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Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews
A collection of interviews with some of the world's most distinguished authors features conversations with Bishop, Fuentes, Gardner, Gordimer, Malumud, Garcia Marquez, Goyen, Merrill, Spender, Vonnegut, West, and Williams
- GenresWriting
414 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1984
About the author
George Plimpton
333 books104 followersGeorge Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, actor, and gamesman. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review.
He was the grandson of George A. Plimpton.
He was the grandson of George A. Plimpton.
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August 8, 2023
BOOK REVIEW – WRITERS AT WORK SIXTH SERIES
Because of a trauma experienced at a very young age, my childhood was spent as a shy recluse who read voraciously. I was particularly lucky that my mother considered my reading to be a very positive quality, and she allowed me to read anything I wanted without restrictions. Both my parents worked, so I grew up as a latchkey kid with little parental supervision. And as I mentioned, I read voraciously, anything I could get my hands on. Not surprisingly, the writers – the authors of these books I devoured – became my surrogate parents. Not only was I learning about life through the worlds I inhabited from novels, I personalized the authors who offered these experiences and saw them as my guides through a hazardous, puzzling, and challenging real world. I found great writers who could be trusted to carve out truths from the bewildering chaos of information that sourced, it seemed, from almost all adults and the social systems they created and inhabited. As a child I really did think the world was insane, and these authors, with their novels, seemed to shed some light on life’s shadows for me.
It was only recently, to my great delight, that I discovered the Writers at Work publications – a series of books each containing about a dozen interviews with many of these favorite authors of mine, all culled from previous issues of The Paris Review magazine. It was as if I was finally allowed to sit in the room with the adults and witness their intimate conversations, casual asides, revealing gossip, and technical secrets. It has been, to say the least, revelatory. Most of the writers interviewed were surprisingly open and generous in their conversations about their childhood and the people who impacted and influenced them, or about their history and the experiences that molded both their personal lives and their writing selves. One of the unexpected benefits of reading these interviews and paying attention to the many, many opinions and comments about the art and craft of their own and others’ writing, is that I think I have become a better, more aware, reader. I have also discovered books by authors I want to re-read, or books I have never read that are now added to my shelves… and that’s just a grand benefit and reward.
Although I am familiar with many of the dozens of great authors and poets in the complete series, many of them I only know by reputation, and many more that, I’m embarrassed to admit, I’ve never heard of at all (some of those even being Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners). Lucky for me, George Plimpton (editor) and The Paris Review made all of these talented writers and their thoughts available to the public.
I am not starting at the beginning with a review of the First Series, because at the time I only owned a copy of the Sixth Series publication, which is what I am reviewing here. I own all nine of the series now, plus the Women Writers at Work book.
Each writer’s interview is usually prefaced by a very short bio, a photo of a sample page from one of that author’s manuscripts, a photo or drawing of the writer, and a description of the setting where the interview took place. Then the interviewer begins their questions. The interviewers, who are often writers themselves, are clearly very familiar with their interview subjects and their writings, and they ask interesting, knowledgeable, and often provocative questions. For this review I am listing the authors interviewed in this edition and adding a short comment of my own.
Authors in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews –
* Rebecca West – I’ve only read one of her novels, The Return of the Soldier, and I think I’d like to maybe attempt her 1000+ page “magnum opus” Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. She has some strong and harsh opinions about other writers. She met Yeats but didn’t seem too taken by him, “… what he liked was solemnity and, if you were big enough, heavy enough, and strong enough, he loved you. He loved great big women. He would have been mad about Vanessa Redgrave.” She and H.G. Wells were lovers for many years, and had a son.
* Stephen Spender – I’m embarrassed to say I’d never heard of Spender or his poetry before reading this interview. He also knew and spent time with Yeats (whom he liked), as well as Dylan Thomas and Hemingway. When the interviewer asked him about politics, Spender responded, “One thing we used to discuss in the 1930s was whether a fascist could be a good writer. We always decided that he couldn’t because fascism was stupid and inhuman. So by definition a person who was a writer might call himself a fascist, but couldn’t really be one.” I enjoyed some of his poetry which I found at www.poetryfoundation.org (a great resource).
