from George Plimpton to Auden dated 7 June 1973. Plimpton self­ consciously notes that the sum is merely a token: "I hope (with the collapse of the dollar) it will be enough to buy at least a couple of bottles of Valpolicella." adequately contain. In the practice of writing, details such as an idea's origins, the

concrete drafts, and one's writing habits or biography are simply foils that surround the real process and inspiration which must, by its nature, remain hidden. Frank contends,

the real origin is concealed—in the fragment of a dream, or an image of a

child in summer twilight, or a vision of a Mediterranean village—as well

as in hours of daydreaming, writing, and revising, not to mention

everything he has lived and experienced. [The details revealed in

interviews] tell us nothing about the actual process. They are stand-ins,

understudies, markers.... The literary interview is a bit like a failed

detective story, seeking the answer to the question: how does the writer do

it?—when everybody knows that no one can explain how the writer did

it—not even the writer. (46)

These insights lead us to wonder if and how these limitations devalue the literary

interview. We might ask, do these weaknesses make the interview a futile exercise? Not

at all, contends Frank: "Ultimately it doesn't matter that the literary interview is a masquerade ball in which the writer, the interviewer, and the reader meet in a ritual promenade, never taking off their mask" (46) because the true genius of the interview lies

in the connection that can be made between the reader and the writer, however imagined.

The reader's desire to know the writer, much like the desire to know a fictional character,

is sustained and even thrives in the world of the interview. Readers will be drawn to the

interview again and again "because we are curious, because we are uncomfortable with the invisible, and because our culture revels in the cult of personality" (46). And while

she doesn't describe her own position in this way, it seems that for Frank, the writerly 161 persona is simply another invention, a creation that can be appreciated along with their other works. The power of persona and the role it plays in the field of literary production will be examined in the next chapter.

4.3 THE UNIQUE PROCESS OF THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW: COLLABORATION

Since its first appearance in 1953 ("The Art of Fiction No.l: E.M. Forster), the

Paris Review interview has been a highly collaborative and often cooperative process. As noted elsewhere, Paris Review interviewers, editors and author subjects usually work together through several revisions to come up with a final product that is acceptable to all parties. The project can take months or even, in some cases, years of meetings, correspondence and multiple drafts before a polished version is settled on. As Jeanne

McCulloch noted in a 1990 interview, this process of giving control to the interview

subject is unusual: "This seems to me unique in the world of journalism: to let a subject get a second or third chance to go on the record precisely the way he wants to go on the record" (Linville 59). George Plimpton referred to the Paris Review interviews as

"collaborations rather than inquisitions" (qtd in Gussow El).

This approach is certainly at odds with the "off the record" tone of many

contemporary interviews which ostensibly try to ambush, surprise or trick their subjects into spilling more than they mean to. While some might call this system of collaboration a kind of "cheating," The Paris Review has made no secret of its highly edited approach to the literary interview. Certainly, its willingness to work over the conversation "until all 162 parties—interviewer, subject, and editor—are satisfied" has a number of implications for the final interview (Bawer 422).

Paris Review editors stress that the open and collaborative process allows the

subject to feel safe, and, ironically, nudges them to reveal more than they might have in a more confrontational interview setting. By meeting with the subject in several different

encounters, and continuing the conversation through correspondence, the interviewer has

access to the subject in various states of mind and not the single moment and sensibility

that most interviews capture. In the best situations, such an extended acquaintance can

develop into a friendly rapport, even a kind of trusting affinity that further encourages

intimate revelations.

The collaborative editing process also can lead to a higher quality final product, if

the parties involved share a similar creative vision for the piece. By giving the interview

subject control over the contents, even the phrasing and style of the exchange, the Paris

Review interview becomes much more of a crafted literary art form than a dynamic

record of a real-world conversation. While many, if not most, of the final printed

interviews endeavour to preserve some moments of real spontaneity and impulse, the

dialogues as a whole are finely polished, quite intentional pieces. Bruce Bawer explains

that The Paris Review is the gold standard for literary interviews precisely because of this

process of revision: "[The Paris Review] treats the interview transcript not as a sacred

document to be presented verbatim, but as a piece of copy which, like everything else

that goes into the magazine is open to editing, tightening, revision" (422).

The magazine's ability to consistently land interviews with the biggest writers of

the day is also likely due to the power of the subject to have the final word on what gets out. As mentioned, many writers hesitate to give interviews, fearing that they will misrepresent themselves or their words will be taken out of context. The Paris Review has from its beginnings been seen as a writer's magazine, a safe place for writers to speak

of their craft without manipulation, and with the security of being able to work on, even

develop their conversation into a literary document worthy of their name. The Paris

Review's highly cooperative process has never been a secret and has likely been an

incentive for reluctant subjects to participate in the process. For example, when Harold

Humes, one of the founders of The Paris Review, wrote to William Faulkner for an

interview, he explained that the objective of the exchange was for the '"Old China

Hands' of literature to explain their conjuring tricks to younger writers" and reassured

him that he would have "final authority to pass on every word of the finished interview

before publication" (Gussow El). Furthermore, the arrangement and atmosphere likely

encourage writers to be more candid than they would otherwise; "Most journalists

wouldn't countenance such meddling [in terms of revisions by subject], but surely this

policy won over skittish authors who then proceeded to cut loose in the Review's

atmosphere of awe-struck collegiality" (Miller 14).

The first two decades of Paris Review interviews were reserved for writers of

fiction and poetry. In the early 1980s, the subject pool was expanded to include literary

leaders in other fields, such as Publishing, Translation, Criticism, and Biography. While

ostensibly focused on "The Art of Fiction (or Poetry or Drama)," even the early The

Paris Review Interviews actually cover a lot of ground beyond the obvious "fiction technicalities." In general, the conversations range from the trivial, such as choice of writing instrument and time of day for composition, to the monumental, such as philosophical discussions on the role of literature or the moral responsibilities of the literary community (Plimpton, Paris Review Anthology 282). As James Linville noted in a conversation about the interviews in 1993, while the Review was ideally interested in unearthing "the grand views of literature," it was often "the simplest questions [that got] to the heart of the creative act." By starting with seemingly basic details like the writing environment, the interview subject might start to dip into larger themes like creativity and the mind, whereas, "when you start with the most high-minded questions, you get lost"

(Linville 58-9). It is the delicate balance of the serious and the trivial, the sombre and the entertaining, that can make these interviews so "addictively readable" (Miller 14).

Similarly, in an essay on the Paris Review interviews, Laura Miller observes that it's not the "pronouncements about great art" that are memorable, but "the small observations, the funny stories, the enthusiasms, the gossip" and the ability of these dialogic events to capture personalities and even "preserve cultural moments" in terms of what people are thinking, feeling and doing in snapshots of time, that really matter (14).

While some readers may enjoy the exchanges as intimate meetings of great minds, others ransack the interviews for gems of writing wisdom, pithy quotations that can be collected on the art of writing, perhaps granting their collector some of their power. It is here that we find the place twentieth-century writers made so many of the

In 1953, T. S. Eliot initially refused an invitation from Plimpton to interview for The Paris Review on the grounds that he was "not qualified to speak about the art of fiction since [he had] never written a story or novel" (Eliot, Letter to Plimpton). Once the request was qualified, Eliot submitted to an interview on "The Art of Poetry" in 1959. remarks we still quote today—where Faulkner said, "If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies" and

Dorothy Parker said, "It's not the tragedies that kill us, it's the messes." The memorability and longevity of these quotations is testament to the impact of their publication; however, how spontaneous or revealing were these comments in their original utterance?

4.4 CONSTRUCTING THE AUTHOR: EDITORIAL STRATEGIES

One of the criticisms of The Paris Review's invitation to its interview subjects to collaborate in the final product is that such a system also allows the subject to delete or alter anything that he may have unintentionally let slip. Perhaps even more so than with most writings, the final published versions of the Paris Review interviews tell only one story of the encounter they claim to represent. This is why the Paris Review archives are so valuable to any serious study of the interviews. The archival material for the early years (1953-1978) is extensive, as almost all communication during those years was conducted by written correspondence, especially in the years when The Paris Review was headquartered in Paris and long-distance telephone calls were prohibitively expensive.

The archive, held at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, houses transcripts, letters and drafts from these early interviews, and offers a privileged perspective into the process of the interview, the negotiations and deletions, and the literary stylings and exchanges that preceded the final published version most readers of The Paris Review and Writers at Work collections are familiar with. There are files of conversation drafts, 166 often complete with handwritten notes, corrections, deletions and additions. Several interview files also contain extensive notes by the interviewer, correspondence between participating editors and contributors, headnote drafts and supporting materials including photographs, receipts and budgets. Through a close reading of many of the supporting materials for these interviews, details about the collaborative and creative interview process emerge. Carefully edited interview drafts, when compared with final published versions, demonstrate many of the concerns and conflicts of the interview subject. In some cases, a chronology of revisions can establish quite conscious efforts on the part of the interviewer, author-subject or editor to present a specific image or persona.

Sometimes it is possible to tease apart the dynamics of the final published version to construct what went before, what was intended, and what kind of strategies of authorial self-construction were at play. In other examples, the power struggles, censorship and self-fashioning that happened before the final draft tell us more about the interview subject than does the final interview.

4.4.1 Collaboration or Counterfeit?: Norman Mailer

The Paris Review archives reveal the multiple stages of collaboration and revision for many of the early writer interviews. The interview subjects' privileged access to editing allowed by The Paris Review is perhaps nowhere better reflected than in the noted process changes of Steven Marcus's 1964 interview with Norman Mailer. Upon close inspection of a full draft of the original interview transcript, the collaborative process is explicit. After their personal interview, conducted in 1963, Marcus sent an edited version 167 of the transcript to Mailer for his review. Mailer heavily edited this draft; almost every line, including those of the interviewer, was revised. In several places, Mailer inserted new questions to make it appear that he had been compelled to provide additional information, whereas, in the original version, he had freely provided those details.

At one point in the interview, Marcus questions Mailer about his early development as a writer. Mailer's handwritten corrections to the transcript reflect a desire to create a more dramatic exchange, with rhythmic back-and-forth banter and smoothly flowing storytelling:

MILES ' ••

r •'" -•:. */ I don't know if I can answer. I did a lot Dp writing when I was young. Swiurmi twrt thm T Trrnta vir'1 "^"TliTr i "vmTi mfrrnn^'j"WTTririr™",*;-

<¥BBto&4bivm a science ..fiction novel about peop.e on lasth taking a rocket ship to Mars

pCp^bsro'Skrjame w« aoimthiag like Buck Sogers. ' TShro oooonrt hairo was called Dr. Hoor,

Fig. 7. Edited Interview Draft, from Norman Mailer, Draft of Interview by Stephen Marcus. Corrected ts. (Corrections by Mailer). Mailer Interview file 1 part 2. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY.

Throughout the interview, tangents are deleted and telling details are added where necessary. In a discussion of the perils of his craft, Mailer repeatedly revises his answers, at times making them seem more conversational than in the original (through the insertion of interjections such as "of course" and "yes!"). In one segment, Mailer has actually scissored out part of a question and we are only left with its final words and 168

Mailer's crossed-out answer: "I'm not sure I am going to answer that. I have a feeling it is a bad question to answer, at least for me" (4). Neither the question nor the responses appear in the final version, but its remnants in the transcript pique one's curiosity.

Many of Mailer's revisions are stylistic; his marks and changes suggest the ways in which he might have edited his own novels, altering diction and syntax to improve the elegance and impact of his stories. After all, for Mailer, this interview is likely simply another literary creation, equally deserving of his editorial eye. In several places, however, the collaborative nature of the interview seems almost a facade for the single- minded control of the author subject. When Mailer inserts entire questions and answers, even introducing entirely new subjects, the usual conventions of the interview genre are completely overturned. In Mailer's draft of the interview, 12 of the 22 pages contain

Mailer's additional questions and answers added after the original exchange. All evidence indicates that these pages are wholly the invention of Mailer, designed with the intent to tell stories that weren't touched upon in the initial interview or to "set the record straight" on topics important to him. For example, Mailer adds a long section explaining the genesis of the idea for the climax of his novel The Naked and the Dead. In his

"response," Mailer is able to tell fairly lengthy tales of his own war experience; he goes as far as to detail how the metaphor of the hornet's nest is an apt one for the

"disproportions" of war (14a). He goes on to add long discourses on existentialism, politics and future plans, all written in a language and tone that suggest an oral conversation, belying the words' solitary written origins.

In one sense, the interview becomes more of a first-person essay in these sections.

However, with the imagined "questions" appearing to goad him along, Mailer actively 169 creates a very specific version of himself; his character is "Mailer in conversation" and he is as much a construction as any of his other characters. While the parts of the interview actually conducted by Stephen Marcus are interesting in their own right, the transcript reveals that there are large sections written exclusively by Mailer, making them a kind of staged drama, perhaps Mailer's first play. It is unlikely that his usurpation of the interviewer role was simply blindly accepted by Marcus; in fact, the final published interview includes Mailer's stories only as they relate to his works, and excludes others, such as the one pictured below, that do not.

/'". \ A> n 'flM'+Ar'fov o^Sfo •£&*' filiate

Fig. 8. Handwritten insertions by Mailer, from Norman Mailer, Draft of Interview by Stephen Marcus. Corrected ts. (Corrections by Mailer). Mailer Interview file 1 part 2. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY.

Mailer's handwritten corrections tell us as much, if not more, about him as a writer as the final published Paris Review interview might. The process of his deletions and revisions reveals his genuine response to some of the questions posed. Like many writers, Mailer appears to feel great discomfort when asked to talk about his present work. While loathe to call his work rituals superstitious, Mailer's hesitation to discuss his methods is made plain through his layered editing of the interview in Fig. 9. INTERVIEWER • • ."

Do you have any superstitions about your methods o £ workj

MUL5R •' £_ ^ _ kmii ,tm*f4mm lT°«8"l»n" I wouldn't call them superstitions exactly.. ft«iii>toowyS"OJi' W'j' i"(iupeudftfl.,*8bogt

I .ittt.iiiiniiuL.UCTis. T 4-I-;„K *i ,1 TJ„44-^) ;•,„,] +w, ,»„•, •'•"""'"•'»'litHHIUitj:QT].f'.fli]iTif?iTiii'!iii?'- • AtA.i'f- '4 kink "H'f fe**^" 11.1 lull rlnmij \ IIJTHITIJ rnr-rrrnriiiiijiftiinji tn talk about one's present work, for it spoils •Cur-, titinin Qiirii'tf\ mnjftxji^'"*M|iilf" something at tHe root of the creative act.A It discharges the tension. 1~n'*wiii111M>n,M11 iLlXLL^^L- ":

Fig. 9. Handwritten insertions by Mailer, from Norman Mailer, Draft of Interview by Stephen Marcus. Corrected ts. (Corrections by Mailer). Mailer Interview file 1 part 2. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY.

Readers of the interview proofs might be inclined to say that some of the best parts of the conversation were cut from the exchange, and yet, while some spontaneity and intimacy may be lost, something else is gained in terms of composition and style.

This pattern of tangential insertions can be seen in many Paris Review interview transcripts. In several cases, one can see that the writer, upon reading a draft transcript, saw an opportunity to add something that did not come up in the initial exchange. Instead of simply appending material to his answer, often he would also invent a question to contextualize the material in the interview. In this sense, both interviewer and subject exhibit a familiarity with, and an acceptance of, the "rules" of the genre. Similarly, the

1975 interview with Bernard Malamud displays added sections of questions & answers

(Fig. 10), long quotations added at the transcript stage (Fig. 11), and conversational comments inserted to replace answers that came across as stiff or overly formal (Fig. 12).

These handwritten corrections, identified as Malamud's handwriting through comparison with correspondence, attest to the subject's interest in creating a certain style of 171 interviewee presence, one who is effortlessly clever and eloquent in even the most casual remarks.

INTERVIEWER What specific piece of advice would you give to young^ j^re^Bjf' writers? . • • ' ' ^y^m%^^ ^^ '

-vnur heart 0Mi<^iS^7l=0£ m-f^ECgrr. ^ «-«eT~iU - <***** c)t ^T^4^oTCy~^' ' i^t»4- e-tPMVi.tKi&. ; -irffEtVffiWER Anything special to more experienced types?

Fig. 10. Selected handwritten insertions by Malamud, from Bernard Malamud, Draft of Interview by Daniel Stern. Corrected ts. Malamud Interview file. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY.

Page 23

MALAMUD Many more than I call three. Usually the last of the first puts it in place. The second focuses,develops , subtilizes. By the thirdmostofthedrossisgonclworkwithknguage. How the "&*e*2£4ti §Ai&« Bowers of afterthought. ^ %^rfeg^^^Mmw^&&*^^^d M IXfc MB*} 4*^

MTE1VIEWEI Your style has always seemed so individual, so recognizable. *%£, LtMN'-r To Is this a natural gift, or is it contrived and honed?

MALAMUD My style flows from the fingers. The eye and ear approve or amend.

INTERVIEWER ft>.r_, -f.crr©^* • -;- -Knur the future?

Fig. 11. Selected handwritten insertions by Malamud, from Bernard Malamud, Draft of Interview by Daniel Stern. Corrected ts. Malamud Interview file. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY. 172

INTERVIEWER Is it a moral allegory? fig

MALAMUD

afoy is4Hiligious-afy-e8tfae»%HFi»e»^niofe than morality In a ^o^ Sit*,**} To 6OU& O? J gooBTnmrirOnc&wio make room in those he creates. So far as c^ % -rue IM4S U INTERVIEWER To fcie« "-?>£&§ fj I J' What is the source of The Assistant} ' ' ' • F

Fig. 12. Selected handwritten insertions by Malamud, from Bernard Malamud, Draft of Interview by Daniel Stern. Corrected ts. Malamud Interview file. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY.

4.4.2 To Cut or Not to Cut: Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Ralph Ellison

Even with extensive editing, not all Paris Review interviews are able to achieve a balanced conversational feel. Thomas Clark's 1966 interview with Allen Ginsberg reads more like a series of extended monologues by Ginsberg than a true conversation. Clark was himself a poet, a poetry editor for the Review, as well as a close friend of Ginsberg's, which may have contributed to the unprecedented "access" to the subject in the interview.

In both the initial transcripts and final published interview, Ginsberg holds forth on topics from spirituality to gossip, from metre to madness, from word associations to weed, sometimes for five or ten pages at a stretch without interruption. When Clark does get a word in, it is often just a short interjection to refocus his subject. Supporting correspondence indicates that the Ginsberg interview was substantially edited, and yet the final version is one of the lengthiest Paris Review interviews on record (over 43 pages in its publication in The Paris Review). Both the transcript and the final document ramble at times and yet have moments of brilliant clarity, almost genius. Although Ginsberg's voice dominates the piece to the extent that the label "interview" seems almost inappropriate, this very quality is, in itself, a result of careful editorial decision-making. Clark, in a letter to Plimpton, explains his approach to the mass of material gathered in conversation with Ginsberg:

. . . working from the tape directly, I got 62 single-space pages (yes!), with

of course a lot of fat in it, so I went over that with Allen, cutting out

hesitations and repetitions in the speech—that left a version with about 55

pages, still too bulky, and sounding like recitation from a prepared script.

So then I restored the original text-voice in most places, and just cut down

or cut out half the questions. Since most of these were only extensions of

previous questions, none of the gist of the interview is gone, and now I

find the whole thing more readable, and, best, I think Allen's voice is

there.

In a sense it isn't really an interview. He obviously wanted to state

certain things about his work and life, and was taking this opportunity to

do it at length. So there is a certain longeurs [sic] that I didn't want to

interrupt because it's also narrative, with references backward and forward

at various points in the text. (Clark, Letter to Plimpton, 20 July 1965) Clark's letter goes a long way to explain the kind of editorial considerations taken on by

Paris Review interviewers. In this case, Clark struggles with how much of the interviewer's presence should be felt in the final draft. Ultimately, he decides that the lengthy, sometimes convoluted monologues better express his subject's position and personality than could a highly edited and tight "interview." Perhaps, we might surmise, the Paris Review interviews simply reflect a representative conversation with the author; in the case of Ginsberg, his typical conversations were, indeed, known to be labyrinthine and, at times, one-sided. So, the decision to "let Ginsberg go" in terms of freedom of expression seems to have been sound. Ginsberg's habits of communication seem so genuine, so utterly candid, that there appears to be an absolute correspondence between his words and his thoughts. As Clark says, while other interviews with Ginsberg may hit all the right notes in terms of "topical points," they often fail to get a true "sense of the man" (Letter to Plimpton), something that seems to forcefully come through in this interview.

Gerard Malanga's 1970 conversation with Charles Olson was another unwieldy conversation that needed to be tamed into the Paris Review format. Like Ginsberg, Olson was known for his convoluted, at times impenetrable oration. All in all, it took a team to carve the volumes of "jibberish" gathered in the initial encounter into something readable: at different points, Malanga had the help of Ed Sanders, Harvey Brown, George

Plimpton and Robert Creeley. Malanga initially described the interview as "unique, off­ beat and eccentric," (Malanga, Letter to "Peter" 23 June 1969) but in later correspondence, admitted that large sections were "mostly jibberish [sic]" (Malanga,

Letter to Plimpton 31 Oct. 1969). Charles Olson died during the editing process (in 175

January 1970), and so it was impossible to go back to the source to clarify parts of the conversation. Plimpton agreed that the material was largely inaccessible and solicited the help of Olson's patron and confidant Harvey Brown to find some key into the cryptic world of Olson's speech. Plimpton wrote, "I have edited the material severely, as you will see but it is still jibberish of a remarkable order. I think it needs comment from an outside source ... I think the reader wants to know a) does Olson always talk like this? b) was he under the influences of some sort of intoxicant? c) is there some sense that can be derived from this material? and d) are there any clues which the reader can grasp at?"

(Plimpton, Letter to Brown 18 March 1970). Plimpton also wrote to Robert Creeley, saying of the interview, "I understand very little of it—other than it's wonderful to the ear" (Plimpton, Letter to Creeley 18 March 1970). Plimpton's editorial efforts are admirable here. His correspondence reflects his desire to preserve the interest and poetry of Olson's words, and also shows how acutely aware he is of the incoherence of the interview text as a whole.

To this reader, the majority of material in the Olson interview transcripts is nearly impossible to understand. Great portions of the original transcript appear to record two parallel monologues taking place: one of Malanga taking different approaches to questions of Olson's work, and one of Olson speaking randomly on topics completely unrelated to the questions put to him. There are pages of personal conversation that are equally confusing and mysterious, often referring to texts and experiences that are never explained. Olson resists the interview process throughout and often directly attacks the nature, format and content of the questions. At one point, Olson jokes that his failure to provide a good interview will offend Plimpton. He implies that such an insult would put 176 him in the bad books of the CIA (see Fig. 14). This comment was, obviously, deleted from the final interview draft.

Also in the Olson interview transcripts, there are frequent interjections by others present that do not exist in the final interview. From the mass of deleted pages, we might say that Plimpton and the other editors took the Ezra Pound approach to editing by slashing whole chunks of material and seeking out the essence of the piece that was left.

Eventually, they carved out an interview from the mass of material before them, finding the order in the chaos. Draft transcripts show massive deletions and rearrangements with multiple insertions of explanation. Lengthy monologues are paraphrased into reasonable responses and even individual sentences are spliced together to create coherent statements. The process appears much like that of a sculptor carving a figure from a block of wood. The changes indicate that the editors often had to "imagine" what Olson meant, prompting the question, "is this truly an interview?" The original transcripts would be useful to Olson scholars interested in whether some poetry or original sense was lost in the extensive editing. Some would argue that the final product never did achieve intelligibility60, and yet it reads much more like a traditional interview in The Paris

Review sense. In any case, the Olson interview process stands as a vivid example of the

Certainly, some Paris Review readers were put off by the Olson interview, even in its edited and abridged form. One reader wrote to the editor to complain that the interview was a "waste of space," saying "Olson strikes me as a poet who is so enraptured by the mystique of his incoherence that he rambles senselessly in search of nonexistent revelations and inarticulate statements that will paint him as a poet of unfathomable depth. // The only thing unfathomable is that the REVIEW, after reading the transcript of Olson's remarks, would consider the interview worth printing. // In a world where inarticulation is rampant, need we be exposed to more inarticulation passed off as a revelation of intellect?" (Robb, Letter). considerable creative contributions of the interviewer and editors, while the final published interview attests to the naturalization of that process.

OLSOB Zbat'a wis&t !'• talMag aJsout - yes afftwi aa/sot to write it down, but to sit tore lite a - why dcn't ysm glv* se a form lite in a/govtraa«at °£***«> *<* O-U «** 3 hours oyer if you're going to get a job with Vote Mote"iircraft Oorajway. 1 »ea» let me sit dotrn and answer your questioae. LABOKS As a matter of fact I was thinidjig why doesa't he amid me tae iatenriew and than I could aa#' MB elsesfcare - lite we have already, thank God, the way it case about. T© read it/earns an lite ufcraigitt. Voalda't it have been awful? I aieaa, thank Sod we're % and welHre pOayiag this thiag Ilka we're % suits of cards, like I mean we've got a chance. JUJBBBEHSt It's troe, too. We're placing 4 suits here to­ night. 4 Baited cards and if/atai. LSBGBB And by the way is of any Soadamn pokar ia anything straighter/or a drawer than this? It's so trae, isn't it? Isn't it

exciting, Serrit, G®rrit?/Gerrit, isn't it exaitiag? Hay, stuts, stuts, hey stilts.

/ Want ae to read thai/; question again?

Fig. 13. p. 17. Selected handwritten deletions (hand unknown), from Charles Olson, Draft of Interview by Gerard Malanga. Corrected ts. Olson Interview file 2. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY.

0XS08 football team. WHwptoa. Kill a^i-'iiliwllow, ELiwptoa wHJ.-'ist 1*11 be all is teoahle. lenfT's ia trouble with toolrf'aad Beatl* 1'H. be ia treable *ita Cores'' 1AWI82EE I *^eU«44iiA„ MBWESS said to aa. Tern Kasaler

OLSOg *i/X'« afraid a* w«li«^_^i_Md^' It's like feeing sunk ia a cockpit. 'pie airplane sack,, X mm £ read the oost beautiful atopy about

Fig. 14. p. 20. Selected handwritten deletions (hand unknown), from Charles Olson, Draft of Interview by Gerard Malanga. Corrected ts. Olson Interview file 2. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY. 178

While difficult to ascertain with certainty from the archival evidence, it appears that the interview by Alfred Chester and Vilma Howard with Ralph Ellison in Paris in

1955 was another example of a marathon conversation cut down to length. Ellison personally sent the interview transcript to Plimpton with a note warning him to "draw a

deep breath before you count the pages because there are a hell of a lot of them" (Ellison,

Letter to Plimpton, 22 Nov. 1954). Alfred Chester's correspondence supports a similar

conclusion, in which he describes the interview as "ridiculously long and unnecessarily

repetitive ... A third of it could be torn right out without the loss of a single nuance"

(Chester, letter to Plimpton). In the final interview headnote, the interviewers describe the

effect of Ellison's long monologues on the listener in more generous terms:

While Mr. Ellison speaks, he rarely pauses, and although the strain of

organizing his thought is sometimes evident, his phraseology and the quiet,

steady flow and development of ideas are overwhelming. To listen to him

is rather like sitting in the back of a huge hall and feeling the lecturer's

faraway eyes staring directly into your own. The highly emphatic, almost

professorial intonations, startle with their distance, self-confidence, and

warm undertones of humor. (Chester and Howard)

The interviewers' description of Ellison as "professorial" aptly reflects the style of the

interview, less a conversation than a sessional performance or lecture by Ellison. Ellison

was, in fact, at the end of a lecture circuit in Europe, spending his last days in Paris with a

small group of expatriate American writers, sharing his wisdom and experiences. The

scene for the interview was the "Cafe de la Mairie du Vie"—-the very same place Djuna

Barnes composed her novel Nightwood. In their headnote, Chester and Howard point out 179 that in Barnes' book, her protagonist Dr. O'Connor often held court with his rhetorical

addresses to groups of interested listeners. By mentioning the literary tradition in which

Ellison might be seen to be speaking in their introduction, the interviewers set the stage

for their readers to appreciate Ellison's distinctive (however lengthy) oratorical address.

There is something "official" and almost historical about this interview; one gets the

sense that Ellison was deeply aware of his audience and his place in history and wanted

to set the record straight on matters such as his influences, style, sense of history,

folklore, politics ("I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest"), and, perhaps most

notably, his feelings on the role of the "Negro writer" ("If the Negro, or any other writer,

is going to do what is expected of him, he's lost the battle before he takes the field"

[Ellison, Interview 5]). The published interview is a rich mine of information on Ellison

delivered with a directness and clarity rarely seen in the genre. It should be considered

required reading for anyone seriously interested in Ellison's work.

4.4.3 What is Hidden: John Berryman

The Paris Review archives are invaluable for showing us that sometimes what is

not printed in the final interview tells us more about the interview process than what does

appear. Such is the case in Peter Stitt's 1972 "Art of Poetry" Interview with John

Berryman. A draft of the original headnote, written by Stitt, contains descriptions of

Berryman's worsened physical health and his nervous ticks and mannerisms. At the time

of their first meeting, Berryman was recently out of a long stint in a psychiatric hospital

(see Fig. 15) and was back in hospital during their second meeting (Fig. 16). 180

"~ i had had a -?ery bad winter, he explained, and had spent much of th© spring in the extended*care ward at St, Mary's Hospital. T^pSfc*®feT^&ffiffia^^a*«^ffl»jgn.

j^ fjf\ , ,^aA>l«ejs?dyelrroc^gj

Fig. 15. Edited Interview Draft, from John Berryman, Draft of Interview by Peter Stitt. Corrected ts. Berryman Interview file 1. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY.

^siBj^w±th"1&e"»re..human .jso.isids..-£eoa- 4Sbe----*o**<»*ow-**oA0ee,, of aouyse, iiit>, ahtifffMng; uy 'papapc,• occasional brief visitors, .. and Berryman coughing,- -lighting his ~Mgarettes,.,di®C JjajBing

ttr*9teni!it8rr^ra«4tet^ was usually slow to get going on an answer, as he

Hade false starts looking for just the right wards, Onee he started talking, he would continue until he hadjsxhausted the ^) subject—Urns some of fee answers TiwLa'K are wfiftwratfy long. Oils method left Ml ' UJftimiima unasked questions, and the most

Fig. 16. Edited Interview Draft, from John Berryman, Draft of Interview by Peter Stitt. Corrected ts. Berryman Interview file 1. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY.

We also learn, from the hand-corrected typescript, that Berryman "demanded absolutely no control over the interview" despite Stitt's insistence on sending him a draft.

This detail tells us that not all author subjects presume to control the final version, or 181

even want to collaborate in the editing process. Perhaps, for some, they look on it as a

composition of the interviewer more than the interviewee. Others may enjoy, or at least be comfortable with, letting the interviewer craft the portrait as he or she sees fit. In this

case, Berryman's nonchalance about the content of the interview more likely reflects a

general indifference about his public self-image, especially at a time when greater

concerns (i.e., his sanity) would have preoccupied him.

The Berryman interview is notable for other reasons as well. Conducted in 1971,

the year before his suicide, Berryman had just completed a book of poetry he called

Delusions (published immediately after his death as Delusions Etc.). When Clark sent an

edited transcript of the interview to Berryman for proofreading, the author accepted it on

the whole; however, he added five "footnotes" to the work flagging instances which

spoke of things somehow related to personal "delusions" (for example, comments on his

own poetry, his faith, and his attitude towards the future). For the most part, the footnotes

read, simply, "Delusion," so it is not clear whether the remarks themselves are considered

delusional to Berryman, or if they simply relate to issues he touches upon in his volume,

Delusions.

More interesting than the footnotes themselves, is the decision that Clark and

Plimpton jointly made to include these cryptic messages in the final interview (Clark,

Letter to Plimpton, 20 July 1965). Explained only with the phrase "* Delusion (J.B.,

March 1971)," or, in one case, "* Get the delusion (J.B., March 1971)," these footnotes

add an element of mystery to the final published interview. While obscure, these notes

come from the creative hand of Berryman, not Stitt or Plimpton, and deeply influence the

final impression of the interviews. In the final read, the presence of Berryman's footnotes effectively converts the interview from a work about the poet to a work by the poet.

While Berryman was content to allow his interviewer to determine the majority of the content and form of the piece, his input, however inscrutable, successfully infuses a

Berryman-esque tone to the work, adding both interest and literary import. Notably, it was the editors' decision that allowed such input, making the final product truly a collaborative work.

4.4.4 Interview as Domestic Drama: William Carlos Williams, Jack Kerouac

In the spring of 1962, Stanley Koehler visited William Carlos Williams in his home several times, for periods of two or three days at a stretch, to conduct his Paris

Review interview. Williams was seventy-nine years old and several strokes had left him struggling to gather his thoughts and to speak. During his visits, Koehler also spoke with

Williams' wife and his brother, hoping to gather material for background or filler for the piece. In the end, the interview was mostly a straight exchange between Williams and

Koehler, with some conversation with Williams' wife present and participating, and some private talk with Mrs. Williams alone. After his visits, Koehler fretted to poetry editor

Donald Hall that the interviews "did not produce any kind of critical comment" but were merely "interesting in a personal way at times" (Koehler, Letter to Hall, 1 May 1962).

Contrary to Koehler's assessment, the interview transcript reads like a riveting stage play in parts, with Mr. and Mrs. Williams bantering with the interviewer in an often light-hearted manner, leaving and entering the room and interrupted by phone calls from

Williams' patients. In the final published draft, the inclusion of action reads like stage 183 directions in a quiet parlour drama, as in this exchange after a discussion of the First

World War and how Williams had defied convention through his free verse, his alleged communism, his continued friendship with Pound despite political differences, and his marriage to a German:

MRS. WILLIAMS. Bill was always in a controversy. But I think he stood

his ground very well through it all.

WILLIAMS, [coming in, and with his hands on Mrs. Williams' shoulders]

Maybe you've had enough.

MRS. WILLIAMS. Oh, Bill, it's all right. Don't worry about me. Go out

and take a walk,

and later:

INTERVIEWER Edgar [Williams' brother] says that in the political

club which your father started, you were always the liberal.

WILLIAMS. Yes, to my sorrow.

INTERVIEWER. To your sorrow?

MRS. WILLIAMS. He doesn't mean it! I don't see why—

WILLIAMS. Do I mean it? For God's sake, my friends have all been

pretty disillusioned friends.

There are dozens of these moments that reveal more of Williams' personality than a traditional interview could ever hope to. These don't seem to be consciously fashioned moments by Williams; instead, I am inclined to credit Koehler with the intuition of a film director or editor in knowing what to include and what to cut out. Koehler's tete-a-tete with Mrs. Williams also yields some candid biographic details on the couple as well as 184 some fascinating anecdotes on other writers (especially Ezra Pound and his and

Williams' correspondence) and the literary community to which they belonged. While we know from the headnote that, during the conversations, Mrs. Williams often had to help her husband find a word or finish a thought (due to the effects of stroke), the final interview actually contains more material on poetic technique, idiom and measure than many other "Art of Poetry" interviews.

Still, Koehler wasn't able to obtain all of the material he felt was required for the final interview through these brief meetings with Williams. In a letter to Plimpton about the interview, Koehler notes that he has invented a couple of interview answers by looking at correspondence he has in his possession:

I have included a few remarks ... which are derived from a couple of

letters from WCW [Williams] from the past few years. I don't know

whether it's a good idea or not, in principle. It's a way of getting some

matters on the record; but I'm not sure it's proper. If you have any

contrary feelings, and would prefer to stick to the tape, just let me know.

(Koehler, Letter to George Plimpton, 18 April, 1963)

There is no indication on the drafts in the archives which of the final interview questions were from recorded conversations and which were inserted to contextualize letter excerpts, but I mention this matter only to point out the adaptability of the interview process. We see this patchwork approach to the final interview content in other cases as well, namely the John Steinbeck interview, as discussed later. While Williams died the following spring, before the interview was in print (despite Koehler's pleading with

Plimpton to print the interview earlier), he survived long enough to have his wife read the 185 proofs to him and expressed his satisfaction with them, communicating no displeasure with the included correspondence material.61

Ted Berrigan's lengthy 1968 interview with Jack Kerouac also derives great power from its dramatic energy and inclusion of scene. The background to this interview is typical Paris Review process: a combination of personal meetings and written correspondence. As the interview headnote explains, Ted Berrigan and a couple of friends showed up unexpectedly at Kerouac's home sometime in late 1967 after a preliminary letter, since the Kerouacs had no telephone. Despite his wife's initial attempts to eject them from the premises, Kerouac eventually settled into a lengthy, friendly and (seemingly) drunken evening of conversation and poetry with Berrigan and his friends. The result was a spirited, rambling glimpse into the personality of Kerouac.

