Chekhov's Mistress
Too Good to be True? Paris Review Posting Entire Series of Writers at Work?
Poets & Writers reports on their site that The Paris Review “recently made all of the magazine’s Writers-at-Work interviews from the past 51 years available on its Web site. The free feature, titled “The DNA of Literature,” includes 10,000 searchable pages of text.”
I can find no trace of these literary time capsules at The Paris Review Website, so perhaps the editors of Poets & Writers, despite using the past-tense in their notice, has gotten ahead of themselves.
If it is true, this is exciting news. These are some of the most interesting literary reviews ever published and they have the air of something created for posterity. Each is written from a writer’s perspective, typically going into details of the author’s workday and habits, for example this excerpt from the Spring 1958 issue:
Hemingway: “When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.”
The interviewers tend to cultivate their subjects over a period of time, sometimes years, like Olga Carlisle’s three interviews (culminating in one for the journal’s Summer 1960 issue) with Boris Pasternak, who had no phone and lived in Peredelkino, Russia, far outside of Moscow.
Although the 1958 Hemingway interview, conducted in a Madrid cafe, is the most famous, many of the others I’ve read introduced me to writers that I had never thought about reading before or brought new insights to those I had.
William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Aldous Huxley, Marianne Moore, Henry Miller, Boris Pasternak, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ralph Ellison, and Dorothy Parker are a few of the pickings from the first two editions collected in book form. Later interviewees include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Paul Auster, Richard Powers and myriad others.
If they post them on their site, all the better, but if they don’t, it’s worth while to pick up some of those that are in print in book form. Otherwise, if anyone knows more about this, please post a comment here.
Read widely, think well, and write often.
comments
According to their press release (not that they bother to share the information with their website visitors): two Styron interviews will be posted 10 November, then they’ll add all the interviews decade by decade: 1950s on 15 November, 1960s 10 January, 1970s 14 Feb., 1980s 4 April, 1990s 16 May.
– M.A.Orthofer (11/02 at 09:20 AM)
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: November 01, 2004
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:1
- Links to this Post: Technorati
