George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  PATI HILL I would never probably have had anything to do withThe Paris Review if it hadn’t been for George. I had a picture in my mind of a lot of men who were mainly sitting around in front of the Café le Tournon, all very macho. That was the big word at the time, said without irony. Peter Matthiessen was supposed to be very macho, but he was also great-looking in his lanky way and funny enough so you could forgive him for always being off down the world’s canyons in a canoe. John Train was just a mystery. He was so young he seemed more a captive of his three-piece suit than he probably did once he got the upper hand of it. I liked George immediately. He was incredibly stylish—like a praying mantis. It was his mantis movement, breaking sort of wildly and elegantly in the middle, that you noticed. That and his bunged-up hat that he wore as if it were a kind of subtitle: The Intrepid News Reporter, brim pushed back—oh gosh, how could I have forgotten that appointment—brim pulled down over his ears.

  IMMY HUMES Doc went back to the States before the first issue was printed and shipped, so he never knew that the editors decided to remove his name from the masthead. I can imagine that the rest of the guys were furious with him because he didn’t do enough work and didn’t pony up the five hundred bucks that they did, even though he ponied up the original magazine. I don’t know what other real grievances there were. But they couldn’t deal with it. Doc was probably always mentally ill, and always manic-depressive, and always a talker like you’ve never seen, and they didn’t know what to make of him. George was better able to deal with that. He was less competitive. Or he was just better natured.

  JOHN TRAIN My supreme moment as managing editor was when George had to return to the States to seek funds, leaving me to get out the first issue and ship some of it to the States. I negotiated a deal with U.S. Lines, swapping passage on a ship, the United States, for a free ad—standard stuff in the magazine business. Then I had to get the magazine boxed for shipment. The agency asked whether it should be in one big carton or in smaller ones. I said I had no idea, and I asked them for the ins and outs of the matter. They said the smaller ones were easier to transport, but one big one would be reusable, being heavy and substantial. I said, “Let’s do it with one big one.” Alas, I had not calculated how heavy that would be. As a consequence, several thousand copies of The Paris Review were plopped down by crane onto the New York docks in an immense, immovable carton. The dockworkers refused to touch it, so we had to assemble a kind of ant army of volunteers to break up the crate on the dock and carry the copies into a warehouse. That was when Doc Humes turned up. He got hold of a rubber stamp and stamped them all “Harold Humes, New York Representative.” He was miffed that his role consulting on the inception of the magazine, even though he didn’t appear in the office, had not been acknowledged on the masthead.

  First issue of The Paris Review.

  Courtesy of the Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

  GORE VIDAL I read the first issue of The Paris Review; somebody —not George—gave me a copy and asked me what I thought of it. I said, and perhaps I was unfair, that it looked like a number of well-to-do boys who’d got together because they’d all heard about the 1920s in Paris. So now in the 1950s, they were going to be Hemingway and Fitzgerald and all the others. They were so self-conscious. And much impressed by what they were doing. But it doesn’t happen like that. You don’t make a great magazine from the top down.

  At La Table Ronde: from top, Peter Matthiessen, Colette Duhamel, George, Louisa Noble, Billy Pène du Bois.

  Photograph © Estate Brassaï–RMN; Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.

  WILLA KIM On my way back to New York, I stopped in Paris at a dinner that Tom Keogh and Theodora Roosevelt Keogh gave. It was a Thanksgiving dinner—Thanksgiving 1952—and I met Billy Pène du Bois. He said there was going to be a party, and it was the inauguration party for the first issue of The Paris Review. Shortly after the party, I was catching a plane, and Hal Prince was on the train with me to get to the airport. He said, “Something awful happened to me. I was invited to a party by George Plimpton, and then he called up and canceled my invitation, so I didn’t get to go.” I guess George had invited too many people. Of all people to cancel on! I knew Hal because he was the stage manager on Wonderful Town. Everyone else was at the party: Styron, George, Peter Matthiessen, Tom Guinzburg, John Train. Billy designed the magazine. He always said that all the editors had been dithering about it forever, until he finally lost patience and took all the material, did the layout, and had it printed and gave it to them, and they were astonished that they had a magazine out.

  RUSS HEMENWAY Billy Pène du Bois is the reason there is something called The Paris Review, I’m convinced. Because even though the first issue didn’t have much content, it looked great, and it looked great because Billy Pène du Bois worked over the stone with the printer for days. I remember it was coming down to a deadline, and he made it look beautiful. This was no amateur. He spoke French, and he had six or eight children’s books in circulation and was one of the great illustrators. He had great style. The Paris Review looked great. That’s what everyone talked about.

  TWO RESCUERS; HUNTING FOR HEMINGWAY

  Dear George . . .

