JEANNETTE SEAVER The Merlinites thought that the Harvard boys, with their good looks and their money, were playboys, really—pas du tout sérieux. And they weren’t—that was a fact. They were having fun pulling their beautiful bodies around Paris. George looked the same as he always would—tall, dashing, handsome. He walked about like someone who was born feeling good with himself, with money and aristocracy, whereas our group were like lepers. They were good-looking, yes, but not at all the same thing. Pennies mattered; with George they never mattered. Doors opened from the day he was born, which does make you look different and move about differently. The head of Merlin was also a very tall, handsome, brilliant Scot named Alex Trocchi. He was not a good man at all, a junkie, but he was irresistibly intelligent and charming, and we were all under his spell at one point or another. And so was George. When Alex showed up in New York in the late 1950s, George was extremely generous to him. Housed him, gave him money. Then, when Alex fled to Canada, he put on two or three of George’s suits, went to Canada, and from there back to London. I’m not clear whether George gave the suits to him or if he stole them. I wouldn’t be surprised if he stole them, because that’s what he did.
WILLIAM STYRON We were a world apart from the Merlin people. They were in the avant-garde and we were not. I certainly respected the avant-garde, but I felt there was also a place for some conventional stuff, like the stuff The Paris Review would publish.
The Café le Tournon crowd. Front row, left to right: Vilma Howard, Jane Lougee, Muffy Wainhouse, Jean Garrigue. Second row: Christopher Logue, Richard Seaver, Evan Connell, Niccolò Tucci, Eugene Walter, unknown, Peter Huyn, Alfred Chester, Austryn Wainhouse. Last row: George, Michel van der Plats, James Broughton, William Gardner Smith, Harold Witt. Photograph by Otto van Noppen.
RICHARD SEAVER We had a deal with Maurice Girodias, publisher of the Olympia Press. We brought him Beckett’s Watt, and of course he also published Nabokov’s Lolita. Mostly, though, he published porn. Some of us wrote for him, Trocchi more than the others. George also wrote a dirty book—I can’t remember the name—but it was not published. It was terrible. I read it. George had too much Harvard in him. Girodias wanted down and dirty: “It’s page five already, let’s get on with it.” But George was doing elaborate plots and romantic things and just couldn’t do it. Christopher Logue was doing a dirty book at the same time as George, and he had a nervous breakdown, it was so hard for him. He and George were sort of the two cats who couldn’t do it—their minds were not there, they just couldn’t steel themselves for that kind of book on command. You know, to have a wide-ranging sex life and to write about it—there’s a difference.
BEE DABNEY He was always struggling with his stories. I would go to his flat and cook rice because he lived on rice, along with all the cats he’d collected. Wherever he was living, he had to have a cat. I remember one time he read to me a story he was struggling with, and it was so pornographic and so shocking to me, I said, “George, you simply can’t!” I don’t know why I became so prissy about it, but it upset me so much that I burst into tears, persuading him to please, please not write that story. His other stories were really much more elegant and stylish, and I didn’t want him to be known for that story.
RICHARD SEAVER I found The Paris Review, when it appeared in the fall of 1952, to be a real competitor to Merlin. “First of all,” I said, “the magazine looks better than Merlin.” And Alex Trocchi said, “Yeah, but look at the inside. Don’t be worried, these people are not serious. They won’t be on the Left Bank very long, and when they leave Paris after their stint here, their magazine will not exist. And we will. We’ll still be here.” And, of course, we had nine issues and George had two hundred and thirty or whatever it was.
A LOVE STORY
BEE DABNEY After the first trip with Sadri and his parents I went back to Boston, only to return, of course, with my beribboned admission to the Atelier the next fall. I stayed in Paris for two years. That’s when I again saw a lot of George. We were either at Café de Flore or the Deux Magots, with hundreds of writers and artists, people like Orson Welles and Truman Capote. But we scattered ourselves all over Paris. We were one minute dressed up as best we could be on the Right Bank at some very pompous French thing, struggling with our French; or going off to an outing in this little tiny house in the country. It was wildly exciting. He lived on the Left Bank in a series of freezing cold little apartments, and I lived on the Right Bank, with a very serious French family. I was constantly getting on this bus to the Left Bank to see George and creeping home at the wee hours, because whenever I saw George, there was no bedtime, ever. My French family could hear the bathtub running in the wee hours, because I was so frozen cold that I wanted to take hot baths, and they kept reprimanding me.
