The Paris Review has been around since 1953, founded by Harold Humes, George Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen. Over the years, it has published many of the most prominent authors from the 1950s and onward—names along the lines of Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino, Donald Barthelme, Adrienne Rich, etc.
That, alone, would probably solidify its importance/relevance, but the real kicker here is that, besides publishing and launching many high-profile writers, The Paris Review has also been conducting some of the most in-depth writer interviews—maybe the most in-depth—within the annals of lit journalism.
You don’t have to be a book geek to find this sort of thing cool, although it helps.
Those interviews, first called “Writers at Work” but now termed “The Art of Fiction” (or “Poetry” or “Humor” or whatever, depending on the speaker), run the gamut from “humorists” (Joseph Heller, Dorothy Parker) to playwrights (Harold Pinter) to poets (T.S. Eliot, John Berryman, W.H. Auden) to novelists (gobs and gobs, but the likes of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow—you get the idea).
The premise is remarkably simple, based on the samples I’ve seen: Let the subject of the interview just talk and talk while the interviewer listens and records it. Then, edit it (usually with the oversight of the interviewee) and publish it. Simple.
I’ve enjoyed more than a few of those interviews, especially the ones from some of my favorite authors (Thornton Wilder, Wallace Stegner, John Steinbeck, Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, etc.). I think they’re brilliant.
In some cases, the interviews are starkly revealing. Love or hate Don DeLillo, he gave a great Art of Fiction interview in 1992, shortly after he published “Pafko on the Wall,” which was eventually integrated into his masterful (or unbearable) novel “Underworld.” At the very end, after bringing up “Pafko,” the interviewer tossed off some alternatives to writing what would end up being called “Underworld”—which DeLillo confessed was “slogging” along—like gardening or handball. At that point, DeLillo spoke about a move in handball where, “you hit the ball right at the seam of the wall and the ground, and the shot is unreturnable.” If that isn’t an apt metaphor for what the release of “Underworld” meant to everyone else, I don’t know what is.
But many of the interviews (let’s be honest) are not of uniform brilliance. Most of them are rambling, and most of them are from people you don’t have license to read, or even to have heard of. And, they won’t do you a bit of good if you actually want to learn “the art of fiction.”
If you read any of these interviews, the manifold secrets of writing will not be revealed to you. There’s no moment where Evelyn Waugh says the secret to writing well involves doing 17 somersaults with a mouthful of black olives every morning. There’s no moment where William Faulkner reveals he’s just been dissolving pages of Shakespeare and The Old Testament in bourbon and then downing the mix and praying for osmotic instruction.
So, why call those interviews “The Art of Fiction” when they don’t teach you about it? I think it’s because the “art” of fiction (or any writing) is not something simply taught. The thing to understand is, by and large, these writers were not sitting down at these interviews as teacher (although plenty of them were teachers). They were sitting down to talk about their work, which was synonymous with their art, and both are synonymous with life.
If you’re going to check out these interviews—and if you so much as know what the word “literature” means I would recommend it, since they’re free to read on the Paris Review website—you shouldn’t read them for writing tips (although some slip through the cracks, it can’t be helped). You should read them for book tips and life stories, and for the glimpse of humor and brilliance that lay behind these workers of their craft.
I will add, in closing, while these interviews won’t teach you how to write, they may give you an inkling of what it’s like to be a writer, professional or otherwise, and that perspective is invaluable.
Do you know the art of fiction? Tell Sean at sreichard@wisc.edu.