* Tennessee Williams – I was very excited to read the Tennessee Williams interview – the man who wrote the plays The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Now I almost wish I hadn’t gotten to know him quite so well. He had a miserable childhood with a very dysfunctional Southern family, and as an adult seemed pretty much a wild miserable mess himself because of it. But maybe it was worth it in the long run – at least to the audiences of his brilliant plays, which all expressed moments of angst, loneliness, or insanity. He talked about meeting Marlon Brando, who came to his house to read for the part in Streetcar, “He was very natural and helpful. He repaired the plumbing that had gone on the whack, and he repaired the lights that had gone off. And then he just sat calmly down and began to read… and that’s how he was cast in Streetcar.”
* Elizabeth Bishop – Another poet I was completely unaware of who won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for her poetry, but it turns out she was a fairly obscure poet anyway, who didn’t really gain attention until after her death. She was shy, or maybe the word is private, because the interview didn’t really unearth many of her personal thoughts or feelings. Her poem Filling Station made me smile:
Filling Station by Elizabeth Bishop
Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!
Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.
Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.
Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.
Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO—SO—SO—SO
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
* Bernard Malamud – I’ve only read one of Malamud’s books, The Assistant, and while I was very young at the time (in my teens I think), it has always left an impression on me… I can still recall the grocery store in Brooklyn. His book The Fixer won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer, and I keep meaning to read it. The interviewer mentioned that there seems to be a prison motif throughout Malamud’s work. Malamud’s reply: “Perhaps I use it as a metaphor for the dilemma of all men: necessity, whose bars we look through and try not to see. Social injustice, apathy, ignorance.”
* William Goyen – Goyen originally wanted to be a composer and musician, but his father was violently opposed to it (it was not a manly profession), so Goyen used his feeling for lyric and rhythm in the silent expression of writing words. Goyen is one of the authors I’ve known of but have never read. At one point Goyen became fascinated with the Bible’s New Testament and the story of Jesus, so he decided to reconstruct the life of Jesus using the New Testament as his source. He said in the process, “A very real man began to live with me, of flesh and blood. He did the same work on me that He did on the people of the New Testament that He walked among….” Goyen’s A Book of Jesus cost him his editorial job at McGraw-Hill. I was curious about this little book and ordered it from an online used book distributor. I was delighted to discover that this used ex-library book that I now own was signed by William Goyen himself. The interview does not mention Goyen’s final novel, Arcadio, written after the interview and just before his death… it is the sensual, mystical story of a half man, half woman, raised in a whorehouse and for years the veteran exhibitionist in an itinerant circus sideshow. This might be an intriguing story for current times.
* Kurt Vonnegut – The last book I read by Vonnegut was Breakfast of Champions. I read it years ago, and I don’t think I’ve read anything quite as brilliant since then. Vonnegut is one-of-a-kind, as is his literary alter ego and star protagonist Kilgore Trout. In this interview, Vonnegut gets very explicit about his role as a German POW during and after the bombing of Dresden in Word War II. Some of these experiences created the basis of his award winning novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the anti-war novel that was thoroughly embraced during the Vietnam era. He talks about teaching young writers, and says there are plenty of good writers, just not good readers: “I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.”
* Nadine Gordimer – A Nobel prizewinning author, she was born and raised in a small town just outside of Johannesburg South Africa. She didn’t realize she was a White colonial until she was in college and experienced her first acquaintanceships with Blacks, which changed everything for her. Since that awakening she wrote several anti-apartheid novels and books of short stories. She claims her writing is not political, but most of her books were banned for either weeks or in a couple cases for 10-12 years. “I come to America, I go to England, I go to France… nobody’s at risk. They’re afraid of getting cancer, losing a lover, losing their jobs, being insecure… It’s only in my own country that I find people who voluntarily choose to put everything at risk…”
* James Merrill – This is the Pulitzer prize winning poet whose poems were dictated through the Ouija board. He had some very interesting comments about the idea of mediumship as a creative process. He had no patience for the “occult.” He was awarded the Pulitzer in 1977, and received more than one National Book Award and a National Book Critic Circle Award, all for his poetry. His poems eventually focused on metaphysics and angels.