Berrigan clearly recognized that even after his initial revisions, the interview record, as he cut it, did not fit into the typical Paris Review interview formula; however, like Thomas Clark with Allen Ginsberg before him, Berrigan felt a loyalty to the honesty of the scene. In a letter to Plimpton sent with the interview draft, Berrigan explains:

I know the form is not quite like most PR interviews, but it was the only

way.

There are no mistakes. Anything, such as seeming confusion about

quotation marks, that seems confused, incomplete, etc., isn't, and I think

that will be evident after reading a good part of it. As close as possible,

and that is pretty close, this is the way the whole scene was.

See Koehler, Letter to George Plimpton, 13 Aug., 1962. 186

I think Jack says everything in here that people would look for in an

interview, but he never gave us a chance when we tried to come at him

straight. Consequently, the setting, the actual scene, who is there, who's

talking, and to whom, must be dug before the reader can actually see and

hear what is being said. So that's what I did, I put the scene and the people

first, and then they talked. It's like a play with five characters.

The edited transcript that Berrigan sent to Plimpton indeed reads like a script for an art film starring "Jack Kerouac, genius and madman." Like Ginsberg's piece, this conversation has moments of great lucidity as well as stretches of incoherence. Overall,

Berrigan is right about the importance of "the actual scene," that is, who was there and what kind of energy was created in the room. This information greatly increases the texture and richness of the exchange.

Unfortunately, the interview, as it stood, did not include a lot of information about the craft of writing in the usual format of the Paris Review interview. Shortly after receiving the draft, Plimpton contacted Kerouac to ask if he would do some additional questions. In response, Kerouac explains why he won't do another personal interview and admits that he "was in [his] cups" (drinking) when he let Berrigan in. Still, he agrees to answer additional inquiries by correspondence but "'spontaneously' so as not to create an unevenness of style in the interview entire" (Kerouac, Letter to Plimpton, 13 Dec,

1967). Again, we see that even the most eccentric interview subject understands the

"rules" of the genre and willingly participates in creating the illusion that is the personal

Kerouac expresses a desire to keep cameras and tape recorders out of his house and keep his personal and public lives separate, because of his ailing mother (Kerouac, letter to Plimpton). 187 literary interview. Plimpton sent off an extensive list of questions, instructing Kerouac to

"ignore the ones that annoy or don't evoke interest" and promising to incorporate "some of the pertinent Berrigan stuff (Letter to Kerouac, 16 Feb., 1968).

After a close inspection of the letters sent to Kerouac and the original interview transcribed by Berrigan, the editing process of the interview can be generally established.

In the end, Plimpton inserted his own questions into the conversation between Berrigan,

Kerouac and friends in such a way that they appear to have been posed during the boozy, creative night. Plimpton's specific inquiries about Kerouac's method of dictation, his

"Yeatsian semi-trance," his spontaneous writing, his mystical, musical and cinematic influences, and, of course, his rituals and superstitions about writing (a Paris Review favourite) are inserted into false pauses created in the genuine, and often quite intimate, rap session of the visit. Plimpton goes as far as to add fictional stage directions to smooth the transitions. For example, notes such as "[Drinks are served]," ["pass me that glass"] and "[knocks microphone off footstool... recovers it]" occur in the midst of text submitted in writing, and do not appear to have been part of the original transcript.

Plimpton also later added atmospheric stage notes to the conversation itself, even though he was not personally present at the conversation, including the Tennessee Williams- esque, "Stella, let's have another bottle or two" (Kerouac's wife was named Stella) (see

Fig. 148). 188

- .. 1 ? INTERVIEWER

What do you find the best time and place for writing •>

•

KEE0U4C •

The desk.in the room, near the bed, with a good light, midnight till dawn, a drink when you get tired, preferably at home, but if you have no home , make a home out of your hotel room or motel room ox pads peace. U&> WrWcfr- ajji ^*f) G*1, CGU-v. A- &}•

Fig. 17. Selected handwritten insertions by Plimpton, from Jack Kerouac, Draft of Interview by Ted Berrigan. Corrected ts. Kerouac Interview file 3. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY.

tmnnvitm*. STELLA Tuffyl Here Toffy! Come on kitty... KEROOAC Yeah, I'm going to murder everybody if they let me go. I did. Hot fudge sundaes! Boom! I used to have two or three hot fudge sundaes\be£ore every game. Lon Little... INTERVIEWER He kas your coach at Columbia?

Swkt W^ Wu»fr*Mlwurt

Fig. 18. Selected handwritten insertions by Plimpton, from Jack Kerouac, Draft of Interview by Ted Berrigan. Corrected ts. Kerouac Interview file 3. Paris Review Archives. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY.

The effect is truly an imagined scene: a night of debauchery and creativity, infused with a level of seriousness and order via the written answers composed months after the fact. 189

For the reader of the final published Kerouac interview, there is little indication of the collaborative and, even, collage-like process of assembly. In its original publication, the interview headnote indicated that portions of the interview were added from

Kerouac's written replies to "add substance to the portrait of the author and his metier"; however, current reprints of the interview and headnote, including its online version on the Paris Review website, exclude this disclaimer and mention only Berrigan's first-hand account of the meeting. The headnote, in fact, details the circumstances of the interview as being strictly the personal visit in 1967. Hence, today's readers take away an impressive, dare I say inflated, image of "Kerouac the man-in-conversation."

4.4.5 Interview with a Dead Man: John Steinbeck

A select few Paris Review Interviews perhaps should not be called interviews at all. John Steinbeck's "interview," published (posthumously) in 1969 as "The Art of

Fiction No 45" consists of material gathered from a range of sources, none of which include an epistolary or personal interview.64 While Steinbeck had initially refused to participate, he eventually agreed to do an interview with George Plimpton late in life.

Additional material from the same sources was collected and published in The Paris Review 16.63 (Fall 1975) as "The Art of Fiction No. 45 (continued)."

64 The 1966 interview with Blaise Cendrars was also a posthumous publication. In this case, the Paris Review editors chose to select material from a pre-existing series of interviews and create their own version. The original material came from a 1950 radio interview series between Michel Manoll and Cendrars, published by Editions Denoel as Blaise Cendrars vous parle. It was translated in 1966 by William Brandon and selected and arranged for The Paris Review. While not originally intended for the Paris Review audience, the Cendrars interview follows a more conventional editing process, albeit without the final input or approval of the author subject. 190

Plimpton later explained that Steinbeck's reluctance was based on the oral format of the interview; however, when Plimpton explained that questions could be answered in a written form, Steinbeck relented.65 In fact, archival correspondence shows that Plimpton actually mailed a list of questions only a week before Steinbeck's death.66 In the accompanying letter, Plimpton expresses to Steinbeck his desire for a lengthy correspondence and give-and-take of questions. In a later letter to Steinbeck's widow, we learn that Steinbeck "was turning the questions over in his mind" in the days leading up to his death. Despite the death of his author subject, Plimpton did not lose sight of his original goal, and within a month had written to Steinbeck's agent, Elizabeth Otis, to request suggestions for useful materials such as "letters, prefaces, articles, speeches, and so forth, in which Steinbeck refers to the craft of writing or to fellow authors" with which to "construct an interview" (Plimpton, Letter to Elizabeth Otis). He also solicited remembered comments from Steinbeck's family and friends, saying "I know it is difficult to speak for someone else—but even a paraphrase of his original words would be, if the jist [sic] of it is right, a valuable contribution indeed" (Plimpton, Letter to Elaine

Archival correspondence shows that many authors, especially when unfamiliar with the process of the Paris Review interview, were initially reluctant to participate. T.S. Eliot had his secretary (and future wife) Valerie Fletcher respond to the first set of questions sent him with: "Dear Madam, Mr. Eliot asked me to let you know that he was interested in your questions ... but they appear to be divisible chiefly into the questions he cannot answer and questions he would not care to answer, as some of them are very general and some too personal." Ezra Pound balked at the project for another reason, feeling it was "aimed at retrospect," but that he would "suspend judgement until [he saw the] actual product" (Howe, Letter to Plimpton, 22 Sept. 194?)

66 See Plimpton, Letter to John Steinbeck dated 13 December 1968. Steinbeck died December 20, 1968.

67 See Plimpton, Letter to Elaine Steinbeck dated 30 October 1969. 191

Steinbeck, 30 Oct., 1969). In other letters, Plimpton explains that "such a contrivance [a constructed interview] of this sort would not have been appropriate, or even suggested, had not Steinbeck himself begun such an interview" (Plimpton, Letter to Nathaniel

Benchley, 26 January 1969). Clearly, in Plimpton's mind, agreeing to an interview was tantamount to beginning an interview, and so the deed itself was inevitable in spite of the death of the primary author. One wonders how the poet who speaks of "writing an autobiography" on his deathbed would feel about having it constructed for him posthumously. Eventually, the Paris Review editors pulled together an amalgam of comments from different times, including correspondence (both unpublished and previously collected) and selections from his East of Eden diaries, Journal of a Novel.

The "interview" reads more as a series of quotations grouped thematically, with an introduction by Steinbeck's personal friend, Nathaniel Benchley (Plimpton, Headnote).

From all indications, Steinbeck very much coveted the Paris Review interview at the end, and would likely have been pleased to see it in print as a kind of homage to his ideas on craft. Certainly, the headnote and footnotes to the interview make plain the true nature of its composition; however, the tone of its selections and its inclusion in the interview series reveal its intentions to be read as an interview. The reader is asked to imagine, for a moment, that the great writer is still alive to dispense his wisdom about topics such as "On Verse," "On Character," and "On Intent." Steinbeck's quotations, often excerpted from letters, use the first and second person repeatedly, as if in conversation, suggesting an immediate audience. One problem is that these passages were originally intended for many different readers, at different times in his life, creating a jumble of tones and styles. Lengthy sections have a pedagogical tone, likely written in 192 solitude while working on East of Eden. While Steinbeck certainly authorized the idea of the interview, he missed out on the kind of editorial control most other authors enjoyed in the most extreme sense. Not only did he not have the opportunity to revise what he had said in an interview, he didn't even have the choice over its initial draft. In this sense, the final version of the Steinbeck interview might be better termed a collection of sayings or quotations.

4.4.6 Editors, Interviewers, Egos: W.H. Auden

In some cases, the greatest interview battles were fought behind the scenes, among the creative personnel of The Paris Review. Michael Newman's 1974 interview with W. H. Auden is a good example. Like many Paris Review interviews, this one was done at the eleventh hour, in the final months before Auden's death. In the last days of

Auden's life, letters were exchanged among contributing parties (including Auden) regarding the inaccuracies of the interview, most of which were later deemed to be

/TO extremely minor. Correspondence indicates that there were ongoing disagreements between interviewer Michael Newman and Paris Review editor George Plimpton about the content of the interview. Plimpton's habit was both to collaborate on the original questions of most interviews and, having read the initial transcripts, to suggest to the interviewer additional areas to explore. His meticulous attention to content and tone

See Plimpton's letter to Auden dated 2 Aug., 1973. In a handwritten note from Auden dated 8 Aug, 1973, he explains, "Dear Mr. Plimpton, // Thank you for your letter. Though the inaccuracies are frequent, they are all too trivial to worry about. A typical example. I am said to be smoking a Smart cigarette in New York. Smart is an Austrian cigarette, which I smoke here, but which is unobtainable in N.Y. // Yours sincerely, W. H. Auden." 193 resulted in an identifiable "Plimpton touch," an editorial polish to the final product that even his detractors begrudgingly admired. In one letter to Auden, Newman concedes that, although he finds Plimpton's demands rigorous, he is inclined to agree with his suggestions:

I've never met an editor who cared so much for his interviews as does

George. Though sometimes I quibble with their relevance, I respect his

standards for his adherence to them, and for the way in which he sees that

they are met. That he would go to this much trouble to see that you will be

adequately covered in his series is as admirable as it is unusual. Would that

the anthologers had half his thoroughness.

The gentleman is, I think, right in bemoaning our interview's lack of

shop talk. Certainly any study of Auden ought to encompass a look at the

maker's method, not to say mastery.

[Detailed discussion of technical matters]... At any rate, I think we did

not talk shop because of a tacit agreement with regard to the slackness of

the interview's original conversational format. But I think that the

precedent of 50-odd Paris Review Interviews, and their permanence, cry

out, nay, implore inclusion of a discussion of these matters. (Newman,

Letter to Auden, 6 April 1973)

Despite these concessions, there appears to have been ongoing tensions about the interview's content, culminating in a letter from Newman to Plimpton the day after 194

Auden's death giving a "take-it-or-leave-it" ultimatum on the interview's contents.69

Newman brings up the precedent of another interviewer "getting his prerogative" with the

Review in his efforts to make a case for his version. Plimpton is adamant that he has the final say and takes great pains to delineate exactly how he sees the process:

The function of an editor is so often to blunt the inclinations of the

interviewer, especially if they do not satisfy the basic requirements of the

series on the craft of writing—which is to inform and entertain to whatever

degree can be mustered, however many additional questions, editing and

rework by the author himself are required. (Plimpton, Letter to Newman 5

Oct. 1973)

While the syntax of this sentence is confusing, Plimpton clearly saw the interviewer's powers as secondary to those of the editor, who ultimately had the final say on what content qualified for the esteemed series of interviews. Newman's personal friendship with Auden, and his role as sometimes-editor of Plimpton's own writings, made the dynamics of this struggle particularly complicated (see other letters between Plimpton and Newman). While there are possibly archival gaps in the evidence for this case, the dramatic changes between the early interview transcripts and the final published version indicate that Plimpton's demands were, at least partially, met.

The Auden interview aptly illustrates the kind of competing forces and interests typical of Paris Review interviews. In the Plimpton years, the interview series developed

See Newman's letter dated September 30, 1973 in which he demands the conversation "be printed as he and I did it, or not at all," with a justification that "Mr. Auden's death makes my decision imperative. It is the last authentic trace we have of a man I knew well, and I must not allow that image to be altered." 195 an identifiable and oft-imitated style that required constant tending. The formula didn't just "happen," nor was it the result of features inherent in the form of the interview itself.

Instead, it was vigilantly maintained through Plimpton's singular attention to the goals and standards of the interview series, and his interviewers' and author subjects' understanding of that form through repeated exposure.

While contemporary magazines occasionally interviewed established writers and artists, The Paris Review was developing a house style all its own. While never (to my knowledge) formally defined, it is clear from Paris Review correspondence, transcripts and final published interviews, that all parties involved understood there to be a distinctive type of question associated with a Paris Review interview. Instead of going directly to technical or philosophical matters, interviewers usually warmed up (and sometimes remained with) matters of the quotidian in hopes that such topics would inevitably lead to deeper issues. One of John Ashbery's interviewers, Peter Stitt, describes the way these questions worked for him:

[The interview] is finished and I think quite good. It is curious that I got

most of my best answers in response to standard "Paris Review

questions"—that is, the relatively chatty questions about personal things,

etc., as opposed to the heavy ones about the administration of

decasyllabics. The things that no one else ever thinks of asking such

questions, and they were just right for Ashbery." (Stitt)

The trick is to get at the big issues without driving at them directly. The Paris Review interview has to touch on the tough and serious topics without appearing to try, and 196 always without the self-seriousness so often associated with other literary magazines and reviews.

4.5 CONTROL, CHARACTER AND THE CONFLICTED SUBJECT: VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The struggle for control is an integral part of the interview process in all fields.

Even in the psycho-therapeutic realm, the use of the interview model can have the disadvantage of social competition in the form of a struggle for power within the interaction; however, this factor is seen to be no greater in the interview setting than in any other personal exchange (Davis 153). Standardized interviews play an important role in the mental health field and have been closely studied for how their components perform together. Of course, in the clinical setting, the primary goal is the therapy of the interviewee; therefore, any drawbacks must be measured against the greater good of the patient. In the case of the literary interview, an element such as conflict can, in fact, increase the impact of the final product and may be considered a positive ingredient in the exchange.

In a perceptive article on the interviews of Jorge Luis Borges, Ted Lyon points out that Borges exploited the interview opportunity to create an original genre for his own artistic expression. As a prolific interviewee with around 600 printed interviews, Borges knew how to manipulate the interview occasion to suit his needs and work as a dialogic literary art form. Using verbal irony, satire, interrogation, performed naivete, false modesty, obfuscation and word play, Borges would take control of the interview and make it a site for his own performance, rather than an exercise controlled by the interviewer (Lyon 78). Quite often, Borges' responses were so baffling to his interviewers that they had to abandon their original line of questioning altogether (80).

Lyon notes that there is practically a tradition of such coups, with practitioners including

Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In many of these cases, the verbal strategies employed in the authors' interviews reflect similar literary techniques used in their own poetry or fiction (87). In this way, the evasions of the author subject are worth attending to, for they can tell us a great deal, especially when we let go of the idea of there being a "true self that can be concealed or exposed in the interview forum. As

Stephen Arkin also notes:

Since the romantic period we have allowed writers the freedom of their

uniqueness. Indeed, we have more than allowed, we have glorified that

freedom. Writers have become in our popular legends people who are fully

and uniquely themselves. So, when we go to them with our tape recorders

and notebooks we are, in effect, asking how it is that they are unique and

for insights into what this feel likes. Not surprisingly many take flight, but

the woods they head for are the woods they devise.... For the artful

dodger seated across from an interviewer, the Active self is the truest self.

(Arkin 18)

Writers accomplish their mastery of the interview form in a variety of ways. For some, the terms of the exchange and the questions chosen are strictly dictated by the interviewee. For example, when interviewer Herbert Gold sent a list of questions in

I am indebted to Ted Lyon for his careful close reading of the Borges interviews. His attention to verbal performance influenced my own analysis of the Paris Review interviews. 198 advance of his personal interview with Vladimir Nabokov, he arrived to find "an envelope waiting for him—the questions had been shaken up and transformed into an interview" (Gold, Headnote). Later, Nabokov simply refused to answer eight of the 17 questions mailed to him by George Plimpton, with no reason given (Plimpton, Letter to

Herbert Gold, 18 July 1967). These missing questions covered topics such as his pleasures and difficulties as a writer, the early destruction of a draft of Lolita, the relation between poetry and prose and moral truth. He also insisted that all his responses be printed precisely as he wrote them, without revision or abridgement. Gold addresses this aspect of Nabokov's personality in the headnote to the interview:

[Nabokov] claims that he needs to write his responses because of his

unfamiliarity with English; this is a constant seriocomic form of teasing.

He speaks with a dramatic Cambridge accent, very slightly nuanced by an

occasional Russian pronunciation. Spoken English is, in fact, no hazard to

him. Misquotation, however, is a menace. (Gold, Headnote)

In addition, when asked for a manuscript page (normally printed as an image alongside the interview), Nabokov's wife reported his response: "... my husband asks me to say that in his opinion 'only the artist's end product should exist as far as the public is concerned'" (Nabokov, Vera, Letter to Plimpton, 27 July 1967).

Throughout the interview proper, Nabokov consistently steers the (written)

"conversation." Quite often, instead of answering, he attacks the terms of the question.

He corrects the interviewer's assumptions, challenges the validity of quotations by critics, and undermines even the language of the questions. This example is typical of many such moments in the exchange: INTERVIEWER. Another critic has written that your "worlds are static.

They may become tense with obsession, but they do not break apart like

the worlds of everyday reality." Do you agree? ...

NABOKOV. Whose "reality"? "Everyday" where? Let me suggest that the

very term "everyday reality" is utterly static since it presupposes a

situation that is permanently observable, essentially objective, and

universally known. I suspect you have invented that expert on "everyday

reality." Neither exists. (4)

Fascinating here is how Nabokov so deftly controls the entire conversation, and through his use of language, reasoning and comedy, presents himself as a character not unlike so many of his fictional creations. He consistently uses obscure diction, such as "eidolon"

(to refer to his own invented characters as phantoms), "avuncular" (referring to editors), and meshchantsvo (for a Philistine essence). He uses doublespeak, irony, puns, veiled insults, faux flippancy and naivete, trickery and puzzles. The lines he delivers are so carefully crafted that the reader is drawn in by the language as much as by the content of his answers. He describes himself as "American as April in Arizona" and when asked in what time he would prefer to live, he responds,

In the coming days of silent planes and graceful aircycles, and cloudless

silvery skies, and a universal system of padded underground roads to

which trucks shall be related like Morlocks. As to the past, I would not

mind retrieving from various corners of space-time certain lost comforts,

such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs. (11) 200

This Nabokov is Nabokov the eloquent, bold writer who can alternately seduce or butcher with his words. He delivers long, brilliant discourses on the nature of "poshlust"

(philistinism, cliche) and denounces the fakery of Pound and Lawrence. The self that

Nabokov performs is markedly articulate and aggressive, able to slay any opponent with a carefully wielded word. He is also an unapologetic elitist, a blatant snob in his tastes and opinions. None of this is by accident, nor is it likely to have been spontaneous. The interview, after all, was written and proofed at every stage by Nabokov. Not a word slipped through of which he did not approve. As Arkin perceives, "writers have a tendency to turn interviews into fictions of their own devising" (18) and admires the talent that this effort requires:

writers in interviews compose a self which turns out to be remarkably like

the selves they invent in their work. Far from letting us in on what it is that

makes them splendidly gifted or how they actually write, they give us a

performance in the particular imaginative mode that is theirs. Nor is this

feat trivial. (Arkin 13)

Finally, one other aspect of Nabokov's interview worth mentioning is how we see a continuing conversation developing within the confines of the Paris Review Interview series. In the very first Paris Review interview, E. M. Forster spoke with P.N. Furbank and F.J.H. Haskell on the topic of character and control; Forster spoke of a "character running away with you" as something that he had experienced and, though tough and difficult to control, it was a "wonderful thing" that "happens to everyone" (Forster 4). A couple of years later, in 1955, Ralph Ellison's interviewers, Alfred Chester and Vilma

Howard, brought up this comment: 201

INTERVIEWER. Do you have any difficulty controlling your characters?

E. M. Forster says that he sometimes finds a character running away with

him.

Clearly, the interviewer has done his homework; or, the content of the Paris Review interviews is becoming a common wealth of information that can be drawn on in future dialogues. However, when Herbert Gold tries this same approach in his 1967 interview with Vladimir Nabokov, he inadvertently gets a slap in the face for Forster:

INTERVIEWER: E.M. Forster speaks of his major characters sometimes

taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this ever been a

problem for you, or are you in complete command?

NABOKOV: My knowledge of Mr. Forster's works is limited to one

novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite

little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills,

although one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that

71

trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.

These cases demonstrate just one of the many ways that the Paris Review interview series endeavoured to create an ongoing conversation and even a common language in which to discuss "The Art of Writing." The example of Nabokov is entertaining in its refusal to submit neatly to any conventions of discourse around the subject and his inimitable talent for taking the steam out of all those who dared take themselves too seriously.

The Forster interview is again referenced in Plimpton's 1957 conversation with Ernest Hemingway: "Do you make a distinction—as E.M. Forster does—between "flat" and "round" characters?" (234). The opportunities for both conflict and control and the multiplicity of issues at stake for an author agreeing to an interview are perhaps no better reflected than in the curious, somewhat contentious case of George Plimpton's 1958 interview with Ernest

Hemingway. According to Plimpton, Hemingway "hated, hated, the interview" and saw talking about craft as "withdrawing water from the well," an effort that could, implicitly, deplete it. Plimpton had a great anecdote about trying to get information for the interview during one visit with "Papa":

We were coming along the dock—I was carrying a picnic hamper, I

remember—and I said, "papa, what's the symbol of the white bird that

seems to appear in so many of your sex scenes?" It was as if I had stuck

him with a pin. He turned red with rage. I put down the picnic hamper,

somewhat alarmed, and he shouted at me, so you could hear him for half a

mile. He shouted at me, "So you think you can do better!" I, at this time,

had written a children's book .... He was a Nobel Prize winner.

(Plimpton, Anthology 57)

Having read so much about Hemingway's reticence to discuss his craft, I anticipated finding some hostile correspondence in the Paris Review archives; however, that was far from the case. In fact, the letters from Hemingway, while insistent and frank at times, show a real affection for Plimpton and a desire on Hemingway's part to get the information just right and to get it to Plimpton in a timely, accessible fashion. In one,

Hemingway explains: "I had the questions finished when I said I would. But they weren't right and I kept going over them to try to get them better." He asks for other manuscripts to be sent back for his personal proofreading "to be sure nothing slips up" (Letter to Plimpton, 26 April 1957). One gets the sense of the seriousness with which Hemingway has agreed to the interview and his concern that he be correctly represented in the final account.

The friendship between Hemingway and Plimpton went back quite a number of years before the interview proper. The archives contain several letters from the early

1950s that indicate the interview project had been in the works for some time. We know that Plimpton introduced himself to Hemingway in the Hotel Ritz bar in Paris and got to know him watching bullfights in Madrid together. Plimpton eventually flew to Cuba to visit Hemingway; they split their time together between fishing and long talks in

Hemingway's Finca Vigia home ("Big Little Magazine" 57). In correspondence,

Hemingway speaks candidly about his ambivalence about the interview genre and his mental and physical condition. The intimacy of the letters' details reflect the nature of their relationship. In one heartbreaking note, dated 1954, Hemingway explains that his silence has been due to his terrible injuries sustained in his much-publicized plane crashes:

I was hurt rather more badly than the press reports. Did not wish to worry

anyone. For a time I could not write. For your own information (not for the

press) I had a skull fracture, two broken vertebrae, a collapsed intestine,

dislocated right arm and shoulder.

Later on the coast we had to fight a bad bush fire in a force 7 wind and I

received 2n degree burns on the legs, stomach, abdomen, chest and mouth

and 3rd degree on the left hand right forearm (we kept this incident out of the papers).... [gives more detail about damaged kidney, spine]

(Hemingway, Letter to George Plimpton. March 1954)

One could argue that the only reason Hemingway would give such information to a magazine editor was that he did, indeed, want it to get into the papers; however, it is debatable whether such a description would buttress the reputation of toughness

Hemingway had worked so hard to construct. His image of strength and invulnerability would depend on his success in recovering from these injuries. In any case, we know in retrospect that these wounds were the beginning of the mental and physical decline that many blame for Hemingway's eventual suicide.

This four-page letter, part of which is shown below, demands a close reading because it provides a glimpse into the perspective of Hemingway struggling with his role of the subject of the Paris Review interview. Here, despite his condition (or perhaps, in some way, because of it), Hemingway divulges his extreme reluctance to participate in the interview series. His remarks tell us as much about the status and reputation of the

Paris Review interviews as his feelings about the interview form:

My temper is a little bad from a slight surfeit of pain. I truly never mean to

be rude ever but I am not in training for the type of excellent candid

camera interview you and your outfit have been making on The Art of

Fiction.

I cannot talk like Forster, nor Graham Greene nor I. [Irwin] Shaw and I

might say "Fuck the Art of Fiction" which would give a wrong impression

as what I would really mean was Fuck talking about it. Let us practice it

and shut up. 205

f3)

GRITTI PALACE-HOTEL^^ %^*^-^MM^. „ *»™ **$£. —«^ «^_ ^^

"3/5/54." Ms. Hemingway Interview file 3. fans ne Library, New York, NY. 206

Hemingway's references to E. M. Forster, Graham Greene and Irwin Shaw are double-edged. On the one hand, he seems to be saying that he lacks the eloquence to wax poetically about the craft of writing; on the other, he suggests that anyone who does so is narcissistic or simply wasting his own time. The expression "candid camera interview" may also be ironic; perhaps he is saying that the interviews are not "candid" at all, but highly scripted.

As the letter continues, Hemingway's deeply conflicted feelings about the interview become increasingly clear. His refusal to abandon the topic tells us that he does indeed want to engage in the form, he wants to tell his story, and yet he is afraid. What is he afraid of? He hints at the reception he worries his interview might receive, saying,

"My experience has been that when a writer talks about himself and his work except with his girl or other writers or to try to straighten kids out with what you know that can help them he is usually through, or a poseur or a more or less pompous ass." Perhaps he is uncertain whether speaking in an interview can correspond with his carefully-constructed image, whether such an enterprise might compromise his reputation as a no-nonsense, straight-shooting guy—more action than talk.

Later in the letter, Hemingway indicates that while the idea of the interview has been in the works for some time but that it is simply his injuries that make the project impossible for the moment. His language and syntax express the acute discomfort he is in: Am sorry to be beat up. Noble characters are en-nobled by pam. I hurt

about !4 as much as the normal but present un-comfort been going on too

long. I know we are winning and it is me who has to make the fight but

just at the time the Art of Fiction is suspended. I was writing well on a

very good story but had to knock off.

One way to read the phrase "we are winning" is that it implies that they have been working out the interview for some time and that the process has been productive yet exceedingly difficult, requiring a pause in the process. However, just when you think his position has been made clear, Hemingway softens and seems to open up the door once again. No sooner has Hemingway written the project off for the time being than he recommences to (convincingly) pitch ideas for his interview, almost teasing Plimpton with the juicy material he has to offer: 208

Once I was there [in Madrid] for San Isidros [a bullfighting festival] and

they were snowed out and I wrote The Killers, Today is Friday, and Ten

Indians in one day.

Maybe the circumstances under which things are written would be

possibly interesting and maybe useful.

See what you think, a truthful account of incredible things can be useful.

Every doctor here tells me, for instance, that I should have died from

internal bleeding, been paralysed from the waist down on what the x ray

shows, etc. But I flew in the 2nd day after the 2nd crash—Flew again after

the brain hemmorage [sic] etc. They are just finding out that no two human

beings are alike. In writing it is the same.

. . . But maybe the simple circumstances under which various pieces of

fiction were written could be instructive. It has to do with The Art of

Fiction, (very difficult[?] art). (Hemingway, Letter to George Plimpton.

March 1954)

Plimpton may have read this letter with a feeling of torture. In effect, Hemingway says, "I will not agree to an interview now, but look what you're missing!" Throughout the letter, Hemingway tries to extract himself from the agreement to interview, and then slides back into inviting Plimpton to visit and talk. The letter seems to be close to goodbye when Hemingway declares the Art of Fiction "suspended," but in a final burst of revelation, he returns to his own inspiration, exclaiming he "can only write when [he is] 209 in love," but then he flips again with "it is better to keep your mouth shut on such things" before closing his missive. Reading this letter is like watching a man battling duelling impulses, wanting to express something very intimate and important to him, and yet terrified that he could destroy that very treasure through its revelation. Also, Hemingway seems torn between an earnest desire to share some insight, and an image of himself as silent, stoic writer: a man of action and few words (other than when writing). It's clear that though reluctant, Hemingway has some respect for the enterprise of the Review and the other Paris Review interviews he has read, and compliments Plimpton on the series as a whole.

Fortunately, this letter was not the final word; Plimpton and Hemingway went on to meet again over the next few years and work together on an interview that became one of the most famous of the Paris Review interview series. The interview is famous for many well-known quotations ascribed to Hemingway, including his philosophy of the iceberg analogy of writing:

If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the

iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.

Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your

iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something

because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story. (Hemingway,

"The Art of Fiction" 235).

Several anecdotes from Hemingway's earlier letters also make their way into the final interview, including a very detailed narrative about writing three stories in his hotel room when the San Isidro bullfights were snowed out. For the interview, he elaborates the 210 experience into its own short story complete with secondary characters, dialogue, his menu of the day, and ending with some hardnosed self-commentary: "So I sat up in bed and drank the Valdepenas and thought what a hell of a writer I was if the first story was a good as I'd hoped" (Hemingway, "The Art of Fiction" 232-33). The development of the story, from a brief mention in his initial letter to Plimpton to the final, polished version, suggests that the event of the interview may have afforded Hemingway a reason to revisit the memory and work it up into a good tale.

Hemingway was, in any case, a difficult subject to interview, and we know that he repeatedly resisted participating and even attempted to withdraw from the process. His letters and the final interview show his inherent dislike for talking about his work. In fact, the difficult struggle of the interview itself and the impatience and hostility of

Hemingway make their way into, and contribute to the readability and interest of, the final published version. Throughout the exchange, Hemingway's curt and sarcastic remarks are left intact, often to humorous effect. For example, to Plimpton's banal inquiry, "How do you name your characters?" Hemingway snipes back, "The best I can"

(235). Several times, Hemingway complains directly about Plimpton's questions. For example, Plimpton tries to draw out his subject on something mentioned in a previous letter:

INTERVIEWER. Is emotional stability necessary to write well? You told

me once that you could only write well when you were in love. Could you

expound on that a bit more?

HEMINGWAY. What a question. But full marks for trying. You can write

any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you 211

can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly

when you are in love. If it is all the same to you I would rather not

expound on that (223).

Later, when asked about literary influences, Hemingway dismisses the question and asks

Plimpton, "Doesn't this sort of talk bore you?" (227). Finally, giving it a try, he provides an impressive list of his literary forebears, from Twain to Donne to Dante to painters like

Goya and Cezanne. He relents on his previous position, saying "This isn't an old dull question. It is a very good but a solemn question and requires an examination of conscience. I put in painters, or started to, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers. You ask how this is done? It would take another day of explaining" (227-8).

Perhaps one reason for Hemingway's testiness is simply that the interview requires real time and work, effort he would prefer to spend on his own writing.

However, even stronger than his annoyance at time wasted is Hemingway's superstition that discussing his craft could, in some way, irreparably harm it. Several times in the interview, Hemingway expresses a clear nervousness to address issues of craft. This reluctance to put words to his practice borders on the superstitious at times, and is further addressed later in my discussion of Hemingway and authorial intention.

Hemingway's impatience may also be considered quasi-performance at times. As will be discussed further in the next chapter, Hemingway's public persona as a tough guy who did not suffer fools gladly was carefully constructed. It would simply not do to sit quietly and answer questions obediently like a trained puppy. Instead, Hemingway 212 swings between genuine effort, aggression, evasion, and comical flippancy, depending on the attention he feels the question merits.

The collaborative process of Hemingway and Plimpton is important to note here because it was the subject of debate years after Hemingway's death when Mary

Hemingway claimed, in an interview with Denis Brian (excerpted in Esquire magazine in

1973 and 15 years later published in book form as part of The True Gen), that

Hemingway wrote both his own questions and answers for the Paris Review interview having concluded that Plimpton's questions were "stupid" (Hemingway, Mary qtd in

Brian "Excerpt" 169). The controversy climaxed in a war of words via letters to the editor in Esquire in which Plimpton defended the collaborative process of the interview. In his defence, Plimpton claimed that Hemingway's widow had unintentionally misled Brian:

. . . Hemingway did not rewrite any of the questions I put to him for his

Paris Review interview. Mary Hemingway reported . . . that he had, but

when I telephoned her in some bewilderment she admitted that she had not

seen him do so, but had "heard him mumbling about the questions as I

went out into the garden." Hemingway was indeed testy about some of the

questions, which is quite evident to anyone reading the published

interview, but he certainly didn't change, or edit, or add any questions of

his account. (Plimpton, Letter. Esquire)

The archival record partially supports Plimpton's account. While pieces of the archive seem to be missing, we can see that the interview was developed over several personal visits (to Cuba) and numerous letters and sets of revised questions. There are reams of draft questions and handwritten notes by Plimpton, many corresponding exactly to the 213 final printed interview. However, based on other interviews, it is highly likely that

Hemingway revised at least some of the questions sent to him. Still, a close study of the archives and the final published interview refutes the idea that Hemingway was the sole author of questions and answers alike. The interview, by all accounts, began in earnest with several visits by Plimpton to see Hemingway in Havana. He then followed up on their conversations with long lists of questions sent back and forth through the mail. The long distance mail was a problem, and several letters suggest that drafts had been lost in the post or sent to the wrong address. In a letter dated March of 1957, Hemingway expresses regret at not having finished the interview in person, since the questions now feel like work to him:

So far I have done 21 pages of the 32 you sent. It came at a rough time,

kid. [details the demands of correspondence, income tax, his book] I'll

have the questions done by first week in April. . . But when I think I could

have done them where we were at Escorial [?] and had fun doing it instead

of taking the top off each day here. This morning started at 0700 and to

1030 and I've done 3 questions.

[Main?] trouble is that I'm so profoundly un-interested in them and I can

feel you are too. We are both way past this question and answer thing and I

have none of the exhibitionist's love of being in the book and there are so

many more things more important to do with what time I dispose of.

Please don't bother to come over. We always love to see you. But I

honest to Christ won't have the time.

Will knock this off now and get back back [sic] to the interrogation. Best always

Papa

Mary sends her very best.

If I can get the framework of the questions done then I can take the top

of the day for my own work and be happy I know you know how this is.

EH

As final evidence to their collaboration, a couple of years after the interview's publication, Hemingway sent a letter to Plimpton that again supports the existence of a more traditional interview collaboration. In it he asks for permission to quote his part of

"the Paris Review with the interview I wrote the answers [inserted here "to your questions"] for you" (Hemingway, Letter to Plimpton, Feb. 1961.)