PATI HILL Bee was marvelous looking. She looked like a little animal. If you had a squirrel or a marmot or something for your own, you might want it to look like Bee Dabney. She was very seductive in the way of giving smiles and admiration all around, but not making you feel as if you had to deserve it. She wasn’t a close friend of mine. I just admired her and felt like explaining to her how to make pound cake or something. How to do some very simple magic trick, as if she didn’t already know all she needed.
TEDDY VAN ZUYLEN Flirting was part of Bee’s charm. I think that she was obviously, seriously interested in George, but he never showed anything of that kind. He did not wear his heart on his sleeve as some people do and caress the lady, call her “darling,” say, “Ah, you look so lovely.” She was so cute, so feminine, and so charming that it was a mystery to me to see how indifferent he seemed. I’m sure that part of his New England lineage would never allow him to show any affection in public to the woman he happened to be with. He was perfectly polite to her. He never treated her badly. But you never would have known they were together, if you didn’t already know it.
BEE DABNEY I left the serious French family I was staying with when I first arrived in Paris and found a flat on the Left Bank, right next to this wonderful, imaginative nightclub on the rue du Bac. When I would go to George’s for dinner, he would always concoct this rice dish. So I said, “George, why don’t you come over and have dinner in my little apartment here.” I did not know how to cook particularly well, but I got my dinner together: a piece of meat, and some salad, and some cheese and bread, and a perfectly delicious bottle of Rothschild wine that I had been given by this relative of the Rothschilds, a most interesting man named Karl Hans Strauss. Fascinating man. He had sent a whole case of this wine, which I used to give to that family I was living with, and they were mortified, because by then I think they thought their table wine that we’d been drinking was not up to snuff or something. Here I was, taking hot baths and presenting them with a bottle of Rothschild wine. I didn’t realize—well, anyway, I think that’s why I moved out and into my little flat. So, George was having difficulties carving the meat, and it was just adorable. The table I set up with the candle, and everything was so romantic, except for this terrible piece of meat that kept flying around. George asked me what it was, and I told him. Of course, George made a huge story out of it and said I’d served him cat lung with a bottle of Rothschild wine. That was the end of my dinner parties.
George with Baron Teddy van Zuylen.
From the collection of George Plimpton.
CHRISTOPHER LOGUE I was looking at a photograph of Bee Dabney yesterday. She had this beautiful oval face with her hair that came down like that, also oval. She knew very well what she was doing with George. But I don’t think she was really very keen. It was very difficult to tell with Bee how interested she was in men. She was kind of distant—at least, I thought so. George was dotty about her; at the same time, he was always pretending to be somewhere else, free all the time, you see. He didn’t want to be emotionally committed, and he did want to be emotionally committed. Very common. He was elusive, George was.
BEE DABNEY I got a little fussed over George’s attentions to others. I was quite jeal
ous of Zadie Parkinson. I thought she was very good-looking, and George seemed to like her, and that irritated me. At the same time, Jimmy Goldsmith was paying a lot of attention to me, so I suppose I was being just as irritating to George. I don’t know what came over me, to find Jimmy so interesting. He could be so charming, and yet he was a gambler, an incredible gambler, which was a total bore. He was also terribly jealous of George. Still, no matter what, George and I were with each other throughout all this time in Paris. We would go to our little bistros, whatever they were called, where they would be willing sometimes to take the paper tabletop that we had been painting or drawing or writing on and frame it, and give us a free meal. We were always inventing children’s stories together. He would tell the story, and I would illustrate it right then and there. We were also always making wedding plans. Who are our ushers going to be, and who are our bridesmaids going to be? We were always making these lists and dreaming away of wedding plans.
