PETER MATTHIESSEN With the future Paris Review still germinating in Paris, and still unnamed, it occurred to me that George Plimpton, my old buddy, might be good for the job of editor. He was in England, winding down his last year at Cambridge without knowing what he wanted to do next. This would be midspring 1952. The first issue was still months away. I took a chance and rang him up. I wanted him to come and take over as editor: I doubt if anything less would have attracted him. I didn’t want the job, and I didn’t think my colleagues in the venture, Doc Humes and Billy du Bois, were, for very different reasons, up to it. Did George imagine being a magazine editor? I doubt it. But he was an extremely curious and energetic guy, and he thought it was a great excuse to come to Paris—why not?
Dear Mother and Daddy,
. . . I shall be leaving here next week after degree day and probably go straight to Paris. In the interests of the magazine, I should have left as soon as term ended but after so many years of fruitless attempts to march in a Commencement I’m not going to pass this one by. I have to wear “black boots, a black suit, black stockings, a square in a good state of repair” and a piece of rabbit fur about my neck.
I didn’t do particularly well in my exams—an honours degree third class which could sound impressive but isn’t. I thought the exams hard and was pulled down by an essay paper which got out of hand, as essays written to a time limit will, and a difficult three hours of French translation.
I went down to Oxford after the exam to stay with Don Hall, a friend of mine from Harvard and the Newdigate Poetry Prize– winner (see last week’s Time). He’s given me his prize-winning poem for the Paris Magazine and has collected a startlingly good portfolio of Oxford verse and prose, mostly verse, which should be successful. . . . [ June 12, 1952]
III.
CREATION MYTHS OF
THE PARIS REVIEW: 1952–1955
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I am struck by how it must have been when they started the Review, how unencumbered and free and bold they were. It was a work of love among friends. They were publishing each other at first, as well as their heroes. Even as the years have gone by, you never lost the sense that George was doing it out of love. He took some glamour from it, but he gave it glamour. That was all because it was a work of love. It’s not something you do because it’s a good career move.
—PHILIP GOUREVITCH
THE FOUNDERS CONVERGE
RUSS HEMENWAY We were all in the right place, at the right time: postwar Paris. We felt just as important as Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway and all the expatriates did after World War One. Some people were very productive, some people were not; some people were relatively rich—they had the GI Bill, plus a little money from home, maybe more than a little—some were flat-out poor. Myself, I could do things. I could access Paris. If I wanted to go to the theater, I could go to the theater, whereas many people would sit around and say, “Gee, I wish I could eat out at a restaurant instead of eating over this Bunsen burner,” you know? But we all felt like family. There was some division; the Montparnasse crowd was a little different from the Saint-Germain-des-Prés crowd, and there were some people who actually lived on the Right Bank—we couldn’t understand them at all. They actually lived over there.
WILLIAM BECKER We were living like kings. In Paris, on the black market in the mid-1950s, you could exchange a dollar for six hundred francs. My hotel room cost three hundred francs. For a hundred and eighty francs, you could get a steak pommes frites, with a bottle of Beaujolais. Paris was filled with GIs who were living on their seventy-five dollars a month GI Bill money. I had GI Bill money, plus my Rhodes stipend, which was converted into dollars. So I would go cash my Rhodes money into American dollar traveler’s checks and head off to the Left Bank. But it was astonishing how well you could live in Paris even on seventy-five dollars a month.
Max Steele, Peter Matthiessen, and Richard Wright, Paris.
Photograph by Otto van Noppen.
Harold L. (Doc) Humes.