The controversy in Esquire over the nature of the process of the Hemingway interview is revealing for many reasons. While the collaborative roles of the

Hemingway—or any—interview can never be absolutely defined, the letters to the editor between Plimpton and Esquire editor Howard Hayes ("H.T.P.H.") tell us a great deal about their differing philosophies about the interview form. Plimpton's position on the cooperative nature of the genre has been detailed in Chapter 2; here, we can see how far his perspective was from some of his colleagues at other magazines. In Plimpton's letter to the editor, he criticizes Esquire interviewer and author Denis Brian for misquoting. He explains,

Mr. Brian only had authority to use my words (which he taped over the

telephone) provided I could see a final version to check for sense and

accuracy. I required this with good reason, which is that I don't think one should be forever saddled with the responsibility for words spoken to an

interviewer armed with a tape recorder. The interviewee is too vulnerable.

Nuances of meaning and sense are so often lost in transcription. Questions

can be misunderstood. Answers can be edited out of context. The

interviewee may not be on form: he may be bored to tears with his

interviewer, so that despite his best intentions his answers are flaccid and

uninspired—a pale reflection of what he truly thinks. Besides, oral

exchange presupposes being able to thrash around somewhat, to try out

ideas, to conject, to be flippant, or laconic—and certainly the interviewee

has the right to ask for the chance to set this material in order if it is to

appear under his name in a question-and-answer form. I asked this of Mr.

Brian, but despite his promises he failed me. What he finally concocted

from his transcripts (read in Esquire for the first time) confirmed my worst

fears—a sorry mishmash indeed, sloppy, inaccurate, incomplete.

Plimpton's mistake was his assumption that other journalists necessarily shared his view of the unwritten contract of the interview. Or, perhaps by the mid-1970s, times had changed dramatically since his initial cooperative arrangements with Hemingway and other Paris Review interview subjects almost two decades earlier.

Esquire editor Howard Hayes, in his letter of reply, unapologetically sets the record straight on how he views the interview genre. Hayes observes that Plimpton's argument about his own interview justifies why Hemingway, too, may have greatly altered both sides of the interview he participated in. In any case, Hayes declares that

Esquire takes a different view of the interview contract: 216

The truth may be caught off guard by spontaneity, and when this happens

the interviewer ought to be welcome to it. Unless the exchange is one

between old friends, an interview is most often a confrontation. You are

what you say you are at the moment; less so when you think about it days

later. Take away the reporter's right to confront you, which is what

happens when you restrict the use of his material, and you offer him at best

an official version of yourself—yours. Better for all concerned if you both

cancel the interview. Without your control over his tapes (or notes, or

manuscript) he can distort but he is ultimately answerable to the truth as

based on those tapes ... and may be obliged by laws of libel to produce

them. Truth wins. With your control over his materials, you may tell him

anything you like, change your mind, lie about yourself and others, for

contract law now is on your side, and if he doesn't like it, you may prevent

him from publishing anything at all. Truth becomes irrelevant. (Hayes,

Reply)

Certainly, Hayes' remarks contain some solid points, both in the journalistic and legal sense; however, it appears that these two opponents failed to see the fundamental differences between their positions. Hayes speaks of "confrontation," "reporters" and

"truth." From this study's in-depth look at the Paris Review interview, Plimpton's concerns were more about "collaboration," "minds" and "ideas." The issue seems to me more about the differing understandings of the interview format between The Paris

Review and Esquire than a matter of what Hemingway did and didn't actually do. The

Paris Review editors have always admitted, nay, insisted, that their interviews are 217 collaborations between an interviewer and a writer. The revisions and changes that occur throughout the process are necessary, even valuable, steps along the way to producing a high quality final document. Conversely, at the time, Esquire saw the interview as a chance to catch its subject off-guard and, perhaps in a kind of ambush mentality, land upon some extraordinary revelations spontaneously (almost like catching someone in the act of undressing, unawares). Esquire's editors assumed a relationship of "confrontation," while Plimpton and his colleagues saw it more as a collaborated, highly polished art form, worked at together over several exchanges to produce a final record that was satisfying to editor, subject and reader alike.

The example of Hemingway's Paris Review interview illustrates the complex process of constructing the author behind the final printed version of the interview. By considering the archival drafts and correspondence, along with supporting historical and biographical information, we are able to see the unique and telling dynamics inside the

Paris Review interview. The job of creating the story of the author as presented in the interview is influenced by many factors, including the interviewers' and editors' need for narrative interest and appeal, the power of authorial persona in literary culture, the pressures of the marketplace, the subject's vested interest in controlling the reception of their own work, and the potent vanities, egos and insecurities of even the most established and respected writers. The Paris Review interview emerges as a kind of

Grand Central Station of these competing impulses and can be an extraordinary mirror to the literary culture of its subject and time. How the interview can be made use of in general reading practice, particularly as it pertains to the understanding of authorial persona, will be the subject of the next chapter. CHAPTER 5 THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW IN THE WORLD

5.1 THE NATURE AND LIMITATIONS OF THE MODERN LITERARY INTERVIEW

The previous chapters of this study looked at the genesis of the interview form, the unique history of the Paris Review, and the process of The Paris Review interview, respectively. With the shape and nature of the Paris Review interview established, it is possible to consider the broader impact of this generic incarnation on its cultural context.

How does the Paris Review interview function within twentieth-century literary culture?

What are the aims of the interview and what role does the interviewer play in working towards that goal? What does the author accomplish through his participation in the interview form? How does the literary interview function within the field of cultural production? The historical development of the literary interview outlined in Chapter 2 looked at the ways in which it entered public consciousness. When the interview enters that realm, it participates in the construction of authorship and celebrity. What effects can it have? How do persona, reputation and celebrity interact with both commercial and symbolic value? In short, why does the interview matter!

Chapter 2 explored the significant breadth and variety of the modern interview form. One might conclude that with all this interviewing going on in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the art form would have evolved into a finely polished specimen.

Not so, according to many. Before we can adequately assess the potential of the genre in literary culture, let us first address some of the criticisms and challenges to the form.

While the Paris Review interview is held up as the pinnacle of the form, its many 219 imitators often fall short of attaining its delicate balance of ideas, criticism, personality, storytelling and insight. The shortcomings of the form as a whole can serve to highlight both the strengths and limitations of the work of the Paris Review interview.

Cultural critics such as Bruce Bawer point out that the interview, both literary or otherwise, has traditionally—especially before The Paris Review's reinvention of the form in the mid-twentieth century—been treated as a low-culture phenomenon, something that while admittedly entertaining, should not be taken too seriously by humanities scholars. In his 1988 American Scholar article, Bawer argues that the interview often attempts to be too many things, and then fails at all of them. Without any clear boundaries or standards of what the interview is supposed to accomplish, the form often comes across as unprofessional. Bawer laments the form's popularity, saying it lacks rigorous critical systems and tends to treat its subject too lightly (423). As a serious critical resource, literary interviews are not held to the same standard as essays and are

"congenitally foggy about names, dates, titles and such" (425), often as a result of interviewers being too shy or intimidated to correct their subjects. The public appetite for sensational comments and disclosures surely encourages interviewers, writers and editors to flirt with hyperbole and engage in frivolous gossip. The personality of the subject can overpower the content: verbose writers often exploit the opportunity for "showing off, pure and simple" (425); some enjoy the chance to brag and even "trash the competition with ad hominem name-calling" (426).

Melvin Lasky, in an article on "The Art of the Interview," also finds fault with the interview's "superficiality, sensationalism [and] sauciness" (62). While interested in the evolution of the form, Laskey contends that there is often a distinct lack of message 220 beyond the interview's recording of a specific moment of time, perhaps much like a snapshot. Another critic of the interview form, Kasia Boddy, expostulates that the literary interview, while different from its sociological and psychological counterparts, ought to be subject to the same standards of evaluation, namely, the details of the interaction between subject and questioner. She recommends assessing the exact physical logistics of the exchange (location, tape-recorder, duration, etc.), the details of its editing, and the nature of the relationship between the individuals (66). Ted Lyon is also critical of the form and cites C.H. Knoblauch's observations on an interview with Paulo Frieire that the literary interview reflects the "mercurial serendipitous movement of conversation.

Questions are not themselves subject to question; responses are not subject to close engagement that might lead to greater clarity or to modification" (Knoblauch 177 qtd in

Lyon 78). Knoblauch also criticizes the "politeness" of the interview situation for cutting off sensitive avenues of exploration and Lyon adds to that the speed of the exchange and the expectations and assumptions of both parties as serious detriments to the form (Lyon

78).

Another problem is that, in some cases, the interview can become "dated" in a way that an essay or personal portrait is less likely to. For example, when political or social issues are discussed, or current events alluded to, the relevance of these points can quickly fail the test of time and make the whole exchange feel outdated. Likewise, writers' own opinions and ways of representing themselves change over time. Or worse, writers may be unable to rise adequately to the occasion of the interview in the way other celebrities or public figures do. Laura Miller sees the literary interview as a particularly

"misbegotten form" and poor journalism because writers mostly "labor in solitude and 221 lead relatively uneventful lives." According to Miller, good authors have already given us their thoughts through their writing, and "many authors who hate giving interviews complain that as literature, the form is extraneous; all that ought to matter is the work"

(Miller 14).

Despite noting great differences in the style and quality of the final product, some critics argue that there is a remarkable uniformity to the kind of questions generally asked in literary interviews. For fiction writers, interviewers generally want to know a story's origins (autobiographical or not) and influences, the author's experience of writing, and, in some cases, the motivations for the characters. Gerard Genette argues that not only are interview questions formulaic, but so too are interview answers. When asked if an event or a character is based on reality, or even the writer's own experience, writers most often respond with a hedging "yes and no," offering little or no clarification in the end (363).

Genette mockingly derides those authors who agree to engage in dissecting and analyzing their own characters:

[these authors], transformed by urgency, launch into motivational analyses

in which the most common place psychology hobnobs with the boldest

cock-and-bull stories to the great delight of an audience convinced it is at

that very instant penetrating the arcane of creation. . . . the characters .. .

take on amazing substance for those few moments, these ' empty bodies'

arrive on stage, everyone auscultates them and palpates them, takes them

apart, puts them back together, loves them, hates them, rewrites the story,

walks in their shoes, and finally, as usual, recounts his life. This is all very 222

pleasant when it is happening but does not stand the test of rereading—

such is not its purpose. (363)

Clearly, Genette is not unduly impressed by the potential of the interviewed author to reveal great wisdom to his readers. While he is marginally more generous to those interviews he feels qualify as "conversations," he finds the latter, also, are marred by cliche and formula (363). However, Genette recognizes that approaching the interview as a "key" to understanding the authors' works is a misguided reason for reading it; it "is not its purpose."

Perhaps some of the limitations of the literary interview form stem from the nature of the act of writing itself. Russell Haley points out that for most creative acts, the best way to understand the art is to watch the artist first hand. Unlike painting, sculpting, dancing or playing music, the act of writing is hardly a dynamic act to observe in the immediate. Haley describes watching the painter Pat Hanly work on canvas after a year of interviewing him:

... just watching him on the floor getting a paper cut-out figure, painting

around it, throwing the paper away, throwing cigarettes into the corner of

the room with the turpentine rags, and then getting to work, I learnt more

from watching than in a year of talking about painting. The trouble is that

you can't watch a writer. (Haley qtd. in Durix 8)

The act of writing is notoriously difficult to describe; most literary interviews are wild swings in the dark. One writer notes that we might learn more from simply looking at a manuscript page (Durix 9). This is something the Paris Review editors understand well, perhaps justifying their inclusion of heavily edited facsimile images in the pages of their published interviews.

The difficulty of adequately representing the writing experience is evident in many examples of the Paris Review interview; however, the efforts, even acrobatic strains, that author-subjects go to in order to attempt such representation are themselves informative. While we cannot expect the literary interview to be a transparent equivalent to the act of writing, the performance of the subject, and what we, as readers, make of it, tell us a great deal about writing and the whole process of meaning-making in which reading occurs. What we do with the literary interview has repercussions throughout the cultural field, and how we understand the author, her work and our role as readers.

In a review of three recent interview collections, Carolyne Wright also poses the question, beyond inspiring the reader to read more of the subjects' works, "what other purpose does [or should] a collection of interviews serve?" (639). She rightly observes that, in all too many cases, a joyful romp through a writer interview stands in for reading and grappling with said writer's actual oeuvre. She reasons for a kind of hierarchy of value that interviewers should always have in mind:

they are working in what might be called a 'service' medium—anterior to

and dependent upon the existence of the author and the author's work, just

as the literary work is anterior to and dependent upon the existence of the

world itself (and of conscious human beings who live in it and feel

compelled to write about it). (Wright 639) 224

However, while the interview may depend on the existence of other, more primary, texts for its interest, it would be a mistake to overlook the distinct qualities that may be present in a literary interview which are not present in the author's other literary works.

The validity of many objections to the literary interview depends heavily on the generic expectations brought to the form by the reader. For example, if one picks up a literary interview looking for rigorous literary criticism and theory, the failure to clarify terms and theoretical assumptions will seem an enormous detriment. However, if one is expecting instructive "shop" talk, the presence of such jargon and elaborate disclaiming would be an encumbrance. Likewise, if one is seeking a thorough life story of an interview subject, or historical accuracy on literary history and movements, most literary interviews would fail to supply the detail and contextualization necessary to most researchers. And yet, in many cases, such elaboration would only get in the way of the drama of a spirited intellectual exchange. In some ways, any definitive generic expectations will be disappointed in the literary interview, a problem that only supports the establishment of a distinct conceptual framework for understanding the interview as a unique generic hybrid. Instead of asking the interview to function as a critical essay or a biographical document, we should instead explore the unique work it performs in literary culture. Those who criticize the potential of the art form often fail to take into account certain aspects of the interview situation. For example, readers may overlook the fluidity of the form that is partly a result of its collaborative conception, which includes the reader as participant. Not all limiting attributes of the interview form must be considered flaws. As I will discuss in this chapter, the intentional and carefully orchestrated performance of an author in interview can be seen as a distinct asset of the form, 225 depending on one's perspective and what one hopes to gain from a reading. The effects of the interview, for both its participants and its readers, can be best discerned by looking at the role of the interview more broadly: what readers do with the material of the literary interview, how it is used to understand literature and how it affects the status of the author in profound ways.

5.2 THE LITERARY INTERVIEW IN THE FIELD OF LITERARY PRODUCTION

There are theoretical and critical-historical reasons for the traditionally low status of the literary interview. Certainly, in the last century, the literary interview has suffered from the changing tides of critical theory and the relative status of the author in the consideration of literary works (this will be discussed in detail in the next chapter's treatment of authorial intention). Kasia Boddy observes how anti-intentionalist criticism, followed by Barthes' "Death of the Author," and finally, structuralist theory and New

Historicism, put to bed the idea of the author as having anything relevant to say in our consideration of her works (62-3). However, this conclusion has begun to change in recent years as reception studies and book history have inspired a renewed interest in the opinions of writers, albeit from a new, perhaps more limited perspective:

Writers can tell us not only how memories, ideas and images are

transformed into fiction, but also about the ways in which manuscripts

become published, printed texts, about the processes of negotiation

between writer, editor and publisher ... the literary interview does not aim

to reveal the author's subconscious intentions, nor does it concern itself 226

with the rituals he or she performed before sitting down to write. Rather, it

views the writer as a participant and witness in a publicly observable

event. (Boddy 63)

Boddy considers the author interview as an opportunity for readers to consult with the writer as representative, that is, "the writer, in his or her work as well as in interview, assumes the role of what ethnographers call a 'native informant'" (64). We see this kind of approach in the numerous collections themed by ethnicity, geography, or other minority identification, such as Black Women Writers at Work (1985).72 While we must accept that the authority of the author has diminished in the latter half of the twentieth century, the problem with this view is that it relegates writers solely to the sidelines, as mere cultural commentators on events to which they have a uniquely privileged access.

This is an unnecessarily limited lens through which to view the interview.

In order to describe properly what the modern literary interview does offer the reader, one must abandon any approach that treats the interview strictly as an unproblematic source of information about the author or her work. Instead, it is more productive to consider how the literary interview works within the larger literary culture, the role that it plays in how literature is produced, consumed and understood. The interview is not simply a reservoir of knowledge that can be taken at face value or directly applied to the consumption of other literary texts. Instead, the interview performs a unique function in the way authors, readers and other literary agents relate to one another and value literature.

Boddy recognizes that this strategy can be more about niche marketing than developing any kind of homogenizing conclusion on the writers contained within (64-5). 227

One way to describe this complex process of culture is by looking to the work of

Pierre Bourdieu. In his 1993 The Field of Cultural Production, Bourdieu introduces a pragmatic methodology for describing the forces at work in culture. He imagines culture as a system of position-takings with different power relations, each influenced by the various changes that filter through the field as a whole. In the case of literature, a primary concern for Bourdieu, positions in the field might include agents such as writers, publishers, editors, readers and critics; position-takings could mean book launches, publicity events, political affiliations, and, yes, interviews. Each of these "forces" and its position in the field is determined by power relations and the vast amounts of information linked to each force. For example, in the case of a reader, his knowledge of the text's author, the author's background, surrounding gossip, biographical details, critical reception and other factors, all influence his reading of the text. Bourdieu speaks of the

"history of ideas" and how "all contemporaries immediately invest in their reading of works" a range of related information such as: "information about institutions—e.g. academies, journals, magazines, galleries, publishers, etc.—and about persons, their relationships, liaisons and quarrels, information about the ideas and problems which are

"in the air" and circulate orally in gossip and rumour" (32). Therefore, the Paris Review interviews exist within, to use Bourdieu's terminology, a field of cultural production with complex dynamics between the author, the text, and the reader. The literary encounters of

The Paris Review reflect myriad tensions, contradictions, and mediations that can be productively read to understand better the dynamics of this field.

This conceptualization of how literature works in culture is a far cry from the more Romantic vision of books as sacred objects with an intrinsic, essential value, or "the 228 charismatic image of artistic activity as pure, disinterested creation by an isolated artist"

(34). Instead, we begin to imagine all the players in the field both knowingly and unknowingly taking positions which, in turn, affect the structure and power relations with all the other positions in the field. A single work's value and meaning is conditional upon the production of discourse around it. Suddenly, a simple literary interview takes on much greater significance.

To bring this conceptual framework back to The Paris Review, the conversation about a work of literature by its author and an interviewer (acting, in some ways, as the reader's agent), bears deeply upon the value subsequently attached to the work itself. The

Paris Review interviewer, as a representative of an established literary magazine with a history of publishing and profiling quality writers, simply by choosing the author as subject, bestows a certain kind of status upon the individual, but even more so, upon her literary works. This is because the value of the work is deeply constructed, or as

Bourdieu explains, "the belief m the value of the work ... is part of the full reality of the work of art" (emphasis added) (36).

Stressing the significance of the various methods of value and meaning-making around works of art, Bourdieu encourages the examination of paratextual materials in the study of literature and literary culture. Bourdieu calls for a greater consideration of the symbolic value of cultural works, that is, the way that art works (including books) are a

"manifestation of the field as a whole, in which all the powers of the field, and all the determinism inherent in its structure and functioning, are concentrated":

Given that works of art exist as symbolic objects only if they are known

and recognized, that is socially instituted as works of art and received by 229

spectators capable of knowing and recognizing them as such, the sociology

of art and literature has to take as its object not only the material

production but also the symbolic production of the work, i.e. [sic] the

production of the value of the work or, which amounts to the same thing,

of belief in the value of the work. It therefore has to consider as

contributing to production not only the direct producers of the work in its

materiality (artist, writer, etc.) but also the producers of the meaning and

value of the work—critics, publishers, gallery directors and the whole sets

of agents whose combined efforts produce consumers capable of knowing

and recognizing the work of art as such .... (37)

The Paris Review interview and its editors are significant "producers of the meaning and value" of literary works. They select subjects and confer upon them the power to speak to their readers from a position of acclaim and influence. The authors themselves are given unprecedented free rein to participate in the production of meaning that occurs outside of the primary text, and, in many cases, attempt to control the reception of their own works by teaching consumers how to recognize and appreciate their work.

Part and parcel of the work of The Paris Review is not only to select esteemed works of art and art makers, but to influence the collectively held idea of what a great a writer is, and what kind of work she creates. This task of defining the writer is seen as central to this system, according to Bourdieu: "the field of cultural production is the site of struggles in which what is at stake is the power to impose the dominant definition of the writer and therefore to delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the struggle to define the writer" (42). An invitation to interview in The Paris Review is also 230 an invitation to participate in the conversation about authorship. Even the title of the

Paris Review interview series ("The Art of Fiction / Poetry / Drama") implies that the interviewee has highly specialized knowledge about what qualifies for the named genre.

Authors may speak of their own work and how they create, but many also speak about other authors and their literary output, thus conferring status and authority onto other individuals. They are in a position to say, in effect, "this person is a writer; this person is not." In this way, the Paris Review interview contributes to the definition of authorship and how the concept is understood by readers.

In order to apply Bourdieu's theories to readership, it is important to look more closely at how power works in systematized, albeit unexpected, ways. While both contain power relations, Bourdieu's concept of "the field of cultural production" must be distinguished from "the field of power." Bourdieu explains that "the field of power" reflects the traditional understandings of power in society, with economic capital which is higher for the dominant classes and, of course, lower for the dominated. In contrast, "the field of cultural production" deals primarily with cultural capital, the value of which is not synchronous with the general economic profits of cultural production. In general, cultural capital is highest with autonomous art ("art for art's sake"), work outside of the mainstream, more often considered avant-garde. In contrast, "Bourgeois art," perhaps mass-marketed and highly accessible, may turn great economic profits but have a relatively low cultural capital.

While Bourdieu's terminology and systems are useful, even in this greatly simplified version of his schema, The Paris Review and its interviews do not fit neatly into these structures. The author-subjects of Paris Review interviews were and are 231 generally well-established, sometimes even canonized, authors, familiar to both intellectuals and more general readers. However, the primary readership of The Paris

Review during its first 25 years was more specialized than the broad audience of more popular magazines. The collected volumes of Paris Review interviews—the Writers at

Work series—appear to be aimed at writers; however, students and literature-lovers of all stripes have also become fans of the collections. Today, the anthologies command a broad readership. Considering these contradictions and mix of hierarchies, where does

The Paris Review fit into Bourdieu's schema of fields of cultural production?

In its material form, The Paris Review was, especially in its first decades, and still is, a little magazine with a relatively small budget and circulation. This would ordinarily place the publication in Bourdieu's realm of autonomous art, with low economic profits and high cultural capital. However, through the interviews' anthologized forms and the professional reputation of the publication, the conversations actually reached (and continue, especially via the internet, to reach) a very broad audience base. Likewise, the subjects of the interviews are generally well-known writers. In the early years, figures such as Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost could hardly have been considered subversive. The work of someone like Frost would generally be considered, in

Bourdieu's terminology, "heteronomous," that is, a cultural product with a broad, even bourgeois appeal. And yet, alongside such canonized writers, The Paris Review also interviewed much lesser-known writers and brought them into the public consciousness through their exposure.

Likewise, the position of the reader of a typical Paris Review interview is also difficult to categorize. Paris Review readers range from the highly intellectual, often academic, reader seeking background information on a literary text; to the professional writer looking to the interview for insight into her craft; to the more popular, generalist reader interested in the interview as a source of biography and anecdote. Material from these interviews has been quoted extensively in academic, literary and popular media.

This mix of audiences is evidence of the usefulness of the Paris Review interviews; they appeal to multiple populations, and are used in widely varied ways.

The cachet of The Paris Review is imparted to its reader through consumption.

The atmosphere of the Paris Review interview is intentionally intimate and, at times, secretive. One often gets the sense that one is eavesdropping on a private conversation and that the information gained is of a rare and precious nature. Whether constructed or genuine, the seeming vulnerability of many of the author-subjects is part of the interviews' allure. The inclusion of gossip, off-the-cuff revelations and friendly banter further emphasizes its aura of intimacy and candidness. Finally, The Paris Review's decision to reproduce a manuscript page (in the subject author's handwriting) and a personal portrait of the author further suggests that the interview affords privileged and intimate access to the subject.

The intimacy gained from reading a Paris Review interview may be considered a rare form of cultural capital accessible only to those "in the know," that is, those who are aware of The Paris Review through experience in an academic, literary or cultural realm.

Today, The Paris Review rarely advertises; it doesn't need to. Even in its early days, as outlined in the history chapter, The Paris Review engaged in eccentric, "in-joke" publicity campaigns, manipulating mainstream marketing ploys without participating fully in the mainstream (see "Enterprise in the Service of Art"). 233

It is no easy task to determine where The Paris Review sits in the hierarchy of the field of cultural production. In many ways, just as the literary interview is genetically a hybrid form, so too is the Paris Review interview a hybrid example of the interview form.

It bridges the divide between populism and elitism by maintaining its highbrow status while appealing to a fairly wide audience. In Bourdieu's epistemological model of culture, the most powerful art is that produced primarily for other artists, even though such art rarely commands high economic returns in the short term. The legitimacy of such work is guaranteed, in part, by its rarefied appeal and its resistance to popular notions of success. In this sense, The Paris Review is never going to be like People magazine; it chooses its subjects not based on their mass appeal or numbers but on a standard of quality assessed by the subjects' peers and the Paris Review editors and interviewers. In Bourdieu's model, the pursuit of commercial success is considered the antithesis of the highest forms of cultural capital, which should remain independent of such comprises. The contemporary version of Bourdieu's understanding of popular writers includes those writing what might be considered "genre" fiction (crime, romance, thriller, etc.), names like John Grisham, Stephen King and Danielle Steele. In that world, positions are taken to assert the dominant values of writing and often to define what makes the "best" literature of the masses. On the other hand, we have a "subfield of restricted production" within which artists are also struggling to determine what forms of work are legitimate and can command the highest cultural capital (Bourdieu 45-58). Even within the realm of the more autonomous art makers, the "subfield of restricted production," artists continue to negotiate for power by pushing the boundaries of art and 234 art movements. Both groups define themselves against each other, and in some ways, depend upon one another for their distinction.

In fact, in recent years these fields have become increasingly difficult to tell apart.

With the rise in popularity of institutions such as Oprah's Book Club heralding texts from all rungs of the cultural ladder, writers long considered highbrow (such as Dostoyevsky and Faulkner) are entering the mainstream. Conversely, academics and critics are taking a closer look at writers of the long-maligned literary genres such as crime, mystery and even non-fiction. For example, popular horror author Stephen King has in recent years been critically lauded and was himself interviewed by The Paris Review in 2006.

This is not to say that Bourdieu's model is no longer a useful template for understanding the structure of the field. Challenges to the divisions between the intellectual and the bourgeois, the elite and the mass, the avant-garde and the traditional, the non-commercial and the commercial, simply expose the fault lines and overlaps between the categories that have existed all along. Bourdieu outlines the "competing principles of legitimacy" by which art (or literature) can gain esteem: 1) recognition by one's peers (art for art's sake); 2) recognition by tribunals such as academies, awards, etc.; and 3) recognition by the mass audience (50-51). The Paris Review is, in many ways, in a privileged position in that it can command legitimacy on many different fronts: from the writers who agree to participate in the interviews, to the accomplished readers who count the interviews among the best, to the award-granting institutions who recognize the value of the collections, to the academies (often MFA programs) which regularly use the interviews as resources for aspiring writers. By featuring poets and dramatists, both fields considered outside of the realm of mass audiences, The Paris 235

Review can claim, often times, a fairly rarified audience, while an issue with someone like John Steinbeck (1969), Robert Frost (1960) or even Woody Allen (1995), would likely command a much more popular readership. The Paris Review, in some ways, can claim legitimacy from all three principles, giving it a uniquely powerful cultural position.

Bourdieu's conception of "symbolic capital" can also be seen to be at work in the

Paris Review interview from the perspective of what motivates the author to participate in the interview form. Unlike cultural capital, which refers primarily to cultural knowledge, "an internalized code or a cognitive acquisition which equips the social agent with empathy towards, appreciation for or competence in deciphering cultural relations and cultural artefacts," symbolic capital includes a broader range of sources of power, obtained through "accumulated prestige, celebrity, consecration or honour" not exclusively related to culture (Johnson, "Editor's Introduction" 7). Symbolic capital can operate to cultivate belief in creators of work within the field of cultural production. For example, in the field of literature, the prestige of any given author is constantly being produced by reviewers, interviewers, publicists, readers, celebrities and other agents with enough "symbolic capital" to recommend their subject, all without explicitly seeming to do so (Bourdieu, Field 77). According to Bourdieu, the "collective disavowal of commercial interests and profits" is a standard characteristic of those seeking to build

"symbolic capital" by cultivating a belief in the value of their works, a value that is beyond the monetary (Field 74-6). Often, this "belief in a work's value relies upon shifting the focus from the product to the producer, that is, by emphasizing the value of the author, who in turn, authorizes the value of all of his works. This "ideology of creation, which makes the author the first and last source of the value of his work" 236 depends upon a system overeating the author, for example, through agents, publishers, interviews, awards, etc. (76-77). It is not enough for the author himself to proclaim his own worth; there must be a team of critics, interviewers, magazines, etc. to make that declaration for him, to create that "circle of belief' (77) around his authority in the field.

Simply being published is the first recommendation; a positive book review might be the next. In the career of a writer, monographs, criticism, conferences and awards might all contribute to the accumulation of symbolic capital, and surely, one of the pinnacle achievements for the twentieth (and twenty-first) century author is to be invited to a Paris

Review interview. It is a kind of final confirmation of symbolic capital unparalleled by any bestseller list or sales number.

Bourdieu's model, while built on the 19 and 20 -century French situation, is valuable in that it teaches the dynamic ways in which cultural capital can be negotiated and constructed. The claim that the intentional or nonintentional actions (or position- takings) of individual authors in terms of their public life and the publicity that surrounds them can have concrete effects on the cultural capital associated with their works is relevant to this study of the import of the Paris Review interviews. While a full descripiton of America's field of cultural production in the first 25 years of The Paris

Review would be difficult to determine (and a much broader project than I would attempt in this study), the specific effects of the position-takings of the literary interview can be more closely examined. 237

5.3 CELEBRITY, POWER AND PERSONA

Leaving behind the sociological and technical language of Bourdieu for the moment, there are other ways to consider the "position-taking" of the literary interview and its importance for the author. We might consider the role of celebrity in literary culture and the way power and status are radically influenced by levels of fame. The term

"celebrity" and how it applies to the field of literature and literary production can be difficult to clearly systematize. The OED defines celebrity as "the condition of being much extolled or talked about; famousness, notoriety" and yet the way such "talking about" is inspired and maintained is a complex and controversial issue, especially when it comes to literature. When we think of the writer, an initial occasion for public attention could be, ideally, a literary work itself, and yet such is not always the case. Quite often, book reviews, related current events, scandals, and personal factors can greatly influence a writer's initial public reception. Once "famous," the celebrity process can become self- perpetuating; people want to know about those who are famous, and thus fame grows accordingly. They want to know because there is something compelling about the aura, or image, or myth surrounding the celebrated person.

Celebrity exerts influence in Bourdieu's field of cultural production as a form of symbolic capital; however, while the two concepts (celebrity and symbolic capital) function similarly, they are not entirely analogous. While symbolic power is itself a complex issue, notions of celebrity, fame and reputation depend on even more nebulous factors and require consideration of personality and performance issues that make it even more difficult to quantify. The idea of celebrity has been the focus of some recent studies, and it has emerged as a construct largely reliant on the individual, as well as abstract notions such as charisma, originality and ideology.

In his 1997 book Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture, P. David

Marshall examines the phenomenon of "overtly public individuals" (ix) or celebrities in late twentieth-century culture. Marshall argues that the celebrity exercises unique forms of power including forming cultural understandings of meaning and ideological positions

(x). He observes how the famous individual "participates openly as a marketable commodity," becoming a human embodiment of the essence of capitalism, making his very self into something of value in a system of exchange and value, selling himself for the masses. One tricky part about describing the operation of celebrityhood is that the value of the celebrity is a hybrid of "media construction, audience construction, and the real, living and breathing human being" (xi); it is a slippery and ambiguous concept and shifts over time and place. While Marshall's study focuses on the fields of music, television and film, his thoughts and findings on the role of the culture industry in shaping the masses are pertinent and instructive to a study of literary stars.

The elevation of individuals to celebrity status in today's culture can be seen as a modern day "cult of the personality"; "the star is meant to epitomize the potential of everyone in American society" (Marshall 9). Marshall draws on the ideas of critical theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno, cultural critics like Lowenthal and Baudrillard, film scholars, sociologists, political economists (i.e. Max Weber) and even Freud to develop a theory of the construction and operation of fame. By exerting influence over her followers, the celebrity manifests dual powers in "the realm of individual identity and the realm of the supporting group of followers" (25). Marshall's book traces the 239 development of celebrity as it grows out of the circulation of power in mass democracies

(241). The celebrity influences the way individual and collective identities are understood within her culture and wields enormous economic and cultural power. Most of Marshall's work focuses on the actual operation of the power of the celebrity in culture, a topic far more vast than the intentions of my present study; however, since one of the tangible (if nebulous) upshots of the Paris Review interview is an increase of celebrity for the author subject, the shape and impact of celebrity is worth discussing.

According to Marshall (echoing the work of Foucault and others before him), the celebrity operates as a sign, while the sign's material reality (the breathing individual behind the representation) "disappears into a cultural formation of meaning" (57). Like

Foucault's theory of the author-function, Marshall's celebrity is a constructed personality with elevated cultural significance that invests power into the cultural products associated with it. Marshall looks to reception theorists like Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser to begin to understand how the audience is affected by the power of celebrity. He pinpoints the common theme in what makes both literature and individuals rise above the pack and enter the public consciousness in a form of distinction, according to reception theorists.

According to Marshall, this shared quality is the mark of the new, that is, Jauss's idea of the works that "emerge from the break with the horizon of expectation" and Iser's

"conception of innovation and its positive value as the presentation of something that breaks the normative convention" (68). This "continuous creation of something new" is what captures the attention and often the devotion of the audience subject.

In the case of the television or film star, the nature of the work requires a constant production of the new. When she is not appearing in the most recent star vehicle, there 240 are ample physical appearances to keep the image of a famous actress constantly reproduced. Frequent red carpet events, press junkets, award opportunities, talk shows, product launches and cameo appearances keep the film star's face in the public eye. With the increased attention of tabloid paparazzi in recent years, even a trip to the supermarket can become a chance to be in the spotlight. The star's body itself, perhaps because it is the vehicle for her initial claims for attention, physically renews celebrity with each appearance. Conversely, for the literary giant (never directly discussed by Marshall), there are relatively few avenues for such constant output other than the composition of the primary art form, that is, a novel, play or collection of poetry, many of which take years to produce. The physical appearance of the author subject (say, at a reading, book launch or awards show) possesses less power than the textual appearance of the author's words in an interview, in part because of the limited audience size associated with such physical events. For the author, it is arguably her words and ideas that together create a distinct authorial persona, that reproduce her import.

Marshall's recognition of the importance of the "new" helps explain the power of the literary interview. While Paris Review interviews rarely mark a book release or historical event, the interviews themselves are the event. The publication of a Paris

Review interview with an established author of some renown qualifies as an occasion, and the material—even secrets—revealed in the course of the interview take on the aura of the "new" for the interview reader. While ideas expressed in a literary interview may have manifested elsewhere in a writer's oeuvre, the immediacy and (constructed) spontaneity of the Paris Review interview lends an urgency and newness to those same ideas. 241

Other recent studies on celebrity and fame are also instructive to my subject.

While Marshall's work centres on film, music and television celebrities, Loren Glass's book on modern authorial fame, Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United

States, 1880-1980, picks up handily where Marshall's research leaves off. Glass asserts that, by mid-century, America had an established "star system in which the marketable

'personalities' of authors were frequently as important as the quality of their literary production" (2). Even those who officially rejected the attainment of fame or the promotion of personality—or even dismissed it as threatening to their work (i.e. high modernists such as T.S. Eliot who emphasized their work over their personality)—were still inevitably subject to a market that traded in celebrity. Glass looks to the recent scholarship on the machinations of the marketplace as it pertains to (specifically

American) authorship and determines to "unpack [the] contradictions" of conflicting views of "modern American authorial celebrity": the model of "the author as a solitary creative genius whose work goes unrecognized by the mainstream" versus that of "the author as part of a corporate publisher's marketing strategy" (6). As one might expect, the answer is to be found in both places, and Glass relies heavily on the authorial autobiography as a site that both reflects and constructs the tension between these visions.

