George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  CHRIS CERF It was profoundly embarrassing; except that as George remembered it, it became one of the funniest evenings of his life. It was so shameful, you just bled for him as he made his pitch, but he told it with such glee.

  TIM SELDES George was Tom Sawyer–ish from Exeter to the day he died. He woke me up one night many years ago and he said, “Old Tim,” which is what he called me when he wanted something, “I’ve agreed to take my first parachute jump this morning, and I’m leaving at four o’clock, and I’d like you to come, too, because I think you should do it.” And I could hardly say anything but “Oh, okay, George.” Probably at around two in the morning, I finally stopped shaking, terrified, and when I woke up it was well past four, and later on that day I called George up and I said, “Well?” He said, “I decided to give you a reprieve, and you should be grateful to me that I did, it was absolutely awful.” And I still don’t know whether he really intended to take me with him or whether he was just poking me up to see what I would do.

  Collection of Jonathan Becker.

  TONY HENDRA Not the New York Times, the parody edition of the paper we put out during the newspaper strike in October of ’78—that was the ultimate Dynamite Museum prank. Or might have been had the Dynamite Museum not flopped.

  CHRIS CERF The central group behind Not the New York Times was Tony Hendra and Rusty Unger Guinzburg; a guy named Josh Feigenbaum, a radio producer, who was not a close friend of George’s but of Hendra’s; and Larry Durocher, a Bostonian who really knew the inside of the newspaper business. And Freddy, of course. There were very active contributors, including Carl Bern-stein, who wrote the lead story; Nora Ephron, who was his girl-friend at the time; Jack Egan, who did the whole financial section. We recruited an awful lot of the Times people, including one of their chief designers, which was one of the reasons it looked good, a guy named Richard Yeend. It had a literary group involved, too. Michael Arlen and Alice Albright and Frankie FitzGerald wrote for it. It’s amazing who wrote for it, Victor Navasky and all those people. It’s still my favorite thing of all the projects I’ve ever been involved in. It was done by seventy or eighty people working twenty-four hours a day for three weeks, mostly at George and Freddy’s, all in mortal fear that the newspaper strike would end before we finished.

  TONY HENDRA I was in effect the editor in chief of the newspaper, so I knew pretty much everything that everybody wrote. The piece that sticks out in my mind, because it involves George prominently, was the lead, which was written by Carl Bernstein. As it happens, we were doing this parody at the same time as John Paul the First was dying; the cardinals were reconvening, having convened only thirty-something days earlier to elect him. So we conceived this story about the next pope, whom the cardinals would then be electing. We were going to call him John Paul George Ringo, but that seemed distracting. We called him John Paul John Paul, JP2 for short. Interesting that, because a few weeks later, John Paul the Second was actually elected pope. But anyway, the point about John Paul John Paul was that he came from Liverpool, and his reign lasted for nineteen and a half minutes. He was elected, the white smoke came out, and he died. And that was the whole story. It was a very funny story, which Carl wrote off in a corner of George’s apartment. There were people everywhere working on their stories, then laying things out on that big pool table. And this was fairly late in the process, when the paper was being put to bed. We did the whole thing in a week. So Carl wrote this very funny story, and we set it in type. And then we needed a head. It was two or three o’clock in the morning, with one day to go before the paper was closed. So George and I sat down and tried to come up with this very important headline. You know, the right idea for the lead story would set the tone for the entire front page. And I said, “What do you think, George? What kind of headline should this be?” And he said, “Well, I think this is an occasion for the blindingly obvious, that kind of absurdly literal New York Times headline, you know.” So we threw a couple of things around, and then I said, “Well, how about ‘Pope Dies Yet Again.’ ” And he thought that was pretty funny. And then he said, “But no, no, we can’t finish it with that, we’ve got to have at least two other subheads. Say we have ‘Pope Dies Yet Again; Reign Is Briefest Ever.’ ” We liked that very much. And then he said, “ ‘Cardinals Return from Airport.’ ” It was just brilliant. It was just perfect. So that was the headline for our lead, and it was a classic story. Jonathan Becker shot the photo right there in George’s apartment on the stairwell. I was the pope. I had a reverse collar and looked very holy.

  CHRIS CERF We got the Times’s distributors to sell it on the newsstand; it was on every newsstand, and it looked just like the Times. I’ve been told that Abe Rosenthal was furious, and they talked about suing us but didn’t. I don’t know if it’s true.

  TONY HENDRA The whole event was, to my way of thinking, typically George. It was like this massive prank. We put in all kinds of wonderful jokes, like a very important little filler item which the Times had at the time. It was known at the paper as a “bus plunger.” Somebody at the Times would collect these news bits about horrendous bus accidents—in South America especially—where buses would plunge off a cliff with thirty-five aboard. We had a few of those. There was another running joke: We’d note some disaster, but whatever happened, whether it was in New York or Vietnam or Washington, the reaction in Israel would be “muted.” Somehow George’s spirit just permeated the whole thing. Many contributors had been conditioned by the Lampoon, which in the years after George’s time there had a wildly extremist kind of humor. So it needed a fundamentally sympathetic but calming influence to make it work. And that was George; he actually acted as a brake on certain of our excesses. Not all the time, but some of the time.

