Paris Review Interviews
I have just sent off to the publishers another book manuscript, short this time. Several pots of Angst have been poured into it, especially over these last few days. Will it stick? Has it got ‘juice’ as Hemingway put it? And, above all, will my relations with my publishers remain tolerably good? Every writer knows that the organization of an efficient, harmonious publishing team is one of the key elements to a book’s success. And every writer also knows that publishing houses today are no longer what they were even five years ago.
With all this swirling about in my head I have been in sore need of a tranquillizer, and here it is: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (ed. Philip Gourevitch, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007). You’ve guessed it -- my interest was piqued by its title. I have never before read The Paris Review, which comes out of New York. What I first wanted to know was how a bunch of Anglo-Saxon writers living in Paris managed to clock up such astounding successes.
Well, there is not as much as a paragraph in this 500-page volume on the subject. Many of the writers interviewed -- they are largely American -- have not as much as visited our sweet capital of France. What references there are to Paris are mostly slighting. Dame Rebecca West came over to film one of her novels; she was ‘so horrified by the cheap food’ served up on her post-war plate. The interviewer asks Hemingway if, in Paris in the 1920s, he had any sense of ‘group feeling’ with other writers and artists; the old man of the sea starkly replies: ‘No. There was no group feeling’ -- an answer any reader of Hemingway’s unashamedly self-centred Movable Feast could have foreseen. Saul Bellow, who I don’t think ever stayed in France, spends a page debunking ideas à la Sartre and à la Camus (a popular pastime in our turn-of-a-millennium world that I find verges on a philistine anti-intellectualism).
Yet there was a Parisian origin to the Review. It was founded in the 1950s by a group of Americans who living in France because it was cheap. Within a short space of time they were famous authors, many of them making their fortunes out of just one or two books; they all returned home to be closer to their mass audiences.
These interviews are wonderful. Every author -- every SOAF member -- ought to have a copy by his or her bedside. It is the sort of thing you can peruse at three in the morning and suddenly bump into an author with the same problem that is keeping you awake. In this first volume we find Hemingway confessing that he re-wrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. ‘I can’t write five words but that I change seven’ says Dorothy Parker. ‘What would you say is the source of most of your work?’ she is asked. ‘Need of money, dear.’ Truman Capote writes his first two drafts in longhand pencil and then types his third on yellow paper, puts it away for a couple of months, then starts the whole process over again; his final version is typed on white paper. T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land is apparently only a fragment of a much larger poem that Ezra Pound cut to pieces; the original colossus has been lost (‘I sold it to John Quinn’). Jorge Luis Borges is another indefatigable reviser, though ‘when a man reaches a certain age, he has found his real tone,’ and the obsessive corrections are no longer needed. Rebecca West tells us that she ‘fiddles away’ at a lot of drafts as ‘I think D.H. Lawrence did.’
Now that is exactly what I want to hear when, apprehensively, I am about to launch into the third revision of my own manuscript. Can you teach somebody how to write a book? Opinion is fairly divided here. Kurt Vonnegut, after sounding off his sceptical remarks, tells us that ‘in a creative writing class of twenty people anywhere in this country [the US], six students will be startlingly talented. Two of those might actually publish something by and by.’ James M. Cain, on the other hand, dismisses the whole how-to business as the ‘bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing’ -- the only thing you can do, he claims, for somebody who wants to write a book is buy him a typewriter (for today’s budding authors, an expensive computer). Saul Bellow, who provides the most fascinating of all the interviews, describes how the whole creative process goes back to ‘a primitive prompter or commentator within.’ He reviews his life as being largely an attempt ‘to get nearer to that primitive commentator… He won’t talk until the situation’s right’; you have to prepare the ground for him. Hemingway is typically much more down to earth. ‘The best kind of writing,’ he says, ‘is when you are in love.’