  The latest issue of the Review turned up a day or two ago. I have only had a chance to glance at it, finding the first piece not to my liking, by reason of a certain exhibitionist quality of substandard taste. I recognize an incorrigible tendency in the young toward épater la bourgeoisie, but I must say that I think it is a tendency, which, if it affords any gratification to anyone, affords it only to the author. . . . Affectionately, Daddy [December 17, 1953]

  Dear Mother and Daddy,

  Here is another Paris Review, the fifth. I’m not sure as usual that you’re not going to be shocked by most of the content. It is hard to say why such stories are being written or why editors find them the best being done—best, that is, in terms of literary quality. William Styron in his interview discusses the matter at some length. He has an answer to give; no solution though, and that probably is as it should be. The contents, you’ll be glad to hear, are hardly reflections of my own character, which remains merry enough and full of hope and enthusiasm. You’ll have to wait for The Rabbit’s Umbrella1. for proof, which in its way may make you laugh twice, or even three times, and I doubt will be considered the product of a tormented mind.... [March 20, 1954]

  Dear Mother and Daddy,

  I am still not quite sure of my plans for the future. I quite realize I must come back and fairly quickly. I must admit that I don’t like to live in Paris in tiny breathless hotels. I can never tire of working on this magazine, though. Unlike the others I have a sense of mission about it. There is no-one else here now. If I left without getting a good replacement the whole business would collapse like a house of cards. I owe that neither to myself nor to those like yourself, grandma, and others who have helped; nor to the subscribers, or authors who so believe in this enterprise.

  We have been in serious financial difficulty for the past two months. It is mostly the fault of the New York people who have been, for one reason or another, unable to catch hold and do the things that must be done. Their office is running at a loss, which is incredible, considering they have no expenses to speak of other than distributing [a product] which is supplied them by us. There is nothing I can do about it by letter, though I’ve tried. I must return to do it myself, probably at the close of the summer. In the meantime I must find a replacement—someone like John Cowles for example, or Blair Fuller, responsible people who would have not too hard a job to do now that the operation here has finally been pretty well streamlined. Perhaps then the magazine can run without my having to spend so much time on it; but I hope you’ll understand that I must work very hard to set it right. Of course, this might go on indefinitely, but I promise you I don’t intend to let it. Some recent events suggest that the magazine may be put on a firm financial footing, and that of course must be the basis for any permanence I feel we must h
ave before I throw over the traces. . . . [no date]

  JOHN TRAIN Obviously, there was always a problem about money. George had a very valuable conception approaching the Paris Herald, as it was then called—it’s now the International Herald Tribune—about scrapping the stock page, which was only one page in those days, and replacing it with a literary page, which we would design and edit for a huge amount of money. As you might imagine, this idea met with very little favor at the Paris Herald. More fruitful were the hawkers we employed to peddle the magazine in the streets. In French, such people are called camelots. Our best camelot was named Abrami. He was a poet, and he would walk in front of the Deux Magots and the Flore handing out to the drinkers on the sidewalk copies open to some interesting illustration, preferably off-color; then he’d come back, retrieve them, or collect payment, if possible. He was particularly effective. You had to catch up with him at frequent intervals, because if he collected too much money from the customers, you risked having him go into hiding and on to a spending spree. So you had to keep up with him. It was like emptying a cormorant every few fish. Of course, we are talking about units of a few dozen from time to time, not hundreds of thousands. Unfortunately, Abrami became enamored of a girl student, and by way of attracting her attention, he shaved his hair, like van Gogh cutting off his ear, which gave him a particularly hideous appearance and reduced his capabilities as a camelot. We also sold the magazine in kiosks and bookstores and daily came up against the Hachette Company, which fancied it had a monopoly on that activity. We had these big sit-downs, à la Mafia, in which they said we had to get out of the hawking business, and we said, No, it was a free country, and so on.

  RUSS HEMENWAY I wrote a piece for their fifth issue, an interesting piece on the livres d’or of Paris. These were guest books kept by the better Parisian restaurants. In those days, at some point in the course of your meal, the maître d’ would come over and say, “Would you sign the gold book?” If you’re Charlie Chaplin, you might make a little illustration; or if you’re Prévert, you might write a little poem; or if you’re Matisse, Chagall, or Picasso, you might draw something. They were a treasure trove, as you can imagine. I did a piece for the Review on these. I went around with Billy and we took photographs that we thought would appeal to a general audience. We had a page of clowns: Grok, Chaplin, and Tati, for instance, on one page. It was a nice little piece. And the head of the Paris bureau of Life magazine called me up and said they’d like to do a piece on this subject as well—they wanted to know, did I have a lot of pictures? George was thrilled, because the Review would be mentioned in Life magazine; I was very pleased to be in Life magazine, too. My deal with George assumed that I owned the photographs and was therefore entitled to a share of Life’s fee. So we sold them to Life for—I’ve forgotten what it was now, but it was something substantial for those days, two hundred and fifty dollars or something like that. The check came to the Review—at which point, George decided that there had been expenses involved in doing all this and kept the money. They invented the word parsimony for George.

