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Question and answer—the form is primal. It was there at the beginning of our literature: “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”
Interrogation or dialogue—“Where do you come from Socrates?”—call it what you like, the ancients understood the dramatic force and intimacy of direct colloquy. Call and response, give and take: the reader becomes engrossed as an eavesdropper, and every thought gleaned, every argument or story overheard acquires an extra jolt of vividness and of surprise. The conversational transcript seems the most natural sort of writing, yet the interview as a genre of literature unto itself is a distinctly modern phenomenon, a mode of expression that, to a large degree, came into its own during the second half of the twentieth century in the pages of a literary magazine of decidedly modest circulation called The Paris Review.
Like many great innovations that later appear inevitable and indispensable, the Paris Review interviews got started without any notion that they might one day be acclaimed as canonical. On the contrary, the young Americans who started the magazine, in the city that gave it its name, imagined the interviews as an antidote to the academic formalism that dominated other literary journals. At that time—the early 1950s—such publications were largely preoccupied with criticism, and their editorial boards tended to be allied with one or another aesthetic stance or political creed by which they set their agendas. The men who started The Paris Review took the dissenting view that instead of pontificating about writing they should simply publish the stuff: fiction and poetry, nonfiction and plays. Who needed a theory, much less a dogma? “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,” William Styron (at the age of twenty-seven, one of the elders of the original Paris Review circle) declared in a sort of antimanifesto in the inaugural issue. He called for the magazine to devote its pages simply to “the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders.”
Excellence, then, would be the magazine’s only editorial requirement, and the interviews were conceived as the best way to discuss writing and the writing life in their own terms—by letting writers speak for themselves about their work. It didn’t hurt that conducting a sustained Q&A with an established master offered the additional advantage to a new, virtually penniless and unheard of “little magazine,” of publishing the biggest names in contemporary literature. In 1953, the first issue of the magazine carried an interview with E. M. Forster, and just five years later, when the Viking Press published the first collection of Paris Review interviews under the title “Writers at Work,” the table of contents boasted, in addition to Forster, Nelson Algren, Truman Capote, Joyce Cary, William Faulkner, François Mauriac, Alberto Moravia, Frank O’Connor, Dorothy Parker, Françoise Sagan, Georges Simenon, William Styron, James Thurber, Robert Penn Warren, Thornton Wilder, and Angus Wilson. The magazine was only publishing twice a year during much of that period, yet the interview archive was already so rich that there wasn’t room in that first collection for Isak Dinesen, Ralph Ellison, or Graham Greene.
So it has gone ever since at The Paris Review—issue by issue, year by year, decade by decade—and there are now more than three hundred interviews from which the selection in this book was chosen. When they appear in the magazine, the interviews are tagged according to the writer’s main body of work, most of them falling under the rubrics Art of Fiction, Art of Poetry, and Art of Theater. With time, the categories have proliferated to include: Art of Biography, Art of Criticism, Art of the Diary, Art of the Essay, Art of Humor, Art of the Musical, Art of Screenwriting, and Art of Translation, as well as Art of Editing and Art of Publishing. To choose the best—a greatest hits list—from this extraordinary trove is an inherently absurd and arbitrary task: for every writer I’ve had the delight of including here, there is a handful of others I’m pained not to have had room for. The consolation is that this is but the first book of a three-volume set, and in choosing its content I have sought not only to pick exceptionally strong examples of what can fairly be called the art of the interview—but also to make this a book that reflects the scope and depth and variety of the interview archive as a whole.
