Big Little Magazine

The "little" magazines have fallen on thin times. Published in Paris attics or Greenwich Village cellars, printed on butcher paper, and usually as short-lived as May flies, little magazines were the focus and the forum of the experimental '20s, awaited by literati with breathless interest for the latest chapter of James Joyce, the newest obscurity of Ezra Pound, the next outrageous typographical innovation devised by e.e. cummings.

But the experimenters ran out of experiments; the four-letter words migrated to clothback books and the little magazines were left without shock value. The surviving quarterlies, usually backed by rich men or foundations and run by professors, have taken on the ivy-clad tone of a graduate faculty tea. Critics quarrel with critics in thin, querulous prose, and authors are made to feel unwelcome.

In this dimming constellation, a bright new light is a little-known publication called the Paris Review--a magazine dedicated to the proposition that authors are more interesting than critics. Founded in Paris five years ago by a group of bumptious young Americans just out of college, the Review offered as its star turn a series of Q. and A. interviews with writers on the art of writing fiction.

The Iceberg. Brash young Review-men got E.M. Forster to explain why he stopped writing novels in 1924, James Thurber to discuss the difference between American and British humor, William Faulkner to talk about his technique, recorded equally penetrating chats with Francois Mauriac, Joyce Gary, Robert Penn Warren and other literary lights. Result: 21 interviews in the Review and a book (Writers at Work; Viking; $5).

This week the Review celebrated the fifth anniversary of its founding by peddling a 28,000-copy issue featuring a long, intimate interview with Ernest Hemingway. The interview was obtained with an enterprise characteristic of Review's methods. Young (31) Editor George Plimpton introduced himself to Hemingway in the bar of Paris' Hotel Ritz, spent two weeks watching bullfights with him in Madrid, later flew down to Cuba for long hours of talk in Hemingway's Finca Vigia home, broken by long hours in a fishing boat with the old man and the sea. The resulting interview has a refreshing flavor matched against the pedantic fuss-budgetry of critics in rival quarterlies. Sample: "I always write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know, you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. If a writer omits something because he does not know it, then there is a hole in the story."

Pernods & Bludgeons. Review's four American founders spun together accidentally in the Paris literary whirl late in 1952. They were Plimpton (Harvard '48), Novelist Harold Humes (M.I.T. '48), Peter Matthiessen (Yale '50) and John P.C. Train (Harvard '50), son of the late lawyer-writer Arthur Train. Over Pernods at the Chaplain bar in Montparnasse, they agreed that the world badly needed a new little magazine, and scraped together $ 1,000 to start it. Their complaint: "Laden with terms like 'architectonic,' 'Zeitgeist' and 'dichotomous,' the literary magazines seem today on the verge of doing away with literature, not with any philistine bludgeon, but by smothering it under the weight of learned chatter." The Review "put criticism where we thought it belonged: in the back of the book," says Plimpton.

The Review ran in advance a big chunk of Beat Generation Novelist Jack Kerouac's On the Road, printed the first short stories of Playwright James (Blue Denim) Herlihy and Mac (No Time for Sergeants) Hyman. Their office was a back room in the office of a Paris publisher, who locked the front door after 6:30 p.m., forcing Review's editors and visiting writers to depart by dropping six feet from a side window into a stone courtyard below. Unlike its austerely printed rivals, Review early decided to print drawings and illustrate its stories, enlisted as art editor William Pene du Bois, son of the late U.S. Painter Guy Pene du Bois.

Its most enterprising artistic coup cost nothing. Knowing that many of Paris' famed artists amiably sign the guest books kept by most Paris cafes and often add a quick sketch, Plimpton and Du Bois spent weeks going from cafe to cafe to search the books, turned up a fascinating collection of spontaneous sketches by Matisse, Picasso, Dufy, Derain, Buffet and even the long dead Toulouse-Lautrec.

Review's nonfiction manages to convey the flavor of the Left Bank's fermenting geniuses and flamboyant phonies, e.g., Editor Plimpton's relaxed biography of an expressionistic dancer named Vali, who invited her friends in to watch her commit suicide, thought better of it, instead turned out some haunting macabre drawings reproduced in the current issue.

Angel at Their Shoulders. From the first, Review's editors waved away stuffy illusions about the dignity expected of "pure" literature, promoted Paris Review as if it were Paris Confidential. Reviewmen dashed about Paris after dark armed with gluepot and brush, illegally plastered posters on handy walls (one ended up on the lavatory ceiling of the Cafe du Dome); others peddled subscriptions from door to door. One early salesman: England's waspish young man Colin (The Outsider) Wilson, who absentmindedly went off with a week's collections. Circulation reached the impressive figure (among the literary magazine set) of 7,000. But Review still lost money. In the summer of 1956 an unlikely angel came to its rescue and became publisher: Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan (Harvard '54), second son of the late Aga Khan.

Since then circulation has risen, and all four founders have had to go back to the U.S. to make a living. But the Review still keeps its base in Paris, where Editor Nelson Aldrich aims at keeping the sense of immediacy that surged in past issues when the editors talked through the long Paris nights.

Some literary critics carp at the generally moderate fiction and poetry chosen by Review editors. But in an age of painfully intense analysis of fiction and poetry, the Paris Review has scored a solid beat by the simple device of getting away from the library and talking to the authors themselves. Already, Review is the biggest little magazine in history.

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