  GEORGE’S EDITORIAL TASTE AND TOUCH

  MONA SIMPSON George wanted to have a staff. He didn’t want people just to work for him. He wanted to have people push things to him. He wanted it to be an eclectic magazine. He ultimately wanted it to be his magazine, but he wanted things that were new, that were interesting. The magazine was unique, I think, because of his personality. I mean, usually these literary magazines reflect one intense personality like Ben Sonnenberg with Grand Street or Ted Solotaroff with New American Review. The person who does it, it’s really their vision completely, and then they burn out. That’s the normal way of things. George’s sensibility was a bit more porous; he was a little bit more open to the variable spirit of the time and place, and for that reason, I think, he was able to stay passionate about the magazine for fifty years or more.

  MOLLY MCGRANN Stories would go through a series of readers. It would start with a general reading, which was done by interns, and then if something was good, it would get passed around the office. If something was really good, the senior editors would spend time really looking at it and would either deem it worthy of George’s attention or not. George would gradually accumulate this pile, and at some point he would essentially be given a deadline; he’d be sat down and told he had to go through them. Putting the magazine together went down to the wire every single time. It was exhilarating. Galleys would come in, and everyone had to sit and work on them furiously because time was so short, and decisions were being made up till the last possible moment.

  JEANNE MCCULLOCH Almost without exception, when I was there, George ushered in everything the staff got really excited about and wanted to put in the magazine. When he’d learned to trust us, I almost never came up against him saying no to something. We published some really interesting people: Michael Cunningham for the first time, Rick Moody, Jay McInerney, Susan Minot, Jeff Eugenides, Donald Antrim. It was a unique opportunity, because most of these people were also our friends, and they would come by and hang out at the parties.

  DANIEL KUNITZ The paradigmatic editorial moment with George: You come in hung over, and you feel really strongly about some story that you’re certain George has not read but that you’re sure he doesn’t want to publish, and you go upstairs to his office, where he�
�s sitting there in his underwear, and you’re going to fight it out with him. You say, “George, I disagree with you about this.” The first thing that happens is, he knows the story better than you do. He’s read it three times, and he can point to specific words, phrases, this and that. He was so incredibly bright. I didn’t always agree with him, but the things he said were just so on. He was a joy to work with in every way.

  ELIZA GRISWOLD As for the poetry, what would happen is, it would come into the office, and then we readers would prescreen it, and basically any letter that said the writer knew Richard Howard [the poetry editor at the time] or said something else that made it clear the person was to be considered carefully, that submission would just be bundled up and sent to Richard, who is an incredibly generous reader and reviewer of young poets. He and George didn’t interact very much, because Richard did most of the poetry outside of The Paris Review and George didn’t read the poetry. Nobody read the poetry, because there was just too much. I hardly read the poetry. When I left, we had a five-year backlog.

  The Old Guard in 1976. Front row, from left: Maxine Groffsky, George, Donald Hall, Patsy Southgate, Rose Styron. Back row, from left: William Styron, Drue Heinz, Tom Guinzburg, Peter Matthiessen, John Marquand, Blair Fuller, Robert Silvers. Photograph by Jill Krementz.

  RICHARD HOWARD We had some difficulty with John Updike about a poem called “Three Cunts in Paris.” George said to me, “Do you think we can do that?” I said, “Well, I don’t think anything will happen....” It was a description of a statue and two paintings in the Louvre, and it was an amusing poem. There was some French quoted in it, though, all quite incorrectly, and I wrote John back and said, “Do you mind if we do this a little differently? It won’t affect the poem, but it will be correct.” He wrote back saying that he didn’t mind at all, that they always did that to him at The New Yorker. He wondered if I got extra pay for being so careful. Updike has published several big volumes of poetry by now, but he’s not really a poet; he’s a verse writer, and a very good one. Like Billy Collins, you know—as good as that, and a little more intellectual than that. Still, I remember George being a little hesitant about “Three Cunts in Paris,” but he thought we should go ahead with it.

  JONATHAN DEE As a fiction editor, his strength and his weakness were one and the same. If you asked George in 1990, “Who are the essential American writers?” (a) that list would have been the same as it was for him in 1965, and (b) it would have been composed entirely of people with whom he socialized. I remember when we wanted to try to get Toni Morrison for the interview series in 1986, we had to explain to him who she was. He didn’t read any contemporary fiction other than what he read for the magazine. He had to rely on us for that, and he took our word for it, which is pretty amazing. Who were we, you know? Just a bunch of assistants. But he knew what kind of value to put on our enthusiasm.