* Gabriel Garcia Marquez – A very well-known and well-read Nobel Prize-winning Columbian author of novels of “magic realism.” The two most widely read of his novels are One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Even though I usually embrace all kinds of magical realism, I never finished (after barely starting) Solitude, and have no desire to read Cholera… Marquez’s fiction and I just don’t click, it’s purely subjective, and I’m sure he is a wonderful writer to garner all the praise he has received. It's possible I have to become a better reader. On the other hand, I think his politics are truly insightful, as he demonstrates in the interview: “Sooner or later people believe writers rather than the government… The more power you have, the harder it is to know who is lying to you and who is not. When you reach absolute power, there is no contact with reality, and that’s the worst kind of solitude there can be. A very powerful person, a dictator, is surrounded by interests and people whose final aim is to isolate him from reality, everything is in concert to isolate him.”
* Carlos Fuentes – This is a very interesting interview with a Mexican author who lives in the United States in order to keep enough distance between himself and Mexico to enable him to write with perspective and clarity about Mexico and its people: “Pablo Neruda used to say that every Latin American writer goes around dragging a heavy body, the body of his people, of his past, of his national history… I realize that my writings are my masks… verbal masks I offer my country as mirrors. Mexico is defined in the legend of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, the god who creates man and is destroyed by a demon who offers him a mirror. The demon shows him he has a face when he thought he had no face. This is the essence of Mexico: to discover you have a face when you thought you only had a mask… I don’t think literature can content itself with being either a mask or a mirror of reality. I think literature creates reality or it is not literature at all.”
* John Gardner – Gardner is probably best known for his novel Grendel – the story of Beowulf told from the monster’s point of view. Gardner also received the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for fiction for his novel October Light. His most controversial work, however, was On Moral Fiction, where he discusses the relationship between literature and morality (which he equates to honesty). Besides publishing several novels and critical works, he taught creative writing for years in several university literature departments, such as Northwestern, and published books based on his lectures. He died at the age of 49 in an accident with his Harley motorcycle, just four days before he was to be married. “There’s fiction that is neither moral nor immoral – minor fiction, pure entertainment. I’m accused of not valuing it, but actually all I say is that it’s trivial: I’m not at all against it except when some critic takes it seriously. I favor it as on a hot day I favor ice cream.” His description of the three types of moral fiction is fascinating, and a perfect way to end this sixth series of interviews.
The whole nine series of Writers at Work is highly recommended. 5 stars.
Because of a trauma experienced at a very young age, my childhood was spent as a shy recluse who read voraciously. I was particularly lucky that my mother considered my reading to be a very positive quality, and she allowed me to read anything I wanted without restrictions. Both my parents worked, so I grew up as a latchkey kid with little parental supervision. And as I mentioned, I read voraciously, anything I could get my hands on. Not surprisingly, the writers – the authors of these books I devoured – became my surrogate parents. Not only was I learning about life through the worlds I inhabited from novels, I personalized the authors who offered these experiences and saw them as my guides through a hazardous, puzzling, and challenging real world. I found great writers who could be trusted to carve out truths from the bewildering chaos of information that sourced, it seemed, from almost all adults and the social systems they created and inhabited. As a child I really did think the world was insane, and these authors, with their novels, seemed to shed some light on life’s shadows for me.
It was only recently, to my great delight, that I discovered the Writers at Work publications – a series of books each containing about a dozen interviews with many of these favorite authors of mine, all culled from previous issues of The Paris Review magazine. It was as if I was finally allowed to sit in the room with the adults and witness their intimate conversations, casual asides, revealing gossip, and technical secrets. It has been, to say the least, revelatory. Most of the writers interviewed were surprisingly open and generous in their conversations about their childhood and the people who impacted and influenced them, or about their history and the experiences that molded both their personal lives and their writing selves. One of the unexpected benefits of reading these interviews and paying attention to the many, many opinions and comments about the art and craft of their own and others’ writing, is that I think I have become a better, more aware, reader. I have also discovered books by authors I want to re-read, or books I have never read that are now added to my shelves… and that’s just a grand benefit and reward.
Although I am familiar with many of the dozens of great authors and poets in the complete series, many of them I only know by reputation, and many more that, I’m embarrassed to admit, I’ve never heard of at all (some of those even being Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners). Lucky for me, George Plimpton (editor) and The Paris Review made all of these talented writers and their thoughts available to the public.