What draws so many of the world’s best writers to talk to The Paris Review is an understanding of the seriousness and care with which the interviews are conducted and edited, the way they are constructed to stand as testimonials for the ages—if not as definitive portraits of each artist, then, as a significant contribution to such an ultimate portrait, with the added fascination that they are in large measure self-portraits. A Paris Review interview is always a collaboration, not a confrontation. In the beginning, before there were tape recorders, the interviewers worked in teams of two—“like FBI agents,” as Malcolm Cowley observed. Each person would scribble down the writer’s remarks as fast as possible, and later they would coordinate their notes to create a master transcript, which would be trimmed and shaped and reorganized into a cohesive, fluent whole—“a dramatic form in itself,” said George Plimpton, who edited the magazine for its first fifty years and made the interviews what they are. With the advent of the tape recorder, the task became at once more efficient and more cumbersome, since the volume of words recorded was far greater—and the cruel literalism of verbatim transcripts requires particular editorial vigilance to safeguard against what the journalist Janet Malcolm calls “tape-recorderese”—“the bizarre syntax, the hesitations, the circumlocutions, the repetitions, the contradictions, the lacunae in almost every non-sentence we speak.” In shaping a Paris Review interview, Plimpton said, “One’s tools are very much the dramatic devices: character buildup, surprise, argument even. The best interviews not only divulge something about the character of the writer, but have a surprise or two in them, and maybe even a plot.”
Along the way, during the editing process, or at least before the interview finally goes to press—the writer who has been interviewed is given the text to review and revise. This collaborative approach to the final product is unapologetically at odds with journalistic practice, where it is presumed that the reporter’s accuracy depends on strict independence from the subject’s influence. The Paris Review’s purpose is not to catch writers off guard, but to elicit from them 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. A few Paris Review interviews were accomplished in a single sitting, but it is far more common for them to be conducted over several seasons, even several years, with multiple sessions in person and many rounds of written correspondence as well. And just as there is no attempt to play “gotcha” with the subject, the interviewer in the most successful final edits never shows off, never appears self-serious, and is never afraid to sound dumb in the cause of asking what may be a fruitful question about writerly process and craft (the sort of question that the novelist William Gaddis, in his Paris Review interview, described jokingly: “On which side of the paper do you write?”).
The best Paris Review interviews—there are many, and every one in this book is of that number—are at once fine entertainments and profound soundings of the writer’s soul. They may contain gossip or bile or rhapsodies or love stories or medical complaints or a lot of jokes, or all of these things—and they are bound to be seething with strong opinions strongly expressed—but they are also always discussions of the making of literature that frequently attain the quality of literature itself. And although the writers who reveal themselves in these pages all did so willingly and had the opportunity to clarify, correct, retract, and amplify their remarks, they never used that opportunity to hide themselves better—but rather, whether knowingly or inadvertently, the deeper they got into rendering their accounts the more they tended to unmask themselves.
When The Paris Review began interviewing writers, the exercise was something of a novelty. This was before the publishing industry had discovered the book tour, before television and radio appearances were the hope of every aspiring sonnet writer. You could be an extremely famous author, with a vast international readership, without really having been heard from except in your books. If the Paris Review interviews helped to change that (Hugh Hefner at Playboy and Andy Warhol when he launched Interview both pointed to Plimpton’s quarterly as a driving inspiration), the Writers at Work series has nevertheless retained its freshness and timeless appeal—for writers and readers equally—in our media-dizzied age. Indeed, a Paris Review interview has become a sort of international laurel for writers, a recognition of a mature life’s work, and an occasion to reflect on what has been achieved and how it has been achieved. And even now, in a world where authors are chattering all over the radio and television dial and in nearly every bookstore and library, the Paris Review interview is one of the few occasions, outside of a book, where a writer with something to say can really hope to be heard.
What makes writers different from everyone else is that they write, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, story after story, book after book. The writers whose voices are collected in these pages could hardly make up a more various and eclectic company, and their interviews reflect all their differences—but what binds them together is that they all do it, they write and keep writing, whatever it takes. Most of them will tell you, at first, that it’s not terribly interesting to observe what they do when they’re doing it—but for half a century now one of the ways writers learned how to do it, felt less alone doing it, or found affirmation in their solitude while doing it is by observing their fellow writers as they describe themselves at work in the Paris Review interviews. There is hardly a more enjoyable way to spend one’s time, when not writing, than in the company of so much sheer intelligence demanding the best of itself.
 Purchase The Paris Review Interviews, I, available now from Picador.
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