JONATHAN DEE The Paris Review figured, in the imagination of a bookish college student like I was, as a kind of mecca. I had no idea how small an operation it actually was—it might have been in the Chrysler Building for all I knew. George was part of the allure, as a writer and also, I suppose, as a celebrity. But maybe the biggest draw, for those who wanted to be part of what Terry Southern used to call the “quality lit game,” was just the opportunity to live in New York, not because there was any great advantage to it but because you knew you could at least surround yourself with kindred spirits there.
BEN RYDER HOWE The first thing you noticed, coming to work at the Review office, was George’s block, the last before you hit the East River. That block was incredible, with red brick sidewalks and, down at the end of it, his building, the smallest, black as coal. You’d think it was a tenement, not a warren of small luxury apartments. The street scene was bizarre, too. You had all those cancer treatment centers, with people coming there from all over the world. I remember seeing a Saudi sheikh on the promenade who was between chemo treatments, and he was out there smoking a cigarette. Or you would see someone who had just come out of Sotheby’s, at the corner of York, with a two-thousand-dollar egg cup or something. Toward the river, opposite George’s building, were huge, ugly apartment buildings, outside of which you might see powerful people screaming into their cell phones as they paced up and down the street. You’d see people who were obviously having secret rendezvous down on the promenade. George’s building had four entries, 527 to 541, the last of which, with his apartment, gave right onto the river. It was right there under the promenade, practically at your feet, narrow as a sluice at that point, with big ships squeezing past each other between Roosevelt Island and the FDR Drive. Sometimes, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, when you were just completely delirious from reading all the unsolicited manuscripts, you felt like one of those ships spinning on the tide.
SUSAN MORGAN Whenever I was there, the atmosphere of George’s apartment was a bit scuffed, unself-conscious, something good against something decrepit. The little crummy bridge table was always set up, and there was always a tear in the carpet, where you thought you were going to take a header into the couch when you walked across the room. It was a WASPy kind of thing: You don’t have something that’s shiny new, you just have it because that’s what you’ve always had and this is perfectly good so why should you get something new? George had very little visual sense.
Photograph by Louis Mackall.
BEN RYDER HOWE The Review office was on the ground floor, with windows giving onto the tiny overlook of the river. There was an intercom to George’s office on the second floor, and underneath the intercom, if you looked, there was all this random scribbling on the wall, years and years of scribbling by generations of staffers doodling while they answered George’s buzz from above. The perfectly centered fan hung over the center table, which was covered with stacks of magazines and all the manuscripts that we were either reading or not reading. The building smelled old, and we had to leave when the oil truck came, you noticed the dead vermin and the cockroach traps in the cellar underneath us. The managing editor was always bumping his or her chair up against an intern’s chair or two interns’ chairs. There might be six or seven staffers in that room, or there might be just you. George’s bicycle hung from the ceiling over some staffer’s head. What George was saying, in a way, was: This is your training ground, and later you’ll go on to be a big celebrity as an editor, or as a writer, or something else. That was how you were supposed to look at your experience there.
STEPHEN GAGHAN In Kentucky, where I came from, nobody read. I mean, I was known as the kid who read books. It’s kind of threatening, you know. Adults who don’t read don’t like young people who read. But it’s through books that you feel this connection to the wider world. I didn’t know how to pronounce many words because I’d only seen them printed; I’d never heard anyone use them. So you’re that person, and then this guy Plimpton opens his arms to you and says, “All right, you seem like a bright young man: Here’s an opportunity, what are you gonna do with it? I’m not gonna tell you what to do with it; there’s no manual.” There was time to write, and a social network so that when you’re done writing you have somewhere to go and you didn’t feel so alone. People were talking about the same things and cared about the same things.
Paris Review office: George’s bicycle and staffer Fiona Maazel.
Copyright by Sally Wiener Grotta.
LARISSA MACFARQUHAR I don’t know where I got this notion—probably from my parents—but I thought that once you graduated from college, life got very, very staid, and you had to wear a certain kind of clothing, and you had to attend work for certain hours of the day, and everything got very serious. A job at the Review could not have been more calculated to drive these notions out of your head. I think one of the first things you learn when you get there as an intern is that grown-up life is so much more fun than you had anticipated. I was hired on a beautiful, early fall day. It was very warm, and I’d worn a silk wraparound skirt to my interview, and I had been hired on the spot. I was elated. Later I was walking home along Second Avenue and felt this swishing feeling at my ankles, and I thought, “The trash in New York. . . .” Meanwhile my skirt had completely untied itself and I was walking down the street without clothes. That just seemed like part of the day. It seemed portentous of the future.
HALLIE GAY WALDEN I was a Kentucky girl who’d just graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in English and a thesis on Virginia Woolf. I can’t remember how I heard about the job, but I was a devoted reader of the Review. I applied and got an interview. It was in George’s living room. I was in a comfortable chair by the window, and he walked in, and I thought I had seen the most graceful, elegant man ever.