Glass' choice of genre for his focus is a thoughtful one; the autobiography has its own critical lineage that informs Glass' consideration of celebrity. For example, Philippe

Lejeune's notion of "the autobiographical pact" in which author, narrator and protagonist are synonymous73 has been both referred to and challenged by subsequent autobiography critics and authorial autobiographies themselves. Glass is inspired by Mutlu Konuk

73 See Philippe Lejeune's On Autobiography. Biasing's description of the autobiographical form as "a self-examination that is at the same time private and public. . . . the hero of autobiography is the paradoxical private- person-as-public-hero" (19). Glass depicts the authorial autobiography as "the textual location where the modernist creative consciousness comes up against the public personality," where "the author explicitly attempts] to reappropriate the public discourse that determines the authorial career" (7). The problem with celebrity is that it moves the locus of control away from the author towards the readership and the marketplace as a whole. The author searches for a way to wrest that control back into his domain. The autobiography, according to Glass, is the perfect site from which to survey the troubling relationship between writers and celebrity, especially as it affects understandings of

"authorial inspiration and property in texts" (8).

While not explicitly mentioned by Glass, the literary interview, like the autobiography, should be identified as another unique site of access to these tensions.

With its autobiographical elements and the added bonus of the presence of a pseudo- representative of the audience or marketplace (in the person of the interviewer), one has the entire field "in miniature" with the literary interview. It, too, is a site for the

"modernist creative consciousness" to wrestle with its own public persona and for the author to try to regain control of the story of his life, the myth through which he is seen by the public.

Glass' perspective is helpful in reading the Paris Review interviews in that it focuses on the personality of the author and the opportunities for self-invention in the modern marketplace. Glass acknowledges the tensions inherent in public moments of self-display, the conflicts of consciousness, privacy and publicity that determine both the 243 content and reception of autobiographical forms. Moreover, the author's awareness of the

"public discourse" that determines his reception and success is particularly evident in the

Paris Review interviews I will examine later in this chapter.

Celebrity plays a major role in the reading practices brought to the Paris Review interview. Readers are drawn to an interview based in part on the perceived celebrity of its subject, and in turn, the interview itself can further build the fame attached to its author. While not the only factor, the desire to have the "inside scoop" on an acclaimed, public figure separates the Paris Review interview from, say, a conversation with the local librarian printed in a high school newsletter. As sociologist Gary Alan Fine argues, the public's drive to obtain information about the exalted individual is nothing new; hierarchical systems of status have existed as long as humans have lived together. Still, something has certainly changed in the last couple of centuries as people (and not just royalty and religious figures) have attained unprecedented power over the masses through name (and persona) alone.

The construction of celebrity is closely associated with the even more delicate concept of reputation. Reputation is closely aligned with personality and individuality and captures the intricate fraternity of myth and celebrity. While the word "celebrity" implies a living person, Fine defines "reputation" as,

... a socially recognized persona: an organizing principle by which the

actions of a person (or an organization that is thought of as a person) can

be linked together. On one level a reputation constitutes a moral gestalt

that is linked to a person—an organizing principle for person perception..

. . reputations are collective representations enacted in relationships. A reputation is not the opinion that one individual forms of another; rather, it

is a shared, established image. Reputations are embedded within social

relations, and as a consequence, reputation is connected to forms of

communication embedded within a community. (2-3)

Celebrity and reputation both rely upon a hungry audience and the communication technologies and economy that will allow attention to be focused on the

(often creative) individual (Fine 2). With the increase in these technologies and media conduits, so too increases the "social capital" of the celebrity. This take on reputation is a useful tool for the study of author interviews. While authors, interviewers and editors continuously construct and finesse the authorial subject's presence in the interview format, the actual personality of the author is never touched. At stake is the recognized persona or reputation of the author, often constructed through the presentation of stories and performance of character in the interview setting. Once the interview moves into the field of literary production, the discrete machinations of the interview process assume their full effect in the form of the creation of celebrity power and cultural capital.

Fine explores the ways in which reputation is created, disseminated and maintained by public discourse largely operated by the media. The intricacies of this discourse are dynamic and rapidly changing with technology and societal values; however, it is generally agreed that media attention breeds further attention, finally disrupting any stable definition of "institutionally sanctioned knowledge" (5). Fine locates his study of reputation within "a social constructionist model that suggests that the past is not a set of facts, but a set of interpretations," not that history is strictly fiction but that it is deeply influenced by the stories we tell about it. In the case of authorial 245 reputation, the "stories" told can be in collaboration or conflict between the author and other storytellers such as biographers, reviewers, publishers, readers and, of course, interviewers.

Collectively, these stories create narratives about the author that, in turn, loom large in the minds of readers. These narratives need not have any precise relationship with "truth" in the historical sense. Instead, they deal more in personality, emotion, anecdote and even myth. The literary interview, with its elements of performance and intimacy, is the perfect stage for launching these stories and supplying the material that eventually constructs an author's reputation. Because of their popularity since the time of their inception in 1953, the Paris Review interviews also play a crucial role in celebrity construction which, in turn, exerts pressure on literary reception.

5.4 PERFORMING THE PUBLIC SELF: AUTHORIAL PERSONA AND THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW

Literary interviews depend upon strong authorial personae for their readerly interest. Readers approach interviews, in part, to see how the exchange conforms to or challenges previously held impressions of the subject author. Sometimes, in simple interviews, the myth that the author may have already carefully constructed for herself is simply supported through the conversation. Knowing the publicly crafted image of the interview subject, an interviewer may choose questions and comments which buttress and further develop that conception of the writer. For example, questions may be designed to reinforce an idea of the writer as one who pontificates in a self-serious manner on political issues, or one who prefers to speak of sports than of his own writing, or, perhaps, 246 the one who is known for waxing poetically on the big themes of love and God while ignoring issues of writerly process. Through the choice of questions, successive editing, the commentary of the headnote, and even the physical description of the subject and her whereabouts, the writer's public persona is fortified again and again and the interview itself risks becoming little more than a public relations tool.

Conversely, the writer's myth or image can go through the opposite process in the course of an interview. Perhaps the writer is ready to reinvent himself in the public eye or feels that his public persona is unsavoury and due for revision. Perhaps the interviewer decides to move beyond the common stereotype of her subject and chooses questions that scratch at a different aspect of the writer. In some cases, an astute interviewer may want to challenge the author's myth with pointed questions meant to reveal new information or uncover a deception.

The Paris Review interviews, due to their collaborative nature, rarely take an obviously combative approach, nor are they simple promotional tools for the author subject. Instead, as I will show through several examples, the final published interview most often performs a certain kind of personality agreed upon by both interviewer and interviewee. Through headnote, question selection and commentary, the interviewer constructs a set and scene that will accommodate a specific version of the author. Then, through their revelations, tone and comments, the author subject performs a certain persona, sometimes as seamlessly as a theatrical actor, but more often with crevices and tears for us, as readers, to see through and worry. Perhaps most fascinating are those instances when the interviewer begins with questions that suggest a certain myth, and then through genuine and spontaneous conversation, that myth is complicated and 247 deepened, and the reader is left with a more dynamic, perhaps more "real" image of the author by the end.74 As William Dowling points out in his study of Boswell's Life of

Johnson, the exchanges (between Boswell and Johnson) often start off with a myth of the subject (in this case with Johnson as a moral and intellectual giant), and through engagement with the author, and other biographical narrative, a much more complex, layered image of the man is slowly revealed ("Biographer, Hero, and Audience" 478). As a result, throughout the conversations between these two men, there is an ongoing interplay and resultant tension between the real and the ideal (479).

We see this same kind of tension in Paris Review interviews. Through the apparatus of the headnote and the questions themselves, a sense of the idealized (or, at times, exaggerated) image of the interview subject is built. Perhaps he is an ardent traveller, a wise sage, a mad genius, a notorious womanizer or a dreadful drunk; these are all stereotyped roles that have become the myths that contain the writer. Whether idealized or debased caricatures, they are flattened masks nonetheless, and quite often it is through the exchange with the interviewer that the limitations of those very labels are exposed.

In order to demonstrate the way that the Paris Review interview performs this kind of work, I will look at several examples of persona construction in the interview series, including conversations with Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost and Marianne

Moore. These examples lend themselves well to such an examination because each of these writers possessed larger-than-life personae well known to their readers and the

The interview, by supplying this privileged information, offers access to uncommon knowledge and therefore has the added allure of "rarity," a component of symbolic capital, according to Bourdieu. larger literary culture. Because of their established reputations at the time of their interviews, it is possible to trace how these personalities were both constructed through and reflected in the Paris Review interviews.

5.4.1 An Ornery "Papa": Ernest Hemingway's 1958 Paris Review Interview

As discussed in previous chapters, George Plimpton's 1958 interview with Ernest

Hemingway is a representative example of the potential of the Paris Review interview to convey unique information about the author subject. In this interview, the well- established reputation of Hemingway is both developed and challenged. Hemingway's projected self-image in mid-century literary culture has been the subject of much discussion and study. While some aspects of his chosen image are debatable, in order to ground my discussion, I will offer a general look at how critics and readers saw him through a brief portrait of the public persona of Hemingway during his final years.

In his consideration of American authorial celebrity, Loren Glass chose several strong and celebrated authorial personalities to examine, including Mark Twain, Jack

London, Gertrude Stein, Norman Mailer, and of course, Ernest Hemingway. On the subject of Hemingway, Glass calls his public personality "an embarrassment for literary critics" and cites Edmund Wilson's 1939 article in Atlantic Monthly in which he states that this persona was Hemingway's "own worst-invented character" (304 qtd in Glass

140). Glass identifies the 1932 publication of Death in the Afternoon, with its focus on bullfighting and lack of the literary complexity of his earlier works, as the moment that effectively fused Hemingway's "hypermasculine" literary and public persona. 249

Hemingway's earlier reputation, built in the 1920s, as a high modernist with an elite coterie of literary colleagues and readers, was slowly dismantled through the massive popular success of his novel A Farewell to Arms and his ensuing international mainstream celebrity. It was replaced by a kind of "stylized masculinity" cultivated both in his works and his public appearances and interviews. Glass traces the development of this persona through Hemingway's writing and his public reception, identifying elements of homophobia (and, at times, homoeroticism), misogyny, brute strength, paternalism, and sexual dominance.

In Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as a Public Writer, John Raeburn discusses how Hemingway was "the architect of his public reputation" (7) and was inordinately concerned with how his public saw him. However, unlike Frost or Moore (as I will discuss later), Hemingway did not cultivate a uniformly likable self-image. Instead,

Hemingway constructed an image of gruff masculinity into whose intimate circle only a select few could gain entry. In fact, part of Hemingway's calculated image included an explicit disdain for the media and his critics, and sometimes, even his average readers.

Hemingway consistently promoted himself as an avid sportsman, but only in the most manly of sports such as fishing, big game hunting, boxing, skiing and bullfighting (as a spectator of the latter, of course). Photographs and published letters to popular magazines like Esquire and articles for commercial sporting magazines further buttressed this image.

He was proud of his temper, his ability to drink, and his willingness to get his hands dirty in matters of conflict or survival. He was a literary tough guy, so boasting of his virility that critics often challenged the authenticity of his projected persona, starting as early as

1933 with Max Eastman's critical article "Bull in the Afternoon": 250

... Hemingway lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man....

Some circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway a continual sense

of the obligation to put forth evidences of red-blooded masculinity. It must

be made obvious not only in the swing of the big shoulders and the clothes

he puts on, but in the stride of his prose style and the emotions he permits

to come to the surface there. (Eastman 96, qtd in Raeburn 60)

In response to these comments, Hemingway wrote letters defending his sexual prowess

and threatening violence; in a letter to Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway said he could "beat

the shit out of any of them [Eastman and his other critics]" (Raeburn 60).

A thorough examination of the complexities of Hemingway's sexual, public and

literary character is beyond the scope of this discussion;751 only highlight some of the

established understandings of his image in order to ground an examination of his Paris

Review interview. The Paris Review interview with Hemingway was conducted in the

final period of his life. John Raeburn calls these years the "Papa" years (144), as

Hemingway's persona had developed into an aged, hardened, and somewhat gruffly

paternal version of its masculine self. Hemingway's public image was that of a hunter on

safari in Africa, promoted thorough regular features and photos in magazines such as The

Atlantic, Saturday Review, True, Look, and various sporting magazines. His well-

publicized plane crashes, love affairs, fistfights, heavy drinking and health problems only

increased his tough reputation, prompting commentators to say things like "you can't kill

'Papa'" (Raeburn 146). Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954,

See John Raeburn's Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as a Public Writer; Leonard J. Leff s Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribner 's and the Making of American Celebrity Culture; and Philip Young's Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. 251 confirming his literary status and making him a "full-fledged culture hero" (151). In his final years, Hemingway added "sage" to his public character; journalists and writers regularly came to him not only for information on his life, but advice on his field more broadly. Such was certainly the case with the Paris Review interview.

It has been noted that George Plimpton's conversation with Hemingway, with its emphasis on matters of fiction and creativity, differs greatly from other interviews with

"Papa." John Raeburn points out how the interview avoids the usual topics, such as bullfighting and hunting (161), covered by the kind of publications Hemingway had become accustomed to being profiled in (however, Hemingway does manage to slip in a few comments that demonstrate his sportsmanship, such as his knowledge of large fish, whales, and fishing village life [236]). And yet, Hemingway's strong persona still comes through in his gruff presence with Plimpton, his performed crankiness and intentional elusiveness. Raeburn determines that, in this particular interview, Hemingway was

"disingenuous" because "Plimpton's questions were more specific and more penetrating"

(161-2) than he was accustomed to. Raeburn contends that Hemingway likely felt torn between his chosen public persona as an anti-intellectual, rough-and-tumble man (more content to speak of non-literary topics) and the potential of the Paris Review interview to make him appear as a highbrow intellectual:

[Hemingway] could maintain his credibility only by adopting an attitude of

grouchy taciturnity, and especially by insisting on his reluctance to answer

the questions at all. His misgivings were manifest in his insistence on

working out many answers on paper rather than responding orally . . . the Paris Review audience was no longer the one Hemingway depended upon,

and was just the kind of elite he most distrusted. (162)

While Hemingway may have distrusted the more intellectual, cultured audience of The

Paris Review, he still coveted its approval and strove to rise to the challenge in many ways. The Paris Review interview with Ernest Hemingway is replete with material about

Hemingway's style and his approach to writing. As discussed elsewhere, many of

Hemingway's best known quotations on the craft of writing come from this conversation, and the piece makes great reading for avid readers and aspiring writers alike. Perhaps best known of all is his use of the iceberg analogy, a quotation frequently referred to in studies of Hemingway's works.76 It appears that Hemingway had a gift for the pithy

See the previous chapter for a discussion of this passage. Other quotable gems in Hemingway's Paris Review interview include: "If I explained how that [the process of turning a real-life character into a fictional one] is sometimes done, it would be a handbook for libel lawyers" (234);

"A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the yearbook of a school for exceptional children than writing novels" (239);

"If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen" (235);

"Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function. All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it" (238);

"Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading" (229); and "When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. . . . You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. . . . When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt 253 quotation, a talent polished by the many drafts exchanged during the editing process with

Plimpton, as discussed in the previous chapter. For my purposes, I am less interested in the wisdom Hemingway chose to divulge in this exchange than the way the interview and its process performs his public persona.

While Hemingway struggled to maintain his chosen image throughout the interview, Plimpton's headnote openly discusses the dualities of Hemingway's personality. Plimpton notes the seriousness with which Hemingway approaches his work and his anxieties about putting his creativity under close scrutiny. He identifies in

Hemingway a "strong feeling that writing is a private, lonely occupation with no need for witnesses until the final work is done," part of his "dedication to his art [that] may suggest a personality at odds with the rambunctious, carefree, world-wheeling

Hemingway-at-play of popular conception" (220).

In several exchanges, Hemingway carries his tough public persona over into the discussion of his art. When discussing his ability to remain focused on his work,

Hemingway states that "it takes discipline to do it and this discipline is acquired" (222).

Later, when describing his economic writing style of composition by elimination, he explains that it "is very hard to do and [he has] worked at it very hard" (236). Here, he is distinguishing himself from the Romantic vision of the artist inspired under the stars, the artist who simply sits at his desk and allows his creativity to flow. In contrast,

Hemingway frames himself as a workman, someone who recognizes the skill and determination required of his trade and is more than prepared to rise to the challenge. For

you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through" (221). 254

Hemingway, it is significant that this work be of the laborious, determined kind, not the kind requiring intellectual acrobatics or clever tricks. In a similar vein, the narrative that

Hemingway often chose to recount about his life included a childhood destined for greatness. In the Paris Review interview, he seizes the opportunity to tell this story in various ways, saying he "always wanted to be a writer" (223).

Hemingway appears to relish the opportunities presented by Plimpton to perform his dramatic self, saying "Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it" (223). His flair for melodramatic overstatement is evident in many quotable lines he delivers about the art of writing in this interview. For example:

INTERVIEWER. What would you consider the best intellectual training

for the would-be writer?

HEMINGWAY. Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because

he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut

down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can

for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to

commence with. (224)

Hemingway is clearly playing a role here, and may not fully expect to be taken seriously.

He is aware that his performance makes for good reading in the same way his hard-boiled and pugnacious characters make for good fiction. He delivers his ruthless absolutism with just enough humour to remind his audience that he is, beneath it all, a somewhat likable teddy bear, everybody's "Papa." Hemingway is not offering information to the reader directly; instead, he is entertaining his audience with the presentation of an interesting character. Near the end of the interview, Hemingway offers another pithy statement, often reprinted as solid advice for aspiring writers. He phrases it in his signature tough- guy style: "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it" (239). His choice of language and the certainty, nay arrogance, with which he delivers this aphorism are pure

"Hemingway."

Hemingway does not conceal, and may even exaggerate, his testiness, often lashing out at Plimpton for questions he feels are inappropriate or unintelligent. The interview is riddled with impatient outbursts directed towards his interviewer. For example, when asked about balancing writing and teaching, he responds, "I see I am

77 getting away from the question, but the question was not very interesting" (225). He seems to resent the entire interview project, and comically expresses his anger and certainty that the interview will be put to bad use:

INTERVIEWER. Do you find it easy to shift from one literary project to

another or do you continue through to finish what you start?

HEMINGWAY. The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer

these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized

severely. I will be. Don't worry. (233-4)

Other examples of Hemingway's irritability and reticence with the interview project include: [On the influence of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, etc] "Doesn't this sort of talk bore you? This backyard literary gossip while washing out the dirty clothes of thirty-five years ago is disgusting to me. It would be different if one had tried to tell the whole truth. That would have some value" (227); [On symbols in his work] "If you do not mind I dislike talking about them and being questioned about them. It is hard enough to write books and stories without being asked to explain them as well" (229); [On the evolution of Hemingway's style] "That is a long-term tiring question and if you spent a couple of days answering it you would be so self-conscious that you could not write. I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made" (231); 256

In this case, he basically ignores the question, exploiting it only as a chance to perform his irritated character for the audience. In other moments, he shows his displeasure for the question by giving an obvious or mocking answer. For example, Plimpton asks, "Have you ever described any type of situation of which you had no personal knowledge?" to which Hemingway answers, "That is a strange question. By personal knowledge do you mean carnal knowledge? In that case the answer is positive" (237). Clearly, the question is hardly that strange; it is simply one that Hemingway is not inclined to answer, and yet, instead of simply crossing the question from the list entirely (remember, he has control of the edited transcript), he grabs the chance to add a flavour of sex to a topic that does not inherently have one and to attack his interrogator at the same time. It is a slightly awkward and somewhat funny reaction to an ordinary question.

Again and again, throughout the interview, when Hemingway doesn't like a question, he either attacks Plimpton or the terms of the question itself. His technique inflates his own status while subtly knocking down that of others. In the following passage, we see this method in action; Hemingway treats Plimpton as the "straight man" to enable his own grouchy yet comedic performance:

INTERVIEWER. Would you say, ever, that there is any didactic intention

in your work?

HEMINGWAY. Didactic is a word that has been misused and has spoiled.

Death in the Afternoon is an instructive book.

INTERVIEWER. It has been said that a writer only deals with one or two

ideas throughout his work. Would you say your work reflects one or two

ideas? 257

HEMINGWAY. Who said that? It sounds much too simple. The man who

said it possibly had only one or two ideas. (238-9)

We know, from my study of the process of this interview in the previous chapter, that the final published interview was the result of extensive collaboration and editing between

Plimpton and Hemingway. There are no stray remarks that slip through, accidentally showing Hemingway's impatience. On the contrary, each and every outburst is calculated by Hemingway, most often appearing in its first form in writing, and then corroborated by Plimpton in editing. They are intentional elements of an overall portrait of surliness and impatience with literary criticism and study that Hemingway wants to convey to his audience.

Perhaps because Hemingway fears being held accountable for his theories of literature (theories which may or may not hold up under scrutiny), he plays down the seriousness of oral conversation: "The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not" (224). Later, when reminded of a quotation he once made about writing being akin to self-destruction, Hemingway seems aware of his own penchant for off-the-cuff dogmatic invective. In fact, he willingly and self-deprecatingly disowns comments he is quoted on while in conversation with

Plimpton, saying "I do not remember writing that. But it sounds silly and violent enough for me to have said it to avoid having to bite on the nail and make a sensible statement"

(225). In this aspect of his persona, Hemingway wants to show his readers that he is different from the self-serious critics who try to describe his work. Likewise, he doesn't want to be pinned down on anything he has said in the past or may say in the moment. 258

Like Frost and Moore, as I will discuss later, Hemingway repeatedly insists on his social independence. When asked of the writing scene in 1920s Paris (long-considered to be a strong expatriate community of writers), Hemingway asserts categorically that "there was no group feeling" (225), fortifying his image as a solitary, independent writer and dispelling any romantic myths about his group. Likewise, he claims to have found little influence from other writers (226). Finally, he embellishes this aspect of his persona by describing his current situation as a somewhat tragic, lonely one. His description shows a touch of the despair of old age one associates with his short stories such as "A Clean,

Well-Lighted Place":

HEMINGWAY.... The further you go in writing the more alone you are.

Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away. You do not

see them except rarely, but you write .... But you are more alone because

that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and

if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no

forgiveness. (226)

Whether performed or genuine (or a bit of both), Hemingway's dedication to his art is convincingly conveyed in soliloquies such as these. His perseverance and independence are still there, but also in evidence are traces of a new kind of personal doubt mixed in with the passion, likely the normal fears of aging and mortality, that have slipped into his discourse. This is clearly Hemingway at the end of his life, looking back. Only a couple of years after this interview's publication, Hemingway would end his life with a shot to the head after prolonged treatment for depression and poor physical health. 259

In a contemplative moment at the end of the interview, Plimpton asks Hemingway about how he will write about traumatic experiences, such as his plane crashes.

Hemingway's response is uncharacteristically gentle and, with its notes of despair and foreboding, strangely prophetic:

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which

burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will

be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that

outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-

important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since

no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-

and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they

believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and

easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are

understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more

human and more beloved. (237)

It's hard to say where Hemingway saw himself in this final dichotomy, as a survivor or one who would not last. In any case, it is striking how cognizant Hemingway was of the crucible in his life. The response illustrates how persona is necessarily a delicate construction that, under moments of duress and life changes, often shows its faultlines.

This final quotation also reminds us of the continuum of reading that can occur with any literary interview. Surely, contemporary readers of Hemingway could have read his thoughts on survival as further evidence of his stalwart image as a victor over the odds, perhaps even as a phoenix rising from the ashes to write his best work yet. Today's readers, armed with the knowledge of Hemingway's decline and suicide, read the interview differently. Instead of reading the voice of a survivor in these final expressions, we are likely to feel disturbed by this glimpse of an aging man clinging to his manhood and glory while his body and mind slip irrevocably into an abyss. This reminds us that the character we infer from the interview proper is continuously affected by other information outside of the text. Biographical, critical, and even creative materials deeply impact our reading of the persona of the literary interview, and make any conclusions open to revision.

5.4.2 The Perfect Yankee: Robert Frost's 1960 Paris Review Interview

Robert Frost's Paris Review interview is a fascinating example of the role of persona in the interview form because Frost's reputation was and continues to be itself rife with contradiction. During his lifetime, Frost cultivated a distinctive public persona of the rural bard, "an amiable hayseed with a twinkle in his eye: a Yankee nature poet masquerading as a snowy-haired New England farmer" (Kakutani). After his death, however, Frost's personal reputation was blackened by Lawrance Thompson's "official" biography Robert Frost (in three parts: The Early Years 1874-1915, The Years of

Triumph 1015-1938 and The Later Years 1938-1963), a vicious life history that paints

Frost as a cruel, selfish, ambitious and manipulative man.

Robert Frost's poetic reputation has also gone through major upheavals. From the

1920s through the early 1950s, Frost's poetic persona was impacted by the modernist atmosphere of poetry around him. Compared to the experimental and often difficult 261 poetry of his high Modernist contemporaries, Frost's works, especially those poems with a pastoral theme, were often seen as dated and conservative. Certainly, Frost's widespread popularity, most notably with audiences who did not appreciate the radical innovations of modernist writing, further increased his bourgeois reputation. Late in his lifetime and, increasingly, after his death, the poetry of Robert Frost has been given a closer consideration that now places Frost the poet more firmly in the company of his modernist peers. Since the 1960s, a growing critical discussion of the themes of darkness, isolation and alienation in his work along with the recognition of a more ironic and ambiguous tone than previously believed, has increasingly led Frost's poetry to be considered as work deserving of serious scholarly interest.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Robert Frost found popular success relatively early in his lifetime. From the time of the positive reception of his poetry collection A

Boy's Will in 1913 until his death, Frost had a half century to carefully build and polish his public image for a massive and attentive audience. And build it he did, with a record of public appearances and participation unparalleled by any other American poet. So

A highly selective survey of Frost's many opportunities for self-promotion and advancement would include an early reading tour in New England (1916); election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1916); four Pulitzer Prizes (1924, 1932, 1937, and 1943); election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1930); continuous heavy lecture schedule (throughout 1930s); appointment as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University (1936); membership in the American Philosophical Society (1938); appointment as Ralph Waldo Emerson Fellow in Poetry at Harvard (1939); appointment at Dartmouth College as George Ticknor Fellow in Humanities (1943); award of the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets (1953); service as a delegate to the World Congress of Writers held in Sao Paulo (1954); invitation by President Eisenhower to the White House (1958); leadership in the movement for Ezra Pound's release (1957-9); appointment as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1958); appointment to three-year term as Honorary Consultant in the Humanities at the Library of Congress (1959); testimony before Senate subcommittee in favor of a bill to establish a 262 aware of his legacy was Frost that he had already chosen his official biographer

(Thompson) by 1939, almost 25 years before his death. During his lifetime, especially during the last two decades when his popular success was at its highest and official accolades and honours rained upon him with striking regularity, Frost's public persona was a solidly-built construction familiar to almost any American reader.

One aspect of Frost that is rarely argued is his keen interest in the way the public saw him. In the first volume of his biography, The Early Years 1874-1915, Lawrance

Thompson opens his introduction with the cutting statement that Frost "was so fascinated by the story of his life that he never tired of retelling it" (xiii). In the next volume, The

Years of Triumph 1915-1938, Thompson explores this aspect of Frost further, detailing how Frost's "platform manner dramatized his ideal image of how he wanted to be viewed, so his accounts of his early experiences fulfilled his ideal of what he wished the story of his life to become" (xviii). According to Thompson, Frost's ideal was a story of triumph over poverty, adversity, family dysfunction and other obstacles.

The life that Frost chose to share with his public was, of course, a selective one. For the most part, in both his poetry and his public performances, Frost presented himself as a "man of the earth," someone close to nature and more at home walking the fields of a

New England farm than the streets of a bustling city. He projected a folksy, "down- National Academy of Culture (1960); invitation to read for John F. Kennedy Inauguration (1961); lectures in Israel and Greece (1961); 1962 visit to the Soviet Union as cultural exchange program at the invitation of President Kennedy; and award of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (1962) (to name just a few!).

7Q Often overlooked is Frost's self-confessed duplicity when it came to his own self- representation. Frost once said, "Don't trust me too far. I'm liable to tell you anything. Trust me on the poetry, but don't trust me on my life. Check up on me some" (qtd in "Frost: 'Courage'" 90; Thompson xviii). 263 home" image: a simple man, with wise advice built on tough experience and pragmatism.

Frost was particularly fond of telling stories of his early years of poverty and obscurity, times he credited with building his self-reliance and ruggedness, all contributing to his foremost physical image: that of a strong, virile, and yet gentle man. His masculinity was something Frost emphasized indirectly again and again, often describing his work and beliefs in terms inflected with strength. Thompson quotes Frost: "A real artist delights in roughness for what he can do to it. He's the brute who can knock the corners of the marble block and drag the unbedded beauty out of bed" (491) and "It is a coarse brutal world, unendurably coarse and brutal, for anyone who hasn't the least dash of coarseness or brutality in his own nature to enjoy it with" (559). While these are expressions one might more readily associate with Faulkner or Hemingway, Frost carefully and deliberately maintained his image of toughness in tandem with his more gentle features.

Ironically, Frost also tried to project an air of humility, often undercutting his own comments about himself and attacking his faults before his enemies dared to ("I am too cowardly to offend anybody intentionally and usually too skillful to do it unintentionally"

[Thompson 685] and "such is my indolence, cowardice or both that I will grant anything you please rather than run the risk of argument" [333]). This performed humility extended to his relationship with God: Frost had a kind of laissez-faire approach to destiny and the universe that resonated with his audiences both on and off the page (552).

He affected an analogous acceptance when it came to his public reception, claiming to care little how critics or the public responded to his work. Similarly, Frost often came across as anti-intellectual, though he didn't hesitate to mention his familiarity with Greek and Latin in order to compare himself with (and often outrank) his competitors (Thompson 692). Perhaps most of all, Frost consistently presented himself as independent in the creative, personal and political senses of the word. He consistently called himself a loner and a rebel, a "grown-up" but not "grown-old" version of the adventurous boy who loved to swing from birch trees. He enjoyed making a verbal show of mischief and playfulness, corresponding to his insistent revelry in his indifference to opinion, a characteristic that perhaps most suggests his radical insecurity and great concern about the opinion of others.

Frost was known as a kind of playful riddle; he loved to baffle and tease his audiences by asserting one thing and then subtly taking it back in the next breath. And yet, though he was notoriously ambiguous, Frost consistently swore by his own transparency and simplicity. He claimed not to be able to help himself in his "way of coming at things" (Thompson 546). In this way, although his many masks were generally likable, he was a thoroughly difficult creature to pin down.

Foremost, Frost was the quintessential Yankee. Critics have observed how his audiences often saw him as "a true American" (Paton), a role intrinsically connected to the masculine and the strong. According to Priscilla Paton, in her examination of the public reception of Robert Frost, the ideal of "The American" is a hybrid of qualities, many self-contradicting:

The American is self-educated, crude, hardworking, and honest. Rarely is

he linked with the beautiful, a subjective sensibility or the refined in art—

areas dangerously "feminine." His authenticity runs counter to trained

mastery but arises from local character and scenery. However, there is

doubt, even among defenders, about the American's ability to compete technically, aesthetically, and philosophically with Europeans or worse,

with effete expatriate intellectuals. To be "American" is to be

representative, manly, popular, and inferior. (79)

And so, perhaps Robert Frost had chosen an impossibly self-contradictory image for himself, an image which virtually guaranteed conflict. Frost's public persona projected all of those qualities, and the myriad tensions associated with them are detectable in a close examination of his Paris Review interview, as I will consider below.

These images of Frost have been fully deconstructed, and in many cases, dismissed since his death in 1963. It is difficult to believe that his image as a born and bred New Englander with thoroughly ordinary and rural roots was ever blindly accepted as fact; however, Frost's self-presentation was accomplished not only through his self- professed biography, in personal statements and lectures, but also through his poetry itself. His poetic and public personas were virtually indistinguishable; for many readers, when Frost wrote of the experience of rural poverty and struggle it was the same as his having lived it and even descended from it.

Frost's image as the "Yankee farmer" was vigorously disputed only shortly after his death with the publication of the second volume of Thompson's Frost biography and similar later indictments by other critics, such as Helen Vendler. Readers were reminded that Frost spent most of his childhood in San Francisco and so was hardly a Yankee by birth. As a more recent Frost biographer, Jay Parini, points out, this "Yankee poet" had to learn to act the part, going as far as to listen in on the party line from his farm in New

Hampshire in order to pick "up the nuances of Yankee speech that would later become the trademark of his poetry" (Howie 13). Even Frost's poverty was questioned by 266

Thompson, who argued that Frost never endured the kind of hard-scrabble childhood he so often recounted (Sheehy 17-20). Thompson's biography makes a point of detailing the many ways in which Frost actively and meticulously created his own mythology. In recounting Frost's life, he returns again and again to how Frost romantically idealized events in his life through his own storytelling. Examples include Frost's reasons over going to England (55-6), his beginnings as a farmer and life on the Deny farm (525, 321,

633-4), his poverty (157, 570), and his spontaneous writing in the case of "Stopping by

Woods" (written 'with one stroke of the pen') (596), to name just a few. Thompson emphasizes Frost's postures and pretences in an effort to dispel the very myth that Frost worked so hard to create.

Thompson and others also claim that Frost's carefully projected image as a kind, gentle and sage farmer masked a cruel, vicious and self-interested man. After the publication of his "official" biography in 1966, in short order, Frost's saint-like image with replaced with that of a monster. While Thompson's treatment is now usually considered to be unfairly biased and even a vindictive literary defamation (Burnshaw

216-8, 226-30), the contradictions and complexities of Frost's life, personality and persona are still being hotly debated; some call it the "Frost biographical wars" (qtd. in

Sheehy 7). It is not my concern here to determine the "true" Frost; what is at stake here is the effort and expertise devoted to the construction of the public Frost, and the role the

Paris Review interview played in that project.

Robert Frost was interviewed by Richard Poirier for The Paris Review in 1960, only three years before his death. According to Frost biographer Jeffrey Meyers, during his last 15 years, "[Frost's] popular acclaim increased while his poetry inevitably 267 declined" (290). Biographers generally agree that Frost continued to cultivate a benevolent public image through his public readings, interviews and speeches almost to the end (Meyers 290). His final years were spent as a kind of American literary ambassador, often travelling abroad to collect degrees and honours and spread a kind of home-grown American goodwill. Meyers describes Frost during these years as "the apotheosis of the public poet (a kind of Japanese 'living treasure')" and "a roving cultural ambassador" (290). It would be difficult to overestimate the extent of his public recognition from the 1950s until his death. He appeared on the covers of Time and Life and in many television programs; he was on close terms with presidents and celebrities; he travelled to South America, Europe and even Israel on his reading tours; and he received enough honorary degrees to have a quilt made of the silken robes bestowed upon him (294). He was heavily involved in all types of public affairs, including appearances as a cultural ambassador for the US. By many accounts, in his later life, Frost assumed the character of the Bard, traveling around to spread his wisdom and build his legacy as a wise poet (Burnshaw 88).

Paris Review interviewer Richard Poirier was sensitive to Frost's tendency towards extreme control of his projected public persona. In his interview headnote,

Poirier emphasizes the importance of Frost's "wholly self-created image" (1). Poirier notes that even Frost's physical appearance is inseparable from his personality; both are impressive in size and power and "spontaneously expressive." Poirier's headnote is more of an extended meditation on how Frost has both maintained and struggled with his own public and poetic character than it is a typical background of the poet-subject. He remarks on how Frost has never "let his self-portrait be altered" and yet, can be oppressed both by 268 his own self-definitions and the newer, more philosophical critical interpretations placed upon him late in life (2). Poirier observes that Frost is keenly aware of his audience's expectations of him, and yet is no slave to public opinion but, instead, stubbornly insistent on his own unpredictable opinions. When discussing the tape recorder used during the interview, Poirier notes Frost's remarks on his own anti-modern reputation:

[Frost said] 'they,' presumably the people 'outside,' 'like to hear me say

nasty things about machines.' A thoroughly supple knowledge of the ways

in which the world tries to take him [Frost] and a confidence that his own

ways are more just and liberating was apparent here and everywhere in the

conversation. (Poirier 2-3)

Through Poirier's headnote, readers of this Paris Review interview are made aware of

Frost's self-consciousness even before they begin to read the interview proper. If we look closely at the exchange that follows, there are many instances of Frost's careful self- projection that correspond with the public persona outlined above. When asked about his writing habits, Frost's response reflects the ordinary, down-home roots he has chosen to project. He claims to have "never had a table in [his] life" because he can write anywhere, even "on the sole of [his] shoe" (3). This remark fits with Frost's anti- professionalist attitude. Frost is also careful to downplay any ambition or striving on his part, a strategy common to many Paris Review interviewees. When asked about his time in England (1912-1915), Frost claims he "went over there to be poor for a while, nothing else," dismissing any suggestion that he had specific plans or goals for his time abroad

(4). Likewise, when talking about his earliest teaching experiences, he is careful to paint himself as a carefree, footloose young man unconcerned with professional aspirations: 269

"Every time I'd get sick of the city I'd go out for the springtime and take school for one term.... I didn't know what I wanted to do with myself to earn a living" (12). The image of the wandering school teacher in a little schoolhouse with "about a dozen children, all barefooted" works well for building a Romantic myth of a wandering poet who comes to the "The Road Not Taken" and eventually finds a farm to settle down on to work hard and write poetry about the land. It is a likable image and one that endures to this day for many of Frost's readers.

