In His League: Being George Plimpton (Page 2)

Founded in 1953, The Paris Review was the brainchild of two young expatriates, Harold ("Doc") Humes and Peter Matthiessen, who met in Paris in the winter of 1951-52. Humes was a mentally unbalanced former Navy cook who fled the United States in 1948 because, as he once declared, "the alternative to leaving was suicide or madness." He wandered through the city's summer heat dressed in a wool suit and homburg and sporting a silver-handled cane. Matthiessen was a handsome, gifted and supremely confident graduate of Yale (class of 1950). Born eight weeks after Plimpton, he also enjoyed a velvet upbringing. The son of a prominent architect, he was raised in Manhattan and Stamford, Connecticut--indeed, his parents owned an apartment in the same building where Plimpton grew up, 1165 Fifth Avenue--and he was in Plimpton's class at St. Bernard's. In 1952 he invited Plimpton, who was still in England, to come to Paris and assume the editorship of a new literary journal, which George agreed to do.

From the start, the founders of The Paris Review endeavored to navigate a course between The Kenyon Review, which favored a form of academically inflected criticism that, as William Styron proclaimed in the inaugural issue of The Paris Review, smothered literature "under the weight of learned chatter," and Partisan Review, whose editors had been tested by the literary polemics and ideological fisticuffs of the 1930s. Instead of learned criticism, or scrappy essays in the vein of Philip Rahv, the fledgling Paris Review decided to publish what Styron called "creative work"--fiction, poetry, art. And instead of conversing about literature in the lofty tone of the critic, the editors, in a marvelous stroke of insight, decided that they would speak directly to the finest writers, in tightly edited Q&A interviews, where the muse could dance on the page:

INTERVIEWER: Are there devices one can use in improving one's technique?
 CAPOTE: Work is the only device I know of. Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

There is no better guide to the art of writing than the stray volumes of Paris Review interviews, whose sprightly pages constitute a voluble history of twentieth-century English-language literature.

Plimpton & Co. avoided wading into the muck of politics. Robert Silvers, who met Plimpton in Paris in 1954 and would soon become a Paris Review editor, told Aldrich he was struck by a tone-setting essay of John Train's in the first issue: "He pointedly seemed to avoid such matters as the bitter controversy between Sartre and Camus that was dividing Paris intellectuals at the time." The Paris Review was the antithesis of another Paris-based journal, Merlin, whose expat editors included Alexander Trocchi and Richard Seaver, and which promised to "hit at all clots of rigid categories in criticism and life." Seaver notes: "Trocchi used to try and get George more interested in the political concerns of Europe and our country, but George could not get existentially involved in that. He was a terribly positive person, even if postwar Paris wasn't." Over the years, the decidedly literary bent of The Paris Review would leave some admirers disenchanted. "How is it," John Leonard wrote in 1981, "that The Paris Review--unlike, say, Partisan Review, which has been around considerably longer--seems so tangential to the politics of its portion of the 20th century...?"

Having chosen a purely literary path, how well did the editors acquit themselves? By and large, they leaned toward the conventional and the canonical. They had no desire to brush up against the avant-garde or the law, as Margaret Anderson did by serializing Ulysses in Little Review before its book publication in 1922, a decision that incurred the wrath of the US Post Office--which found some parts of the work obscene and refused to distribute copies of the magazine--and altered the course of fiction. We remember The Dial because it published T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, early drafts of Ezra Pound's Cantos, the scintillating poems and prose of Marianne Moore and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. The editors of The Paris Review made no discoveries of that caliber: for the most part they preferred to reinforce reputations rather than scout young talent. Still, no one can sneer at their choices in the '50s and early '60s: stories by Philip Roth later included in Goodbye, Columbus; the first English translations of Italo Calvino; early work by Nadine Gordimer, Richard Yates and Stanley Elkin. If The Paris Review was not always wildly adventurous--Gerald Howard has persuasively argued that Ted Solotaroff's New American Review surpassed The Paris Review, and every other literary journal, between 1967 and 1977--it was consistently impressive.

Plimpton moved back to Manhattan in 1955, followed by others in the Paris Review circle. They returned "not in the melancholy mood of Malcolm Cowley's exiles of the Twenties, who were forced home during the early currents of the crash," Gay Talese noted in a famous article in Esquire in 1956, "but rather with the attitude that the party would now shift to the other side of the Atlantic." Plimpton's home at 541 East Seventy-second Street became the epicenter of "the Paris Review crowd." George, Being George contains a famous photograph of a party that Plimpton hosted in 1963: the male guests, neatly outfitted in suits and ties, included Styron, Gore Vidal, Jonathan Miller, Truman Capote, Arthur Penn, Mario Puzo and a stiff-looking Ralph Ellison, the only nonwhite face in the room. In the foreground is Plimpton, dashingly at ease, clutching a cocktail. Gazing at this photo, you begin to get a sense of why James Baldwin, who spent eight days in a Paris jail in 1949 after being falsely accused of stealing a hotel bedsheet, was moved to dismiss the Paris Review crowd as a circle of wealthy dilettantes. Still, at least guests didn't have to be wealthy or famous to be admitted to Plimpton's parties. Geoffrey Gates explains that, following his departure from the Marine Corps in the late 1950s and his subsequent expulsion from his mother's house, he moved in with a friend of Plimpton's, who recounted the revelry to Gates: "'What we've got here are a lot of young editors and writers, and a lot of girls, and all the liquor you could drink.' I said, 'I'm very interested.'"

For Jules Feiffer, those gatherings marked the eclipse of McCarthyism and nascent stirrings of a new generation: "George's literary world," Feiffer says in George, Being George, "was part of a general cultural revolt--against conformity, against sexual constraint." Anne Roiphe's memories tilt toward the sardonic: "Most of the time everybody was too drunk to be brilliant," she says. "It was more about one big bull bumping up against another big bull." By the early 1960s, Plimpton's salon--along with his expanding portfolio of journalism and his social connections to the Kennedys--helped to cement his celebrity status. Guests on their way home from 541 East Seventy-second would be greeted by taxi drivers inquiring, "Is that George Plimpton's building?"

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