Interviewing The Paris Review Interviews

So what's The Paris Review?

The biggest 'little magazine' in history, according to Time magazine. To be honest, until a few years ago, I always thought it was a Paris based literary journal, started on the wave of popularity the French city had with Europhile American writers last century. Then I discovered it was based in Manhattan. However, I wasn't wholly wrong – the magazine was founded in Paris and based there for the first two decades of its five in existence. In the past few years, since the death of long-term editor George Plimpton, the magazine has become more sober and protean, with a fuller interest in the literary arts outside heavyweight and maverick fiction, which were its mainstays.

What are we discussing here then?

With the new editor Philip Gourevitch comes a greater desire to celebrate the journal's past. Previous anthologies have been quirky selections from the magazine's back numbers. A new book - The Paris Review Interviews (Canongate) - is volume 1 in a series and selects from what the magazine is best known for: lengthy interviews with writers.

What's the house interview style?

The length is the key, with clued-up interviewers often spending two days with their subjects, who are generally interrogated gently in their own environments. Thus, most interviews begin with a detailed description of the writers' homes, with emphasis on their writing rooms. These thumbnail sketches are often as enlightening as the subsequent declamations and deflections which writers thrive on. We find a fading Hemingway in Cuba, surrounded by trinkets and treasures from his African forays. Another traveller, Elizabeth Bishop, is found holed up, writing in a corner of a room in Maine decked with boxes of her possessions. Occasionally the format is subverted: renowned fiction editor Richard Gottlieb is interviewed via a succession of questions gathered from his authors. Meanwhile Kurt Vonnegut compiled his own interview here from a number of Paris Review pieces, stitched together with some self-querying.

What are the book's flaws?

The main one is the journal's tendency to go for authors in their later years. Sure, the twilight years bring wisdom and hindsight, but they can also bring rehearsed answers, disinterest and pat resolutions. The average age of the interviewees here is 65. The average age of their finest literary achievement is 39.

So who are the troublesome characters?

An 89 year old Rebecca West is entertainingly catty, describing Ian McEwan (then a controversial young novelist) as presenting the reader 'with the hairs along people's groins and the smell, and very little else'! Hemingway is interviewed by someone he has met before and becomes frustrated by any attempt to quiz him on the actual business of writing, performing that tired author's trick of hubris: refusing to talk, then doing so at considerable length. The poet Jack Gilbert comes across as rather a bore with a charmed life, and I wondered exactly how his interview had made the cut.

And who shines out from the pages?

The other lesser-known names are here for good reason: the novelist Robert Stone (known for his books on counter-culture and conflict) is fascinating in his comments on writing and his reminisces from the 50s and 60s. Elsewhere, Borges is charmingly elusive over 50 gripping pages, while Dorothy Parker, despite bemoaning her reputation as a 'smartcracker' shows herself to be a very good one. Elizabeth Bishop is vibrant and effusive on all sorts of things such as Mexican soap operas and tree climbing and never quite gets around to talking about writing much – something she evidently noticed, later phoning her interviewer to apologise for being frothy. My favourite interview was the 'best of', selected by Vonnegut from his various interviews. A witty and thoughtful man, he moves from knockabout humour to his awful yet moving tale of being in a Dresden bunker during the hours when the Allies' planes were bombing, killing several people per second (which informed his best-known work Slaughterhouse 5).

Recommended?

Don't listen to me: feel the quality and the width of the back page testimonials from John Ashbery, Salman Rushdie, Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood and Dave Eggers, a motley crew, all of whom are keen to tell you what a marvellous contribution to recent literature the Review's 'Writers at Work' interviews have made.