My head drops to the pillow; I ask myself, ‘Well that’s just lovely, now what about the editor?’ There is an interview in here of the former editor-in-chief at Simon and Schuster and later at Knopf, Robert Gottlieb, who is a real dream. He reads books, you see. ‘I was about forty years old,’ he reports, ‘when I had an amazing revelation -- this is going to sound dumb -- it suddenly came to me that not every person in the world assumed, without thinking about it, that reading was the most important thing in life.’ Gottlieb doesn’t like writing, he doesn’t like it at all -- ‘it’s very, very hard, and I just don’t like the activity,’ whilst reading, it ‘is like breathing.’ ‘Bob is the best-read person I’ve ever met,’ says the deputy editor of The New Yorker, Charles McGrath. ‘He is a marvellous reader and surrenders completely to a text,’ says the Nobel Prize winner, Toni Morrison. Gottlieb explains what surrendering to a text actually means: ‘You must not allow yourself to want the writer to write a certain kind of book.’ This is perhaps the biggest challenge of them all for an editor, who naturally has his own ideas of what a book ought to be. But surrender he must. Gottlieb remembers the struggle he had with himself to get inside Joseph Heller’s Something Happened. Gottlieb wanted it completely rewritten; Heller said he could only write it once. Heller won his point and it went on to become one of Gottlieb’s favourite books.
Which is not to suggest that Gottlieb is an easy editor. He has, apparently, a terrible temper; he is not interested at all in lunches -- ‘We have, basically, no social relationship whatsoever,’ says Robert Caro, who has been a colleague as well as an author at Knopf; he can be a tyrant over revisions. A whole chapter, some fifty or sixty pages, was cut out of Heller’s Catch 22. Chaim Potok dropped three hundred pages from The Chosen. Most extraordinary of all is the story behind Caro’s The Power Broker. The delivered manuscript was over a million words long; in the 1960s it was technologically impossible to produce such a book between two covers. So three hundred thousand words had to be cut -- the equivalent of a 500-page book. Caro used to come round to the Knopf offices every morning and day by day, for one whole year, editor Gottlieb and author Caro laboured away at the manuscript. ‘Late in the afternoon when I left,’ says Caro, ‘there was a line of people outside his office, waiting for him.’
Gottlieb got into the dangerous business of suggesting book ideas to authors. It was he who recommended the idea of Wanderings to Chaim Potok; it was he who got Antonia Fraser to write about the six wives of Henry VIII; it was he who persuaded John Cheever to put together his lovely collection of short stories. Where many editors would come a cropper by trying to impose their own ideas on the author, Gottlieb -- because he read and was so familiar with the author’s work -- could soar forward in the sort of happy partnership that would push those books into the skies of success.
Gottlieb retired from his editing a decade ago. Most of the writers I have mentioned are no longer with us. ‘Publishing has changed in many ways and one of them is that these days many editors don’t edit,’ says Gottlieb in his interview of 1994. ‘There are editors now who basically make deals.’ In the year 2007 many editors no longer call themselves editors -- that job has been farmed out to some poorly paid assistant. Many editors today no longer even use the term ‘books’; their deals are only in ‘titles’.
As I wrap my third draft up in brown paper I wonder to myself who is actually going to read this. What control does an author still retain of his text? No, I won’t send it by email; it will be delivered in this crispy brown paper -- editorial comments can be made, with a pencil, in the MS’s margins. If nice Mr Gottlieb were to give me a call I would be all ears open. But today I do not even know from where, or how, that call will come. That’s publishing today and for most authors it’s mighty worrisome.
Now place the problem in a wider context, our context. Could one imagine such a venture as The Paris Review in Paris today? In the first place, Paris is no longer cheap so one is unlikely to capture such a glamorous clientele as that of the 1950s. Yet I am convinced that the quality of our SOAF members is every bit as high as that of the Anglo-American community in France half a century ago; it is possibly, given the wicked rules of selection these days, even higher. Second, we are more dispersed than those Americans were -- though these interviews demonstrate that there was not really much sense of community even then. Third, there is the problem of cost. The cost of setting up such a review would be prohibitive and an efficient system of distribution would be virtually unattainable. One would have to turn to the new technologies.