DAVID EVANIER George called me from a plane and accepted one of my stories—I think it was “Cancer of the Testicles”—so of course that was very, very thrilling for me. He published three stories of mine very quickly, that one and “The One-Star Jew,” which was in Best American Short Stories later and became the title of my book. So, you know, I was thrilled. It was a dream come true. I began to sort of hang out a little bit at the magazine, and I told him I was good at the slush pile. He said, “Why don’t you read some manuscripts for us,” so I started doing that. Gradually that turned into a kind of a job. He sent me a check for two hundred and fifty dollars a month, which, you know, I was a struggling writer and it helped. And then, gradually, he made me a fiction editor. I never really worked there. I basically worked at home.
The Review office, up from the basement.
Copyright by Sally Wiener Grotta.
JANET NOBLE I first worked for George doing layout on a huge anniversary issue. I had been going through a terrible, terrible separation and divorce. So whenever I got to the Review office, which was only when there was an issue to put out, I was in a state of high anxiety. George would come down—always, like, in his socks, padding down. He was very tall and he took up whatever space there was left in that tiny office, and I remember at one point thinking that it was like being in the pocket of his gray flannel pants or something. I was never anxious for long.
BUDDY BURNISKE Max Steele, George’s old friend from Paris, introduced us when George came to Chapel Hill to speak, and I told him how much I admired the Review. He said, “Why don’t you come up and help us out?” I was at that point in my life, very much smitten with literature, when to be able to go down to the basement beneath the Review office and find all those old issues, I felt like I was in some secret vault at the Smithsonian. All this stuff was just kind of lying around. It was very exciting to be that close to what had been sort of the epicenter of so much good literature over a quarter of a century. Also, when I was there, I think T. Coraghessan Boyle’s first story was published. And I definitely remember [Dallas Wiebe’s] “Night Flight to Stockholm,” because I just thought that was one of the funniest things I’d ever read. And the
other thing that went on that summer was that goofy little interview with J. D. Salinger, where the woman from, I think, Louisiana went up to New Hampshire and interviewed him. Now stop a minute and think about what I just described. I was only there for, like, three months. T. Coraghessan Boyle’s first story, Dallas Wiebe’s “Night Flight to Stockholm,” which I’ve seen anthologized, and Betty Epps interviewing J. D. Salinger. That’s a pretty good run, and that was one summer.
ELIZABETH GAFFNEY When it came time to select the summer interns—or editors, for that matter—George certainly did not want the ugly ones. One time, when we had a really brilliant, dykey, purple-haired summer intern who was terrific—she was so smart, so well-read—numerous times over that summer, I heard him say, “Why don’t we just fire her and get some charming young girl from Harvard. She’s no good. She’s no use to us.” He couldn’t have been more wrong. He just couldn’t see her, because she was overtly lesbian and had purple hair.
MARJORIE KALMAN It was a pretty WASPy crowd downstairs, but I never felt, ever, ever, ever, in this office, in twenty-five years, that anybody was made to feel uncomfortable because of their ethnicity. George and Remar came in one day after having lunch with Lee Radziwill and asked what the Yiddish word is for penis. “Schlong,” I think, was the word they were looking for. They were very drunk and had obviously gone down and had a good time. God knows what the conversation was.
ELIZA GRISWOLD Was he classist? You’re not going to get a WASP to talk about class, but I’ll give it a try. First of all, anybody who’s going to work at the Review probably had some alternative source of income, because you got paid nothing. The idea was, you were getting paid in experience. So the staff came to him self-selected, in terms of their parents’ ability to pay their rent, but also in terms of class. I would have hated to come into that office as an outsider—at the age we were working there it was pretty cliquish, who knew who, who’d had what experiences, a cultural shorthand I wouldn’t have recognized then as class, but that’s what it is.
BEN RYDER HOWE The Review might have been defined as essential reading by The Preppy Handbook; it was the magazine for Biff with his pink Izod shirt—not the best packaging for any decade after the 1950s. I found that the staff had kind of a pathology about class. You’d see that famous photo in George’s apartment, the one with Jackie O and everybody else in it, and there’s only one black guy in the room, James Baldwin, and he’s studying everybody. It’s a black-and-white picture, and you would suppose it was an age that had passed, but it hadn’t passed. There was one black guy working at the magazine for a little while. He was an intern, and he left in disgust because, at a party, someone asked him to refill their drink. That was a problem, and it had to at least be acknowledged: that in the magazine’s DNA were a lot of high-class genes, that it was a product of a particular class, with a particular desire to get at a certain goal that they thought was noble. That had to be acknowledged. We couldn’t be McSweeney’s.
MONA SIMPSON I think I was the first middle-class person to work there. I worked there during graduate school, and afterwards when I started working there more, I asked for health insurance. This was a preposterous idea to George. He said, “Well, if you get sick, just give me the bill and I’ll pay it.” And I’m sure that’s true—he would have. But I kept at it, and ultimately he did actually give us health insurance.