ROBERT SILVERS George and Bee would travel together, sometimes to George’s family’s villa on Lake Como. In fact, we would all go down there Teddy Van Zuylen, John Marquand, and several others. George’s sister, Sarah, would join us, and then George’s father and mother.
BEE DABNEY All the time, of course, the greatest thing in George’s life was, really, The Paris Review. I felt it, what with all of these late nights all the time, it was always Paris Review, Paris Review. The focus was The Paris Review, really. I knew this. We used to joke about it. As time went on, I realized that I was getting unable to stay up that late, because I’m an early person. When your time clocks are different from someone, it isn’t as easy. So I began to realize that those late nights were extraordinary, and I couldn’t keep up with that.
THE FIRST ISSUE
“They were the most glamorous quartet you could imagine.” George, Bee Dabney (obscuring Dune Plunkett), Sadruddin Khan, and Princess Andrée (Sadri’s mother). Photograph by Germaine Traverso, from the collection of George Plimpton.
GEORGE PLIMPTON DIARY Elected editor, chairman, president, what-have-you to magazine. Position of no authority except position of whip, hardly one which I can do well. Decisions I don’t mind. That’s what I wanted. If Humes, Matthiessen, and du Bois had agreed to that we’d have no trouble on the magazine, though perhaps hurt feelings. . . . A composite accumulation of agreements through vote in a magazine results in its death. . . . Therefore there must be an absolute boss if one agrees that the magazine is more important than feelings. Example is argument about cover. I know The Paris Review is a sensible and safe title. It may not sell a million copies but it’s safe. It has snob appeal. Paris—God what that connotes everywhere, and its life and its literatures, and its eccentrics. But not quite enough for them. Merde, Phusct, Venture, MS, Manuscript, Counterpoint, Baccarat, all these evocative names which symbolize countless magazines with similar names which have failed in one respect for that very reason—zero, Blast, Transition (although that a fine one), Wake, etc. I said I’d never read a literary magazine of any sort with a one name supposedly striking title which hadn’t folded within a year or so. “Time, Life, Fortune?” asked du Bois. Well, he may be right but we shall see. The title can certainly ruin it. We’re all thinking about it. I hope if there’s a better one and a safer one than The Paris Review I can open my mind to it.
PETER MATTHIESSEN In my wonderful flat on 14, rue Perceval, we tried to thrash out the name of the magazine-to-be—“we” being George, Humes, Styron, du Bois, perhaps Train, and me. This was also, I think, the first meeting in which we agreed on our editorial philosophy and content, which excluded literary criticism in favor of fiction and poetry—or agreed, anyway, to the point where we could start to put it together.
JOHN TRAIN A magazine seemed to all of us like a good thing to do; that was a given. Not so given was exactly what sort of magazine it would be. Matthiessen favored a magazine to be called Baccarat—hyperliterary. I claim to have come up with the name The Paris Review and lobbied for that because it seemed very logical.
IMMY HUMES There was a skirmish over the title; they were all kids, and they were all fighting over who would get the credits for The Paris Review right from the start.
PETER MATTHIESSEN I was very proud of the magazine and was petty enough to bristle occasionally when, over a period of many years and almost to the end, George permitted people to describe him in interviews and elsewhere as “the founder and editor of The Paris Review.” This was technically untrue. The magazine was under way when George was invited to Paris, but that founding was nebulous and mostly talk: The real founding did not take place until after George and Billy du Bois had joined us. Patsy Southgate made many contributions, including a fine translation for the first issue, and Styron, Guinzburg, and Train were also important participants and contributors in that spring and summer of 1952.
GEORGE PLIMPTON, DIARY Meeting of editorial board here in the afternoon. Went much better. Humes a bit difficult but argument always led to an understanding far deeper than a snap agreed judgment would have given us. Title agreed upon: The Paris Review. Closing date agreed upon. 15 July. Issues per year decided. Six. Cover agreed upon. Humes broke one glass.