Frost deftly feigns modesty about his achievements, while simultaneously and subtly boosting his own status. He downplays his contributions to the Bread Loaf School of Writing in Vermont and repeatedly refers to himself as ordinary and anti-intellectual.

He is happy to claim ignorance on many subjects, and seems to revel in denying comment to his interviewer ("No, you couldn't pin me there;" "That I wouldn't be able to tell you;" "I'll leave that for somebody else to tell me. I wouldn't know"; "I wouldn't know that"; and, teasingly, "Where were we? Oh yes, you were trying to trace me"). He especially likes to affect ignorance when asked for his critical opinions or judgements on his own work or influences. Asked to comment on the public's selection of his most popular poems, Frost replies, "I leave that in the lap of the gods, as they say" (24). He rejects what he calls the theory of influence as "that idea of Stevenson's that you should play the sedulous ape to anybody" (12). However, when asked about his classical education in reference to Pound's mention of it, Frost remarks that he has read "probably more Latin and Greek than Pound ever did" (10). He wants it both ways, to appear as both the self-educated genius unmoved by the work of his predecessors or his peers, and the expert who is highly trained in learned topics granting authority to his work. 270

Ezra Pound is a favourite target of Frost in this interview, perhaps in part due to

Poirier's repeated attempts (in vain) to link the two poetically. Instead, Frost deftly flicks

Pound from his intellectual tower by casually mentioning his hypocrisies and frailties. He mocks Pound's fickle literary tastes (15); his rudeness and cruelty; and his pretence to

"take a fellow that had never written anything and think he could make a poet out of him"

(16) (Frost remarks, "We won't go into that" - he says plenty without going into it!).

Frost suggests that Pound's knowledge of linguistics has been exaggerated by mentioning that Pound's old teacher once said to him, "Pound? I had him in Latin, and Pound never knew the difference between a declension and a conjugation" (18). Finally, he hints at

Pound's inflated sense of self by remarking on his exceptionally large signature (19).

Interestingly, Frost avoids coming off as vindictive or cruel by tempering his remarks, in the end, with kindness and generosity. Frost discusses his role in securing Pound's release from St. Elizabeth's Hospital after Pound's conviction on charges of treason:

Well, it's a sad business. And he's a poet. I never, I never questioned that.

We've been friends all the way along, but I didn't like what he did in

wartime. I only heard it secondhand, so I didn't judge it too closely. But it

sounded pretty bad. He was very foolish in what he bet on and whenever

anybody really loses that way, I don't want to rub it into him. (19)

And so, after all the shots Frost has taken at Pound, he comes off sounding like a gentle, forgiving, old man who ultimately knows best.

Perhaps Frost's greatest affectation is his repeated claims to indifference about the accomplishments, status and opinions of others. Again, on the topic of Pound, Frost claims not to have ever heard of him before Harold Monro referred Frost to him. He 271 blames his ignorance on not having read the magazines or paid any attention to gossip

(5). Later when asked about his literary relationship with Wallace Stevens, Frost says he felt "no affinity with him" (13). When asked if he knew the philosopher Santayana at school, Frost states he "never knew him personally... never knew anybody personally in college" (22).

On the topic of Frost's public reception, Poirier brings up Lionel Trilling's famous speech on the occasion of Frost's eighty-fifth birthday in 1959. For many,

Trilling's speech is considered a turning point in the direction and tone of critical attention towards Frost's work. In his address, later reprinted in full in The Partisan

Review, Trilling eloquently pointed out the gap between "the 'two' Robert Frosts", the famous, well-loved Yankee poet who "reassures us by his affirmations of old virtues, simplicities, pieties, and ways of feeling" and the "terrifying poet" who showed people

on

"the terrible things of human life" (Trilling, "A Speech" 450-2). In retrospect, Trilling's remarks can be seen to have elevated Frost's critical legacy by triggering a sea change in the way that Frost is read and discussed at all levels of literary and academic culture.

Since the time of Trilling's speech, critics are more inclined to focus on Frost's more complex, highly ambiguous works, such as "Design" and "Neither Out Far nor In Deep."

It was, in fact, an angry response to Trilling's speech in the New York Times Book Review (by J. Donald Adams) that caused the biggest stir at the time ("Speaking of Books" 12 April 1959). Adams, like many of Frost's readers, was shocked and deeply offended by Trilling's impression of Frost, an impression that certainly contradicted the accepted (and relatively simplistic) reception of his work at the time. Subsequent readers' letters to the Review (including ones from prominent poets, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and the publisher of The Saturday Review) confirm the popular understanding of Frost at the time, that is, the first of the two Frosts: reassuring, simplistic, idealistic ("Recent Letters to the Editor" 26 April 1959). And yet, as Trilling went on to explain in further commentary on the matter, his assessment was hardly intended to be an insult ("A Speech" 445). 272

By exposing and tenderly touching the tragic side of life as something deeply entwined in the ideal, the pastoral, and even the manifest America, Frost was a poet of great power, much loved by his people.

When questioned about the speech in the Paris Review interview, Frost agrees that his work is "full of darkness" and wonders why it wasn't seen sooner (25). Still, as with other criticism of his work, Frost distances himself from his commentators. On

Trilling, Frost remarks: "I hadn't read his paper. I'd never read him much. I don't read criticism. You see no magazines in the house" (26). Again, Frost is adamant about his creative independence and, whether we believe him or not, he wants his audience to think that he does not cater to the critics in his work or his life.

Ironically, in the next breath, Frost returns to an article mentioned by Poirier earlier in the conversation, a piece by Karl Shapiro in The New York Times Book Review which praised Frost for being simpler and therefore superior to his Modernist contemporaries. Frost asks Poirier if Shapiro "is a friend" (read: is the article favourable?). Poirier gives a brief description of Shapiro's position but Frost is still not satisfied, and repeats, "What was Shapiro saying?" (27). Clearly, Frost is not as critically disinterested as he claims. Like Hemingway, Frost consistently works to protect his literary sovereignty by distancing himself from the influences of his peers and the opinion of his critics while simultaneously caring deeply about how his public sees him.

Related to this affected indifference is Frost's insistent independence from groups or movements of any kind. He speaks of never having wanted to choose "positions," or

"belong to any gang" and how he refused to align himself with any poetic style (Frost even affects a confusion about the name of the Georgian poets—calling them the Edwardians—to further distance himself) (7). During college, Frost says he "went [his] own way" (22). Frost is careful to note that his self-identified outsider status has always been of his own choosing, that others wanted his presence in their circles but he always resisted. This tendency is best illustrated in an anecdote that Frost tells about Pound and

Hulme:

... I had an instinct against belonging to any of those [literary] crowds.

I've had friends, but very scattering, a scattering over there. You know, I

could have . . . Pound had an afternoon meeting once a week with Flint

and Aldington and H. D. And at one time Hulme, I think ... They met

every week to rewrite each other's poems.... I knew Hulme, knew him

quite well. But I never went to one of those meetings. I said to Pound,

"What do you do?" He said, "Rewrite each other's poems." And I said,

"Why?" He said, "To squeeze the water out of them." "That sounds like a

parlor game to me," I said, "and I'm a serious artist"—kidding, you know.

And he laughed and he didn't invite me any more. (8)

This anecdote subtly accomplishes several things for Frost. He is able to imply a desire on Pound's part to have a closer relationship with him without directly saying that he was so wanted. Also, he is able to paint Pound as a humourless man while simultaneously depicting himself as a misunderstood teaser who has the upper hand on these highly acclaimed contemporaries. While it is Frost who is no longer invited, the story makes it appear that Frost is ultimately in control, teasing his contemporaries for their poetic methods. 274

Finally, Frost exploits the Paris Review interview form to perform his favourite self: the insouciant accidental poet. Near the end of the interview, Poirier points out to

Frost that there is a duality and even deception that lurks beneath his seemingly simple facade in his tendency to undercut his own statements or "unsay" everything after he has said it (27). Frost admits he likes to "fool" and be "mischievous" but insists it is never "in that dull way of just being dogged and doggedly obscure" (27). Poirier reminds Frost that he himself has previously described his use of variety of tone to double his meaning.

While Frost seems to like this characterization in some ways, perhaps it smacks a little of a kind of striving artifice, of too much intention for his liking. After first agreeing with

Poirier's assessment, Frost wants to make it clear that he is not willing to play the critic.

He appears to momentarily lose his composure before regaining his careful nonchalant demeanour. He scrambles to distance himself from the strivers, the others who try too hard to define themselves, who are too self-consciously writerly:

I don't know. No, don't... no don't you . . . don't think of me . . . See I

haven't led a literary life. These fellows, they really work away with their

prose trying to describe themselves and understand themselves, and so on.

I don't do that. I don't want to know too much about myself. It interests

me to know that Shapiro thinks I'm not difficult. That's all right. I never

wrote a review in my life, never wrote articles. I'm constantly refusing to

write articles. These fellows are all literary men. I don't have hours; I

don't work at it, you know." (28)

Despite his loud protestations, Frost spends the better part of the rest of the interview doing exactly what he has denied doing, trying to explain himself and his 275 creative vision. While he may reject those who "really work away with their prose trying to describe themselves," Frost does a fine job and manages some eloquent turns of phrase in his poetic self-description. On poetry, he quips: "I look at a poem as a performance. I look on the poet as a man of prowess, just like an athlete. He's a performer.... Every poem is like that: some sort of achievement in performance" (30). Frost describes the necessary "wit" of poetry, an element lost in so much of the "labored stuff (30). He returns to his concern of tone, saying it is "everything" (30). Finally, Frost determines to tackle his poetic theory in the very idiom he is most comfortable with: a folksy, down- home language that speaks directly and with vigour. His description of his own creative process is typical "Frost":

Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat.... Very first [poem] I

wrote I was walking home from school and I began to make it—a March

day—and I was making it all afternoon and making it so I was late at my

grandmother's for dinner. I finished it, but it burned right up, just burned

right up, you know. And what started that? What burned it? ... The whole

thing is performance and prowess and feats of association. Why don't

critics talk about those things—what a feat it was to turn that that way, and

what a feat it was to remember that, to be reminded of that by this? Why

don't they talk about that? Scoring. You've got to score.... It ought to be

that you're thinking forward, with the feeling of strength that you're

getting them good all the way, carrying out some intention more felt than

thought. It begins. And what it is that guides us—what is it? Young people

wonder about that, don't they? But I tell them it's just the same as when 276

you feel a joke coming. You see somebody coming down the street that

you're accustomed to abuse, and you feel it rising in you, something to say

as you pass each other. Coming over him the same way. And where do

these thoughts come from? Where does a thought? Something does it to

you. It's him coming toward you that gives you the animus, you know.

When they want to know about inspiration, I tell them it's mostly

animus.81

I quote this passage at length to demonstrate the full extent of Frost's self performance. It reads like the speech of a central character at the climax of a play: homespun, dramatic, accessible, heartfelt. He is an accomplished orator who uses familiar language and passion to deliver his message. The actual information he conveys to the reader is vague; however, his enthusiasm and earnestness capture the audience's full attention and secure the power of the Frost myth.

Ultimately, the Paris Review interview becomes another stage on which Frost's well-developed persona can perform. While it may take him some time to feel comfortable in such a collaborative genre, in the end, Frost firmly secures the reins of the interview and drives it to his desired destination. He refuses to be framed in a portrait he

The term animus suggests an interesting riddle. The word often refers to the Greek concept of the natural and primitive parts of mind's activity and processes which remain after dispensing with the persona. It is the antithesis of the masks we wear for social interaction. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, animus refers to an "Actuating feeling, disposition in a particular direction, animating spirit or temper, usually of a hostile character; hence, animosity." Frost's use of the term to indicate the driving force of inspiration and something akin to performance reflects the complex nature of persona for him. 277 has not approved. Frost's reputation was never something that happened to him. As biographer Stanley Burnshaw puts it:

However amateurish Frost as a self-promoter may appear today, as a

"poet-speaker-performer" he was unsurpassed. From years of barding

around, he learned not only "everything written is as good as it is

dramatic" but also everything said in a hall of listeners. "I have myself all

in a strong box where I can unfold as a personality at discretion," he wrote

about publishing poems; but the words apply to his platform presence as

well. In the early days of success (1916) he had grown aware of his

problem: how to prepare a "face" to present to an audience. The solution

probably called for introducing some acting, some pretending, some

masking of what he considered his frailties. The poet of 1909, who learned

to lessen his fear of facing an audience sought to meet the need of his

listeners or what he thought it to be. (Burnshaw 264)

Burnshaw's take on Frost reminds us of the need for persona among most public figures, that it is a strategy of survival as much as self-promotion. The crafting of a public image is not necessarily deceptive; it is simply a part of the job for most twentieth- century writers. And who can say how much of this image-making eventually spiralled out of Frost's control, even when it may have appeared otherwise? Recent biographer Jay

Parini describes how the line between personality and persona is not always clear:

In playing out the role of public poet... [Frost] had honed a sense of self

and discovered (or created) a persona that felt natural. It was a complex mask: wise, witty, compassionate, ironic, cool, tough. In a sense, it was

artfully composed of his own idiosyncratic mix of attributes. (345)

Parini asserts that Frost eventually became tied to his own mask: "Frost as a New

England Farmer is a self-invention.... It's an act. He chose a mask for himself, and over seven decades, he became that mask. It stuck to his face. It became him."

It is not possible to completely tease apart the strands of reality from those of myth. In the case of Frost, as in that of Hemingway, the man and the mask are so tightly entwined that they must be considered together. The Paris Review interview provides a perfect stage for such a performance, one that, however polished by editing and omissions, still allows the astute reader brief glimpses behind the mask. The mask is informative when it is seen as such: as a creative, constructed facade and not as an integral, essential part of the writer. By looking at the efforts to paint and don that mask, and to maintain its solid position, we can use the interview to learn about the writer, his art, and the field of culture in which both are operating, or, at times, struggling.

5.4.3 A Lady Composed: Marianne Moore's 1961 Pahs Review Interview

In interviews and public events, Marianne Moore consistently projected a well-

on mannered, ladylike, and modest image of herself. For her contemporary readers,

This construction influenced readers' and critics' impressions of Moore as an individual, and also slipped over into critical reception of her work. The context of the reader response to Marianne Moore is framed by an intentional public persona invented and maintained by the poet herself. 279

Moore's work was tied up in the image she conveyed in public interviews and on the streets of New York. She was known as "Miss Moore in the black tricorned hat"

(Erickson 145), a neat little sketch that well reflects the character Moore chose to project.

The calculated nature of Moore's self-presentation was accomplished by a skilful blend of appearance, "impeccable manners" (Plimpton, "The World Series" 54), intelligence, and conversational dexterity. The bare facts of Moore's life set the stage for an eccentric: she lived most of her life with her mother in a small apartment in New York, worked as a teacher and librarian in her early years of writing, and mostly avoided the cosmopolitan social circles and activities of other Modernists. She rarely travelled or participated in the bohemian lifestyle of her contemporaries (Hanscombe 130).

Early in her career, Moore's personality drew mixed response, often positive but with an underlying tone of intimidation or bewilderment. Moore was an unapologetic

Presbyterian Christian in a world that considered such ideas old-fashioned; some scorned her religion, calling her a "churchgoing, cerebralizing moralist" (Robert McAlmon in

Martin 11), while others exalted it, calling her "a saint" (William Carlos Williams in

Erickson 144). Likewise with her charisma: many appreciated it but detected a distance in her nature that made intimacy difficult. Her apartness led her close friend William Carlos

Williams to describe her as "out of place . .. like a red berry still hanging to the jaded rose bush" (qtd. in Erickson 144). Moore participated in this cultivation of difference, and responded to Williams by agreeing that her "reserved manner kept her at the fringe of the

Greenwich Village crowd" but that ought not to provoke pity for "the red berry when the bush is so full of sap" (qtd. in Martin 11). 280

Moore assented to and even encouraged others to accept her reputation of propriety and fastidiousness. On discussing her translating work for The Fables of La

Fontaine, she denied there was anything indelicate in its content, adding, "I'm as near prudish as anyone can get these days, and I don't feel there is anything bad" (Nichols 30).

She also dramatized a sense of modesty in many of her public interviews. In reference to a mid-1950s tribute to her, Moore told an interviewer that "it's dreadful when people of good will try to praise you and make you happy" (Schulman 166).

In general, Moore expressed a kind of reluctance about the demands of the public, resenting their presence while accommodating their requests for information, interviews and even poetic offerings. This reached a comical apex in 1956 when the Ford Motor

Company asked her to name their newest model (later named the Edsel by Henry Ford after his son). After looking at the sketches, she wrote them an enigmatic—and not very useful—response: "They are indeed exciting; they have quality, and the toucan tones lend tremendous allure ... looked at upside down furthermore, there is a sense of fish buoyancy" (Moore, "To Mr. Wallace" 13 Nov. 1955). Moore's suggested names included

"The Mongoose Civique" and "The Utopian Turtletop" (Moore, "To Mr. Wallace" 28

Nov. 1955; Moore, "To Mr. Wallace" 8 Dec. 1955). This incident and its resultant correspondence reflect the playfulness, esotericism, and earnest desire to please that seems to thread through both Moore's public self-presentation and her writing.

Moore's public image went through several shifts over her lifetime. Her personal interests were never defined or limited by the literary community of "high moderns" to which she belonged. Instead of collecting paintings or engaging in erudite discussions of

"high art," in her later years, Moore was attracted to and celebrated aspects of 281 mainstream American culture. Moore became intensely and publicly interested in baseball in 1949, making the Brooklyn Dodgers (and later the New York Yankees) her pet team. Moore's role as a public and outspoken fan of the Dodgers reflects a curious combination of patriotism and sportsmanship. There is also something childlike in her unbridled enthusiasm for and curiosity about the world around her. This passion stayed with Moore until her final days. At eighty-two, Moore was still an avid fan, throwing out the first ball in Yankee Stadium. In addition, she was a friend of Cassius Clay

(Mohammed Ali), dining out regularly with him in New York, and she did not hesitate to express anti-Vietnam sentiments (Schulman 168). By the 1950's, Moore's personal life, performed in public, made her "something of a Grand Old Dame of American Letters"

(Hinshaw).

In her spontaneous outings and contrived public appearances, Moore was photographed, often at her own request. These images were widely reproduced, even gracing the covers of Vogue and Esquire (Hinshaw). There is a remarkable consistency and precision in the constructed appearance recorded in these images (Martin, Erickson) that tells us that Moore was in control of this self-presentation. Even in her early days,

Moore cut a recognizable figure. She was always well-groomed and put-together and had a fondness for somewhat unusual accessories, most famous of course, her black tricorn hat, "an article that was eventually to become her trademark. She was to become a poet of tokens and emblems and rare objects" (Molesworth 30). In later years, she added a black cape and a silver dollar brooch to her uniform appearance, making her instantly familiar to her ever-expanding circle of famous friends in New York City. As her biographer,

Charles Molesworth, points out, this self-representation mirrored her complex self-image which had "several elements in it: self-protectiveness, a genuine love for formal fashion, a sense of play, a desire to have a public role, and even some personal vanity" (432). In addition, Moore's absolute care with diction and pronunciation once led to her description as having "Titian hair, a brilliant complexion and a mellifluous flow of polysyllables which held every man in awe" (Kreymborg 186). A 1969 Saturday Review story describes her as "a beauty with braided white hair and the wit of Casey Stengel" and "flawless credentials" who greeted her interviewer "resting serenely and brightly in the little bed ... in a pink flannelette nightgown with flowers embroidered along the neckline" (Durso 51-2).

While coverage of Moore's public image was generally positive, there was often a tone of condescension or even confusion that shadowed these neat little descriptions of

Marianne Moore. So often, commentators struggled (and continue to struggle) to reconcile the seemingly contradictory elements of her demeanour: her softness and femininity mixed with prowess and precise dexterity. A good example of this tension is apparent in her first major personal profile, a 1957 piece by Winthrop Sargeant in The

New Yorker titled "Humility, Concentration and Gusto." Spread over 22 pages, this lengthy literary, biographical and personal study of the poet brought the personality of

Marianne Moore into the public consciousness. Sargeant starts his profile by describing

Moore as "America's greatest living woman poet, or as one of America's greatest living poets, or even as America's greatest living poet" (38). He then outlines the impression most readers have of Moore, drawn from descriptions in mainstream family magazines, as "a quaint and rather stylish spinster who, at the age of sixty-nine, lives in a cluttered apartment in Brooklyn and writes poems about animals." While determined to move beyond this stereotype, like Donald Hall in the much later Paris Review interview, Sargeant still spends ample time describing in detail

Moore's "snug" domestic environment: the books, rare knickknacks, art and odd souvenirs that people her space (42-44). We are given a homey image of the private poet, a figure who exists in quiet, almost cloistered spaces and represents a nostalgic, somewhat innocent view of the past. This focus on Moore's intimate home setting, her space as one of enclosures and privacy—despite her public image—is a recurrent theme in media descriptions of her. In the New Yorker profile, this domestic imagery is coupled with descriptions by her neighbours, who call her "a real home lady" who "likes to talk about scenery and flowers," has meticulous manners, attends church regularly, and

"represents the genteel traditions of a noble and nearly forgotten era" (38).

Meanwhile, those in Moore's inner circle describe her as an "intellectual comedienne" or a "gentle lioness of formidable glamour" (38). One can't help but wonder if they are talking about the same woman. Sargeant describes both her persona and work in hyperbolic terms; however, they are often terms that seem to be at odds with one another. On the one hand, she is "urbane," "educated," practical, "scrupulous" and reticent; on the other, she can be an "outrageous chatterbox," "thorny," and reckless in her conversational tangents, with a "highly volatile mind" (38-70). In addition, Sargeant presents a fantastic image of Moore as a soaring trapeze artist, performing enviable intellectual and poetic acrobatics; however, this character is simultaneously described as a "quixotic intellectual flirt" who regards others with "a certain coquettish timidity" (76-

77). While perhaps not exactly a paradox, it is fair to say that the image Marianne Moore projected was complex and layered, and not easily reduced to simple labels, especially the narrow, restricted labels available to women intellectuals of her generation.

It is significant that her carefully maintained public ladylike image persisted to her death. By this time, she had composed poems to the Dodgers, the Yankees, Mickey

Mantle and Whitey Ford and was the darling of many athletic celebrities and pop-culture heroes. The relationship was reciprocal; the spirit of these figures inspired her writing and in turn, they considered this quaint, faithful poet their own "Muse" (Durso 52).

Moore's beloved image inspired the mixed blessing of national appreciation and public fawning that led Charles Tomlinson once to note that Moore had been reduced to "the status of a kind of national pet" (12). And yet, in many ways, this was her choice of persona. Moore chose to dress the part of the chaste, quiet, witty lady and was careful to never disrupt that image with expressions of a sexuality or emotionalism that might threaten her colleagues and readers.

The Paris Review interview with Marianne Moore was conducted in 1961 by

Donald Hall when Moore was 74 years old. Like many Paris Review subjects, Moore likely would have been looking back over her life, no longer constructing her image so much as polishing it for posterity. Unlike Frost's interviewer Richard Poirier, who was an established critic and scholar, Donald Hall is himself a poet and the conversation with

Moore focuses on poetic method and literary community concerns to a much greater extent than does the Frost interview. Hall is adept at drawing Moore out to expound on issues of expression and modernity in a way that seems more like a meeting of ideas and minds (those of two creative intellectuals) than a meeting of two strong personalities.

Still, in a close reading of the interview, there are many opportunities to witness the 285 assertion of the persona Moore has so carefully constructed. Most often, Hall works in tandem with her to help her project this chosen image. At other times, tiny fissures appear in her crafted surface and contradictions begin to show through.

From the very beginning of the published interview, in the headnote, Donald Hall strives to delineate the shape of this memorable personality he is about to convey. Hall's physical description of Moore and her milieu works within the public persona Moore had established. He sets the stage in keeping with the old-fashioned aura that surrounds

Moore, noting the paintings hung in her apartment are "heavy, tea-colored oils that

Americans hung in the years before 1914" (2). The furniture is also "old-fashioned and dark," completing the period set-piece. It is no accident that Moore's setting is domestic; her character is shown to best advantage in the "snug" atmosphere of her own home, filled to overflowing with the objects that reflect her varied and often eccentric interests.

Hall also notes that her street "was pleasantly lined with a few trees, and Miss Moore's apartment was conveniently near a grocery store and the Presbyterian church that she attended" completing the prosaic setting and reinforcing the puritan and domestic aspects of her personality through her proximity to church and amenities.

Moore's fastidiousness is deftly represented in Hall's selection of a few choice details, such as her accessories. Before going out for lunch, Moore "decided not to wear her Nixon button because it clashed with her coat and hat" (2). While this is a comment by Hall on Moore, the fact that Moore mentioned her fashion decision to him reflects her meticulous habits of self-presentation. This awareness and concern for her physical appearance corresponds exactly with what her public expects of the "little old lady in the tricorn hat." Donald Hall continues by describing his impression upon meeting Moore:

Miss Moore spoke with an accustomed scrupulosity, and with a humor

which her readers will recognize. When she ended a sentence with a

phrase which was particularly telling, or even tart, she glanced quickly at

the interviewer to see if he was amused, and then snickered gently. (21)

Moore's self-deprecating, yet intelligent humour often left an impression on those she met. In 1964, George Plimpton, interviewing her not for The Paris Review but for

Harper's, noted her soft, "engrossing" voice and her talent for finding appropriate and funny anecdotes (Plimpton, "The World Series" 52). This perception often overflowed into the reception of her poems, causing one critic to detect "the queerest lurking laughter

... mixed with a certain primness" in her writing (Benet 571).

The very language that Moore uses in the interview becomes fodder for the persona the reader constructs of her. Moore's vocabulary is both esoteric and highly precise; she always seeks out the exact word, even when describing banal life events.

This insistence on accurate terminology and her willingness to use an uncommon and highly intellectual lexicon are trademarks of Moore's style and personality. For example, in speaking of her early biography, Moore struggles to remember the order of things and complains that "it's very hard to get these things seriatim" (5). She acknowledges this tendency towards exact language in appropriately elevated diction when discussing her love of "the accuracy of the vernacular": "I think I should be in some philological operation or enterprise, am really much interested in dialect and intonations" (4). Even when her choice of words is not polysyllabic or esoteric, Moore weaves a language as subtle and rhythmic of that in her poetry: "I like rhymes, inconspicuous rhymes and un- pompous conspicuous rhymes" (12).

The way in which Moore describes her writing style further enhances her projected persona. Well known as a self-restrained character, Moore admires these same qualities in science, medicine and her own writing: "Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested, drawing and identifying, liberate—at least have some bearing on—the imagination, it seems to me" (5). Compare this manner of self-expression with, say, Robert Frost's folksy conversation and the singularity of

Moore's public persona is all the more striking. Moore's description of the writing process is made in specific, concrete terms instead of the emotional, cerebral, spiritual or creative processes referred to by other writers. Moore never shies away from workmanlike language when it is appropriate to her subject. For example, she exploits a bodily metaphor often used by her critics in describing her earlier jobs as a librarian and schoolteacher, asserting that these occupations "hardened [her] muscles considerably,

[her] mental approach to things" (7).

As a storyteller, Moore exhibits a painstaking attention to detail and sharpness of memory in the Paris Review interview. When she recounts an experience, it is always with great exactitude. For example, when Moore narrates an anecdote about her education, she includes the number of hours per week a class demanded and the specific academic standing required (5). Her early visits to New York, London and Paris are described with a precision that would make one think she is reading from a travel journal, complete with dates, names and specific locations (6, 8). Her adamance about accuracy comes through in most of her comments; she is never content with vague or exaggerated descriptions of an event. At several points during the interview with Hall, Moore corrects him on a point or emphatically dispels a myth that has been perpetuated by her commentators. For example, she refutes the belief that her family knew the Eliots (2), that she had any early leanings toward writing or theatre (4), that she had read Laforgue and other French authors (as Pound once stated) (14), or that she was somehow responsible for supporting a whole community of Village writers (William Carlos

Williams said she was "a rafter holding up the superstructure of our uncompleted building"; Moore's response was that she "never was a rafter holding up anyone!" [10]).

Part of this concern seems to stem from Moore's fear of being misrepresented to the public. She is acutely aware of her high profile and feels persecuted by inaccuracies in the press: "Although everyone is penalized by being quoted inexactly, I wonder if there is anybody alive whose remarks are so often paraphrased as mine—printed as verbatim. It is really martyrdom" (27). Clearly, Moore's precision in poetic language carries over to her expectations of those who portray her.

As mentioned earlier, connected to Moore's exactitude is her moral correctness.

While this aspect of her persona is subtle in the context of the Paris Review interview, interviewer Donald Hall is clearly aware of this quality and steers the questions in that direction. In discussing the "moral terms" of her writing, he asks "In what way must a man be good if he is to write good poems?" (29). This is an indication of the adaptation of interview to persona, as such a question would never be asked of say, Hemingway or

Mailer, writers for whom "moral correctness" is not part of their reputation. Moore slightly circumvents the question and refuses an absolute answer: 289

MOORE. Must a man be good to write good poems? The villains in

Shakespeare are not illiterate, are they? But rectitude has a ring that is

implicative, I would say. And with no integrity, a man is not likely to write

the kind of book I read. (29)

Quite often, Moore lends her insistence upon accuracy to the service of self- deprecation. She repeatedly speaks of her own work with modesty. She dismisses Alfred

Kreymborg's promotion of her in the early years with, "I was a little different from the others. He thought I might pass as a novelty, I guess" (11), radically downplaying her early poetic achievement. Throughout the interview, Moore readily admits to her own follies and describes her discomfort and often distress with the task of writing. She describes her first poetry collection as a "slight product—conspicuously tentative" (11). It was put out by H.D. and Bryher (1921) in a "format choicer than the content," according to the overly modest Moore. On the 1935 publication of her Selected Poems, Moore has this to say:

MOORE.... it seemed to me not very self-interested of Faber and Faber,

and simultaneously of the Macmillan Company, to propose a Selected

Poems for me. Desultory occasional magazine publications seemed to me

sufficient, conspicuous enough. (11)

Her extreme humility, while charming at times, comes across as an affectation through its repetition. Also, the fact that she brings up the competing interests in her works (in the above passage) suggests that she is not as averse to self-promotion as she longs to

83 appear.

Similarly, Moore implies that there is nothing disciplined or professional about her creative practice. She exaggerates her lack of work ethic, saying that she writes down her ideas but never makes herself work on them and is only successful in writing when she doesn't "know" that she's "trying" (12). Even her motivation to write is framed in terms of inevitability as opposed to poetic ambition or striving: "I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.... Never, I never

"plan" a stanza.... No, I never "draw lines." (18) If her poetic method works like

"gravity," it is beyond her control and outside of her domain to explain. While these comments may seem more relevant to a discussion of Moore's attitude towards intention and composition, they are also related to her persona. Moore's backing away from agency in her own writing corresponds with her carefully constructed non-threatening femininity. She is being prudent not to appear too aggressive or competitive in her poetic position.

Perhaps because this aspect of Moore's persona clashes with an ambition concealed beneath, contradictions abound. She insists that she rarely submits material and only does so under duress ("I don't know that I submitted anything that wasn't extorted from me" [12]), and yet later contradicts herself, admitting that she once submitted a poem "thirty-five times" (17). She willingly details her troubles with, and the early rejection of, her translation of La Fontaine's Fables only to follow it up with an account

See the next chapter for more discussion of this tendency as it relates to the issue of authorial intention. 291 of the hyperbolic praise of Pound for her work (28). A poet of Moore's stature has plenty to crow about, and while it is common for interviewed writers to downplay their achievements, the extent of Moore's modesty, and her gymnastics to repeatedly assert that modesty, suggest an unresolved tension within her chosen persona. This tension may owe something to prevailing notions of femininity which encourage modesty over ambition and self-deprecation over confidence.

Along with her insistent non-striving, Moore repeatedly exhibits a desire to please in the Paris Review interview. She tells stories in which she seeks approval and validation (19); she admits to feelings of disappointment over rejection (19); she looks for confirmation even from her interviewer (21); she speaks of searching for the editorial opinions of others (24); and she admits to being too influenced by others' writing (27).

Some of these instances are simply verbal mannerisms of many women of her generation and should not be overstated; however, there are moments which, when contrasted with her obvious poetic confidence, suggest her desire to please may be an act. Despite her carefully affected lack of ambition, Moore's dogged independence is something that continuously slips through. She is fond of telling stories that illustrate her autonomy, describing herself as "tenacious" and her younger self as "fearless" and "impervious" (6)

The Paris Review interview format, with its focus on poetic inspiration and method, leaves ample room for the revelation of character and promotion of persona.

While Moore's attitude towards poetry is instructive in and of itself, such opinions can equally be found in critical essays and reference notes. The interview genre offers more than the obvious content of the conversation's topic; it can both project a chosen persona 292 for the subject and shed light on how that persona is developed and diffused. The public's acceptance or rejection of that persona deeply influences how the writer's works will be understood and responded to, and, as discussed earlier, how that work will be valued in the field of literary production.

The Paris Review interview works outside of its margins to affect the larger literary culture. Due to their careful description and editing, the interviews are fine examples of the genre's ability to expose the tensions and negotiations writers work through in the process of presenting themselves to the public. The interview both reflects and reproduces the structure of the field of literary production by responding to, and then further increasing, elements of reputation, fame, persona, and symbolic capital. The case studies of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, and Marianne Moore illustrate the potential of the literary interview as a site for the negotiation of public persona and celebrity.

Hemingway struggled to reconcile his tough guy image with his persistent anxieties about the craft of writing; Frost battled to maintain his folksy, simple-yet-wise persona in spite of his great need for control and self-promotion; and Moore wrestled with her conflicting impulses towards restraint and ambition. The Paris Review interview captures all of these mediations, and stands as a testament to the importance and challenges of celebrity for the writer. 293

CHAPTER 6 READING THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW: THE SEARCH FOR AUTHORIAL INTENTION

6.1 AUTHORIAL INTENTION AND THE WAY WE READ

In my examination of individual Paris Review interviews and analysis of how those exchanges were constructed and consumed, one issue repeatedly comes to the fore: authorial intention. Intention has become a somewhat muddled term: used frequently and often dispatched to serve great purposes by literary critics, writers and readers, it seems to mean something quite different to each person who uses it. In its most basic sense, intention refers simply to one's individual purpose, in the case of the author, what he or she meant to accomplish through the act of writing. Intention could cover issues as disparate as plot development, theme, character, style, meaning, symbolism and so on. As the Paris Review interviews take on the art of writing, they necessarily deal with multiple aspects of authorial intention. The problem arises with what to make of such declarations, as well as inferences, of authorial intention. Shall they be treated as gospel, the final word on the value and meaning of a text? Shall we consider them as contributing evidence in our ongoing search to understand and fully unpack a piece of writing? Or, as some would argue, should intention be merely an interesting footnote that in no way impinges upon one's understanding of a work?

In Paris Review interviews, interviewers rarely explicitly pose the question,

"What did you mean by X?"; however, the issue of intention both supports and shadows many of the topics discussed in these exchanges. Intention plays a key role in the writer interview in a host of ways. To begin, the sheer act of the interview, which seeks out the 294 personal opinion, biography and even personality of the author, constitutes an interest in, and attention to, the writer as an individual. In the historical debates around authorial intention, such an interest, when used by readers in their reading practice and assessment of literary value, amounts to what has been variably called "The Personal Heresy," "The

Intentional Fallacy" or, simply, intentionalist criticism. And yet, ideas about authorial intention inevitably influence readers when they pick up a literary interview. This is partly due to the numerous moments in literary interviews when the subject, either directly or indirectly, discusses the meaning of her work. Sometimes this comes in the more oblique form of explaining literary influences, technical aims, or philosophical or political positions. Other times, the theme of intention manifests in a direct discussion of what the writer meant readers to understand from her work or how she wants her work to be read. Intention is entwined in the act of reading a literary interview in both explicit and subtle ways. While readers may not equate authorial intention with the "final word" on a text's meaning, it still plays a significant role in methods of creating meaning. Finally, the issue of intention is occasionally handled in the Paris Review interviews as a theoretical concept. Several writers take up the issue of intention directly, sometimes expressing opinions about the role of authorial intention in literature that challenge the way we read their own statements about the meaning of their work. These direct treatments of authorial intention reflect often contradictory attitudes about the subject, and indicate the widespread confusion and even discomfort around the topic.

Modern literary interviews in general, and Paris Review interviews specifically, are unique sites of access to attitudes about authorial intention. The interview functions as an encounter between a writer and a reader, taking the surrogate form of the interviewer. 295

It is one of the few opportunities in literary culture for the subject of intention to be tackled directly, and for the differing assumptions about what defines intention to collide.