Photograph © the Estate of Harold Louis Humes
PETER MATTHIESSEN I went to Paris after I graduated from Yale in the class of 1950. I was an English major, and by senior year, my favorite professor was a brilliant guy named Norman Holmes Pearson. He and I were members of something called the Jacobean Club, as was a man named James Jesus Angleton, who was already an important CIA officer. Pearson recruited a lot of people for the CIA, including me. My main reason for signing on was that I could insist on being sent to Paris when I graduated. I’d met Patsy Southgate there in the junior year abroad program, from ’48 to ’49, so Paris was very romantic for us; and by 1950 I was beginning to publish short stories, and I wanted to write my first novel. So here was the CIA, as it turned out, offering to send me to Paris for its own reasons. I should mention, back then, that the CIA was brand new, and they were not yet into political assassinations or the other ugly stuff that came later. I had no politics. I was a Yaley greenhorn as far as politics went. This was 1950. The cold war had hardly started, but Paris was a hot spot of anti-Americanism, which Communists were happy to exploit to benefit the Soviet Union. So there was the appeal to my patriotism, to work for my country against the Communist menace. Mainly, I was interested in being a writer.
RUSS HEMENWAY When I first saw Harold (Doc) Humes, he had just arrived in Paris, in 1949. I was doing my graduate work there, but doing the required café sitting as well, and there was this guy walking down the boulevard Saint-Germain in this incredible outfit. It was summertime, so it was hot—Paris gets hot—and he had on this black wool suit, a homburg hat, a white shirt, and a black tie, and he carried a cane with a silver handle. Everyone was saying, “Who’s that guy?” We had no idea, but he was obviously crazy. It was hot as hell out, and he had this beatific smile on his face. This darling, cute face; he looked like a little boy in a grown-up suit. It turned out that he was a remittance man—he got money from his father. It’s the only money he ever had. He didn’t like to talk about it. His father was a Puritan: nice, very nice; loved Doc and dearly wished for him to go straight; get a job and have a conventional life. He wanted Doc to take care of his own children, when they came, whereas he and his wife had to take care of them.
DOC HUMES TO GAY TALESE, 1963 I went to Paris because Paris is where you go when you want to think. I wanted to hide out and think, and maybe learn. Paris is the University of the West, and anybody who doesn’t understand that doesn’t need to go. I went to Paris because I was ignorant; I went as a matriculator, not a pilgrim.
DAVID AMRAM Doc sometimes wouldn’t say anything, he would be really quiet, and then in the middle of a conversation he would come blasting out with this torrent of argument. It wasn’t that he particularly cared about what he was arguing about, I thought it was just his way of keeping himself in shape. He would go into some crazy monologue or start screaming about something that I think made him feel good so he could go home and write about something else. It would relax him. Doc had his own language, combining hip talk with some expressions of his own. He would start speaking about something that had happened two months ago or would continue a conversation from three weeks ago. A lot of people were confused by him.
JOHN TRAIN I arrived in Paris a year before George in the early summer of 1951 to get a doctorate at the Sorbonne after getting an MA at Harvard. I settled at a splendid place on the avenue Franco-Russe that belonged to an English writer. It was a studio transformed into a library, with two floors and a minstrel’s gallery.
WILLIAM STYRON After my first novel was published, Lie Down in Darkness, in 1951, I received a prize called the Prix de Rome, which entitled me to spend a year at the American Academy in Rome. This seemed like a fine thing for me to do since I had delivered myself of a novel and was footloose and fancy-free. Lie Down in Darkness was a modest bestseller, so I had made a bit of money, enough for a bachelor. So I headed, as one did at the age of twenty-six, for Europe. I first went to England, and then to Denmark of all places, and figured this was a goo
d way to get to Rome. It was a long journey but a pleasant one, and in the spring of ’52 I ended up in Paris for eight months, I found a little room in a small hotel called Liberia. I wrote The Long March there. I think it was Blair Fuller, whom I had met in New York, who told me to look up a good friend of his, Peter Matthiessen. So in the course of events, not long after I arrived in Paris, I met Peter. But first I met Doc Humes, who heard that I was in Paris, sought me out in my hotel on the Right Bank, before the Liberia, and said, “You can’t live on the Right Bank. You’ve got to live on the Left Bank.” So he got me situated in the Liberia. And about this time I met Peter.
