George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  DALLAS WIEBE I wasn’t in the New York loop, as they say these days. I was stuck out here in this provincial town called Cincinnati. It’s really a backward swamp down here, certainly in a literary sense. It was kind of a de profundis thing, you know, calling out from the depths. It was wonderful to be in The Paris Review, because that was away from this place. When Skyblue the Badass came out from Paris Review Editions, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences wanted to fire me. I didn’t know anything about it until it was over. There was a group in the city called the Citizens for Decent Literature; that group proliferated. It was in other cities, too. They became Citizens for Decency, and then they became Citizens for Community Values. They’re still here. They’re the kind of people that if they don’t like what you do, they’ll try to punish you. It’s not just a matter of criticizing you or of dealing with you—they go after people. It’s happened a lot here in Cincinnati. It’s not just me. And, by the way, at the time they tried to fire me, the head of the Citizens for Decent Literature was a man named Charlie Keating—have you ever heard of him? He was the guy who ran that big savings and loan swindle out in Arizona. He got all these old people to put their savings and their retirement money into it, and then he went broke. He was the head of that. Mr. Charlie Keating.

  BRIGID HUGHES George came down one morning and read an article in the paper about this book that FSG was publishing, based on a one-woman show where she played fifty different characters. So he sent away for the galleys, and he got an excerpt and said, “Isn’t this great?” I did not think it was great at all, and neither did Fiona, but George was adamant about it. He thought it was different and that we really could stretch the boundaries here. I think what he thought was so new and exciting about it was that it took place at something called a “rave,” which he thought we should provide a definition for at the bottom of the story. I didn’t really know what to say.

  OLIVER BROUDY I forget how the Richard Ford story came in. I think we must have asked for it, because only that could explain how angry Ford got. It was like ninety pages, and it was pretty shitty, really second-rate. We were all passive about it in our comments, because this was Richard Ford. Then, one day, George came downstairs and he had the manuscript with him and he started underlining sentences, pointing out that it was just bad writing, and upbraided us all for it, which I enjoyed, actually. I liked being held accountable. Anyway, George wrote a letter to Ford and basically told him that he thought the story was bad and explained why. A few days later, he came downstairs looking stricken. He confessed that he had gotten a letter back from Richard Ford, and Ford was furious. George was deeply upset that he had pissed Ford off and was worrying aloud about how to patch things up with him, which says something about his approach to editing. He didn’t want to upset people.

  BRIGID HUGHES George wrote Ford a letter at the end of the year that said something like “I’m sitting here on New Year’s Eve and looking back on the past year, and I regret the way that I handled your story.” Ford sent a very lovely note saying that he would never send a story again.

  LORRIE MOORE George took a story of mine, one which had already been rejected by a couple other places, and so I was completely grateful, especially since the story, “Terrific Mother,” was long and had all its happiness at the end and so was unusual for me, which caused a perverse, special fondness for it in no one but myself. But George seemed to like it because he thought it was funny, which I greatly appreciated. He also very astutely noted an unnecessary scene (in getting the characters from the U.S. to Italy I actually included a scene on a plane), and so in deleting that we made the story swifter and more efficient. He did have one query, I recall, regarding the phrase “garbage night” or “trash night,” one or the other. He didn’t know what it meant. I told him that was the night people took out their trash for pickup the next day, and he said, rather skeptically, “Really?” But he gave me the benefit of the doubt. Though I had met him briefly once or twice—he was very tall and charming—all this took place on the phone. He was energetic and jolly and sometimes midsentence would consult with members of his staff on the significance of a word or reference, valuing consensus.

  ELIZABETH GAFFNEY My last really amazing editorial interaction with George was where we both edited the same story separately and then came together. It was this Michael Chabon novella, The Final Solution. I had become friends with Michael Chabon, and I was very pleased to have gotten the piece. We had never published anything by him before. It turned out to be a genre piece. It’s a Sherlock Holmes story, which might not have been a hundred percent what George was expecting from his preconceived idea of Michael Chabon. It was long, one hundred pages. I read it and loved it. We took it, and this was shortly before George died, so I was editor at large at that point, but this was a project I was doing. George kept saying to me, “It needs a lot of work,” and I kept saying to him, “George, it needs a very little bit of work. It’s masterful.” He would say, “We’ve got to sit down together and look at this thing.” It took us forever to sit down and look at it together, but we really wanted to schedule it for this particular issue. We needed to know whether it was going to fly, because George was making rather pessimistic noises about it. He was saying the glass was half-empty, and I was saying it was more than half-full. So we finally sat down, and page after page, we had almost the exact same edits throughout this hundred-page manuscript. It was a blissful moment! I wasn’t a young editor seeking his approval anymore, but there was still something so gratifying. I felt like I internalized what he had to teach me.

