Talking Modernism: Donald Hall’s Paris Review Interviews

Abstract

GEORGE PLIMPTON, critic and socialite, set up The Paris Review in 1953 with a characteristically idiosyncratic vision: to produce ‘eclectic excellence’.1 Its editors followed the numerous little magazines piloted by modernist writers. Many of these thrived on undercutting a new mass media which was funded by advertising and an increasingly commercialised publishing industry. But in establishing their radical political agendas or promoting their high cultural values, modernists also used new technology and brand identity to create their own closely guarded hierarchies of influence. The Review, being somewhat late to the game, benefited from this legacy, which helped to produce its widest popular and critical export, its interview series ‘The Writer at Work’. The format played on media, celebrity, and journalism to reach a wider audience than the magazine’s new writing in poetry and fiction might otherwise have been able to. ‘The Art of Poetry’, ‘The Art of Fiction’, ‘The Art of Criticism’, as the interviews were organised (among other categories), were about writing as much as the writer. How do writers write, where do they write best, do they write on paper, with a typewriter, or with the aid of an assistant? The questions, asked by a writer or critic knowledgeable about the interviewee’s work, established a tone of mutual respect for craft and professionalism while exploring the primal material and social scenes of writing. This attention to the creative process helped to establish the magazine’s overall commitment to the business of writing. More significantly, it also reinvented what the literary interview meant for readers, writers, and critics.