ed Philip Gourevitch (Canongate, £14.99)
By any standard, the three volumes of the Paris Review interviews—selected from the archives of the American literary quarterly—feature an embarrassment of big names. Interviewees include Hemingway, Eliot, Waugh, Larkin, Faulkner, García Márquez, Pinter, Amis, McEwan, Rushdie and Mailer, to name a few. Since the magazine's first issue in 1953—which included an interview with EM Forster (the founding editor, George Plimpton, had met him while at Cambridge)—a Paris Review interview has come to be seen as an essential step in the consolidation of an English language literary reputation. Only the confirmed cranks of American letters—JD Salinger, Harper Lee and Thomas Pynchon—held out. In 1982, even the retiring Philip Larkin submitted, though he insisted questions and answers were exchanged via letter—and noted later that this had "taken a long time because, to my surprise, I found writing it suffocatingly boring."
It's easy to forget—as even the series's professional fans seem to—that the person you get to "know" in each interview is as carefully crafted as any fictional character. One of Plimpton's lures was the promise that the intention was not to "expose" but to "collaborate"; the subject had complete creative control. "You could scratch out some things and scribble in others," Isak Dinesen's interviewer reassures her of the transcript-to-be. Shocking revelations are not to be expected. But the resulting portraits-of-a-writer, in this third and final volume, are witty, courteous, perceptive—and freer of naked egomania than the preceding collections. (The exception being Evelyn Waugh, who raps out, "Six weeks' work" to the question, "Did you write these early novels with ease?") Even Martin Amis is relatively self-deprecating: "I'm a moron when I finish a novel," he admits. "For weeks [after finishing London Fields] I shambled about, unable to do my own shoelaces."
The volume's centre of gravity lies in the mid-section interviews with William Carlos Williams, John Cheever and Raymond Carver, which sketch out the literary voice that the Paris Review, along with the New Yorker, helped to shape—direct, muscular, American and male. Men outnumber women across the series 37 to 11, even allowing for the unique case of the male-foreign-correspondent-turned-female-travel-writer, Jan Morris. Nevertheless, one of the pleasures of the collection is its variety. Across the book, writers agree and, more often, disagree. "In no way does [academia] help those who write fiction or those who love to read it," says Cheever, who is reluctant to talk about his work and often forgets the details of stories he has written. "Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it," replies Joyce Carol Oates. Such differences make up a crazy-mirrors portrait of what writing, and writers, can be. We turn from Ted Hughes's typically intense belief that poems "come up from some other depth… I might feel I would like to change something about them, but they're stronger than I am, and I cannot" (he also admits to covering his windows with brown paper to better hear his "inner voice") back to Carver's brisk assertion that writing is "like shooting billiards, or playing cards, or bowling." Read as a manual, this book's instructions would be head-spinningly contradictory.
The interviews are also fascinating because they freeze-frame a writer at a stage of their life and career to which we know the corollary. Harold Pinter, in 1966, is not yet the theatrical and political eminence he has become; Amis, in 1998, has yet to be unpleasantly provoked by Islamism. As snapshots of lives in decline, they are often very touching. "I can't type," laments gentle, courteous Williams after suffering a stroke. The presiding genius of more than one interview is F Scott Fitzgerald, the archetypal Am-lit tragic figure. Cheever, predictably, admits to crying "like a baby" over critical biographies of Fitzgerald.
It is the slighter details, however, that bring the famous names alive. "Cheever did not invite me to cut any wood with his chainsaw, an activity to which he is rumoured to be addicted," notes his interviewer regretfully. Carver reveals that all the furniture in his strangely characterless house was bought and delivered in a single day. The asides also illuminate writers' personal and professional entanglements with other writers: Ted Hughes speaks of Sylvia Plath, Martin Amis of Kingsley, Jean Rhys of Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford, while Cheever offers a plainspoken lament for his friend EE Cummings, who "could hear a pin falling in soft dirt at the distance of three miles."
The smallest detail of all is the most famous Paris Review question, "What tools do you require [to write]?" Each interview is prefaced by a photograph of a manuscript page, complete with deletions, interpolations and scribbles: a visual analogue to the interviewees' relieved enumerations of other writers who struggled with drafts (Carver happily relates that Tolstoy rewrote War and Peace "eight times"). Dave Eggers, doubtless with these technical revelations in mind, has described the three collections as "the closest thing to an MFA that you can get while sitting alone on your couch." But such utilitarian praise misses the subtler pleasures of their deceptively artful form. As an insight into what the most famous writers of the last 50 years would like you to think of them, the Paris Review Interviews have many charms beside their illustrious roll-call.