PETER MATTHIESSEN Bill Styron showed up on the dingy fourth-floor landing of our apartment at 14, rue Perceval, with no French and a thick Tidewater accent and a scrawled note of introduction from our friend John Marquand, Jr. Patsy and I gave him a drink and then took him to Ti-Jo’s (Petit Joseph), a little Breton café that served big, fresh, delicious Belon and Marenne huîtres (a French word derived, or so I informed Bill, from the sound made when one’s first oyster is spat across the room: hweet-tre!). We were also sloshing up a good deal of rough vin de table, and at a certain point, overcome by dire homesickness, he fell face forward into his platter and lay lachrymose amongst the oysters, uttering the immortal Styronian words: “Ah ain’ got no mo ree-sistunce to change than a snow-flake; ah’m goin’ home to the James Rivuh and grow pee-nuts.” But by this time, we were already fond of this well-read, humorous, and very intelligent man: We became fast friends on that first evening and from that time on.
RUSS HEMENWAY The first time I actually spoke to Doc—well before Peter or George arrived—I asked him, “What are you doing in Paris?”—the obvious question. He said, “I’m an art dealer. I’m over here buying paintings.” In fact, he didn’t have any money to buy paintings. But then he met Sinbad Vail, Peggy Guggenheim’s son, and suddenly he was a publisher. Sinbad had a little magazine called Points. Everybody knew Points, everybody talked about it, it was the beginning of the “little magazine” period, and he was by himself, with his own dough, publishing this little mag. It wasn’t a lot, but it was a little magazine, and Doc thought Paris needed another little magazine. That was the beginning of The Paris News Post.
IMMY HUMES My father told me he had been thinking about starting a magazine for years—that the idea had sort of been germinating—he credits it to a conversation with Jimmy Baldwin, a conversation that happened sometime in ’48 or ’49, before he hooked up with Matthiessen. Doc loved James Baldwin, absolutely idolized James Baldwin, and he says they talked about making a magazine—how great it would be if there were an outlet and a safe space for writers by writers. Doc always talked about The Paris Review as an antianxiety measure. In other words, it was going to be this protected space, and it was going to be criticism free; there would be no academic jargon, just fiction, and this was going to be a measure against this “age of anxiety,” a phrase he got from Randall Jarrell, I think.
JOHN TRAIN By the time George came to town, I had abandoned my studies at the Sorbonne and had already discussed starting a magazine with Rosamond and Georges Bernier. I had a distinct entrepreneurial bent, even then; indeed, I started a car credit company for GIs in Europe. But I liked magazine work, having done it at Groton and at the Lampoon. So I had discussions with the Berniers about starting a New Yorker sort of magazine: a commercial publication, not a “little magazine.” Little magazines, by their very nature, cannot make money. They discover authors. Very few people want to read undiscovered authors. They want to read reliably good authors they’ve already read. Anyway, we made some progress on that project, but then the gang appeared—George, Peter Matthiessen, and Doc Humes, who had been running The Paris News Post—and we sort of coalesced.
PETER MATTHIESSEN Tom Guinzburg, my roommate at Yale in senior year, had been managing editor of the Yale Daily News and was going around with Bill Buckley’s sister, whom he planned to meet in Paris; that’s how he got mixed up with the new magazine. Tom’s editorial input was always welcome, and in addition, he knew a good deal about publishing since his father was head of the Viking Press, as he would be himself. Terry Southern was another member of our group and later became a great friend of George’s. In those days, he smoked so much hash that he passed for a junkie, and his spoken word was suspenseful, to say the least. “Yeah, man, uhhhhh . . .” then three minutes might pass before he resumed, picking up the thread where he’d left off. He had to lean; that was my phrase, he had to lean for three minutes.
MARY LEE SETTLE Max Steele was another Paris Review writer in the earliest days, a funny person, a big-eared southerner who wrote for the Review in the early days. He was very funny, actually, but also odd. Max got his little touch of fame too soon, to tell you the truth. It’s a bad thing that happens to some people. Another early figure was Alfred Chester. He had had some kind of fever that he’d caught when he was growing up, and all his hair fell out. He had a red wig, which he used to put on like a beret. Never gave a damn if it was straight or anything. God, when I think of Alfred, I can see him with squinty eyes and that wig he wore all the time. Later, I gather, he gave up on the wig, but it was very much a part of life for him when he was in Paris. He went to Tangiers, and then things got from bad to worse.