But, wait a minute, isn’t that what we are doing right now? The ‘Paris Review’ of 2007 is called The SOAF Blogspot.
Tell us what you think.
With all this swirling about in my head I have been in sore need of a tranquillizer, and here it is: The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (ed. Philip Gourevitch, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007). You’ve guessed it -- my interest was piqued by its title. I have never before read The Paris Review, which comes out of New York. What I first wanted to know was how a bunch of Anglo-Saxon writers living in Paris managed to clock up such astounding successes.
Well, there is not as much as a paragraph in this 500-page volume on the subject. Many of the writers interviewed -- they are largely American -- have not as much as visited our sweet capital of France. What references there are to Paris are mostly slighting. Dame Rebecca West came over to film one of her novels; she was ‘so horrified by the cheap food’ served up on her post-war plate. The interviewer asks Hemingway if, in Paris in the 1920s, he had any sense of ‘group feeling’ with other writers and artists; the old man of the sea starkly replies: ‘No. There was no group feeling’ -- an answer any reader of Hemingway’s unashamedly self-centred Movable Feast could have foreseen. Saul Bellow, who I don’t think ever stayed in France, spends a page debunking ideas à la Sartre and à la Camus (a popular pastime in our turn-of-a-millennium world that I find verges on a philistine anti-intellectualism).
Yet there was a Parisian origin to the Review. It was founded in the 1950s by a group of Americans who living in France because it was cheap. Within a short space of time they were famous authors, many of them making their fortunes out of just one or two books; they all returned home to be closer to their mass audiences.
These interviews are wonderful. Every author -- every SOAF member -- ought to have a copy by his or her bedside. It is the sort of thing you can peruse at three in the morning and suddenly bump into an author with the same problem that is keeping you awake. In this first volume we find Hemingway confessing that he re-wrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. ‘I can’t write five words but that I change seven’ says Dorothy Parker. ‘What would you say is the source of most of your work?’ she is asked. ‘Need of money, dear.’ Truman Capote writes his first two drafts in longhand pencil and then types his third on yellow paper, puts it away for a couple of months, then starts the whole process over again; his final version is typed on white paper. T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land is apparently only a fragment of a much larger poem that Ezra Pound cut to pieces; the original colossus has been lost (‘I sold it to John Quinn’). Jorge Luis Borges is another indefatigable reviser, though ‘when a man reaches a certain age, he has found his real tone,’ and the obsessive corrections are no longer needed. Rebecca West tells us that she ‘fiddles away’ at a lot of drafts as ‘I think D.H. Lawrence did.’
Now that is exactly what I want to hear when, apprehensively, I am about to launch into the third revision of my own manuscript. Can you teach somebody how to write a book? Opinion is fairly divided here. Kurt Vonnegut, after sounding off his sceptical remarks, tells us that ‘in a creative writing class of twenty people anywhere in this country [the US], six students will be startlingly talented. Two of those might actually publish something by and by.’ James M. Cain, on the other hand, dismisses the whole how-to business as the ‘bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing’ -- the only thing you can do, he claims, for somebody who wants to write a book is buy him a typewriter (for today’s budding authors, an expensive computer). Saul Bellow, who provides the most fascinating of all the interviews, describes how the whole creative process goes back to ‘a primitive prompter or commentator within.’ He reviews his life as being largely an attempt ‘to get nearer to that primitive commentator… He won’t talk until the situation’s right’; you have to prepare the ground for him. Hemingway is typically much more down to earth. ‘The best kind of writing,’ he says, ‘is when you are in love.’