Essentially, the question of intention is also one of authority: who decides what a text means? The writer? The reader? Another, more critical observing party? When the subject of intention is discussed expressly, the distance and difference between these controlling agents is exposed. We see that writers and readers can display a range of attitudes about intention; however, in the climate of recent literary culture, few claims can be made with any certainty.

In this, the final chapter of the project, I will consider in detail how the issue of intention plays out in the Paris Review interview. First, in order to understand the repercussions of authorial talk of intention, I will offer a general historical overview of the debates around authorial intention in literary criticism. The importance, even the legitimacy, of authorial intention has been hotly argued in literary theory and criticism since the Romantic era with its emphasis on the individual author as the creative originator. These debates continue to the present, and often underlie the kind of assumptions and conclusions scholars make in literary interpretation and evaluation. I will address some of these recent debates as they shed new light on the effect of intention on reading practices. Then, I will look at several Paris Review interviews wherein the issue of authorial intention is either central to the conversation or implicit in the topics covered.

Critics have long argued about how one should understand and value the intention of the author in his or her literary production. The link between what readers think of authorial intention and how they approach and understand text has been discussed from 296 different angles. For the most part, up until quite recently, this link has been evaluated and judged from a prescriptive standpoint; that is, critics have traditionally worried less about what readers actually do, and focused on what they should do for optimum reading practice. In the Romantic era, readers were instructed to think of poets as unique and gifted creators, different from ordinary people and worthy of our study and worship.

Conversely, the later New Critical approach to literature concerned itself primarily with the autonomous text, that is, the words on the page, privileging the formal and technical properties of literature over concepts such as intention, inspiration, authenticity or the author's "true meaning." While Romantics took pleasure in elevating the talent of the creative individual, with New Criticism such fascination with the writer began to be seen as a guilty pleasure, or worse, a dangerous preoccupation that threatened to distort one's reading comprehension.

Clearly, especially before New Criticism, authorial intention was tied up in ideas of the singular creative talent or the genius of the writer. Readers sought out the opinion of the author because he was seen to be an exceptional figure, one who possessed rarefied and irrefutable knowledge. At times, a kind of authorial hero-worship made all discussion of intention moot; the writer was seen to create out of a type of original inspiration— conscious intention did not come into the equation. Wimsatt and Beardsley's warnings about "consulting the oracle" refer to this approach to the writer and, by and large, subsequent critics have shied away from treating the author to such a unique and adulated status.

In recent years, with the insights gained by reader response theory and more sociological approaches to literature, more attention is being paid to how readers 297 genuinely behave and how information is actually processed by both professional and non-professional readers alike. In 2001, by integrating the work of linguists, rhetoricians, psychologists and literacy experts, Raymond Gibbs offered the hypothesis that "authorial intentions motivate both why people value certain texts and why they find them to be meaningful when consciously reflecting about them" (Gibbs "Authorial Intentions"). I will come back to recent developments in the study of authorial intention at the end of this historical overview; I mention them here only to position the nature of my central questioning as influenced by the more recent shifts in theory.

The period of the early Paris Review interviews (1953-1978) was dominated by

New Critical doctrine towards authorial intention; however, as we will see, the interviews themselves both embody and reflect a variety of views about the meaning and importance of the concept of authorial intention. In order to sort out the various understandings of the term, and the shifting weight that has been placed on intention over the years, I will begin with a brief overview of literary critical writings on authorship that consider the meaning and significance of intention.

6.2 THE INTENTION DEBATES

6.2.1 The Romantic Era: the Poet is the Poem

The New Critical distaste for the cult of the author can be properly understood only by looking at the attitudes that preceded it, namely, Romanticism. Certainly, poetic commentary of the Romantic era, while not rightly "criticism" by today's definitions, focused heavily on the poet as an individual and his poetic process and intention over the 298 poetic text. A typical example of this is Wordsworth's 1802 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads.

This poetic treatise is devoted to exploring the appropriate purpose and method of the poet. Wordsworth's famous proclamation that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (62) is a statement explicitly about the poet's experience of writing that seems to overlook the final text on the page. Wordsworth takes his time exploring the process of poetic composition and directs his readers to pay attention to that practice. He states definitively that each of his works "has a purpose" and later refers to the "aim" of his poetry. While there is time given to more formal elements such as style, language, rhyme and meter, the preface is essentially a manifesto of Wordsworth's intention as a poet, and even technical matters are framed in terms of poetic desire: "the style in which it was my wish and intention to write" (63-68).

Perhaps most striking—and later most offensive to anti-intentionalist critics—is

Wordsworth's consistent gaze on the figure of the poet instead of the poem as the appropriate object of study. Throughout his preface, Wordsworth clusters his inquiries around the Poet as Man ("What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men ..." [70-71]) and goes to great lengths to describe the character and qualities of the (fine) poet—without a trace of humility, one cannot help but observe. To Wordsworth, a poet is one who is:

... a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm

and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more

comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a

man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more

than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate

similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the 299

universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find

them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more

than other men by absent things as if they were present; . . . whence, and

from practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing

what he thinks and feels ... (71)

In this excerpt, we have an image of the author as a singular creative talent, a man unlike ordinary men, almost a species apart. I quote Wordsworth at length (though I have omitted large sections of the passage) precisely to demonstrate the extent to which he focuses on the personality of the author. The sheer verbosity of this characterization flags it for our attention, and reminds us how out of place such a soliloquy would be in today's post-intentional fallacy climate. As Gail McDonald discusses in Learning to be Modern:

Pound, Eliot, and the American University, it was this "celebration of Romantic genius" that would come to be rejected by moderns such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in their search for a new approach to studying and appreciating literature (57).

In addition to the intentions and process of the poet, Wordsworth repeatedly addresses the issue of feelings and pleasure in his preface. He speaks of the "necessity of producing immediate pleasure" in the reader as a primary concern of the poet (73) and the need for the poet to cleave his own feelings to those of the subject he describes (72).

Again, the emphasis is on the intimate feelings of the poet as an individual. While not explicitly focused on intention, this emphasis on emotion is tied to the elevation of the poet, not the text, as the proper topic of study.

On the whole, Wordsworth's preface prioritizes poetic intention not so much by its explicit proscriptions, but by its general focus: the poet as a creative individual is more 300 important than the poem as a creative work. The reader is taught to judge a work in light of the character of its creator. In fact, Wordsworth's audience is equally the reader and the fellow poet; it is the Poet, one who "thinks and feels in the spirit of the passions of men" (79), who "ought especially to take care that... [his] passions ... should always be accompanied with an overbalance of pleasure" (83). The reader's reception practice is treated as a transparent corollary to the successful poetic intuition-expression.

Wordsworth's emphasis on the poet and his intention is typical of Romantic poetics and is echoed in Francis Turner Palgrave's introduction to his 1861 Golden

Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. The Golden

Treasury was a seminal collection of poetry appreciated through the Romantic lens of the time; Palgrave's editorial decisions and perspective are representative of the period. Like

Wordsworth, Palgrave extols the importance of feelings and pleasure to poetry. Also,

Palgrave explicitly addresses the issue of how one should assign merit to poetry. His primary claim centres on the successful realization of the poet's intention: "... a Poem shall be worthy of the writer's genius ... it shall reach a perfection commensurate with its aim." Again, the singular creative talent of the writer is emphasized to the point that it is equated with his "aim" (read: intention) and the quality of the work. This is precisely the kind of exaltation of poetic intention to the standard for the judgement of quality that

Wimsatt and Beardsley vehemently decry almost three quarters of a century later.

Without delving too deeply into Romantic notions of authorship and intention, what I hope to establish with the examples of Wordsworth and Palgrave is a general rhetoric of intention that existed during the period. Literary thinkers and writers spoke about writing in a way that privileged the individual poetic sensibility; they consistently 301 elevated the poet and his emotions and intentions above the final text. This priority given to the writer would be challenged by the Moderns and a new way of thinking about art.

6.2.2 T. S. Eliot: A Move Towards Impersonality

Written in 1919, T. S. Eliot's famous treatise "Tradition and the Individual

Talent" can be read as a herald of the anti-intentionalist movement in literary criticism.

While it is more obviously about the issue of authorial personality than authorial intention, the claims of the essay have significant bearing on the question of intention and are relevant to the development of criticism around the subject. Like many modernist literary critics of the time, Eliot was writing against the accepted Romantic approach to literature as much as he was writing for a new way of writing and reading.

"Tradition and the Individual Talent" is considered significant for its espousal of an "impersonal theory" of poetry whereby the poet's personality and emotion is secondary to the poem's position in a tradition of artists and writers within which he exists and creates (534). In contrast to the Romantic conception of "emotion recollected in tranquility," in this work, Eliot claims that the poet's job is not to reflect emotion but simply to exploit ordinary feelings to synthetically create, through the process of poetic composition, new emotions that do not correspond in any direct sense with a "real" event or experience. On this, we have one of Eliot's most famous quotations: "Poetry is not a

"Tradition and the Individual Talent" was initially published in two parts in The Egoist (1919). The following year (1920), it was reprinted in The Sacred Wood, Eliot's first collection of criticism. My source text for this project is Selected Essays ofT. S. Eliot (1948). turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality" (538). Historically, this passage has been used to support an anti-intentionalist approach to literature; however, Eliot's position is not nearly that simple.

First, it is important to observe that Eliot, like Wordsworth, is writing principally from the perspective of a writer and is addressing the concerns of the writer or poet, not the reader or critic. In several places in the essay, Eliot takes a pedagogical tone towards an audience that seems to be composed of other poets. This is an often overlooked aspect of his critical views that should influence our reading of his take on intention. For example, in one of the most often quoted passages of the piece, Eliot is, in effect, giving advice to other writers: ". .. the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past... he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career ... the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality"

(534). While this quotation is often made use of by critics as evidence of Eliot's rejection of the importance of the author's emotion, one might equally use it to support another interpretation. Eliot's emphasis throughout the essay on the process of writing from the poet's point of view and the cultivation of self-knowledge and awareness of tradition might also be read as an insistence on the importance of the author's own process in the assessment of his work. While Eliot preaches the repression of personality and the ascendancy of tradition, nowhere does he dismiss the importance of influence and process nor their relevance to the eventual meaning of a work.

Eliot's primary concern, in the opening section of the essay, is to establish a concept of the poet or artist in relation to a tradition of other artists: "no poet, no artist of 303 any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists" (531). At this point in the essay,

Eliot's "you" refers to the reader-critic: "You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead, I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical criticism" (532). On the surface, Eliot appears to disown the Romantic notion of the singular creative talent or genius. In some ways, however, this passage equally challenges later New Critical reading practices that value the autonomous text over external or extra-textual evidence, even while this essay as a whole was often used

Of to support solely text-based analyses.

Eliot's work is widely considered to be a major influence of New Criticism in both England and America. His position was often oversimplified into a rejection of the author's personality and importance. As it was one shared by many moderns including

Ezra Pound, it was soon taken to be doctrine on the character of the best poetry, that it

(and all literature, by implication) should always be autonomous of the author; it should exist independently of the subjective thoughts of its creator. Not only Eliot's ideas, many of which were reflected in the essays of his collection, The Sacred Wood, but also his poetry, came to be used by the New Critics as examples of how literature ought to be

While recent critics are more apt to explore the doubled meanings of Eliot's theories of literature, as early as 1967, critic Hugh Kenner, in an article entitled "Eliot and the Tradition of the Anonymous," made a similar claim about the ambivalent meaning of Eliot's critical theory: "Eliot, we know, was the Invisible Poet; he taught us to say that a poem comes into being mysteriously, immaculately, by a process akin to chemical processes, untouched by the personality that held the pen. He taught us to say this . . . but never really to believe it. Our practice, when we are thinking about Eliot's poetry rather than his critical theory, is to attach Eliot's poems to Eliot, and then invent ourselves an Eliot to go with them" (Kenner 558). As discussed in my consideration of Eliot's 1959 interview for The Paris Review, Eliot collaborates in that invention. 304 both created and considered. Gail McDonald, in her examination of the academy's use of modern poetry, asserts that "Pound and Eliot won not just readers but disciples, who took them as authoritative models for the proper uses of intelligence in a complicated and trying world" (179). Along with the work of I. A. Richards and William Empson, Eliot's attitude towards impersonality and his admiration for the metaphysical poets were shared by American New Critics such as John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt and Robert Penn Warren (see 6.2.5 New Criticism and Anti-Intentionalism). Though, in fact, quite heterogeneous in their critical perspectives, these men were often grouped together into a single school of thought—New Criticism—recognized for its interest in poetic language, structure and irony and their opposition to the use of extrinsic critical evidence such as authorial intention, readers, and historical, cultural or social context

(Newton 19). The poem, according to Eliot and later, the New Critics, should be

"subjected] to intense scrutiny" (McDonald 192), and there were specific, codifiable concerns that one should—and perhaps more importantly, should not—bring to the poetic object. Within this newly rigorous, disciplined approach to literature, there was little room for questions of intention and biography, both central concerns of the Paris Review interviews.

The issue of authorial intention was at the heart of debates around authorship in mid-century American literary culture. The New Critical turning away from the authority of the writer meant that in criticism, any mention of extra-textual factors, such as politics, biography or the intention of the writer, became suspect. Treatises with proscriptive titles such as "The Personal Heresy" (1939) and "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946) took aim at the use of personality or authorial intention in literary criticism. In denying the relevance of the author's desire or will in discerning a text's meaning, the authority of the author was overthrown and the relationship between the author and the text was forever changed.

6.2.3 Personality and Intention: C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard

While concepts of intention often threaded through modernist claims about literary interpretation, by the late 1930s the issue began to find its own language, advocates and dissenters. In 1939, C. S. Lewis and E. M. W. Tillyard published a bulky pamphlet entitled The Personal Heresy: a Controversy. It documents a debate between the two men via a series of essays on the issue of authorial personality and its relationship to the meaning of a poem. The object of Lewis' attack is what he sees as a modern propensity to emphasize the poet's character when reading poetry; he calls this "The

on

Personal Heresy." More specifically, Lewis' target is the critic, who, like Tillyard, proposes "that all poetry is about the poet's state of mind" (2). Instead, Lewis offers a thesis that echoes Eliot's earlier remarks about impersonal poetry: "when we read poetry as poetry should be read, we have before us no representation which claims to be the poet, and frequently no representation of a man, a character, or a personality at all." (4)

To be clear, for Lewis (and Tillyard by implication), poetry includes all "imaginative literature whether in prose or verse" (107); therefore, we can include novels, drama and other prose forms under the category of "poetry."

Lewis admits, part way through his treatise, that his "enemy" is "much less a fully fledged theory than a half-conscious assumption which I saw creeping into our critical tradition under the protection of its very vagueness" (49), a disclaimer that only partly explains why the offending assumption seems to slip away from his attempts to define it at every turn. 306

So how should one read the orphan text, according to Lewis? Lewis offers a fascinating, if somewhat confusing analogy:

Let it be granted that I do approach the poet; at least I do it by sharing his

consciousness, not by studying it. I look with his eyes, not at him.... The

poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says "look

at that" and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I

can possibly see of him. (11)

In some ways, it seems that Lewis is suggesting that the reader can gain more in reading poetry by identifying with the poet, by placing oneself in the position of the subject speaker of a work. Lewis continues, "To see things as the poet sees them I must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look where he looks and not turn round to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles .... I must enjoy him and not contemplate him" (12). However, the problem with "sharing [the] consciousness" of a writer is that it requires a certain familiarity with the character of said consciousness.

To this reader, such intimacy with the sensibilities of the poet/writer could be described as more "personal" than the approach Lewis is condemning. In wearing the "spectacles" of the poet, one necessarily gains access to his intent, perhaps more so than by focusing solely on the object of description or desire.

This approach to reading, Lewis contends, invests the reader with agency and power over the creative work. By eliminating the poet, the poetry becomes the domain of the reader, for better or worse. It is on this point that Lewis approaches a kind of aesthetic relativism: ". .. in such cases it is we who make the poetry. It is our own temperament that we enjoy" (16). Lewis concedes that this willing dismissal of the poet's attitude in 307 turn allows for a difference in point of view between the poet and the reader, a gap that can rarely be discerned accurately, nor should it be.

Relativism is narrowly avoided by Lewis' delineation of the proper and acceptable material for use in the composition of literature. In terms of the language and images the poet selects, "it is absolutely essential that each word should suggest not what is private and personal to the poet but what is public, common, impersonal, objective"

(19). The poet must choose from this common, accessible pool, and from it, he is free to arrange and describe them as he desires, to make them his own. Instead of focusing on appropriate evidence for the critic to consider in literary evaluation, Lewis aims his efforts at narrowing the range of appropriate material for the writer in literary production.

This choice is problematic; is it the poet or the reader who is liable to commit the

"personal heresy"?

Lewis contends that the personality of the poet is absent from the collective pool of images, languages and such; however, that does not equate to personality also being absent from the poet's arrangement of these elements. Here, Lewis concedes that there is some residue of the poetic personality that remains in his new criteria, and yet, what remains is dramatically different from "what the exponents of the personal dogma have in mind," that is, "a widely spread belief that the poet is a man who habitually sees things in a special way, and that his metaphor and other technique are simply means by which he admits us to share for a moment what is normal within him" (22). Now, we are finally approaching the heart of what Lewis is trying to condemn. It is not the personality of the poet, per se, that should be disregarded in literary evaluation; it is a reverence for the poet's mind as somehow unique, a kind of poetic exceptionalism. Here, Lewis firmly 308 dismisses the Romantic concept of the singular creative talent. Lewis asserts that such an attitude towards the poet's personality is not only a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the artist, it is simply bad for literary evaluation.

This focus on the personality can, and often does, lead to a kind of perverse fascination with the individual at the cost of attention to the work itself. Readers risk favouring the creative genius of the writer over its successful realization in the work.

Some would argue that Lewis could have been foreshadowing any number of contemporary interviews when he wrote:

Very few care for beauty; but any one can be interested in gossip. There is

always the great vulgar anxious to know what the famous man ate and

drank and what he said on his deathbed; there is always the small vulgar

greedy to lick up a scandal, to find out that the famous man was no better

than he should be. To such people any excuse for shutting up the terrible

books with all the lines and lines of verse in them and getting down to the

snug or piquant details of a human life, will always be welcome. (28)

Equally dangerous is the tendency to revere the poet on a scale completely out of step with his or her true status. Lewis calls this "Poetolatry," a practice that approaches replacing religion with poetry through its "worship of saints and the traffic in relics" in the form of biographies and expressions of devotion (65). This "cult of poetry" is especially threatening because such attention to the poet's personality, as opposed to a religious figure, "can have no influence on any human action" (67).

On one point, Lewis is clear. Instead of asking, "What kind of man is a poet?", we should only be asking "What kind of composition is a poem?" (103). We ought no longer consider the singular genius of the creative agent, only the evidence of it in his output.

From there, however, Lewis' theory of poetry, and its appropriate mode of evaluation, receives a fury of descriptive strikes that leave it battered and unable to stand on its own.

On the one hand, Lewis asserts that "poetry is an art or skill—a trained habit of using certain instruments to certain ends" (103). He rejects Romantic critics' attention to the poet as a man, calling it a "Naturalistic" argument, one that should be discarded because it is always impossible to prove. Great souls do not always write poetry, and poetry is

[too] often composed by those we ought not to consider "great" at all. Within a few pages, however, Lewis reneges on this position and concedes that '"great poetry' means, in one of its senses, poetry by great men" (115). It seems that even the strongest opponents to the cult of the author are still, perhaps unconsciously, attached to the ideal of the author on some level. Lewis' inability to abandon fully the poet, despite his greatest efforts, reflects a difficulty that critics have historically had with wrenching the text completely away from its maker, a move that—while often appealing in theory— doesn't intuitively make sense to most lovers of literature.

Finally, on the subject of ascertaining the value of literature, Lewis seems to look to the sensibility of the common reader. His criteria are simple: that the work be interesting and have a positive permanent effect on the reader—literature "should make us either happier, or wiser, or better" (119). Lewis denies that this standard is a moral one, claiming only that it looks back to the "old critics" (for example, Chaucer, reiterating a medieval view) who "demanded of literature the utile and the dulce, solas and doctrine, pleasure and profit" (119). In conclusion, Lewis seems to have jumped wholly into the reader's camp: "The value of a poem consisting in what it does to the 310 readers, all questions about the poet's own attitude to his utterance are irrelevant" (120), a position which predicts both Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy" and the much later "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes.

6.2.4 An Absolute Prohibition: Wimsatt and Beardsley

The dangers of using authorial intention in judging literary value were made fully explicit a few years later in the work that has come to be known as the standard in anti- intentionalist dogma: W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley's 1946 essay, "The

Intentional Fallacy." Referencing Lewis and Tillyard's earlier work, the authors begin with the premise that "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard forjudging the success of a work of literary art" (2). Intention, according to Wimsatt and Beardsley, can be defined as the "design or plan in the author's mind," that is, within "a formula which more or less explicitly has had wide acceptance"

(2). The authors concede that the issue converges with other elements, such as "the author's attitude toward his work, the way he felt, what made him write" (2). While this definition may seem simple at first glance, their argument needs to be carefully unpacked to understand its logical and theoretical premises. Also, as my close examination of writers' opinions as expressed in the Paris Review interviews will later demonstrate, the issue of intention from the writer's point of view is far from straightforward. 311

According to Wimsatt and Beardsley, readers and critics must disregard authorial intention when evaluating literature88 because the failure or success of that intention ought to be inherent in the final text itself. The question of "what the poet tried to do" is either impossible to ascertain, or irrelevant, for "if the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do" (3). The first section of the essay attempts an organized argument put forth with five key propositions:

1. Intention exists and is the "designing intellect" of a piece of literature. Its existence does not make it an appropriate standard forjudging the work's value.

2. Intention is relevant only insofar as it is manifest in the final work itself:

"If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do"

(3).

3. The value of a poem should be based solely on its ability to "work," that is, as Archibald MacLeish wrote in his 1925 poem, "Ars Poetica," "a poem should not mean but be."

4. All feelings and opinions of a poem should be attributed to a dramatic speaker, and not to an external author.

5. The revision of a work can, in effect, nullify its original intention. The final intention is the significant intention.

Admittedly, several of these propositions are put forward with such ambiguity that their interpretation could be argued. For example, the authors' third proposition includes the opaque assertion:

The essay refers to the writing of "poetry"; however, like Tillyard and Lewis, Wimsatt and Beardsley's use of the label and their consistent use of the term "author" suggest a broader application to other literary forms. 312

Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant;

what is irrelevant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and "bugs"

from machinery. In this respect poetry differs from practical messages,

which are successful if and only if we correctly infer the intention. They

are more abstract than poetry. (4)

Taken literally, this proposition suggests that poems are not abstract or that practical messages necessarily contain extra, irrelevant information—something difficult for most readers to accept. In any case, this proposition does little to convince us to dismiss intention as a standard of quality.

In the second section of the essay, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that the intentional fallacy is a Romantic misconception based on its "crowning philosophic expression" that "the beautiful is the successful intuition-expression, and the ugly is the unsuccessful; the intuition or private part of art is the aesthetic fact, and the medium or public part is not the subject of aesthetic at all" (5). This part of the authors' argument is worth breaking down carefully, for it sketches out the skeleton of intentionalist thought which will henceforth be pulled apart by various anti-intentionalist theorists.

The Romantic idea that "the beautiful is the successful intuition-expression" demands that the "success" or value of a piece can be ascertained only through knowing its original intention and the proximity of that intention to the final product. Likewise, by focusing on "intuition," the Romantic approach prioritizes the process of creation over the final product. Issues of "medium" such as form, style and technique are secondary to the private, emotional and psychological issues of intention. According to Wimsatt and

Beardsley, associated with the Romantic approach to literature is the critic who separates 313 the artistic ("whether the artist achieved his intentions") from the moral ("whether the work of art ought to have been undertaken at all") in his criticism. Instead, readers should only concern themselves with the latter, which should not be considered a moral concern but an objective and artistic one.

In the third part of their essay, the authors argue that poets' insights into their own work, while often fascinating, are not helpful to literary criticism. This is due, in part, to the fact that most (good) writing comes out of a kind of "genius and inspiration" that can never be adequately expressed or measured (6). Poets can speak of their rituals for writing, their routines to conjure up their muse, their ways of looking into their own heart and firing their imaginations; however, their words have no application to the quality of their compositions. While poets enjoy playing the role of the critic, their words should be given no more weight than that of the "earnest advice" of authors, words which are useful to the aspiring poet but not to the "public art of evaluating poems" (8). Again, the characterization of the authorial agent can be read in contradicting ways. By labelling the author as "genius," the poet is placed squarely back on the pedestal of Romantic thinking.

Also, by mystifying the sources of authorial intention in the term of inaccessible

"inspiration," the writer is again given a cult-like, unique status that demands our attention. If we return to thinking of the artist as genius, how can we possibly dismiss the perspective of one who is so singularly gifted?

The authors take another turn in their writing by advocating the kinds of questions we shouldn't and should be asking of literature. The authors find fault with such

"passwords of the intentional school" as "sincerity," "fidelity," "spontaneity,"

"authenticity," "genuineness," and "originality" in contrast to "more precise terms of 314 evaluation" such as "integrity," "relevance," "unity," "function," "maturity," " subtlety," and "adequacy" (8). This list of terms is useful to consider when looking for intentionalist bias in literary criticism. Words like "sincerity" and "authenticity" point towards the author as originating power and ultimate definer of meaning in a fashion made more explicit in Barthes 1968 essay "The Death of the Author." However, in 1954, these words were still in common use in literary criticism, and to reject them out of hand was a coup.

In the fourth section of the essay, Wimsatt and Beardsley build a case for the separation of internal and external evidence in the assessment of poetry (9). Internal evidence is that which is (somewhat counter-intuitively) public and poetic: that is, the text of the poem itself and information related to the language and general knowledge of literature. The external, on the other hand, is private and personal, outside of the text of the poem and available only through extra-textual sources, for example letters, or diaries or, in the case of this project, interviews. Some material can straddle these categories, such as "private or semiprivate meanings attached to words or topics by an author or by a coterie of which he is a member" (9). In such cases, the evidence often becomes part of the "history of words" and might therefore be relevant and, in fact, internal. This section is particularly relevant to the issue of authorial intention in literary criticism. While the authors rely on somewhat opaque examples to make their case, the conclusion that there are systematic ways of determining appropriate evidence for consultation is quite convincing. The question of suitable evidence for literary evaluation is a more practical, clearly articulated version of the intentionalist debate, and its terms are returned to again and again by later theorists. 315

In the fifth and final part of the article, the authors take up one particularly slippery kind of literary evidence: the literary allusion (13). Using the rich example of

T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that the poem's allusions work not through their specific historical correspondences but through "their suggestive power." This is, perhaps, the most compelling point of the entire essay. While the infamous and extensive notes to The Waste Land can be aesthetically judged as an integral component of the poem proper, the accuracy and specificity of the sources references within them are not relevant to our assessment of the poem (14). Likewise, if we wonder over the source of literary allusions in Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred

Prufrock, our job is not to ascertain them conclusively through consultation with the author himself, but to consider their various resemblances via our own general knowledge of literary symbols and their usage by other writers. Such an approach may never provide a "certain conclusion;" however, it is still preferable to any kind of biographical or genetic inquiry. The essay closes with a final declaration that the intention of the author should not be an option in verifying allusion: "Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle" (18).

After the publication of "The Intentional Fallacy," Monroe Beardsley went on to write extensively on the issue of authorial intention, engaging in debate with what he saw as the later "intentionalist backlash" brought about by the hermeneuticists, whose position I will outline later. Beardsley mostly stuck to his original position, expanding it to counter various intentionalist arguments over the years. As part of his framing of authorial will, Beardsley set out a defining purpose for literary interpretation in his 1970

"The Authority of the Text:" 316

... to help readers approach literary works form the aesthetic point of

view, that is, with an interest in actualizing their (artistic) goodness. The

work is an object capable (presumably) of affording aesthetic satisfaction.

The problem is to know what is there to be responded to: and the literary

interpreter helps us to discern what is there so that we can enjoy it more

fully. (34)

What is there is absolutely restricted to what is on the page. Even when information about the author might "add something aesthetically valuable to the work," we should not consider it because we shift from interpreting the poem to interpreting the writing process, two critical acts which should not be confused. His final position warns against consulting with the author in the same direct language employed in "The Intentional

Fallacy:"

The literary text, in the final analysis, is the determiner of its meaning. It

has a will, or at least a way, of its own. The sense it makes—along with

the sound it makes—is what it offers for our aesthetic contemplation. If

that contemplation is rewarding, there is no need for an author to hover

about like a nervous cook, waiting to supply some condiment that was left

out of the soup. And if that contemplation is not rewarding, there is

nothing the author can do about it, except rewrite—that is, give us another

poem. (36) 317

6.2.5 New Criticism and Anti-Intentionalism

While "The Personal Heresy" and "The Intentional Fallacy" stand out as documents that record the vehement opposition to intentionalist criticism, these essays are simply examples in a larger New Critical climate that was moving in this direction.

Cleanth Brooks—who came to be known as a kind of New Critical spokesperson, publishing multiple textbooks and critical tomes from the late 1930s through to the 1950s

(most notably, The Well Wrought Urn in 1947)—explicitly propounded a kind of formalist criticism that focused on the final poetic text. Brooks both practiced and advocated the New Critical approach to close reading. While acknowledging the value of biographical and psychological issues to the study of the author as an individual, Brooks refused to allow any consideration of the writing process in determining literary value

(Brooks, "Formalist Critic" 27). Interestingly, unlike later anti-intentionalist critics,

Brooks also dismissed the importance of reading practice or reader response in literary criticism. In brief, Brooks offered two premises for formalist criticism that became a shorthand for New Criticism: 1. "that the relevant part of the author's intention is what he got actually into his work; that is, he [the reader] assumes that the author's intention as realized is the 'intention' that counts, not necessarily what he was conscious of trying to do, or what he now remembers he was then trying to do," and 2. that there is "an ideal reader" who replaces "the varying spectrum of possible readings" with a "central point of reference from which [the critic] can focus upon the structure of the poem or novel"

(Brooks 28). While he later tempered many of these remarks, Brooks remained adamant that the best evidence is always the final poetic work. 318

In the early years of The Paris Review, the New Critical party line held sway over many professional and academic readers in America. Certainly, contemporaneous journals of the day were heavily invested in the New Critical approach to literary criticism, an approach that emphasized close textual study and shunned any consideration of the author or his or her intended meaning. In Learning to be Modern, Gail McDonald considers the many reasons for New Criticism's monopoly on literary criticism and the academy. She discusses how the growing professionalization of English literature required a standardized method to validate its status, and New Criticism, with its "highly teachable method" of close reading and analysis, nicely fit the bill. According to

McDonald, during its heyday, New Criticism "seemed like the perfect answer" with its practice of "focusing attention on the poem as the only proper object of discussion, a tenet learned from The Sacred Wood'' (190-1), eventually enjoying "unparalleled success in American literary education" (194). As mentioned earlier in my discussion of T.S.

Eliot, part of the standardized approach to New Criticism included lists of preferred critical practices (using new terminologies and specific methods of analysis) as well as those approaches that should be strictly excluded from use. As McDonald points out,

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's seminal New Critical anthology

Understanding Poetry (1938) "began with the list of 'shalt nots'. Among the practices interdicted were paraphrases, references to writers' biographies and historical events, or the drawing of morals from the poems" (McDonald, Learning to be Modern 193).

While early New Critics such as R.P. Blackmur and Kenneth Burke practiced more varied approaches to literature, eventually, through its institutionalization in the academy, the purpose and vision of New Criticism became flattened in the public 319 imagination and in educational practice: "the finesse, sophistication, and broad cultural and political interests of many of [New Criticism's] early practitioners were effaced in the interest of standardized, and therefore teachable, concepts" (McDonald 192).

Subsequent postmodern and postcolonial scholars characterized the work of the

New Critics as a politically conservative response to the rise of Marxist criticism and a turning away from socio-political and moral contextual issues; however, in recent years, the movement has again been reconsidered. While rigid in some aspects, Brooks' formalist assumptions went a long way to avoid the relativism of some impressionistic critics or the emotionally charged, sometimes sloppy analysis of Romantic readings. We are now in a better position to see the diversity of positions among the New Critics and appreciate their push towards a professionalism and rigour of analysis that has become the mainstay of academic literary studies today.

6.2.6 Post-Structuralism and Intention

One of the most influential pieces of writing in late-twentieth century literary criticism, Roland Barthes' 1968 essay, "The Death of the Author," also makes an important contribution to the historical debates around intention. Widely quoted and often misinterpreted, this essay is in many ways a renewed attack on the use of authorial intention, albeit spoken in a new language. Like Wimsatt and Beardsley, Barthes condemns the popular use of the writer's life and views in literary interpretation and evaluation. Barthes supports his position by looking at the role of the author historically, jumping back before Romanticism and pointing out that our modern fascination with the 320 personality of the writer is a relatively recent development. Traditionally, before Modern times, the author was simply a mediator, not a creative originator. The idea of the author as a centre of the literary work developed with our focus on the individual that emerged

"from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation" (125) into our current capitalist society which posits the individual as unique and self-determining.

Barthes claims that if we let go of this idea of the author, the modern text itself is

"transformed" (127). Instead of thinking of the author as "the past of his own book,"

"thought to nourish the book," we should think of him as a "modern scriptor," "born simultaneously with the text" (127). That is, the author is created with the text, in our reading of it. In this way, the authorial will must be understood as coming from "a field without origin ... at least, [with] no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins" (128). This new perspective radically shifts our old idea of writing, and specifically, literature. We move away from thinking of a text as having a single meaning ("the 'message' of the Author-God") to a new understanding of it as a "multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture" (128).

This view of literature set the stage for how literary criticism would be performed for the next several decades. Authorial intention was to be dismissed, but for different reasons than those proposed by the New Critics. Instead of positioning the authority of the writer and the critic in opposition to one another, Barthes connected their power, claiming that the "reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic" since it was the 321 critic's job to find and explain the Author in order to explain the text (129). Barthes illuminates the motivation behind intentionalist criticism and relates the importance of the author's existence to our need for ontological certainty: "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing"

(129). Barthes supplants this dynamic with a view of writing (no longer conclusively labelled "literature") that is, for some, dangerously indeterminate. The new order requires a different reading practice:

Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite

futile. ... In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled,

nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of

a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath:

the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly

posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic

exemption of meaning. (129)

After the "Death of the Author," the reader becomes the only determinant; she is "the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination" (129). Today, few would subscribe wholeheartedly to the complete denial of the author; however,

Barthes' elevation of the reader subsequently influenced the rise of reader-response theory which places the reader at the centre of literary interpretation.89

It is worth remembering that "The Death of the Author" was written in Paris at the same time as students and workers were agitating for revolution. The toppling of authorial power for the power of the reader echoed the calls for the overthrow of authority for the power of the masses. As with most revolutions, in the wake of the death 322

6.2.7 Intention and Meaning: The Hermeneutic Position

Despite my efforts at chronology, intentionalist debates, naturally, have not proceeded in a rigidly linear fashion. Especially in recent decades, with the rise of theory and the proliferation of academics, experts from various subfields of the humanities have weighed in on the issue of authorial intention. The work of hermeneutic scholars uniquely contributes to the historical debates around authorial intention, and can arguably be credited with setting off a sea change in attitudes towards meaning and literary interpretation. In the early years of the debate, hermeneuticists such as Martin Heidegger and Hans Georg Gadamer were in line with literary critical accounts of the irrelevance of authorial will and the emphasis on semantic autonomy (Hirsch, "Defense" 11). Gadamer promoted a view of literature that required relating it to the present context, that is, the

of the author, a new balance must be found between the old and the new. In his 1969 essay "What is an Author?" French theorist Michel Foucault responds in part to Barthes by questioning how stable our concept of authorship has ever been. Like Barthes, Foucault looks at the changing historical connections between the writer and the text, and suggests that they are always in a state of flux. Foucault looks back to the tradition of anonymity, which ended as writers began to be punished for their works and text became a form of private property. Out of this tie came the largely Romantic fascination with the life and intention of the writer. The most innovative part of Foucault's discussion here is his introduction of the "author-function," a collection of beliefs that determine how we understand the author and impose this understanding on any given text. The "author- function" is quite distinct from the writer and changes depending on time and discursive context. Foucault resembles Barthes in his belief that the author is quite separate from the text; however, he is not as keen to "kill off' the author. Instead, he attempts to map out how our concept of the author works in our efforts to interpret and evaluate writing. Like many post-structuralists, Foucault is primarily concerned with describing how we do use, or construct an idea of an author, as opposed to dictating how we should use the author. He also uses a new language; "text" becomes "discourse"; the "author" becomes the "subject." 323 world of the reader. In Truth and Method, Gadamer writes that "a text is not to be understood as an expression of life, but in what it says" and that readers should not refer

"back to some original source in which something is said or written" but instead completely detach "the sense of what is said from the person saying it" (49-50). His view is that the text should be freed from any notion of an "original meaning," "original author" or "original reader" because these concepts necessarily change over time and, as such, fail to "fix" meaning in any case (51).