I am not starting at the beginning with a review of the First Series, because at the time I only owned a copy of the Sixth Series publication, which is what I am reviewing here. I own all nine of the series now, plus the Women Writers at Work book.
Each writer’s interview is usually prefaced by a very short bio, a photo of a sample page from one of that author’s manuscripts, a photo or drawing of the writer, and a description of the setting where the interview took place. Then the interviewer begins their questions. The interviewers, who are often writers themselves, are clearly very familiar with their interview subjects and their writings, and they ask interesting, knowledgeable, and often provocative questions. For this review I am listing the authors interviewed in this edition and adding a short comment of my own.
Authors in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews –
* Rebecca West – I’ve only read one of her novels, The Return of the Soldier, and I think I’d like to maybe attempt her 1000+ page “magnum opus” Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. She has some strong and harsh opinions about other writers. She met Yeats but didn’t seem too taken by him, “… what he liked was solemnity and, if you were big enough, heavy enough, and strong enough, he loved you. He loved great big women. He would have been mad about Vanessa Redgrave.” She and H.G. Wells were lovers for many years, and had a son.
* Stephen Spender – I’m embarrassed to say I’d never heard of Spender or his poetry before reading this interview. He also knew and spent time with Yeats (whom he liked), as well as Dylan Thomas and Hemingway. When the interviewer asked him about politics, Spender responded, “One thing we used to discuss in the 1930s was whether a fascist could be a good writer. We always decided that he couldn’t because fascism was stupid and inhuman. So by definition a person who was a writer might call himself a fascist, but couldn’t really be one.” I enjoyed some of his poetry which I found at www.poetryfoundation.org (a great resource).
* Tennessee Williams – I was very excited to read the Tennessee Williams interview – the man who wrote the plays The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Now I almost wish I hadn’t gotten to know him quite so well. He had a miserable childhood with a very dysfunctional Southern family, and as an adult seemed pretty much a wild miserable mess himself because of it. But maybe it was worth it in the long run – at least to the audiences of his brilliant plays, which all expressed moments of angst, loneliness, or insanity. He talked about meeting Marlon Brando, who came to his house to read for the part in Streetcar, “He was very natural and helpful. He repaired the plumbing that had gone on the whack, and he repaired the lights that had gone off. And then he just sat calmly down and began to read… and that’s how he was cast in Streetcar.”
* Elizabeth Bishop – Another poet I was completely unaware of who won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for her poetry, but it turns out she was a fairly obscure poet anyway, who didn’t really gain attention until after her death. She was shy, or maybe the word is private, because the interview didn’t really unearth many of her personal thoughts or feelings. Her poem Filling Station made me smile:
Filling Station by Elizabeth Bishop
Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!
Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.
Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.
Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.
Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO—SO—SO—SO
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
* Bernard Malamud – I’ve only read one of Malamud’s books, The Assistant, and while I was very young at the time (in my teens I think), it has always left an impression on me… I can still recall the grocery store in Brooklyn. His book The Fixer won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer, and I keep meaning to read it. The interviewer mentioned that there seems to be a prison motif throughout Malamud’s work. Malamud’s reply: “Perhaps I use it as a metaphor for the dilemma of all men: necessity, whose bars we look through and try not to see. Social injustice, apathy, ignorance.”
* William Goyen – Goyen originally wanted to be a composer and musician, but his father was violently opposed to it (it was not a manly profession), so Goyen used his feeling for lyric and rhythm in the silent expression of writing words. Goyen is one of the authors I’ve known of but have never read. At one point Goyen became fascinated with the Bible’s New Testament and the story of Jesus, so he decided to reconstruct the life of Jesus using the New Testament as his source. He said in the process, “A very real man began to live with me, of flesh and blood. He did the same work on me that He did on the people of the New Testament that He walked among….” Goyen’s A Book of Jesus cost him his editorial job at McGraw-Hill. I was curious about this little book and ordered it from an online used book distributor. I was delighted to discover that this used ex-library book that I now own was signed by William Goyen himself. The interview does not mention Goyen’s final novel, Arcadio, written after the interview and just before his death… it is the sensual, mystical story of a half man, half woman, raised in a whorehouse and for years the veteran exhibitionist in an itinerant circus sideshow. This might be an intriguing story for current times.
