Paris Review Talks the Write

by Andrew Bast

It’s a hell of a lot easier to talk about writing than it is to actually sit down and write. It’s even easier to read about writing, hence the cottage industry of “how-to” manuals for dreamy souls who all seem to believe there’s a novel deep down inside of them.

While Strunk & White’s oh-so-slender The Elements of Style is the only guidebook ever needed to write anything of note, the Paris Review’s interview series comes in a close second, and the newest collection, “The Paris Review Interviews // Vol. 1” out from Picador offers just enough gems to make the holiday shopping list for the writer or wannabe in your life.

The Paris Review was founded in the 1950’s by a gang of writers fed up with the loads of criticism that filled literary journals. They decided to publish fiction and poetry as well as an interview or two in each issue with the literary bigwigs of the day. Today the archive holds more than 300 interviews.

All the stars made it to the party. There are sixteen in total, including: Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, and Joan Didion.

Yet the real gem comes not from a “Writers at Work” interview, but an “Editors at Work,” interview conducted as a roundtable with Robert Gottlieb and a handful of writers (Toni Morrison, Michael Crichton, John Le Carré, et al). Max Perkins may be revered as the quintessential editor, but truth be told, Gottlieb puts him to shame. He not only headed esteemed book publishing houses Simon & Schuster and Knopf, but for a while he also edited The New Yorker.

As authors and editors are hungry for inside information as to how the other one works, they’d be better off leaving the Gawker-snark blather aside and reading a substantive account of how to take on, say, a project from prolific Robert Caro.

The interviews have their moments, too. Truman Capote says that he reads full-length novels in two hours and then charts the course for the rest of us: “Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of the ear, Virginia Wolf never wrote a bad sentence.”

Plimpton interviews Hemingway, and throughout the old man sounds like he’d rather be out to sea. His curt answers, at times insulting, offer an insight here and there, but more than anything point to what anyone who wants to write ought to do: take the phone off the hook, sit down, and put pen to paper.

And lastly, perhaps the truest statement in the collection comes from Dorothy Parker.

Interviewer: What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?

Parker: Need of money, dear.

(Illustration by The Inquirer illustrator Dustin Glick.)