Picador, 2006. 510pp. $16.
Reviewed by Jon Baskin
12.11.06

In the 16 interviews selected for The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 1, chosen with an introduction by new editor Philip Gourevitch, we learn that Dorothy Parker wrote her stories in longhand, or “with two fingers” on the typewriter. Truman Capote wrote lying in bed, devolving from coffee and mint tea to sherry and martinis as day bent towards night. Earnest Hemingway began writing at six in the morning, in his bedroom, keeping track of his progress on a large chart “set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head.” While he was collaborating on a screenplay, Billy Wilder liked to pace around his Hollywood office with a stick.

The distinguishing feature of the Paris Review interview is the simplicity of the questions. How do you get your ideas? Where do you write? What time of day do you do your best work? Asked—not timidly, but with an understated sophistication—these are the inquiries that have yielded the best answers for a little over half a century. Gourevitch explains in his introduction that a Review interview is “a collaboration, not a confrontation.” The purpose is “to elicit from [the artists] the fullest possible reckoning of what interests them most—their lives and work as writers, who they are and where they came from, and how they go about doing what they do all day.”

Several of the newly collected interviews are standouts, but Hemingway’s looms as volume one’s colossus. The author alternates between hectoring the interviewer for wasting his time (“The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid I should be penalized severely”) and offering caustic advice such as, in answer to a question on what would be the best training for an aspiring writer, that he “should go out and hang himself.” He also articulates his famous “principle of the iceberg,” whereby, “[s]even-eights” of what a writer knows remains “underwater for every part that shows.”

Saul Bellow is nearly as eloquent on the art of fiction as Hemingway, and Jorge Luis Borges, whose interview bears an uncanny resemblance to some of his short stories (an assistant, Susana Quinteros, repeatedly interrupts to announce an enigmatic visitor), delivers a disquisition on metaphor which is itself worth the price of the book:

When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same. I mean you compare time to a road, death to sleeping, life to dreaming, and those are the great metaphors in literature because they correspond to something essential. If you invent metaphors they are apt to be surprising during the fraction of a second, but they strike no deep emotion whatever. If you think of life as a dream, that is a thought, a thought that is real, or at least that most men are bound to have, no?

One of Gourevitch’s goals has been to expand the Review to include more than fiction and poetry and the collection reflects this aim. Though fiction writers and poets account for more than two thirds of the interviews, volume one’s highlights include Wilder on the art of screenwriting, Robert Stone and Richard Price on adaptation, Joan Didion on nonfiction and Robert Gottlieb on editing. Gottlieb’s interview is inventively plotted as a dialogue between the renowned editor and some writers he has worked with, including Michael Crichton, Toni Morrison and Joseph Heller. The piece yields fresh insight into the delicate relationships between literary writers and their editors. “The first thing writers want […] is a quick response,” according to Gottlieb. “Once they’ve finished a new manuscript and put it in the mail, they exist in a state of suspended emotional and psychic animation, and it’s cruelty to animals to keep them waiting.”

The Review interviews, as always, will appeal primarily to devotees of the author and (perhaps especially) to fellow writers, eager to test the answers of the masters against their own habits and doubts. Should a writer live near other writers, make outlines, keep a routine, be emotional about, or distant from his material? One may scavenge the interviews for clues; the shocking thing is how far afield the answers to these questions range. One of the affects of having so many interviews collected in one place is that it makes inescapable the conclusion that there may exist more than one formula for success.

In fact, the interviews bare witness to the necessity of only one quality in the world-class artist, which is a powerful and persuasive voice. Without exception, each interviewee articulates his positions convincingly, and seems—at least until the reader moves on to the next interviewee, who may articulate a different and conflicting position on the same subject—to be right. Of course, it should come as little surprise that the writers are so persuasive; if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have had careers worthy of a Review interview in the first place.

If there is any fault to the interviews, it may be that the prose sometimes reads as too polished to be an accurate transcript of spontaneous conversation. This is because the Review has a policy of allowing writers to edit and fuss over their answers until things come out as they wished they had said them (the Kurt Vonnegut interview is culled from four separate visits. Bellow, we are told, spent over six hours a week for more than a month getting his interview just right). On the one hand, this fosters the misimpression that these figures, already so highly esteemed in our imagination, not only write but speak in flawless paragraphs, sprinkled with relevant quotations and references. On the other hand, the process makes for excellent reading. Gourevitch quotes Review founder George Plimpton as saying the interviews employ “the dramatic devices: character buildup, surprise, argument even. The best interviews [...] have a surprise or two in them, and maybe even a plot.” The interviews, in other words, are literature, just like their subject.

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A Partial Archive of Paris Review Interviews