* Kurt Vonnegut – The last book I read by Vonnegut was Breakfast of Champions. I read it years ago, and I don’t think I’ve read anything quite as brilliant since then. Vonnegut is one-of-a-kind, as is his literary alter ego and star protagonist Kilgore Trout. In this interview, Vonnegut gets very explicit about his role as a German POW during and after the bombing of Dresden in Word War II. Some of these experiences created the basis of his award winning novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the anti-war novel that was thoroughly embraced during the Vietnam era. He talks about teaching young writers, and says there are plenty of good writers, just not good readers: “I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.”
* Nadine Gordimer – A Nobel prizewinning author, she was born and raised in a small town just outside of Johannesburg South Africa. She didn’t realize she was a White colonial until she was in college and experienced her first acquaintanceships with Blacks, which changed everything for her. Since that awakening she wrote several anti-apartheid novels and books of short stories. She claims her writing is not political, but most of her books were banned for either weeks or in a couple cases for 10-12 years. “I come to America, I go to England, I go to France… nobody’s at risk. They’re afraid of getting cancer, losing a lover, losing their jobs, being insecure… It’s only in my own country that I find people who voluntarily choose to put everything at risk…”
* James Merrill – This is the Pulitzer prize winning poet whose poems were dictated through the Ouija board. He had some very interesting comments about the idea of mediumship as a creative process. He had no patience for the “occult.” He was awarded the Pulitzer in 1977, and received more than one National Book Award and a National Book Critic Circle Award, all for his poetry. His poems eventually focused on metaphysics and angels.
* Gabriel Garcia Marquez – A very well-known and well-read Nobel Prize-winning Columbian author of novels of “magic realism.” The two most widely read of his novels are One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. Even though I usually embrace all kinds of magical realism, I never finished (after barely starting) Solitude, and have no desire to read Cholera… Marquez’s fiction and I just don’t click, it’s purely subjective, and I’m sure he is a wonderful writer to garner all the praise he has received. It's possible I have to become a better reader. On the other hand, I think his politics are truly insightful, as he demonstrates in the interview: “Sooner or later people believe writers rather than the government… The more power you have, the harder it is to know who is lying to you and who is not. When you reach absolute power, there is no contact with reality, and that’s the worst kind of solitude there can be. A very powerful person, a dictator, is surrounded by interests and people whose final aim is to isolate him from reality, everything is in concert to isolate him.”
* Carlos Fuentes – This is a very interesting interview with a Mexican author who lives in the United States in order to keep enough distance between himself and Mexico to enable him to write with perspective and clarity about Mexico and its people: “Pablo Neruda used to say that every Latin American writer goes around dragging a heavy body, the body of his people, of his past, of his national history… I realize that my writings are my masks… verbal masks I offer my country as mirrors. Mexico is defined in the legend of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent, the god who creates man and is destroyed by a demon who offers him a mirror. The demon shows him he has a face when he thought he had no face. This is the essence of Mexico: to discover you have a face when you thought you only had a mask… I don’t think literature can content itself with being either a mask or a mirror of reality. I think literature creates reality or it is not literature at all.”
* John Gardner – Gardner is probably best known for his novel Grendel – the story of Beowulf told from the monster’s point of view. Gardner also received the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for fiction for his novel October Light. His most controversial work, however, was On Moral Fiction, where he discusses the relationship between literature and morality (which he equates to honesty). Besides publishing several novels and critical works, he taught creative writing for years in several university literature departments, such as Northwestern, and published books based on his lectures. He died at the age of 49 in an accident with his Harley motorcycle, just four days before he was to be married. “There’s fiction that is neither moral nor immoral – minor fiction, pure entertainment. I’m accused of not valuing it, but actually all I say is that it’s trivial: I’m not at all against it except when some critic takes it seriously. I favor it as on a hot day I favor ice cream.” His description of the three types of moral fiction is fascinating, and a perfect way to end this sixth series of interviews.
The whole nine series of Writers at Work is highly recommended. 5 stars.
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