Party at the Hôtel Vendôme, Paris, 1953. From left: Eddie Morgan, John Train, three persons unknown, Bee, George, and Eugene Walter.
Photograph by Otto van Noppen.
BEE DABNEY Let’s see. Pati Hill was one of the people around the Review very early on. She was beautiful, absolutely beautiful, and wrote beautifully. She was once a model. I think she wrote quite a few stories for the Review. Eugene Walter was another. He was called “Tum-te-tum.” I used to walk in the Luxembourg Gardens with him, and we would have picnics. He was always inventive about something to do, and he had the most wonderful imagination, an artful way of whipping up parties and gatherings together. He was full of whimsy. Brilliant. Fascinating, I thought. Very original. Sally Higginson arrived. She was from Boston, and she started out on the Left Bank. I think she stayed in the same hotel that Eugene Walter was in, across the street practically from the Review. Soon after her arrival, she moved out of that hotel and into rather sumptuous quarters at the Hôtel Vendôme, and she was wonderful because she gave parties. We’d all dress up in costumes and had champagne, and it was terrific fun and luxurious for all of us. She had red hair. She was comfy looking and had a comfy way of speaking.
PETER MATTHIESSEN Patsy and I had a poker game at the apartment one evening a week with Terry Southern and others. One night, Terry brought a young black writer named Jimmy Baldwin, whom we didn’t know. During supper, there was quite a lot of talk about how certain jobs in the art world, ballet, and the theater were now almost entirely the province of gays. We were all drinking and excitable—Jimmy, too—and suddenly, deep into the evening, he announced that he was gay and furthermore very offended, although the talk had not been homophobic in the least. I was very annoyed, but being the host, I felt I had to respond, and I said, “Look, I’m sorry, but we don’t know you and you came on like you were straight: Why didn’t you speak up earlier instead of waiting all this time, then acting offended?” Not long after that, his first book, which was Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published in the U.S. He was too broke to go home, so we all chipped in and got him a ticket and sent him off. When he came back, he went out of his way to avoid those who had helped him out, perhaps because he thought we thought he owed everybody money. We didn’t. Jimmy’s first novel was very good, and he was a fine polemic writer, and in later years, he came to Bill Styron’s defense in the uproar among black writers over Confessions of Nat Turner, but I’m afraid I never quite trusted him. This may have been partly because I was friends with Richard Wright, who was also in Paris at that time, knew Baldwin, and admired his talent but found him ambiguous, too.
RUSS HEMENWAY Matthiessen’s the only guy I know who was there in Paris for “you know who.” But i
t was not an opprobrious thing. Those of us who had been in World War Two realized that we had no intelligence service at all, just the OSS. So we were delighted with this thing they called the Central Intelligence Agency, which was going to be the central gathering place of intelligence. We could now make judgments based on something other than talking to the British ambassador. So Peter was never derided for this. Also, you’ve got to remember that from 1949 to 1952, we were living in high anxiety. The Korean War was a major threat, and we were losing. As for the Russians, every night we thought, “Well, they will come off the steppes and march into Western Europe, and there’s absolutely nothing there to stop them.” Meanwhile, back home, the Republicans had taken over the Senate, and Joseph McCarthy was to be chairman of the subcommittee on investigations, and he decided that he had to have a hundred accountants, fifty lawyers, this whole expanded staff, and he came in with a budget of four or five times what the committee budget normally had been. There was one vote against it. One vote against it! Bill Fulbright.
DOC HUMES TO GAY TALESE, 1963 Exile is like unrequited love. Ours was a sick nation in those terrible days. I left my native land because I couldn’t stand watching the rape of justice and murder of decency. I left America because the alternative to leaving was suicide or madness.
George, Being George Page 8