Both E.D. Hirsch, Jr. and P. D. Juhl, in opposition to hermeneutic scholars like

Heidegger and Gadamer, pushed for a new openness to intentionalist criticism. In 1967,

Hirsch wrote "In Defense of the Author," in which he questions the "heavy and largely victorious assault on the sensible belief that a text means what its author meant" (11).

While appreciating the "subtlety and intelligence" that the field of literary scholarship gained through its insistence on "close exegesis," Hirsch insists that any theory of complete "semantic autonomy" or "authorial irrelevance" is deeply flawed (12). For one,

Hirsch notes that the emphasis on individual critical readings simply replaces the power and authority of the writer with the critic. It also leads to an increasingly relativist system of judging the validity of any single interpretation. Since any piece of writing can have a spectrum of interpretation, Hirsch seems to point to the author's intention as a way of limiting or "fixing" the meaning of the text. While New Critics have historically pointed to the ideal reader, or the "best" reading, Hirsch argues that the "ideal reader" is often code for the speaking critic: "when critics deliberately banished the original author, they themselves usurped his place .... Where before there had been but one author, there now arose a multiplicity of them, each carrying as much authority as the next" (14). 324

Concerned with systems of knowing, Hirsch points out that if we banish every

"viable normative ideal that governs the interpretation of texts," no interpretation is possible; all we have left is perpetual indeterminacy (14). Still, Hirsch is uncomfortable with any notion of complete determinacy. He accepts that meaning is "imprecise and ambiguous," and that even an "array of possible meanings" can be contained within boundaries. Hirsch insists that the existence of the author, in fact, enables the reader to make sense of literature. In effect, we need the author in order to fully understand the sense in which a sequence of words works together. Literature is not just a "piece of language" (as William Empson calls it in Seven Types of Ambiguity) but a manifestation of an intended meaning.

6.2.8 From the Author to the Reader

Beginning in the late 60s and early 70s, New Criticism was also challenged by a growing interest in the response of readers and the role readers play in creating the meaning of a text. Like the hermeneuticists, reader response critics were less interested in where meaning comes from than how meaning is understood. Critics like Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser turned their gaze away from the intention of the author and looked at how readers actually comprehend text in their response to literature. While also in

A few years later, Hirsch weighed in on the debate with a new twist, by considering the ethical and moral responsibilities to the author. In his "Three Dimensions of Hermeneutics," Hirsch recommends that literary interpreters take authorial intention into consideration, or risk transgressing '"the ethics of language', just as we transgress ethical norms when we use another person merely for our own ends" (55). Refusing to separate literature from other forms of written speech, we are ethically bound not to simply "treat an author's words merely as grist for one's own mill" (56). 325 opposition to intentionalism, reader response critics were equally fighting the New

Critical concept of the text as something fixed and autonomous. Instead, the site of reading is characterized as the important moment when meaning is actually created. Fish concedes that authorial intention is responsible for the intrinsic meaning of a text; however, since such intention is unknowable, the reader's interpretation is the place to focus one's study. He developed a theory of "interpretive communities" which contends that all readers are governed by their subjective perspectives and knowledge and attempts to access "original intention" are filtered or distorted by the perspective of the reader in any case (Is There a Text in this Class?).

Some critics have observed a similarity between intentionalist and reader- response critics: both look outside of the text to determine meaning and both insist that the text itself is indeterminate and that it can be stabilized only by looking to individuals and information that can function as a "controlling concern" (Loesberg 23). This observed similarity has particular relevance to the literary interview. The interview, as the site where the writer and reader (represented by both the interviewer and the interview reader) meet, represents a unique space where intention is negotiated. As we will see in a close examination of several Paris Review interviews, the interview becomes an opportunity to see the distance and difference between those two controlling agents, and to consider where authority really resides.

While the issue of authorial intention faded from critical prominence in the post- colonial theory-heavy years of the late twentieth century, it has resurfaced in recent years in a new language inflected by scholarship in the fields of reader reception and cultural studies. One of the first to rethink the debate was Gerald Bruns, who wrote an article on 326 the subject for Critical Inquiry in 1980. In this piece, "Intention, Authority, and

Meaning," Bruns takes for granted that authors have intentions that are "expressed in their works;" however, he feels that this fact is secondary to the real issue. Bruns turns his eye to the reality of reading practice, and how intention actually plays out in our reading experience:

we know . . . that we can arrive at intentions, and thus be guided by them,

only in a manner of speaking, that is, by producing our versions of them.

You could say that no matter how hard we try, we always operate

allegorically when we read: we make an art of recovering that which is

hidden or lost, inaccessible or beyond every comprehension. (301)

The shift in perspective here is subtle, but significant. Up until this time, most of the talk about intention was concerned with what readers and critics should do with the idea of intention when reading. Now, people were starting to describe what readers actually do.

This turn from the prescriptive to the descriptive was not merely theoretical.

Literacy and communications scholars were also exploring the connections between comprehension processes and knowledge of the author's intention. Among many interesting studies in this field, several researchers established the link between understanding an author's purpose or intention and understanding the work itself (Bruce,

McGee, Shanahan). Timothy Shanahan's work in "Reading Comprehension as a

Conversation with an Author" argues that "consideration of author intentions, craft, and voice are fruitful interpretive tools that help us look deeper into a text to construct a richer meaning" and "author awareness" has "a positive influence on the metacognitive activity inherent in critical reading and in motivation" (145), while conceding such 327 information should not be confused with the complete meaning of a work (132). In her research, Tina Jacobowitz demonstrates how skilled readers use outside information, knowledge from the text and evidence of authorial intention in the form of words and phrases from the text to construct meaning (621-22). She shows that having more information about the author, his other work and his opinions and "purpose" helps readers to read more productively (622). While focused on ordinary readers, not professional critics, this research allows us to think differently about authorial intention as a helpful concept instead of a dangerous literary tendency. This work, while not produced by literary scholars, helps to explain the historical and persistent popular and academic interest in genres such as the biography and the literary interview.

Paisley Livingston's "Intentionalism in Aesthetics," published in New Literary

History in 1998, takes on the most common anti-intentionalist arguments and proposes a new, moderate version of intentionalism for aesthetics. He rightly observes that many of the protests against intentionalism impose unreasonable demands that are not applied to other critical practices. For example, he looks at the common anti-intentionalist argument that knowledge of authorial intention is often difficult to verify and notes that these "high standards" for "infallible justification" are not applied to other complex issues such as

"the nature of textuality and the ways in which readers construct authors" (833). While influenced by models of "hypothetical intentionalism," Livingston ultimately rejects them for their relativism and disregard of the semantic intentions of the author (842). Instead,

Livingston offers a version of "moderate intentionalism" that "recognizes that the artist's intentions do not always constitute the work's meaning. The contention, rather, is that when intentions are compatible with the text, they can be constitutive of a work's implicit 328 meanings" (835). Livingston further developed this concept in his 2005 book, Art and

Intention: A Philosophical Study; there, he proposes "moderate intentionalism" as an alternative to "absolute intentionalism" which "holds that a work's meaning and the actual author's intentions with regard to the work's meaning are logically equivalent"

(139). Moderate (or constrained, or partial) intentionalism allows one to consider expressed intention while conceding that such intentions are not always made manifest and that there are also unintended meanings (142). In this way, intention can help to clarify and elaborate meaning, yet it is not synonymous with meaning. This usage of intention is, in fact, quite close to the common practice of many literary critics today. In the wake of New Criticism, many critics are cautious about explicitly turning to the writer's intention to settle on meaning; however, many still regularly refer to bibliographical, biographical, political and historical contextual factors in their evaluation of literature.

As recently as 2001, Raymond Gibbs picked up on the empirical evidence that

"ordinary readers consciously use their assumptions about authorship to interpret texts and infer what authors likely wish to communicate through their texts" to propose his own take in "Authorial Intentions in Text Understanding." Using Adrian Pilkington's concepts of strong and weak implicature, Gibbs builds his case for considering authors' communicative intentions as well as unintended meanings. He sets out a call for scholars to study empirically a set of hypotheses around authorial intention, including some concerning how we infer intentionality and how authorial intentions are part of a

"cultural web of people's social interaction via text materials," a field of study that can be guided by Pierre Bourdieu's work on the field of cultural production. 329

These recent discussions of authorial intention consider the concept of intention in a different light than earlier critics. For New Critics like Wimsatt and Beardsley, intention was something concrete that existed in the real world, and its very attachment to a living author was part of what made it an unreliable, unverifiable piece of evidence.

Conversely, recent critics like Gibbs use the term "intention" to refer to a notion that exists in the mind of the reader. Authorial intention is a hypothetical conceit that is used by readers to help them construct meaning from a text. It may or may not be attached to the living author. It can be modified by evidence given in extra-textual contexts (i.e. the interview), as well as clues within the text itself. Intention is a fluid entity that changes depending on the information available to the reader, and it is a critical component in meaning-making. Gibb's gesture towards a "cultural web" is of particular relevance to my study of the Paris Review interviews. As I will explore in my examination of selected interviews, authors' stated views about their intended meanings, as well as their opinions about the nature of intention itself, are central ingredients in the author interview.

6.3 A RECONSIDERATION OF AUTHORIAL INTENTION THROUGH THE INTERVIEW

What role does authorial intention play in the literary interview? Generally, when the issue of intention is raised in literary criticism, it is in relation to readers' use of it in their evaluations of literary value and determination of meaning. On the other hand, what does the term "intention" mean from the perspective of writers? The Paris Review interviews show that writers usually understand the idea of intention in relation to their own process and technique and are reticent to speak with any certainty of it in terms of 330 meaning. And yet, as one of the rare sites where readers and writers directly interact "for the record," the interview inevitably reflects both parties' understandings of the term. The interviewer, standing in for the reader, consistently "digs" for evidence of authorial meaning, whether in the form of background influences, philosophy, or explicit statements of intent. Authors react in a variety of ways. Some refuse to comment on their intention. Others willingly elaborate on their intended meaning. Many resist explanation, and then supply information in other ways, sometimes in spite of themselves. There are, occasionally, writers who refer to their own "intended" meaning as a way of settling the score on a widely misunderstood work they have published. The way that intention is expressed and interpreted is central to almost every writer interview in The Paris Review.

I now turn to selected interviews from the early years of The Paris Review:

William Faulkner (1956), Ernest Hemingway (1958), Marianne Moore (1961), and

William Burroughs (1965). These interviews embody varying approaches to the theme of intention and demonstrate a range of understandings of the concept. I will end by looking more closely at the 1959 interview with T.S. Eliot as a unique example of the ambiguous and often self-contradictory attitudes that a single author can hold, in this case a man known for his anti-intentionalist theoretical position.

6.3.1 William Faulkner: "I don't know what inspiration is"

The 1956 Paris Review interview with William Faulkner reflects many of the tensions and contradictions around the issue of authorial intention. Like Hemingway,

Faulkner is not a highly cooperative interview subject; he announces his resistance to the 331 interview from the first moments. Interviewer Jean Stein opens the exchange by reminding Faulkner that he has previously voiced his dislike for the form. Faulkner responds that he "react[s] violently to personal questions" while he can tolerate questions strictly about his work (111). He goes on to insist that the interview bothers him because the individual writer is not special, not unique, at least to no one other than himself (111).

For the most part, Faulkner's attitude places him squarely in the New Critical camp: he insists that the writer is not important, only the work. He expresses this belief in various ways throughout the interview, but is crystal clear on his position from the opening passages of the conversation. He places himself among the canon of great writers only to belittle the importance of every great writer: "If I had not existed someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Doestoevski, all of us.... what is important is

Hamlet and Midsummer Night's Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance" (111). Faulkner, with his adamant denial of any special treatment of the author or his intentions, illustrates the very persistence of authorial intention in literary talk. The more Faulkner strives to discredit the role of the author, and the relevance of his thoughts, the stronger such messages come through in the course of the interview.

For one thing, Faulkner's repeated disparagement of the authority of the writer is deeply entwined with his chosen performed persona. This character is so strong that it is difficult to tease out where his performance ends and his theories begin. For example, he is adamant that "the writer's only responsibility is to his art" (112), dismissing any moral or ethical demands that the public might make upon the writer: 332

He [the writer] will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a

dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace

until then. Everything goes by the board: honour, pride, decency, security,

happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he

will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old

ladies. (112)

Similarly, Faulkner grumbles about how the writer shouldn't let any distractions, such as work or success, come between him and his creations. He uses a violently misogynistic example to emphasize his point: "Success is feminine and like a woman; if you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way to treat her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she will do the crawling" (113). He is equally dismissive of critics and their influence on writers. He claims to have no regard for critical opinion or the response of his readers (124).

We might read Faulkner's unscrupulousness here as a kind of absolute fidelity to the supremacy of the text. The most important thing is the final work; the process is enslaved by and always justified by the end. In this way, an author has permission to act the brute (as Faulkner seems to demonstrate in this interview) so long as his literary output redeems him. His position is directly at odds with that of Hirsch, whose focus on the process is partly supported by ethical reasoning. Conversely, Faulkner's bravado here may be simply an act. Part of his public character is to present himself as strong and ruthless; his expressed opinions may be more about his public image than his feelings about literary judgment. Throughout this conversation, Faulkner expresses himself with absolute certainty; his opinions are always black or white (or more often, first black, then 333 white) with no room for moderation or caution. In all cases, the strength of his convictions, and the passion with which he expresses them, consistently draw attention back to the figure of the writer and away from the work.

It is difficult to take Faulkner's opinions on the role of writer too seriously since his statements are riddled with contradictions. In one breath, he presents a model of the writer as a disciplined craftsman, requiring both talent and hard work; in the next, we are given more Romantic models: the "artist is a creature driven by demons" (112). When asked to describe his technique, Faulkner dismisses the need for such a concept, since

"there is no mechanical way to get the writing done," and good writers are propelled by their own vanity and ambition alone (117). And yet, as he expands on this point, he reveals that technique has played a role in his own composition, for example, in the "tour de force" of As I Lay Dying and the repeated attempts of The Sound and the Fury (117).

On the latter, Faulkner gives readers some insight into the novel's origins and the development of its plot. While he feels "tenderest towards" The Sound and the Fury, he still resists relating to it as anything beyond a piece of writing. Interviewer Stein asks

Faulkner, "What emotion does Benjy arouse in you?" to which Faulkner mentions "grief and pity for all mankind." While the question is in the present tense, it is not fully distinct from interrogations about intention—Faulkner is being asked to play the role of a reader of his own work, but he cannot avoid revealing his original thoughts on the character's creation. Still, the issue is too personal for Faulkner. He quickly backpedals out of any committed response: "You can't feel anything for Benjy because he doesn't feel anything. The only thing I can feel about him personally is concern as to whether he is 334 believable as I created him" (118). His final remarks constitute the purely detached, professional response of a disciplined craftsman to his creation.

Faulkner may not feel that the writer's personality or philosophy should enter into our interpretation of a piece of writing; however, by engaging in the interview, Faulkner directly provides evidence of authorial intention that will be used by readers in their comprehension of his works. Consider Faulkner's description of The Sound and the Fury.

He gives readers useful information about how he intends his characters and symbols to be approached. His hints about the character of Benjy alone include: that Benjy should be understood as so lacking in rationality as to be an animal; that the reasons for his bellowing include a sensed "threat to tenderness and love" that he felt from Caddy; that he clings to the slipper to fill the void left by Caddy's absence; that he cannot tell good from evil; and finally, that though he mourns Caddy, had she "reappeared he probably would not have known her" (119). He goes on to clarify some symbolic points, such as dispelling the significance of the narcissus ("simply a flower"). Through this engagement, Faulkner submits, in some way, to the role of the writer as ultimate authority.

Throughout the interview, Faulkner provides insight into several of his other works, including A Fable, The Wild Palms, Light in August and As I Lay Dying, including quite specific kernels of wisdom on the nature of the destiny of Lena Grove and the

Bundren family, insight that can be taken as evidence of authorial will by readers.

Perhaps most memorable is Faulkner's description of the origins of The Sound and the

Fury. Faulkner relates the now oft-recounted anecdote of the vision of Caddy peering into the window with muddy drawers: 335

It began with a mental picture. I didn't realize at the time it was

symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl's drawers in a

pear-tree, where she could see through the window where her

grandmother's funeral was taking place and report what was happening to

her brothers on the ground below. By the time I explained who they were

and what they were doing and how her pants got muddy, I realized it

would be impossible to get all of it into a short story and that it would have

to be a book. And then I realized the symbolism of the soiled pants, and

that image was replaced by the one of the fatherless and motherless girl

climbing down the rainpipe to escape from the only home she had, where

she had never been offered love or affection or understanding. (118)

Faulkner's emphasis on this single visual—a compelling image in its own right—is a significant moment in the interview. Faulkner's revelation of it as the starting point of his complex novel The Sound and the Fury is evidence of his intention. It is a piece of evidence that has been fully exploited by readers ever since. After studying this interview in a college literature course, what student would not revise her understandings of the novel to place Caddy more centrally into its themes? The focus Faulkner places on

Caddy's "muddy drawers" conjures up issues of innocence, vulnerability, sexuality, neglect and ambition that readers necessarily carry into the reading of the text. Simply knowing that, of all the characters, "Caddy came first," places an added emphasis on the reading of her character in the novel. In this way, and perhaps in spite of himself,

Faulkner offers up material for an intentionalist interpretation of his text. 336

Similarly, when Faulkner notes the importance of the appendix to the The Sound and the Fury (written 15 years after its publication) to the completion of the story as a whole, his statements again affect reading practice (118). While many readers choose to read the novel without the final chapter, Faulkner has, for the record, supplied his authorial intentions of the importance of the text to make the tale "complete."

Faulkner's comments on his works' themes and origins would fall within the category of what Wimsatt and Beardsley call "external evidence," evidence unsuitable for literary evaluation. Considering Faulkner's words is akin to interpreting the writing process as opposed to interpreting the literary work, something warned against in "The

Intentional Fallacy." And while the Paris Review interview's stated goal is to explore the

"Art of Fiction" (read: the writing process), readers' usage of its revelations cannot be dictated by the collaborating parties. Faulkner may insist that only the work is important; however, by offering a privileged glimpse into his origins and goals, he equally asserts the significance of the author and his intention.

While Faulkner, perhaps unwittingly, provides statements of his own intention, he disowns the notion of inspiration. Stein asks him directly if inspiration is important to the writer and Faulkner's response is a precursor to Eliot's determined self-distancing from intention just a few years later (to be discussed later). Faulkner replies, "I don't know anything about inspiration, because I don't know what inspiration is—I've heard about it, but I never saw it" (121). This is disavowal by claiming innocence; Faulkner sidesteps the question by refusing to be the authority on the subject. How can he be treated as an expert on the subject when he is ignorant even of the term's meaning? 337

Ironically, for many readers, Faulkner's eloquent discussion of the origins of The

Sound and the Fury and his vision of Caddy constitute precisely what inspiration amounts to. Like many of the self-contradictions in Faulkner's interview, this final refusal to engage in talk of inspiration cannot efface the actual practice of what has gone on in the interview. Despite his discomfort with the idea, Faulkner has repeatedly divulged information about authorial intention that can, and will, be used in the understanding and valuation of his work. While striving to shake off the expectations of writerly authority, Faulkner's dramatic and ruthless persona can also be seen to draw attention to his uniqueness, character and opinions, and elevate his personality as a focus of interest above even his work.

6.3.2 Ernest Hemingway: "Only death can stop it"

Ernest Hemingway's Paris Review interview with George Plimpton in 1958 offers both performance and insight into the role of authorial intention. As discussed in the previous chapter, Hemingway is a master at creating a character of himself for his readers and this interview is no exception. However, despite some of his affected and highly crafted responses, his statements are still instructional in terms of the way he views and expresses the concept of authorial intention.

Hemingway was notoriously reticent about discussing his own work. The reasons for his reluctance were multiple. In the Paris Review interview, he expresses a belief that speaking of one's own work is a sign of one's artistic failings: "The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves" (226). As an example, and 338 as a not-so-subtle jab at his questioner (Plimpton), Hemingway continues, "Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it"

(226). Here, Hemingway sees himself in the anti-intentionalist camp that believes that if an intention is successful, it is fully evident in the final work. He reiterates this position later in the interview when asked about symbolism in his novels. His response, though flippant, is yet again instructive:

I suppose there are symbols since critics keep finding them. If you do not

mind I dislike talking about them and being questioned about them. It is

hard enough to write books and stories without being asked to explain

them as well. Also it deprives the explainers of work.... Read anything I

write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the

measure of what you brought to the reading. (229)

Notably, in this passage, Hemingway moves from a New Critical to a reader response model of interpretation: meaning is in the hands of the reader and is up to her, not the writer or the text. And yet, Hemingway is still aware of the need for qualified

"explainers," a term that subtly undercuts the authority of these critics by its awkwardness. The label also emphasizes the difference between the suspect job of reading in order to "explain" literature and the better goal of reading for pleasure.

This isn't the only time that Hemingway states a preference for leaving the work of interpretation to the qualified critic, and keeping his distance from the job. When asked about his influences, he begins with, "I'm sorry but I'm no good at these post-mortems.

There are coroners literary and non-literary provided to deal with such matters" (226-7). 339

He seems to assert the authority of the critic over that of the writer in matters of literary evaluation—a definitively New Critical position. And yet, at most turns, Hemingway can't help but step into the very waters he has just moments earlier declared off-limits.

After declining to have an opinion on the influence of his contemporaries, writers such as

Stein, Pound or Perkins, he takes a strike at Stein's adoption of his techniques, and then relents that he has in fact learned about "the abstract relationship of words" from her

(227).

Likewise, despite Hemingway's repeated refusal to play the literary expert to his own work, he cannot help but do exactly that when Plimpton, surely playing devil's advocate, offers a very specific reading of The Sun Also Rises. Plimpton relays another

Paris Review editor's opinion that the character Robert Cohn is "attracted and pacified by" Jake Barnes as a bull is to a steer because Jake is "emasculated precisely like a steer"

(230). At this point, Hemingway must intervene and set the record straight about his intention. His clarification is absolutely cut-and-dried: "[Jake] had been wounded in quite a different way and his testicles were intact and not damaged. Thus he was capable of all normal feelings as a man but incapable of consummating them. The important distinction is that his wound was physical and not psychological and that he was not emasculated"

(230). Hemingway makes it unequivocally clear what his authorial intention was in the creation of the character of Jake Barnes, supplying information omitted from the novel.

He tolerates no ambiguity in the interpretation of his "wound." He insults the source of the mistaken interpretation (he calls him "screwy") and seems eager to give an authoritative version of events. 340

Hemingway's clarification of the nature of Jake's wound is significant for several reasons. Despite his earlier statements, Hemingway is certainly not content to have

"explainers" have their way with his work in this case. When faced with a reading that contradicts his authorial intention, he must intercede. His insistence on the true nature of

Jake's wound is both an assertion of his intentions, and an anti-critical gesture against those who would dare to offer such a psychosexual reading of his work.

Interestingly, in the very next breath, Hemingway returns to his earlier position:

I still believe, though, that it is very bad for a writer to talk about how he

writes. He writes to be read by the eye and no explanations or dissertations

should be necessary.... it is not the writer's province to explain it or to

run guided tours through the more difficult country of his work. (230)

And yet, if we consider his comments on Jake, this is precisely what Hemingway has just come from doing. He has also done it with such authority that it is sure to be considered the definitive version by any critic who would allow the author's insight to affect his interpretation. This moment of the Paris Review interview illustrates some of the inherent contradictions in the issue of intentionalist criticism. Hemingway's struggle on this point demonstrates the difficulty for an author in holding a strictly anti-intentionalist position about his own works. Likewise, while writers and critics may theoretically oppose

"consulting the oracle" on matters of literary creation, when faced with key critical information, it can be exceedingly tough, even anti-intuitive, to ignore authorial intention entirely, even when that intention is revealed with great reluctance.

It is not just on the subject of textual meaning that Hemingway is loathe to comment. He is also skittish about discussing his writing style, so much so, that one senses an element of the superstitious in his responses. When asked about the

"evolvement" of his "distinctive style," Hemingway answers that he finds the question

"tiring" and warns, "if you spent a couple of days answering it you would be so self- conscious that you could not write" (231). Even while consenting to Plimpton's increasingly specific questions on his writing process, Hemingway states his fears on the matter:

INTERVIEWER: These questions which inquire into craftsmanship really

are an annoyance.

HEMINGWAY: A sensible question is neither a delight nor an

annoyance. I still believe, though that it is very bad for a writer to talk

about how he writes. (230)

Plimpton's headnote to the interview draws attention to this aspect of

Hemingway's character. Plimpton observes that Hemingway seems to draw a kind of creative power from various meaningful tokens in his office and his writerly habits (such as standing at a reading board to compose, his rigid schedule, and his daily swims), and yet he equally notes that "Papa" always avoids acknowledging such superstitions.

Plimpton explains that Hemingway fears that "whatever value [the talismans or charms] may have can be talked away" (220). As Malcolm Cowley points out in his introduction to the first Writers at Work collection, Hemingway was so convinced that his fingers were involved in his actual creative thinking, that he believed that he would stop writing were he to lose them (18). This helps us to understand Hemingway's caution about divulging too much information about his craft and his fear that the critical gaze can actually inflict harm. According to Plimpton, Hemingway was "spooked" even by the 342 asking of such questions, and was often "almost inarticulate" in response, preferring to work out his responses carefully at his writing board in solitude (220). Plimpton reports that Hemingway stated "that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing" (220). The division of these "parts" is never made explicit, and the available evidence suggests that Hemingway, too, found it a struggle to determine what he could speak of and what must be kept hidden.

When Hemingway speaks of what motivates him to write, he offers a vague description: it is something profoundly strong, so strong that "once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it" (223). By assigning such power to the compulsion to write, he seems to move it into another, almost super-human realm. The desire to write cannot be compared to other activities; it is stronger, almost omnipotent. The ideas, the motivation, come from a mysterious "well" where one's

"juice" is found. The well itself is beyond description: "Nobody knows what it is made of, least of all yourself. What you know is if you have it, or you have to wait for it to come back" (229). Still he gives us a few hints here and there, such as "the best writing is certainly when you are in love" before putting on the brakes with, "if it is all the same to you, I would rather not expound on that" (223).

Often, instead of wrestling with what to say that is "safe," Hemingway goes on the offensive when a question cuts too close. To several questions, he delivers stock answers and abuses his interrogator. For example, when commenting on the influence of his newspaper reporting on his writing style, he adds, "This is one of the dustiest cliches there is and I apologize for it. But when you ask someone old tired questions you are apt 343 to receive old tired answers" (225). He is alternately combative and loving with his questioner, so much so that it is easy to overlook what he is actually saying in favour of gazing at his self-presentation as a petulant, difficult subject.

As in Faulkner's interview, in this exchange, Hemingway the character is stressed much more strongly than Hemingway's work or even his writing process. Yet, he differs from Faulkner in the mystery and fragility he assigns to his creative inspiration.

Hemingway's superstitions and rituals, presented as they are, contribute to an impression of the man as a singular, perhaps mad, creative genius. The unknowability of his inspiration is more in line with a Romantic conception of the writer than later New

Critical models. Unable to speak of intention with any objectivity, Hemingway's comments direct the reader again and again to the figure of the writer as a unique being, perhaps unwittingly encouraging the kind of "Poetolatry" C.S. Lewis warned against.

Likewise, Hemingway's stated belief in the primacy of the final text over his explanations of it is repeatedly contradicted by his interventions in his work's critical interpretation.

There is nothing spontaneous or accidental about the Hemingway performed in this interview. In a close reading of the Hemingway interview, it is important to always remember the actual process of most Paris Review interviews. As explained earlier, these interviews were, almost without exception, collaborative projects. The Hemingway-

Plimpton exchange is a great example of the length of time and number of revisions that these dialogues could demand. The Paris Review archives demonstrate that Plimpton and

Hemingway met several times, wrote back and forth, and engaged equally in multiple revisions and edits to come to their final draft. Hemingway insisted on the right to proof 344 each draft and was careful to keep his comments confidential (out of the press) until the final version had been reached. In this way, we know that Papa was keenly aware of his public persona and careful of each adjustment or addition he made to its form.

6.3.3 Marianne Moore: "I was just trying to be honourable"

While the issue of authorial intention is not as explicitly referred to in the Paris

Review's Marianne Moore interview as in those with Hemingway and Faulkner, it emerges in often indirect yet notable ways. Oftentimes in Paris Review interviews, interviewers attempt to draw out authorial intention by setting up their subjects as theoretical critics of their own work. For example, the questioner might propose a relationship that exists in a work, and inquire how the writer feels about it. Donald Hall's

1961 interview with Marianne Moore is one such case. Perhaps aware of Moore's often enigmatic manner, Hall appears to know better than to ask her directly about the intention of her writing. Taking a more circuitous route, Hall suggests that Moore's time in the biology lab while at Bryn Mawr affected her poetry. In response, Moore draws parallels between her scientific studies and her poetic compositions: "Did laboratory studies affect my poetry? I am sure they did. . . . Precision, economy of statement, logic employed to ends that are disinterested, drawing and identifying, liberate—at least have some bearing on—the imagination, it seems to me" (5). Moore's own analysis of the influence of science on her work contributes to the critical evaluation of her poetry by adding to the lexicon we use to describe her writing. Her own admission that "precision" and "economy of statement" have affected her creativity supports critical observations of such qualities in her work.

When asked by Hall to comment more specifically on her formal techniques and poetic method, however, Moore resists. In response to a detailed question about her use of syllabic verse, Moore supplies a vague answer, refusing to "nail down" her approach:

"It never occurred to me that what I wrote was something to define.... I like the end- stopped line and dislike the reversed order of words; like symmetry" (18).

Likewise, Moore disowns her own agency in her compositions. For her, it is the language itself that is in control. She doesn't "plan" her stanzas: "Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure. I may influence an arrangement or thin it, then try to have successive stanzas identical with the first. Spontaneous initial originality— say, impetus—seems difficult to reproduce consciously later. . . . No, I never 'draw lines'" (18).91 When things go wrong and the words do not flow spontaneously, she will put the work away, sometimes for long stretches of time. Moore's self-description seems more akin to a gardener tending to wild weeds than a professional writer. Her role is one of observing, nurturing, ordering, judging; it is not necessarily one of creating from scratch.

Like Hemingway and others, Moore is reluctant to speak directly of her own authorial intentions. When asked about early writing influences and what inspired her to compose poetry, Moore is cautious about expressing even her general intentions to write.

She claims that she "certainly never intended to write poetry" and that she "had no

Note the usage of a scientific metaphor in this description, perhaps influenced by Moore's laboratory studies. 346 ambition to be a writer" (5). Instead, Moore credits all of her motivation to external inspiration, be it literary or social; she declares: "Everything I have written is the result of reading or of interest in people, I'm sure of that" (5). Her position is typically modern in its dismissal of creative inspirational "genius" and more in line with Eliot's conception of

"tradition." Moore's take on the model is typically modest, however: she claims she

"blundered into versifying" (13).

Her humble style of self-reference, which I have already touched upon in the previous chapter, is evident throughout the conversation. She downplays the originality of her heavy use of quotation in her poetry and insists it is not a creative act at all, merely a way of staying honest: "I was just trying to be honourable and not to steal things. I've always felt that if a thing had been said in the best way, how can you say it better? If I wanted to say something and somebody had said it ideally, then I'd take it but give the person credit for it. That's all there is to it" (14). For Moore, quoting bits of text is like passing along a good story and it comes out of a desire to share what has inspired her. If we take her statements here at face value, it seems that she is asking her readers not to overthink her choice of quotations. Her comments cannot help but affect readers' responses to her work.

Moore's early reluctance to publish her poetry also seems tied to issues of intention. Moore dislikes the label of "poetry" as much as she dislikes the notion of identifying herself as a poet or recognizing her own poetic ambition. While she concedes that the term is "a convenient, almost unavoidable term" (11) for the form, she feels her own work defies the category's limits. She refers to her pieces as "observations, experiments in rhythm, or exercises in composition" (11), all models that can be used for 347 readers in their attempts to frame her work. In the same vein, Moore resists the labels applied to the work of her and her ilk, going as far as to reject the term "imagism" (13) and even "poetry" (11). Moore's resistance to these labels for her work is related to her sense of discipline. She rejects the term "poem" for her piece "In Distrust of Merits" because she doesn't feel it is structured or careful enough. Its form is too "haphazard," and "it is just a protest—disjointed, exclamatory. Emotion overpowered [me]. First this thought and then that" (16). For Moore, the release of emotion is incompatible with her conception of poetic composition and she seems to seek a generic exception for this piece due to its lack of organized structure. At the same time, she implicitly directs her readers on how to read the poem: "It's truthful; it is testimony—to the fact that war is intolerable, and unjust" (16). How much closer can she get to supplying a meaning for the work that she wants her reader to take from it?

In terms of her own compositional practice, Moore implies that there is nothing disciplined or professional about it. She makes a point of how she rarely submits material and only does so under duress and seems to exaggerate her own lack of work ethic. She will write down her ideas but never make herself work on them and is successful in writing only when she doesn't "know" that she's "trying" (12). In some sense, this stepping back from ambition or self-promotion is another kind of turning away from intention; Moore is not an active agent, only a passive medium for her art to move through. Even the language she uses to describe her ideas may be seen in this light: "A felicitous phrase springs to mind" (12) suggests a passive approach to her own ideas. She talks of being "governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity" and claims that "Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure" 348

(18). However, this reticence to take possession of her creations or to have her work read should be approached with some caution. As noted previously, Moore had to contend with duelling pressures on women poets to appear both credible and intelligent and yet not appear overly striving or ambitious.

In the Marianne Moore interview, the issue of authorial intention comes through in subtle ways; however, it is still an essential part of the conversation. Uncomfortable with notions of ambition and striving intention, Moore turns away from any direct admission of her own purpose, and yet reveals it at every turn in an indirect fashion. This example adds to the debates around intentionalist criticism by demonstrating a writer's own discomfort and confusion with the term. For readers and critics of Moore's poetry, even if one should choose to turn to the authority of the writer, Moore offers only cryptic, ambiguous notions of what intention entails. There is no clearcut "key" to her work to be found in her perspective; however, there are numerous clues to her intention to be discerned in her influences and writing practices, clues which can rarely be taken at face value and must be deciphered carefully. Just as in the interviews of Faulkner and

Hemingway, decoding Moore's often inscrutable hints requires separating performance from intention, and resisting the urge to focus more on the poet's character than her work. 349

6.3.4 William Burroughs "I had nothing else to do"

William Burroughs' 1965 interview by Conrad Knickerbocker provides an interesting contrast to the interviews of the high moderns. Burroughs defies expectations early on in his Paris Review interview by suggesting that there was never "any strong motivation" (3) for him to write. Unlike most Beat writers who speak of an early "urge" or "compulsion" to put words to paper, Burroughs is frank about the almost randomness of his vocation: "I didn't feel compelled. I had nothing else to do" (3). He chose writing as a way to fill his endless days, much in the same way he chose heroin as an escape from the oppressive monotony of everyday life (7). At the same time, his humility goes beyond what other writers express. While many authors freely abuse their earliest efforts,

Burroughs outright dismisses his hit novel, Junkie, saying it "is not much of a book" because he knew so little about form at the time.

The Burroughs interview is also markedly different from those of his contemporaries in the way that he conceptualizes the relationship between intention and interpretation. Some of this difference can be attributed to the uniqueness of Burroughs' literary output. Intention is given an unusual spin in the discussion of Burroughs' famous

"cut-ups:" pre-existing text, often by established writers, literally scissored into pieces and reassembled into new orders. With these works, Burroughs is the controlling agent insofar as he selects the excerpts and decides on their new associations and orders.

However, the meaning of the original source material is never completely lost. In this interview, Burroughs comments that the rearrangement can make "quite as much sense as the original" (14). The audience, according to Burroughs, can learn to appreciate the cut- up because it makes "explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time 350 anyway" (14), that is, by associating dislocated text excerpts and images with one another to create meaning, such as reading a newspaper in a cafe in New York and combining the surroundings with one's thoughts and one's reading. In this way, Burroughs proposes a reader-centred approach to the creation of meaning—the cut-up maybe a result of a writer's (or artist's) repression and selection of text and images; however, it only acquires its meaning through the participation of the reader. Also, Burroughs sees the cutup as a movement away from the conventional English declarative sentence, a construction he sees as erroneous since it is essentially an "either/or proposition" (15). Unlike some languages, such as Chinese and its use of the ideograph, the English sentence does not allow for multiple ways of reading.