OLIVER BROUDY George didn’t really understand people in terms of class or any sort of sociological or, especially, psychological generalizations. With me it was, “Oh, here comes that computer genius! He’ll know exactly what to do!” It was just a matter of some little quirk on his computer and fiddling a wire, but I fixed it and that made it very easy for him to apprehend me. With Steve Clark he sensed someone he didn’t have to explain certain matters to, like boarding schools, trust funds, the virtues of grass tennis courts, but I felt like I had to hold George’s hand a little bit in helping him to figure out who I was. Of course, most people require premapped avenues of apprehension to arrive at judgments, but George’s were peculiar: They were differentiated by skills, by what you were good at, preferably really good at. Because only in this way could you answer to what I always thought was a deep need of his, which was to admire. Admiration was the key, the admiration of a skill, almost always a skill of action. George’s world was all act. So Steve played tennis really well; I knew all about computers. Not that he fixed you in those skills. For example, this photographer came once to photograph George, some random girl from Columbia. She took her pictures of George, and then she came downstairs and I started talking with her. She was really cute. George had probably felt the stirring of some kind of a prurient interest in her, too. But I ended up having a little fling with this chick; and thereafter, that was something George could easily understand, something that he constantly referred to, adding it to the computer bit.
ELIZABETH GAFFNEY I had just been hired on as a staff editor when George sent me to Germany to interview Günter Grass. I was very raw at that point, and it took a lot of faith to send me off to interview a Nobel laureate in a foreign language. Later, I did Lorrie Moore and Andrea Barrett. Ben Howe and I did David McCullough. I did John Guare. Those are all great interviews, and I was very proud of them, but it meant a lot to me that George thought they were good.
SUSANNAH HUNNEWELL I remember—this is so terrible—when I first started there, I was put to work copyediting a story by a future international best-selling author with a foreign-sounding name. I’d heard of him, but I’d never read him, didn’t know anything about him, and so I thought that the story was a translation. This is so embarrassing. I was going through it, and there were all these grammar problems; I’d been to a very good girls’ school in Boston, and I’d had an excellent grammar education, so I made all these suggestions and sent it back. Binky Urban, the famous agent, called and was furious. I said to her, “Well, I’m sorry, it must be a problem with the translation.” She said, “Translation! It’s not translated!” That was really humiliating. Those were the sorts of circumstances when George would have to step in. He never got mad, though.
ROWAN GAITHER People used to call the Review fairly regularly wanting George to meet foreign writers. As his assistant I answered the phone, and nine times out of ten they were people I’d never heard of. So I came up with this gatekeeping idea that George would only meet people from countries with beachfront. Because I figured you wanted to be in a situation where, wherever you go in the world, when you get there you can call from the airport and say, “We met at The Paris Review, can I come to your beach house?” So one day someone called and said that Haruki Murakami wanted to meet George. And I thought, “Wow, the entire country is beachfront properties! Send him over!” I had no idea who he was. So this very nice Japanese gentleman appeared at the door wearing bright red Keds sneakers. I took him upstairs. I don’t think George was there. So I was struggling to find anything to say. I said, “Ah, well, I was reading The New Yorker the other day and there was this great story written by this Japanese author. . . .” And I told him this whole story, and he listened to the whole thing and he said, “Why, yes, I wrote it.” And I said, “Oh, you did? Well, I read another one, too, in the Atlantic.” And I described that whole story, and he listened very quietly and he said, “Yes, I wrote that, too.” So I said, “Thank you for coming.”
BEN RYDER HOWE The slush pile would arrive every day; you could hear it, the big thud as the duffel bag hit the floor just outside the office. After a while it was depressing to go through it, because you realized that the average person submitting slush can’t even write a covering letter, let alone a short story, but it shapes your values as a reader, because what you realize is, this is the great game, to find the undiscovered champ. Constantly, our interns would be saying, “I found something! I found something!”
JEANNE MCCULLOCH There was a sense that we were all on the cusp of something. And there was George, lending his house and his magazine and his excitement to this project.
It was palpable. He was having everyone’s first book party. I remember one party, when Bright Lights, Big City had just come out, and our whole generation of writers and editors was there. Bill Styron went up to Jay McInerney, shook his hand, and said, “That was an extraordinary book.” I saw Jay’s head spin, and I thought, “He’ll never come off this spin.”
BUDDY BURNISKE Everyone thinks of the Review as these golden years in Paris, but I think George did an amazing job of keeping a lot of that alive for a long time back in New York. I was twenty years old when I was there, and it seemed like every week something was happening that could be life-changing. We went to the premiere of the film Hopscotch, and then we went from that to Elaine’s. The room was just full of Jerzy Kosinskis, or Walter Matthaus, or whoever. Or Candice Bergen falling back on a picnic blanket where Fayette and I were seated with John Seabrook, out in the Hamptons. And it’s kind of like, “How do I explain this to people back home, that Candice Bergen is rolling around and falling back on our laps here at a Fourth of July picnic?” That wasn’t the world I’d come from.
George, Being George Page 19