  JEANNE MCCULLOCH George was a very good mentor, in terms of being an editor, but he was strangely unsupportive of the staff’s writing. I have never heard a story of him being overtly supportive of a staffer’s fiction writing. I remember about Mona Simpson’s book Anywhere but Here he kept saying, “She’s got to fix it. She can’t send it out like that.” She didn’t “fix” it, and after it came out to great acclaim, he said, “I was in California last week, and you can imagine, they’re all talking about Mona’s book!” He said to me many, many times, “Kiddo, you’re an editor. You’re not a writer, you’re an editor,” which at the time was a very hard thing for me to hear, because I believed him for a long time.

  JONATHAN DEE George was more paternal to some of his assistants than to others. There was a lot of talk in the office about “kiddo” status, i.e., you knew he was fond of you once he started addressing you as “kiddo.” I got kiddo’d less than some in the personal assistant’s job—for instance Antonio [Weiss], whom he plainly adored. I had an odd relationship with him. George wasn’t threatened in the Norman Mailer sense of being threatened, where there is always someone nearby who wanted to take his crown. He was threatened because he did not like the idea of some snotty twenty-four-year-old viewing The Paris Review, which was his life’s work, as a kind of stepping-stone or way station on the road to somewhere else. I was actually tremendously invested in the Review and took a lot of pride in working there. But it’s true that there was something else, some other kind of literary endeavor that I cared more about, and he recognized that. Other people who worked there would go home at night and write their novels, just like me, and if they ever showed him their work in progress, looking for his approval, he could be very mean. But that never happened to me. I never showed him anything I was working on, because others there had warned me not to.

  ELIZA GRISWOLD Oh God, yes, he read my writing. I had a poem in The Paris Review once, and George decided he loved it. He read it on NPR, he read it at insane places. It was so sweet of him. It was a dramatic monologue about Midas, and he just loved it. Either he loved it, or he loved encouraging me. Either way, it was a pretty unique experience.

  ELIZABETH GAFFNEY I think it was hard for George to set young novelists free and to endorse them. It was a very father/child dynamic. Watch the child excel in something the parent aspired to do, and if you encourage the child to learn this skill or art form, it’s complicate
d if the child ends up choosing something that you didn’t have the balls to do or the ability to succeed at. To me, being able to edit something is an act of totally optimistic empathy. You have to be able to understand what the writer means—or rather, the best thing that the writer might mean—and then let that optimism show you how the writer might bring out the best in his or her story; and we both could read certain things that we both liked. When he could do it, he was great at it.

  DAVID MICHAELIS People projected on to him a lot of their own issues. Most likely they just fell off him; they didn’t really stick. But what I always felt with George was that the kindness outweighed the coldness. I don’t mean that in a Pollyanna way. I think he was crazy about the people around him. I think he really enjoyed them and had a great capacity for taking pleasure in other people, in their successes and their lives.

  FIONA MAAZEL Whatever his strengths and lapses as a fiction editor, with the interviews he was unbelievable. I’ll never forget—it was the third day I worked there—I transcribed a John le Carré interview, and as far as I could tell, it was junk. Then someone else put it together a little bit, and I read it again and thought, “This is so dumb.” It went upstairs to George, and when it came back down from George, with all the changes, I was shocked. I had never seen anything like it. I didn’t even know such things were possible. He could turn utter schlock into something magnificent because he had just the right touch and such a good ear.

  VICTOR NAVASKY He didn’t invent the interview, obviously, but he was a conversationalist and a performer, an oral performer, so it was appropriate that the interview should be part of the mix of The Paris Review and maybe the most enduring contribution that it made to literature.

  JAMES SCOTT LINVILLE The interviews, of course, were his pride and joy. When I put together the magazine’s archives, I took a close look at each one. Going back to the beginning in Paris, George’s pencil was on every single one of them. And of course his editing was so sharp. The first thing to go, naturally, was whatever the interviewer said, because a Paris Review interview was about the writer, the subject. As for his approach, he preferred the most simple, practical questions rather than something high-minded. This wasn’t simply George being anti-intellectual, which he could be, but that he’d recognized that the more tangible a question you asked, the more likely it was to open a door to something unexpected about the creative process.

  BRIGID HUGHES There was a big file cabinet with old interviews that would just sit there for years, and sometimes George would pull one out and declare that it was going to appear. In one case, somebody called up Woody Allen and asked him a couple of updating questions, which he inserted; then George did one of his cutting-and-pasting jobs. All of this was done without consulting the original interviewer, which had been Kakutani. I’m not sure she even knew it appeared; but when we tried to get permission to anthologize the interview, Ben Howe, who had worked on that project, sent a letter to her, and she said no, she wouldn’t grant it. So Ben called her, but she still said no. George, being George, always thought that a letter from him would change everyone’s minds. So he went upstairs and wrote this letter and wrote out an envelope, and thank God someone picked it up, because it said, “Nikito Kukutani.” He got the name totally wrong. So then he got on the phone with her, and she lit into him for publishing the interview and not consulting with her about edits, and she didn’t want it published in the first place, and she sure as hell didn’t want it published ever again. Good day. George was stunned that he couldn’t charm a woman into granting him permission.

