{"id":161726,"date":"2022-09-23T17:13:40","date_gmt":"2022-09-23T21:13:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=161726"},"modified":"2022-09-23T18:09:53","modified_gmt":"2022-09-23T22:09:53","slug":"in-remembrance-of-john-train-1926-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/09\/23\/in-remembrance-of-john-train-1926-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"In Remembrance of John Train, 1926\u20132022"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

A page from \u201cHow to Name Your Baby<\/a>,\u201d in issue no. 66.<\/p><\/div>\n

John Train, a cofounder of <\/span>The Paris Review <\/span><\/i>and its first managing editor\u2014or \u201cso-called managing editor,\u201d as he often put it\u2014died last month, at age ninety-four. It was Train who coined the <\/span>Review<\/span><\/i>\u2019s name and, in its early days in Paris, as a member of the Caf\u00e9 Tournon crowd, he pushed the magazine away from criticism, <\/span>writing<\/span><\/a> later that \u201ctheories, both literary and political, are the enemy of art.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Train went on to become \u201can operator in high finance and world affairs,\u201d as the <\/span>Times<\/span><\/i> obituary<\/span><\/a> put it today, but many will remember him best for his love of small idiosyncrasies: in the early fifties, while studying for a master\u2019s degree at Harvard in comparative literature, Train noticed in <\/span>Collier\u2019s<\/span><\/i> magazine a Mr. Katz Meow, which led to an earnest obsession with collecting what he called \u201cremarkable names of real people.\u201d You can find some of these in our Summer 1976 issue, no. 66, which features a fourteen-page <\/span>list<\/span><\/a> of names Train had unearthed in the records of a very real and now-defunct state department called the Office of Nomenclature Stabilization. (We published an <\/span>appreciation<\/span><\/a> of \u201cHow to Name Your Baby\u201d online in 2015.) Train announced his departure from his post as managing editor, as George Plimpton and Norman Mailer <\/span>recall<\/span><\/a>, with singularly dry humor:<\/span><\/p>\n

One day in 1954, after a year of organizing things in the office, he left a note in his In-box stating, \u201cDo not put anything in this box.\u201d By this he meant to tell the rest of the staff that he was moving on to something else.<\/span><\/p>\n

From the Chelsea office, the staff of the <\/span>Review<\/span><\/i> are thinking of Train, his legacy and \u201cIn-box,\u201d his family and friends. He will be missed. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cOne day in 1954, after a year of organizing things in the office, he left a note in his In-box stating, \u2018Do not put anything in this box.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[67827,14,20537,18554],"class_list":["post-161726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam","tag-featured","tag-george-plimpton","tag-in-memoriam","tag-john-train"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIn Remembrance of John Train, 1926\u20132022 by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 23, 2022 \u2013 \u201cOne day in 1954, after a year of organizing things in the office, he left a note in his In-box stating, \u2018Do not put anything in this box.\u2019 \u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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