  ELISSA SCHAPPELL It’s hard to say that there was any one sort of story he didn’t like, because when you look at the range of stories he published, they were all very different. He was publishing Lenny Michaels and Lorrie Moore: one writer who dances around issues of intimacy and emotional connection and is very funny; and then Lenny, who basically is like, “I’m going to cut myself in front of you and show you the bone.” I think he didn’t like sloppiness or sentimentality, things that didn’t make good art. He had a great eye—just look at what he bought. And he inspired loyalty in writers, too, so that they sent him their best work. When I was there the Review was in that little first circle: You sent your best to The New Yorker and The Paris Review.

  JAMES SCOTT LINVILLE Staff readers would come in every other week to help read through “the unsoliciteds.” George would invite this crowd to spread out in his living room and give them soda or a beer. He’d explain why this task was so important, and then he’d always pronounce some instructions: “First, no stories about daughters and their mothers. It just won’t work for us.” Of course, a year later he published the beginning of Mona Simpson’s Anywhere but Here. “Secondly, no stories of people dying of cancer. That’s not a Paris Review story.” Soon enough, we showed him that story by Charles D’Ambrosio about the man driving a girl with cancer to Mexico to die. He flipped, just loved it. I said, “George, what about the . . . you know . . . ?” Of course, we gave it the Aga Khan Prize. But that was George. So he’d sternly deliver these Old Testament injunctions of what we were forbidden to publish, and then he’d turn around and be so excited about a story that was exactly that.

  FAYETTE HICKOX Big ideas—War, Conservatism, FreeWill, Love, any sort of theory, anything with a capital letter—just weren’t his thing.

  JONATHAN DEE One episode I’ll never forget: We were the first magazine to see any of the stories from Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. Now, I think you could make the case that Jesus’ Son is the most influential work of American fiction in the last twenty years. The first story we got was “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” which I thought was one of the most amazing things I’d ever read. We all thought so. So we went through the usual dance where we tried to get George to read it in something resembling a timely fashion. Jay McCulloch would sometimes stick manuscripts like that into his flight bag, in the hope that he would find it by accident on the plane and figure he might as well read it. We bugged him and bugged him to read “Car Crash,” and we were all very nervous about what he would say, because we didn’t want to lose it to some other magazine. Finally, he came downstairs to the office one afternoon holding it rolled up in his hand. He sat down in this chair under the clock and he said, “I don’t know what you guys are talking about. I just don’t see anything in this. But if you feel that strongly about it, then we should do it.” That was the aspect of him that people failed to appreciate; that’s what kept the magazine vital for so many years. There was no reason on earth why he should have let us make those judgment calls, but he did.

  BRIGID HUGHES Probably the biggest thing that we looked at in my time was the excerpt from Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel. We had published a story of his an issue or two before we got the Everything Is Illuminated excerpt. Half of the office loved it and said it was the best thing they’d seen since they’d been at The Paris Review. Half the office didn’t like it. George in particular didn’t like it. There were certain times that George didn’t like something when he wasn’t quite sure of his opinion, because he kept throwing it back to the staff for two or three rounds. We kept it for a while and finally said we weren’t going to take it, so I sent Jonathan an e-mail, only to find out that day that The New Yorker had just accepted it, so it turned out fine for him.

  ELISSA SCHAPPELL He once took Alice Munro to task on the phone about some changes he wanted made in one of her stories. It was unbelievable. I thought, “My God, that’s Alice Munro.” It was some story that had something to do with an alien spaceship, and he said, “You’re wrong. You just can’t do that. It’s just not right. You’re wrong.” I heard that he brought her to tears. But he was right.

  Terry Southern sleeping it off in George’s guest room.

  Photograph © Steve Schapiro.

  LARISSA MACFARQUHAR It’s true that George was not involved in every last detail. On the other hand, his taste was very much the guiding force of the Review, and I didn’t always agree with it. I felt that it was a little too conservative. I’m not some wild and woolly advocate of hypertext experimentalism or anything, but I did feel that there was a little too much of a commitment to the classic fifties American short story—the well-crafted short story. It was not just George. I felt that most of the staff of the Review were also fans of the classic, well-crafted story and were turned off by anything remotely pretentious, or flowery, or baroquely constructed—things that drew attention to themselves as writing, to which I could have extended more leeway. I remember disagreeing with George one time, with everyone on my side, and I think he still succeeded in getting it in the magazine, this horrendous piece of dreck by Terry Southern. I think it’s called “Lamp Man.” So
meone recently told me that it had been sent to Harper’s and they had the same fight. We had a huge fight with George over this absurd, pornographic story that involved a lightbulb, a peeping Tom, and an anatomically correct blowup doll. It was the most ridiculous thing, no merit whatsoever. It was so retro-porn. You couldn’t take it seriously as porn, it was so ludicrous. But George, loyal to the end, said, “It’s Terry. We have to publish it.” It was the only time he did that while I was there. If you start a magazine, it’s your magazine, and you should be able to do stuff like that. And Terry Southern is a kind of awe-inspiring figure, even if he does produce pieces of absurd shit, just like everybody else.