  MONA SIMPSON He was very unhappy at one point with the amount of money that the Review had been paid for the various anthologies of interviews. Viking was paying us very little, and they were delaying publications. So Jay and I volunteered to go to this guy we knew at Simon and Schuster to see about moving our books there, and George was all for it. After an extended series of meetings, we got an offer for twenty-five thousand dollars—the current publisher was offering, I think, three thousand—and they were really going to push it and promote it. So we come to George saying, “Okay, let’s sign on the dotted line, it’s going to be great.” Then, at the last minute, George calls our editor at the other house—basically an old friend of George’s whom he’d been working with for years, who occasionally sent him tickets to a ball game. The editor sends George some tickets to the ball game and the whole deal is off. We realized at that point that we couldn’t just go out in the world and do that sort of thing anymore, not even with his permission, because we found that we basically didn’t have power to go against his personal loyalties. It was very embarrassing, because Simon and Schuster was outraged that we were staying with an offer that was about twelve percent of theirs.

  JONATHAN DEE The interviews were so important to me, personally, as a would-be novelist. I would work all day, and then I would take home an armload of the back issues sitting around the office, and I read all the interviews straight through. In terms of my education as a writer, there’s just nothing that could have taken their place. But then in the years after I left, there was a big effort to repackage the old ones along various demographic lines—Women Writers at Work, Latino Writers at Work—or to jazz up the new efforts by transcribing interviews that George did onstage at the Ninety-second Street Y—Writers at Work Live, it was called. I just didn’t buy the premise that the format had become dull. I hated live interviews, because it was the opposite of the private and thoughtful character of those interviews, to do it in front of an audience. I got mad when they started interviewing screenwriters, too.

  JOHN GUARE I must say a real highlight was the day I ran into George and he said, “Oh, John, I’ve been looking for you—would you be interviewed for Writers at Work?” And I couldn’t believe it. I felt there was some, I don’t know, some canonization; it was Olympus, some goal that you got to that you never dream of getting to. I did it with Elizabeth Gaffney. Very intense editing, we kept going back and forth—that’s what I was so impressed with, how George and Liz would go over the interview and keep specifying; you skirted over this, we want to know more about this, or we know too much about that. I mean, the editing was very line-by-line.

  FAYETTE HICKOX It wasn’t just the Writers at Work series. When you think about it, George did an awful lot of editorial work on other people’s spoken words—which was fitting, wasn’t it, George being such an artist of the spoken word himself. I was there when he did Edie with Jean Stein, his most successful “oral biography.” I don’t remember much about it except that one day boxes and boxes of transcripts turned up in the pool room, and there was George digging through them one after the other and being just agog at what Jean Stein had been able to pull out of people. She was an incredibly seductive interviewer.

  George loved the subject, of course. He knew Edie and her parents and siblings; her grandparents were friends of his parents in Cold Spring Harbor. He knew their Society world, and he knew the Warhol world in which poor Edie rose and crashed. Also he was drawn to spectacles of failure, wasn’t he, especially perhaps when they were glamorously self-destructive and involved someone of his own class. He threw himself into the Edie project with great gusto, but perhaps the most amazing thing he did with Jean’s material was to cut up the interviews into paragraph-size bites, as he did with Review interviews, and then splice them together in such a way as to tell Edie’s story without relying on any interpolations by Jean or himself to fill in the gaps.

  Dear Alice—2.

  . . . Jean started her book Edie with Paul Spike as her collaborator. The book was to be in the usual biographical form—she supplying the information, Paul to mold it into book form. Jean didn’t approve of what had been done. She sent me a few chapters and I agreed with her. When she asked for help, I said I would only work on it on the condition that we shift the form to oral biography (the form we had used previously with American Journey: The Times of Robert F. Kennedy) and that she would do the interviewing and I would do
the editing: the two of us were to be listed as co-authors. She agreed to this and that is how the original contract reads.

  So that’s the way we worked. Of course we discussed editorial matters. I valued her opinions. . . .But the vast work of line editing, the arrangement of the chapters, the melding of one interview into the next so that it seemed seamless was mine from start to finish.

  . . . When the manuscript of Edie was completed, Jean and I sent it to Bob Gottlieb at Knopf. . . . I did not know Gottlieb’s modus operandi at the time and when Jean and I arrived I was horrified to find him sitting on the floor of his office and flipping through the pages of our book as if sifting rather petulantly through a pile of old newspapers. I remember mentioning this to Jean afterwards. In fact, Gottlieb was delighted with Edie, said as much, and I don’t recall that he made any editorial suggestions except to reassure Jean, who was worried that the working title Edie might confuse readers into thinking they were buying a book about Eydie Gorme, that the title was fine.