Despite the importance of the reader in interpretation, Burroughs seems almost unconcerned by the reader's experience when he speaks of his considerations while writing. He looks at writing as more of an experiment in consciousness using language and associations than an effort to engage another. These endeavours are more for himself than any sense of an audience or reading community. He explains how many of his writing activities are for selfish psychological reasons: "The scrapbooks and time travel are exercises to expand consciousness, to teach me to think in association blocks rather than words.... What I want to do is to learn to see more of what's out there, to look outside, to achieve as far as possible a complete awareness of surroundings" (11).

Burroughs appears to use the process of writing to expand his own ability to experience reality. This leads to a critical dilemma: even if we take that to be his intention, how would we make use of that in critical or literary inquiry into his work? 351

In the closing moments of the interview, however, Burroughs seems to contradict this position. He makes claims for political aims in his writing: "to make people aware of the true criminality of our times, to wise up the marks" (37). He continues, "All of my work is directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet rendering it uninhabitable" and insists that his writing should be taken literally

(37). Burroughs compares himself to the admen, manipulating "word and image to create an action," in this case, to effect "an alteration in the reader's consciousness" (37). This might be considered a clear indication of Burroughs' intention to convince and convert, to motivate his audience to action, a radical departure from the expressed intention of other interview subjects. While these remarks suggest a readerly orientation, this is abandoned in the next breath when he claims he would continue to write even if there were no audience for his work whatsoever: "I'm creating an imaginary—it's always imaginary—world in which I would like to live" (37).

While Burroughs never projects the image of the "worker" writer toiling away over every sentence, his process of writing is certainly painstaking and crafted. His habits include keeping thousands of pages of notes of his experience—juxtapositions of his thoughts and his actions. Part of this practice grows out of his belief that his experiences can change his consciousness and vice versa; therefore, what he is thinking directly affects what he observes and, perhaps, even what happens. He uses the example of hearing a story about a rat in his friend's apartment and then immediately looking out the window to see a sign for pest control (15). His observations are recorded in great detail and he refers back to his notes in his writing. Burroughs discusses his transcription practices in great detail. While travelling, he records his observations in three columns, one for events and objective observations, one for memories and impressions, and the third for quotations from his reading at the time.

This final column suggests how reading can become part of the writing process. The interaction of these events, texts and images is the preparation for his compositions. He refers to these records as his "coordinate books" (17), and carries these along with massive photographic, research and idea files with him wherever he travels (23).

According to Burroughs, he needs all of this material with him in order to compose, and he needs to have the space to spread it out around him.

Burroughs describes another unusual step in his writing ritual in the case of his earlier work. He came up with his character, Dr. Benway (later resurrected for Naked

Lunch), through role-playing, or "acting-out" his personality with a friend (20). He also has used pictures pasted on a wall and recordings of various characters. Despite his detailed rituals, Burroughs dismisses the possibility of adequately describing the writing process, saying "there is no accurate description of the creation of a book, or an event," since there are so many different ways of looking at the same process (20). However, the extensive descriptions of his writing process provided by Burroughs belie his earlier dismissal of his writerly intentions. Burroughs' described approach to his craft is evidently disciplined, detailed, and careful, and yet, ironically, he willingly relinquishes the meaning-making of his texts to the reader. Perhaps Burroughs' position represents a new kind of approach to intention, where authority and control are perpetually passed from the writer to the reader. 353

Burroughs' repeated emphasis on the technical aspects of composition is a counterpoint to Hemingway's superstition around rituals, disclosure and the writing process. In some ways, Burroughs seems happy to discuss the ordinariness of literary composition, the necessary labour and craft that goes into it. His depiction of the multiple approaches and detail-oriented preparations required to create breaks down any Romantic image of the artist as a singular creative talent inspired from beyond. Burroughs' literary output requires radical thought, hard work and experimentation both to create and to understand; however, it is not output that is unavailable to any other creator. Burroughs does not present himself as an exceptional figure, and while his clues about writing are informative, they are less likely to be treated as gospel when he does not set himself up as somehow apart.

Writing is an activity over which Burroughs maintains consistent control. When discussing his writing plans, he speaks with a sense of agency, not as a writer for whom the story or the characters take over (26). Near the end of the conversation, Burroughs, in discussing philosophical and spiritual ideologies, states unequivocally that, despite his interest in systems of thought such as Zen and even Scientology, his caution is born from his belief that nothing "happens in this universe except by some power—or individual— making it happen. Nothing happens of itself. I believe all events are produced by will"

(33). This description is a far cry from Hemingway's allusions to a mysterious "well" of creative juices and suggest a far more pragmatic take on creative intention and inspiration.

While Burroughs never directly addresses the issue of authorial intention, his comments speak to the subject in sometimes contradictory ways. For example, in a discussion about the role of technology in writing, Burroughs notes that "any artistic product must stand or fall on what's there" (18). He goes on to explain that how one creates is irrelevant to a work's value. There can be no differentiation between the abstract painting created by a chimpanzee and that of a master painter, nor between the

"sense" of a straight composition and that of a cut-up. A cut-up could be a carefully constructed selection and rearrangement of text by a writer, or it could be a spontaneous occurrence, almost an accident. Burroughs gives the example of watching television in

Morocco on a set with poor reception; the "blurring and contractions and visual static" of the Italian Westerns qualify as "cutups" in their accidental creation of meaning (31).

We could read these examples as exceedingly literal expressions of the New

Critical position that the work's value must be based on the final product alone, or we might see them as extreme versions of a reader-centred approach, where the reader possesses sole authority on extracting meaning from a text. In either case, Burroughs, at least on the surface, adamantly rejects the importance of any kind of creative intention in the value of the final work. And yet, Burroughs is consistently interested in explaining the origins and motivations of his specific works. He unambiguously declares that in the case of Naked Lunch, it was "the carny world ... [he] exactly intended to create" (19).

He provides details of his real-life (or sometimes dream state) sources for characters in his novels (21-2). He expresses a desire to "to do something different - almost a deliberate change of style" (24) and to extend "newspaper and magazine formats to so- called literary materials" (25).

Burroughs' Paris Review interview may seem, on the surface, to effectively avoid issues of authorial intention. However, upon closer reading, we see how talk of the 355 writing process, control, and origins bears heavily on notions of authorial intention.

Authorial intention rarely comes across as an explicit disclaimer of what a writer meant; instead, it threads through discussion of all manner of writing concerns, refusing to be ignored. Burroughs' interview exhibits new ways of conceiving of intention and how it can make its way into the final work and readers' interpretation of the work and its creation.

6.3.5 T. S. Eliot: "I don't know until I find I want to do it"

Donald Hall's 1959 Paris Review interview with T.S. Eliot is perhaps the most layered and complex illustration of how intention can function in the author interview.

Keeping in mind Eliot's poetic and critical position on authorial intention, it should be no surprise that the issue should surface repeatedly in the interview context. Perhaps most surprising is that Eliot agreed at all to such a personal exchange, an event that by its very nature privileges the writer over his work.

Quite early in the conversation, Hall steers Eliot towards issues of intention in his discussion of The Waste Land. He refers to Eliot's previous disavowal of critics' suggestion that his masterpiece was about "the disillusionment of a generation" ("you denied that it was your intention" [Hall in Eliot 8]). Hall suggests other possible thematic interpretations for the piece, including a Christian approach or a lack of structure altogether. When asked so directly, Eliot responds by tackling the subject of intention itself: 356

"No, [a Christian theme] wasn't part of my conscious intention. I think that

in Thoughts after Lambeth, I was speaking of intentions more in a negative

than in a positive sense, to say what was not my intention. I wonder what

an "intention" means! One wants to get something off one's chest. One

doesn't know quite what it is that one wants to get off the chest until one's

got it off. But I couldn't apply the word "intention" positively to any of my

poems. Or to any poem." (8)

This passage, early in the interview, embodies many of the tensions around the term

"intention" that Eliot will struggle with throughout the interview. He wants to distance himself from the concept of "intention" by declaring "I wonder what an 'intention' means!" and yet struggles to find another way to talk about purpose. It strikes me that

Eliot may be proposing a new way of using intention that would be less of a challenge to the New Critical paradigm: a negative use of the term. In Eliot's explanation, intention is not a defining element for literature; however, it can be used to "weed out" false interpretations. Therefore, we can say, "no, that was not my intention," yet we can never fully limit readings through a definitive declaration of a singular authorial intention.

Throughout the interview, Eliot deflects Hall's attempts to define his intention for a particular style or individual piece of writing. On the subject of vers libre, Eliot is asked why he chose to use the form, and responds that, although it was initially in imitation of

Laforgue, eventually it "just came that way," without any specific model or influence in mind (10). Again, Hall pushes towards identifying Eliot's intention with his early poetry, asking, "Did you feel, possibly, that you were writing against something, more than from any model?" (10). Time and again, Eliot pushes back, 357

No, no, no. I don't think one was constantly trying to reject things, but just

trying to find out what was right for oneself. One really ignored poet

laureates.... I don't think good poetry can be produced in a kind of

political attempt to overthrow some existing form. I think it just

supersedes. People find a way in which they can say something. 'I can't

say it that way, what way can I find that will do?' One didn't really bother

about the existing modes. (10)

Interesting in this passage is Eliot's uneven use of "one" and "people" to signal, and to depersonalize, his own writing choices. Also, he speaks of poetry in the passive, instead of the active, voice (good poetry "is produced"). In general, even when Eliot speaks of his compositional technique, he employs a language that is reminiscent more of observation than mastery. In discussing his current work (at the time of the interview),

Eliot remarks that "things do come from time to time;" he keeps notes, certainly, but he must wait as his readers do to see how they turn out. Sometimes they don't turn out as he wishes; those pieces are not put out to the world (13). Later in the interview, he talks about "let[ting] a plot develop," another passive verb construction that distances him from control of his work. In the final moments of the interview, Eliot is asked what he considers to be his work's connection with the American past. In response, Eliot notes that the sources, the "emotional springs" of his work are from America (25), reminding of us Moore's similar use of the term "spring." The image of a spring is a natural one, something erupting quite organically, endlessly and without the agency of man.

Reminiscent of Moore's style of speech, Eliot consistently speaks in a kind of distant, detached tone, allowing him to make statements about the poetic process without implicating himself personally. His repeated use of passive verb constructions and the substitution of "I" with the second and third person ("you" and "one") might be considered part of a conscious effort not to present himself as a singular creative talent.

Eliot resists building up an image of "Eliot the Poet" and instead seeks to portray himself as an invisible presence behind his work. In his criticism, Eliot rejects the Romantic notion of the poet as a special breed of man, and he seems to be doing the same thing here. However, if we accept that "one" is simply a semantic stand-in for Eliot's own experience, we see that Eliot is unable to divorce himself entirely.

The issue of influence is deeply entwined with that of intention; however, Eliot is adamant in his refusal to be swayed by it. The language Eliot uses to discuss his writing tends to deflect any responsibility or intention in the work. When asked about his French poems, Eliot insists he cannot explain how they came to be, that he didn't take them seriously in the least. He also describes them "as a sort of tour de force to see what I could do" (11). Of his decision to abandon that approach, the change in style and language seems to happen to Eliot beyond his desire or control: "I suddenly began writing in English again and lost all desire to go on with French" (11). Here, there is a sense that Eliot is subject to a greater force and can only report on what he is compelled to do.

As in the Marianne Moore interview, Eliot's interviewer tries to access authorial intention through the "side-door" of literary influence. When asked, Eliot claims to have first been exposed to the work of the French symbolists through Arthur Symon's book

{The Symbolist Movement in Literature), which he stumbled across at the Harvard Union.

He plays down his early connections, saying, "In those days the Harvard Union was a 359 meeting place for any undergraduate who chose to belong to it" (3). Instead of looking for models, Eliot is grateful for a kind of literary vacuum into which he could create a new space. Because he didn't take "any particular interest" in any living poets in England or America, he was free of the "troublesome distraction" and "dominating presence" they would have afforded (4). And so, while admitting to being aware of a few contemporaries, like Hardy and Robinson, Eliot resists any self-definition through a lens of influence. Even when reminded of his early connections to Pound by the interviewer,

Eliot simplifies the anecdote into negligibility: Eliot simply called on Pound and was lightly praised, in very few words, and then had his work passed on to Harriet Monroe.

There is no exaggerated storytelling or romantic narrative given; the story becomes barely a footnote serving to minimize the connection, if anything.

Eliot makes other gestures against influence throughout the interview. He tells of learning from Pound (an influence in itself) to avoid consciously anything that hints of imitation. According to his anecdote, one version of The Waste Land included a section that imitated The Rape of the Lock; Pound cut it, saying "It's no use trying to do something that somebody else has done as well as it can be done. Do something different" (7). This pushing towards innovation, according to Eliot, did not save him from what he sees as a tendency towards the "structureless" in this early work.

Eliot frames his understanding of intention by speaking of influence only in terms of open-ended models. He considers the Greek original, Oedipus at Colonus, as the

"point of departure" for The Elder Statesman. Finding a direct literal treatment too confusing, he used the myth as "a springboard" from which the new work comes forth.

Again, the creation of a new work is treated in increasingly passive terms: "You can take 360 the situation, rethink it in modern terms, develop your own characters from it, and let another plot develop out of that" (16). Influence works as a trigger to intention, but the work itself isn't propelled along so much as "allowed" to develop. With this description,

Eliot again sidesteps the notion of intention in the writing process.

We also see Eliot's disavowal of intention when Hall asks him about his plans for future poems. Unlike some writers who openly discuss projects in the works, even if only in the mind, Eliot states flatly that he hasn't "any plans for anything at the moment" other than "a little prose writing of a critical sort" (12). He explains that he doesn't like to think

"more than one step ahead" because he can't know until he "find[s] he want[s] to do it" - an expression perfectly in keeping with his earlier position of non-intention. To find that one wants to write sounds much like someone discovering one is hungry and then simply eating what is before one.

Like Hemingway and Faulkner, Eliot offers both opinion and performance in the context of the Paris Review interview. Eliot's evasiveness in the Paris Review interview should be understood within the context of the persona of the "possum" he developed in later life. The expression "to play possum" refers to the opossum's habit of feigning sleep or even death when threatened in order to remain under the radar of an enemy. It is often applied to those who play ignorant or remain silent simply to avoid being targeted or asked to engage in a debate. The implication is that the "possum" has a lot more to say than what he is revealing. Ezra Pound gave Eliot the nickname "Old Possum" on account of Eliot's tendency to cautiously dodge difficult or uncomfortable questions and his 361 refusal to be pinned down (Ackroyd 174).92 Apparently, it was a label that Eliot did not reject; he eventually borrowed the name for his collection of children's verse, Old

Possum's Book of Practical Cats (eventually inspiring Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical

Cats).

The only times that Eliot seems to be comfortable with the notion of intention is when he is talking about it strictly in terms of generic technical intentions for a piece, not in terms of the meaning of his work. Hall asks Eliot directly what his intentions were for his play "The Elder Statesman." For this and his other works, Eliot responds by talking about his "ideal aims, which [he] never fully realizes" (15), which involved elements of language, versification, and structure. He fully admits that such aims and intention are not always evident in his final work: "it isn't always the things constructed most according to plan that are the most successful" (15). In fact, for Eliot, one's aims seem more about deciding direction than determining outcome; he is happy to get a bit closer to his goal, all the while never fully achieving it (16).

This nickname and persona of "possum" for T.S. Eliot has been the subject of some recent scholarly interest. For Eliot and Pound, "possum" was one element in a network of in-jokes that illustrated somewhat troubling class and race beliefs. The nickname was often accompanied by dialects of black speech which suggested the larger implications of how both Eliot and Pound saw the practice of "playing possum." As Michael North argues in "The Dialect in/of Modernism: Pound and Eliot's Racial Masquerade": "When Ezra Pound first tagged T. S. Eliot with the nickname Possum, he no doubt meant to mock his friend's reserve, but he also used the name, which he had found in Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus, to recast Eliot's timidity as subversion. In acting out his nickname, Eliot was to mimic what Alain Locke once called the '"possum play' of the Negro peasant" ... to use the traditional strategy of the powerless, assuming a bland conformity that conceals an explosive charge. In so doing, Eliot would become a milder, subtler version of the trickster from whom Pound had taken his own nickname, Brer Rabbit.... Eliot accepted his nickname and, at least for a time, the role it implied, and he even introduced his own variations .. . ." (North 56). 362

Surprisingly, despite his reputation as a highly disciplined craftsman, Eliot has some writing habits that sound more superstitious than professional. When asked about unfinished poetic works, Eliot states a preference for keeping incomplete pieces only alive in his mind, as leaving them half-done can lead to stagnation, whereas a poem in the mind "becomes transformed into something else" (12). By preserving pieces of work in his head, he is able to pull them out for new pieces and yet not be attached to particular

"nice lines" that don't advance the action.

Still, there are hints of professionalism simply in Eliot's diligence and perseverance. He applies himself to a variety of writing genres and types of poetry as a kind of mental and professional exercise: "one wants to keep one's hand in, you know, in every type of poem, serious and frivolous and proper and improper. One doesn't want to lose one's skill" (14). He also seems to have some concern for the time needed to regenerate or, as he describes it, "to get up a head of steam" between writing projects

(15). This seems to be less about gathering actual material than about recharging his creative energy to be ready to produce again.

Undercutting his reputation as a self-serious literary critic, Eliot surprises his interviewer when asked about his theories of poetic drama. Instead of expounding a system of thought by which one might then evaluate his work, Eliot dismisses his own authority on the subject with a terse, "I am no longer very much interested in my own theories about poetic drama, especially those put forward before 1934.1 have thought less about theories since I have given more time to writing [for the theatre]" (17). One might note the specificity of this remark; when Eliot points to a very specific set of beliefs he wishes to distance himself from, he simultaneously clears the way to adopt new theories 363 without having to grapple with self-contradiction. By gesturing towards, while not completely disowning, his expected position as the literary authority, Eliot forces the focus of the interview back to his most current writing, and, indirectly, his most current theories: those expressed during the interview.

Contrary to popular understandings of modernist writers, Eliot demonstrates an unexpected awareness of his reader when he talks about the writing process. He identifies a difference between dramatic and poetic writing in the relationship with the audience.

He considers writing poetry as an act "primarily for yourself," getting "feeling into words for [one]self," while drama is a creative act intended for an audience (17). Poems, according to Eliot, are also written in one's "own voice," in contrast to drama, which the writer knows will be passed "into the hands of other people" (17). This ceding of control creates a difference of approach, and while unspoken, of intention.

While these two approaches can overlap, it is a rare moment. Eliot's creative development, as pointed out by interviewer Donald Hall, moved from writing for a narrow elect audience (of such difficult works as The Waste Land) to a much broader reception (through drama and poetry). This movement, according to Eliot, grew out of an evolutionary simplification of language and a greater maturity which allowed more dexterity with words. The much puzzled-over density of his earlier works is chalked up to a kind of failure of articulation:

I think that in the early poems it was a question of not being able to—of

having more to say than one knew how to say, and having something one

wanted to put into words and rhythm which one didn't have the command

of words and rhythm to put in a way immediately apprehensible.... That 364

type of obscurity comes when the poet is still at the stage of learning how

to use language. You have to say the thing the difficult way. ... In The

Waste Land, I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was

saying. (18)

Here, Eliot gives the reader insight into his earlier works by telling us what he did not intend. Instead of directing the reader to original thought or meaning, he points directly at his language and technique as flawed, as failing to capture his intention at all. In the absence of appropriate literary expression, there is no original thought worth discussing; there is no "meaning," only failed intention. If we conclude that Eliot is asserting that he lacked any clear intention at all, does that diminish the value of the final text? Eliot's comments here raise an important question about the need for intention in the successful realization of a piece of writing. If, as critics, we determine that a piece of writing lacks any intention whatsoever (as in the example of writing left by the wind in the sand), how shall that discovery influence our appreciation of the final text? Eliot's remarks seem to suggest that there should be no influence whatsoever.

Eliot's Paris Review interview merits a close reading as it embodies so many of the contradictions inherent in discussions of authorial intention. Known for his critical professionalism and his "on the record" position on writing and personality, Eliot is still not immune to the difficulties of reconciling his theoretical positions on intention with his writerly experience. By merely participating in a forum that presupposes the importance of the author (the interview), Eliot struggles to both discuss his writing practice and goals and to distance himself from the role of a controlling agent with full authority over his text. His most common method of evasiveness is to use passive, negative, or impersonal 365 verbal constructions which help him disown his own agency while still asserting certain beliefs about his own writing. At times, these strategies are quite subtle and semantically difficult to tease apart. For example, how does one resist "overthrowing" previous literary movements and simply allow one's new work to "supersede" what came before (10)?

Also, we know that despite how often Eliot—and Moore, for that matter—uses the objective "one" to describe a creative practice, we begin to realize that he is, in fact, referring to his own experience and simply generalizing it to guard consistency in his theoretical discussion. In other cases, the distinction made between types of intention is quite important. Eliot repeatedly resists discussing specific intentions that relate to the meaning of his work; however, he relents on several occasions when asked about his more general intentions when starting a work. For example, Eliot is more comfortable discussing generic (poetry or prose), linguistic (French or English) and even broad thematic (Christianity) intentions, and yet shies away from giving any specific information on the details or significance of these intentions. This differentiation of types of intention is discussed by Jerrold Levinson in his article "Intention and Interpretation" in which he identifies a class of intentions called "categorical intentions" which "in general determine how a text is to be conceptualized and approached on a fundamental level" and "serve to orient a reader vis-a-vis a text at a very basic level, and without knowledge of them one is powerless to begin to sort out its meanings" (232). Thus, Eliot can give us a very general signpost that "this work grapples with Christianity" and not be guilty of privileging authorial intention in the same way as, say, Hemingway is, when he clarifies the exact nature of a character's psychological wound. 366

The example of T. S. Eliot's Paris Review interview, like those with Faulkner,

Hemingway, Moore and Burroughs, highlights several interesting aspects of the intention debates in literary criticism and theory. While critics and scholars continue to struggle with how to conceptualize authorial intention and what use to make of it, few actually turn to authors themselves to consider how they articulate their own intention and the different types of intention that are expressed when discussing work. Literary interviews, and Paris Review interviews in particular, provide unparalleled access into this discussion. The writers talk about their own authority and readers exploit that information in far from straightforward ways that could benefit from greater systematization and study. These Paris Review interviews illustrate the complex ways in which authorial intention infiltrates discussion of the "Art of Writing." These writers, many adamantly anti-intentionalist in their theoretical positions, consistently deal with issues of authorial intention in their discussion of the craft. Most notably, description of the creative process and a writer's discipline and control touch upon what it means to have a writing purpose and how one intends for something in their work. Discussion of influence and ambition necessarily is inflected by understandings of what one sets out to do and how one accomplishes it. Most notably, we see that considerations of inspiration and idea origins are often veiled grapplings with authorial intention that depend on a shared language and context to express themselves. In short, these selected Paris Review interviews effectively explode debates around the relevance of authorial intention by demonstrating the variety of incarnations the subject can take. More than anything, these conversations show that one simply cannot talk about the act of writing without dealing with the issue of authorial intention, and that intention is understood in dramatically different ways by 367 different writers. The Paris Review interview can productively be seen as a unique site of negotiation for the relevance, nature and terms of the ongoing debate on authorial intention. 368

CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION

In 2008, 55 years after its founding, The Paris Review is still thriving and continues to operate with a unique blend of the fantastic, the absurd, the commercial, and the profound. Its most recent fundraising venture, the Spring Revel, was held at the swanky Cipriani 42nd Street restaurant in New York City (with its marble columns and chandelier-studded, 65-foot ceilings); tickets went for $500 to $1500 (or $50,000 for a table). The party boasted an attendance list that included Joan Didion, Don DeLillo, Jay

Mclnerney, Frank McCourt, E. L. Doctorow, Jonathan Safran Foer and other names from the Who's Who of literary society. There were politicians, socialites, actors and fashion designers to round out the cast. A live band (The Slavic Soul Party!) played raucous music and Paris Review founder Peter Matthiessen was honoured with the Hadada Award by Tom Brokaw. One glimpse at its website tells us that the magazine still depends on

"Enterprise in the Service of Art." The Paris Review still shills paraphernalia; you can buy and flaunt a little cultural capital by purchasing a Paris Review tote bag or t-shirt, all the while helping to keep the magazine afloat. A recent issue (The Paris Review No. 184

Spring 2008) brings together an eclectic mix of creative pieces such as a collage by Louis

Armstrong, new fiction by J. David Stevens, various poetry including a piece by Gerard

Malanga (who interviewed Charles Olson in 1970), and a collection of photographs and sketches entitled "Airship." Notably, the top story, given the cover's place of pride, is still reserved for its prize feature, a lengthy interview on "The Art of Fiction." This interview with Kazuo Ishiguro is number 196 in the series on fiction alone, and it begs the questions, is there anything new to be said on the subject of writing? Is there still more we can learn from the writer interviews of The Paris Review1?

A careful look at the Ishiguro piece confirms that there is, indeed, plenty to be gained from reading a Paris Review interview. As my research demonstrates, the Paris

Review interviews are unique sites of negotiation between the writer, the reader and the text and, as such, are rich sources of information about authorial persona, performance, celebrity and intention. In the case of the most recent Kazuo Ishiguro interview, we could choose to fixate on the obvious keys to content and meaning the author willingly supplies: he tells us about his use of the butler in The Remains of the Day as a metaphor for the "emotional frostiness" and reserve of the English as well as those who prefer to remain ignorant of the politics under which they serve (43). Ishiguro also reveals his early technical missteps and outlines his original intentions for novels such as A Pale

View of Hills (40), The Unconsoled (49-50), and When We Were Orphans (51). Likewise, we might extract interesting nuggets of Ishiguro's biography from the interview, such as his mother's life in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped (27), his early impressions of English society (30), his employment as a Royal grouse-beater and acquaintance with the Queen Mother (36), or his experience riding trains with hobos in

As of 2008, The Paris Review has also published 93 interviews on "The Art of Poetry;" 15 on "The Art of Theatre;" four on "The Art of Criticism;" three each on "The Art of Humor," "The Art of Translation" and "The Art of Publishing; two each on "The Art of Screenwriting" and "The Art of the Biography;" and one each on "The Art of the Musical," "The Art of Editing," "The Art of the Diary," "The Art of Journalism," and "The Art of Nonfiction." 370

America in the seventies (34). All of these subjects make for interesting reading and are, in themselves, adequate draw to the interview for many readers.

However, if we look beyond Ishiguro's anecdotes as simply entertaining storytelling, we might consider a more critical approach to this Paris Review interview.

For example, from my close readings of early interviews, we have seen how the author's performance in interview often manifests other aspects of his constructed authority and public personality. For example, we can look to the interview for hints about how

Ishiguro's projected persona as a kind of bohemian chameleon, adapting to different environments and cultures, reflects on the conflicts in his constructed image and his style of fiction. Careful attention should be paid to the headnote by interviewer Susannah

Hunnewell, in which certain aspects of Ishiguro's personality and lifestyle are emphasized. We learn that Ishiguro is polite, speaks "in the pitch-perfect voice of an

English butler" (23), and has an impeccable, custom-designed office complete with "rows of color coded binders neatly stacked in cubby holes" (24). In some ways, this image of

Ishiguro conforms to that of the reserved English-Japanese persona often associated with

Ishiguro in critical pieces and publicity blurbs. As Chu-chueh Cheng points out in

"Making and Marketing Kazuo Ishiguro's Alterity," Ishiguro has been consistently identified with Japanese aesthetics and his Asian heritage despite his repeated attempts to distance himself from such comparisons. Cheng argues that critics "relate [Ishiguro's]

Japanese heritage to his thematic concerns" and often "link the novelist's understated narrative with the Japanese self-suppressive rhetoric" while Ishiguro time and again tries to "downplay the impact of his motherland" (3, 15, 3). In a survey of critical response to

Ishiguro's work, Cheng finds that "critics tend to describe the novelist and his writing in 371 ethnicity-related terms, such as postcolonial, immigrant, and ethnic Japanese''' (4) but these terms are inappropriate to the actual themes and concerns of Ishiguro's oeuvre.

Cheng maintains that Ishiguro's work and style should not be treated as culturally pre­ determined but instead appreciated for its international, even universal appeal to contemporary audiences of many different backgrounds.

Judging from this Paris Review interview, Ishiguro shares Cheng's opinion on the irrelevance of his birth country to his literary output. Equally important as Ishiguro's comments on writing technique are his repeated efforts to distance himself from his

Japanese ethnicity. He complains his Japanese is "awful" and reminds the reader that he left Japan at age five (23). Despite the Japanese content of several of his early novels and stories, Ishiguro repeatedly emphasizes the influence of popular culture—especially

North American—on his writing and creativity. He mentions his early love of The Lone

Ranger, Laramie and all things "cowboy" (28); his fascination with fictional spies like

James Bond and detectives like Sherlock Holmes (31); and the influence of folk singers, rock music and American hippie culture (31-33). The interview's focus on these topics has the effect of reconfiguring the public image of Ishiguro, of transforming him from the figure of a reserved, restrained Japanese writer to a more cosmopolitan, international, even western polymath.

The Paris Review's choice to print three photos of Ishiguro further supports this effort at image (re-)construction. The first image is of Ishiguro as a young man in 1977; he has long messy hair and a beard and peacefully strums a guitar with his eyes closed. In the next photo, we get a glimpse of Ishiguro as a child in 1959. The image, taken in

94 See also Ma 71-88 for a similar argument about critical response to Ishiguro. 372

Nagasaki, shows a smiling Ishiguro on a tricycle, sporting a stereotypical Asian "bob" haircut and traditional Japanese vest (29). The last photo is recent (2005) and the kind of head shot one would expect to find on a dust jacket. In it, Ishiguro wears frameless spectacles and dark clothing and gazes seriously at the camera (41). He appears modern, wealthy and brooding. The effect of these very different images is to demonstrate their subject's impressive mutability. We are not left with a single image of the author confined to an identifiable lifestyle or culture. Instead, we see the cumulative effect of his many changes and experiences.

If one is more interested in the theoretical implications of Ishiguro's interview, one might choose to focus on other details of his Paris Review interview. The background of his novels is not the only field in which Ishiguro has privileged knowledge. He can also tell us things about how writers understand intention and the many gradations of control and meaning that they must contend with. When Ishiguro states that "Most writers have certain things that they decide quite consciously, and other things they decide less consciously," we must decide how to treat that which is not strictly within the control of the writer. He reiterates this blurring of intention in reference to the pitfalls of book tours. As Ishiguro explains, being asked to pin down one's themes and intentions can be devastating for the writer and his craft:

... you spend a lot of your time being quizzed by often very insightful

people. Why is there always a three-legged cat in your stuff, or what's this

with pigeon pie? A lot of what goes into your work can be unconscious, or

at least the emotional reverberations from these images might have been

unanalyzed. .. . I've seen the damage that this does. Some writers get quite screwed up.... it's got to have some effect on how you write. You sit

down to write and you think, I am a realist and I suppose I am a kind of

absurdist as well. You start to become much more self-conscious. (47)

Likewise, when Ishiguro mentions the influence of Bob Dylan and Leonard

Cohen on his work, he states, "Part of [their] appeal... was that you didn't know what the songs were about. You're struggling to express yourself, but you're always being confronted with things you don't fully understand and you have to pretend to understand them. That's what life is like a lot of the time when you're young, and you're ashamed to admit it. Somehow, their lyrics seem to embody this state" (33). Again, we are given a conception of intention that is far from clear cut. It is inadequate to consider authorial intention as a transparent piece of information one can use in analyzing a text when it is rarely transparent even to the writer himself. Despite giving keys to both his own intention and textual meaning, Ishiguro equally instructs his readers to be cautious of taking his interview comments at face value when he quips, "you should never believe an author if he tells you why he has certain recurring themes" (45).

Finally, as critical readers, we ought to further consider the process of the interview itself. Who is conducting the exchange and what is their relationship to the subject? Why did they choose this moment to interview this writer? What was the nature of the conversation; how much of it occurred in person and how much by correspondence? What editorial strategies were used by the interrogator and Ishiguro himself? What didn't make it to the final draft but lies silent on the cutting-room floor?

What do the chosen images that accompany the interview tell us about the writer? 374

These questions are just a few entryways into the wider implications of the work of the Paris Review interviews and will yield wildly different responses from each chosen example. While not a formulaic, "one-size-fits-all" approach to reading the literary interview, the questions put to the Paris Review interview are useful starting points for unpacking all that the literary conversation has to offer interested scholars. Critics focusing on celebrity and authorial performance will find unique material in the interview, just as those interested in authorship and intention will find new ways of understanding those concepts. Finally, scholars of individual writers and works can still look to literary interviews, not as reservoirs of factual information about a fixed individual or her text, but as exceptional opportunities to observe their subject in the process of creating herself and negotiating meaning through contact with her readers in the form of the interviewer.

The legacy of intentionalist criticism teaches us that we ought to be wary of treating writers' perspectives of their own work without a healthy scepticism. William K.

Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley's definitive conclusion on the use of intention in literary study is well represented by their final declaration in "The Intentional Fallacy"

(1946) that "Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle" (18). Certainly, it is far too simplistic to look to the writer to unlock his secret symbols or for the final word on the meaning of a text. Critics have learned to distrust the opinion of the writer on his own work, and to a great degree, have dismissed the literary interview as so much entertaining chatter. Unfortunately, this caution has often led to a tossing of the baby with the bathwater when critics overlook the intellectually productive aspects of the literary interview form. 375

This expression, "consulting the oracle," has become a catch-all phrase for the use of an author's opinion when determining the ultimate meaning of a text. However, its original meaning and usage may shed some light on the encounters of Paris Review interviews. In the Classical sense, "consulting the oracle" referred to seeking the advice of a person or thing known to be a kind of "mouthpiece of the gods" (OED). The Delphic

Oracle of ancient Greece was a female priestess said to possess inspired information invaluable to those who consulted her. Even great leaders and warriors sought her wisdom before embarking on military campaigns, journeys or major decisions. Her messages were often cryptic but always eventually proven accurate. In this way, the knowledge of the oracle was mysterious, unquestionable, and most importantly, infallible. Other cultures had or have similar oracles (referred to by different names), sometimes living breathing individuals, sometimes a tool or device that is thought to reveal privileged knowledge.

In modern times, the phrase has taken on a more figurative meaning. While not necessarily representing the opinion or knowledge of the divine, the words of an oracle are still highly respected as "an utterance of great wisdom, significance, or import; an opinion or declaration regarded as authoritative and infallible" (OED). The oracle can be the message itself or the one who delivers such wisdom, the "authority believed or claiming to be infallible." Unsurprisingly, the authority of the ancient gods and goddesses has been usurped by new powers; today, we turn to more earthly figures of knowledge such as politicians, scientists, psychiatrists, celebrities, philosophers, artists, and experts of all stripes. Still, there are many shared characteristics associated with these vehicles of knowledge and the information they impart: exclusivity, infallibility, authority, and truth. 376

The choice of this expression by Wimsatt and Beardsley alludes to the mysterious, absolute power attached to a divine figure, that is, an unquestionable, unique authority unparalleled by other experts. When critics commit the "Intentional Fallacy," they mistakenly believe that the writer possesses such incomparable wisdom, that his perspective trumps all others. Wimsatt and Beardsley's complaint with such dependence on the authority of the writer is that he is not necessarily best qualified or able to articulate the knowledge the seeker so desires. But, what if the precious wisdom imparted by the writer is not the meaning of the text after all, but some other, equally valuable information? What if, instead of going to the writer as the privileged source on the interpretation of his text, we looked to him for insight into what intention actually means and new ways of conceptualizing authorial power?

"Consulting the oracle" need not be a critical transgression so long as one can imagine that the oracle's knowledge extends beyond the limits of definitive textual interpretation. If looking for insight into editorial strategies, authorial self-construction, performance, celebrity and symbolic capital, the performance of the "oracle"—the author herself—may, in fact, prove to be an incomparable source of material. The Paris Review interviews, as moments of consultation with writers, should be treated not as merely opportunities to discover another way into a chosen text, but as unique sites of negotiation. Under negotiation are multiple issues: the role of the author; the construction of meaning; the struggle for control between writers, readers and critics; the crafting of persona; and many other significant issues of authorship. Ironically, in these moments and on these topics, the writer does possess unparalleled, privileged knowledge. She is in fact an oracle, and one well worth consulting, provided that one knows what questions to 377 ask of her. Instead of asking, "what does this mean?" we might begin to ask "how does one mean?" "who decides what it means?" or even, "what does it mean to mean?" BIBLIOGRAPHY

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November 7, 2007

To Whom It May Concern:

The Paris Review is happy to grant Kelley Lewis permission free of charge to quote exchanges of up to 500 words each from the magazine's "Art of Fiction," "Art of Poetry," "Art of Drama," etc., interviews from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in her dissertation. She may also quote passages (also up to 500 words each) from the correspondence and drafts related to these interviews, which are housed in the Paris Review archive at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. We understand that these quotations are for scholarly use and not for trade publication; should the manuscript be submitted for trade publication, we request to be alerted so as to review the grant of permission.

Sincerely,

Radhika Jones Managing Editor

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