Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Third Series

WRITERS AT WORK Third Series Previously published WRITERS AT WORK The Paris Review Interviews FIRST SERIES Edited, and with an Introduction, by Matcotm CowLry E.. M. Forster Frank O’Connor Francois Mauriac Joyce Cary Dorothy Parker James Thurber Thornton Wilder William Faulkner Georges Simenon Robert Penn Warren Alberto Moravia Nelson Algren Angus Wilson William Styron Truman Capote Francoise Sagan SECOND SERIES Introduced by Van Wyck Brooks Robert Frost Ezra Pound Marianne Moore T.S. Eliot Boris Pasternak Katherine Anne Porter Henry Miller Aldous Huxley Ernest Hemingway S. J. Perelman Lawrence Durrell Mary McCarthy Ralph Ellison Robert Lowell SDSSDAISDIESEDIEOSEOSEOSENSES Writers at Work £93 The Paris Review Interviews THIRD SERIES Introduced by Alfred Kazin NEW YORK: THE VIKING PRESS SDSDSEVSEISOSEOSEDSEOIEOSEOSEOSEOS SSEDAMSVIEVICOSEOSEVIENTOSENSES The interviews and biographical notes in this volume have been prepared for book publication by George Plimpton Copyright © 1967 by The Paris Review,Inc. Copyright in all countries of the International Copyright Union All rights reserved Published in 1967 by The Viking Press,Inc. 625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022 Published simultaneously in Canada by The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited Library of Congress catalog card number: 66~15912 Printed in U.S.A. Contents Introduction by Alfred Kazin V1l WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS BLAISE CENDRARS 31 JEAN COCTEAU 57 LOUIS-FERDINAND CELINE 83 EVELYN WAUGH 103 LILLIAN HELLMAN 115 WILLIAM BURROUGHS 141 SAUL BELLOW 175 ARTHUR MILLER 197 10. JAMES JONES 231 11. NORMAN MAILER 251 12. ALLEN GINSBERG 1 3. EDWARD ALBEE 321 14. HAROLD PINTER 347 Introduction HE Paris Review interviews (of which this is the third selection Ti book form) have been unusually sensitive and adroit exerclses in getting contemporary writers to reveal themselves. They have been the best recent examples of the biographical art of the profile. The classic interview, which Boswell and Eckermann practiced in order to write their respective books on Johnson and Goethe, is surely something else—a form of WisdomLiterature. It seeks a Lesson From The Master(traditionally no smaller man is worth interviewing), and in it the interviewer plays the role of disciple. His job is to put the Master’s views on life into book form—the most notable recent example is the book that Lucien Price called Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. Because he is usually dealing with a great thinker’s comprehensive and universal philosophy, the many branches of one great tree, he will notice inconsistencies, will draw the Master out on fascinatingly unexpected topics, will provoke the Master into unpremeditated eloquence. Theclassic interview with a Great Man probably had its origins in religious discipleship, and the purest exampleof it is still Plato’s Dialogues. What the interviewer really asks is: How Are We To Live? A profile, by contrast, is a sketch; what used to be called a “character”—a personality is quickly built up before our eyes. It is not an intellectual biography, such as a book on a single man seeks to become;it is a close-up, a startlingly informative glance— usually sympathetic, and even when it is not openly so, the covV1 Vill Writers at Work erage becomes a form of sympathy. A profile, by common understanding, is due someonecurrently important. The in