My head drops to the pillow; I ask myself, ‘Well that’s just lovely, now what about the editor?’ There is an interview in here of the former editor-in-chief at Simon and Schuster and later at Knopf, Robert Gottlieb, who is a real dream. He reads books, you see. ‘I was about forty years old,’ he reports, ‘when I had an amazing revelation -- this is going to sound dumb -- it suddenly came to me that not every person in the world assumed, without thinking about it, that reading was the most important thing in life.’ Gottlieb doesn’t like writing, he doesn’t like it at all -- ‘it’s very, very hard, and I just don’t like the activity,’ whilst reading, it ‘is like breathing.’ ‘Bob is the best-read person I’ve ever met,’ says the deputy editor of The New Yorker, Charles McGrath. ‘He is a marvellous reader and surrenders completely to a text,’ says the Nobel Prize winner, Toni Morrison. Gottlieb explains what surrendering to a text actually means: ‘You must not allow yourself to want the writer to write a certain kind of book.’ This is perhaps the biggest challenge of them all for an editor, who naturally has his own ideas of what a book ought to be. But surrender he must. Gottlieb remembers the struggle he had with himself to get inside Joseph Heller’s Something Happened. Gottlieb wanted it completely rewritten; Heller said he could only write it once. Heller won his point and it went on to become one of Gottlieb’s favourite books.
Which is not to suggest that Gottlieb is an easy editor. He has, apparently, a terrible temper; he is not interested at all in lunches -- ‘We have, basically, no social relationship whatsoever,’ says Robert Caro, who has been a colleague as well as an author at Knopf; he can be a tyrant over revisions. A whole chapter, some fifty or sixty pages, was cut out of Heller’s Catch 22. Chaim Potok dropped three hundred pages from The Chosen. Most extraordinary of all is the story behind Caro’s The Power Broker. The delivered manuscript was over a million words long; in the 1960s it was technologically impossible to produce such a book between two covers. So three hundred thousand words had to be cut -- the equivalent of a 500-page book. Caro used to come round to the Knopf offices every morning and day by day, for one whole year, editor Gottlieb and author Caro laboured away at the manuscript. ‘Late in the afternoon when I left,’ says Caro, ‘there was a line of people outside his office, waiting for him.’
Gottlieb got into the dangerous business of suggesting book ideas to authors. It was he who recommended the idea of Wanderings to Chaim Potok; it was he who got Antonia Fraser to write about the six wives of Henry VIII; it was he who persuaded John Cheever to put together his lovely collection of short stories. Where many editors would come a cropper by trying to impose their own ideas on the author, Gottlieb -- because he read and was so familiar with the author’s work -- could soar forward in the sort of happy partnership that would push those books into the skies of success.
Gottlieb retired from his editing a decade ago. Most of the writers I have mentioned are no longer with us. ‘Publishing has changed in many ways and one of them is that these days many editors don’t edit,’ says Gottlieb in his interview of 1994. ‘There are editors now who basically make deals.’ In the year 2007 many editors no longer call themselves editors -- that job has been farmed out to some poorly paid assistant. Many editors today no longer even use the term ‘books’; their deals are only in ‘titles’.
As I wrap my third draft up in brown paper I wonder to myself who is actually going to read this. What control does an author still retain of his text? No, I won’t send it by email; it will be delivered in this crispy brown paper -- editorial comments can be made, with a pencil, in the MS’s margins. If nice Mr Gottlieb were to give me a call I would be all ears open. But today I do not even know from where, or how, that call will come. That’s publishing today and for most authors it’s mighty worrisome.
Now place the problem in a wider context, our context. Could one imagine such a venture as The Paris Review in Paris today? In the first place, Paris is no longer cheap so one is unlikely to capture such a glamorous clientele as that of the 1950s. Yet I am convinced that the quality of our SOAF members is every bit as high as that of the Anglo-American community in France half a century ago; it is possibly, given the wicked rules of selection these days, even higher. Second, we are more dispersed than those Americans were -- though these interviews demonstrate that there was not really much sense of community even then. Third, there is the problem of cost. The cost of setting up such a review would be prohibitive and an efficient system of distribution would be virtually unattainable. One would have to turn to the new technologies.
But, wait a minute, isn’t that what we are doing right now? The ‘Paris Review’ of 2007 is called The SOAF Blogspot.
Tell us what you think.
posted by SOAF Chairman at 6:58 AM
2 comments