PETER MATTHIESSEN At another meeting at 14, rue Perceval, we were talking about what we wanted to do with the contents of the magazine. Because I was a short-story writer, my whole thing was to push new, young talented fiction writers. And I had this idea about interviewing established writers, and I didn’t realize how successful that would be, but it did seem to work. I wanted Irwin Shaw, who was living in Paris then, but George had two well-connected literary friends, Francis Haskell and P. N. Furbank, friends of E. M. Forster at Cambridge, and they did an interview with Forster. That was the first interview, for issue number one, very impressive indeed.
PATI HILL I believe George didn’t actually do the Forster interview, but he could have. He was very good at getting people to talk about themselves. Writers like to talk about themselves anyway, but I think George was really interested in what they had to say, even in the boring bits. He stayed optimistic that something interesting was bound to turn up and, sooner or later, it usually did.
Dear Mother and Daddy,
. . .What we are doing that’s new is presenting a literary quarterly in which the emphasis is more on fiction than on criticism, the bane of present quarterlies. Also we are brightening up the issue with art work. An “Art Portfolio” by a young American artist in Paris is to appear in each issue. The first is by Tom Keogh who has an excellent reputation both here and in America. Appearing with it in the first issue are: the Newdigate prize poem from Oxford by Donald Hall, an essay on the technique of the novel in dialogue form by EM Forster, some unpublished poems by the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, four short stories, and a section of a novel to be published next year by Simon & Schuster. . . . [no date]
WILLIAM STYRON Peter asked me to write an introduction to the first issue, setting a general tone, which was that this was going to be a literary magazine rather than a magazine of heavy-duty literary theorizing like The Hudson Review. It wasn’t going to be political, either, like the Partisan Review. We just wanted to make this a creative magazine. Matthiessen and I worked that out—George, too, I think.
RICHARD SEAVER Trocchi used to try and get George more interested in the political concerns of Europe and our country, but George could not get existentially involved in that. He was a terribly positive person, even if postwar Paris wasn’t. Cohn and Schine were traveling through Paris in those days—Roy Cohn and David Schine. They were visiting consulates throughout Europe, sent by Senator McCarthy to see if any Communists might be lurking in our embassies and so forth. They were creating a climate of unrest and fear wherever they went. But George was sort of above all that.
GEORGE PLIMPTON, DIARY Bill Styron’s preface arrived today from the American Academy in Rome. It is short, to the point. Peter thinks it suffers from overwriting. That is Bill’s style, Jamesian, in which occasionally the structure is so or
nate that one is kept in suspense until the finish—like German which must await the qualifying verb at the end of the sentence. But regardless, Bill’s preface is what sets the issue up. It is now all in.
JOHN TRAIN Tom Guinzburg, who was businesslike, was supposed to be the first managing editor, but then he became paralyzed with love for Francine du Plessix, now Gray, and was unable to proceed. He was lifted gently from behind the desk. I knew about magazines already from having run the Lampoon and indeed the Grotonian, so I was promoted from nonfiction editor. My tenure was not uncontroversial. An early story by Terry Southern had a traffic cop addressing a doctor, whose car he’d stopped. The doctor began to protest, so the cop says to the doctor, “Okay, Doc, don’t get your shit hot.” I pointed out that this would create trouble in Boston, where the post office was exceedingly prudish, so after heated debate we compromised on: “Don’t get your crap hot.” The same story stirred another question: One fellow hits another, who falls to the ground, knocked out. In the tale, his feet and legs are “vibrating,” which I thought highly improbable. George and I went on my standard stroll down the Seine and then up to the Pantheon and down to the Jardin des Plantes—a zoo as well as a botanical garden—and we happened to be discussing this exact issue of the vibrating legs when we passed by the vulture cage. To my amazement, there was a vulture lying on his back in the cage, clearly dying, and his feet were indeed vibrating. George looked at me significantly, and I nodded in submission. The other vultures were staring at him with proprietary interest, waiting for him to stop kicking, undoubtedly before gobbling him up. We went around to the little cabin where the keeper was, and I said, “One of your vultures is dying.” He replied dismissively, “That’s the other service. You have to wait until two o’clock.” Having no intention of doing so, we resumed our walk. I assume nothing good befell that poor bird.
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