  JOHN TRAIN Literary magazines are like churches and political parties and opera houses. You can count on donors. If you have a church, you would never expect to make enough money in the plate to pay for the whole thing. You expect a devoted donor to come along and endow it. The same is true of a political party. Some fat cat appears and gives you millions of dollars. The same is true of an opera house, in response to what’s called a “named gift opportunity,” some huge sum that pays for a new La Bohème. With a literary magazine, if you play your cards carefully, you can sometimes find someone to come along and back it—for a time. George was the ringmaster of these good folk and extremely effective.

  Dear Mother and Daddy . . .

  A splendid Managing Editor has turned up—one Bob Silvers—a discharge from the Army, a good business man, perfectly willing to sacrifice a couple of years running the Review—in fact it’s his dream in life. It’s a stroke of great luck for us. He’s intelligent, very interested, and is that new infusion of blood so necessary to combat apathy, laziness, and downright disinterest that seems to have struck everybody in the concern save your indefatigable son. So after spending a short time as his tutor, overseeing him bring out an issue or two I ought to be able to come home. I will be coming towards the end of October, [but] will have to make one more trip back to Paris. Then my full-time activity with the Review should be over. It is beginning to look as though it would be possible for me to leave the enterprise without its tumbling flat to the ground. . . . [October 6, 1954]

  ROBERT SILVERS I was in the Army, at SHAPE headquarters, just outside Paris, working in the library. One of the nice things about the headquarters was that you had every Wednesday afternoon off. You got on the bus and before long you were at the Arc de Triomphe. I had some friends in New York, Cecil Hemley and Arthur Cohen, whom I’d known at the University of Chicago, and they had a publishing venture called Noonday Press. When I saw them before I went abroad, they said, “Why don’t you represent us in Paris, and see if you can find some French books for us?,” and on Wednesday afternoons I would visit French publishers. This was in 1954, the last year that I was in the Army. The Paris Review had been started the year before, and I’d been reading it in the barracks; and one afternoon I went around to the rue Garancière where La Table Ronde, a small publishing house, had allotted The Paris Review a very small office. I walked in the door and there was George. I said, “I’m with Noonday Press and I’m looking for books.” We talked about some of the writers in the Review, Terry Southern and others, who might be of interest for Noonday, and I’d found a French writer who interested him. I had the impression of someone who was immensely alert, yet relaxed at the same time. Then at the end of the day, George said, “I’m going around to a friend’s. Why don’t you come with me?,” which seemed wonderfully welcoming and generous. So we walked over to the Île Saint-Louis to see Pati Hill, a young woman who had been a fashion model and was now publishing fiction in The Paris Review. She had a charming flat overlooking the Seine with white walls and mustard velvet couches. There were various people about drinking tall glasses of wine, among them John Train, at that time the managing editor of the Review. I knew something about him because he had an essay in the first issue. In a certain way, it set the tone of the Review, because he pointedly seemed to avoid such matters as the bitter controversy between Sartre and Camus that was dividing Paris intellectuals at the time. The Review, so the essay implied, was going to concentrate on the best young fiction writers and poets that the editors could find, and that would be that.

  BEE DABNEY Bob Silvers was there with us. We were all just amazed at his history. I think he graduated from college when he was in his teens or something extraordinary. I always thought that he never flaunted his brilliance. He was cozy and fun, and to this day, I think he’s one of the most attractive, bright people I ever met. Pati Hill was there; she was absolutely beautiful and wrote beautifully, although I can’t remember exactly what she wrote. I think she wrote quite a few stories for The Paris Review. Francine du Plessix was there, and she was rather brilliant and very beautiful also. I feel like we all sort of belonged in a little family together.

  ROBERT SILVERS At Pati Hill’s party, I told John Train I was getting out of the Army soon and thought I would stay in Paris and go to the Sorbonne on the GI Bill, which paid more than enough to live in Paris at the time. When we met a little later at his flat at 2 bis, avenue Franco-Russe, John said, “Why don’t we start a publishing house together?” We might begin, he said, with a book of letters and writings by James Joyce’s brother Stanislaus in Trieste, with whom he’d been in touch. Then he said, “By the way, at the same time, you could have my job as managing editor at The Paris Review. I have the work of getting the paper out pretty well organized, so there’s not a lot to do, but you’ll have to keep an eye on things. I’ve talked to George about this.” I saw George later at the Café le Tournon and he said he was glad
I was joining the paper, and we went to the office around the corner and there I saw a wire basket that said, “Managing Editor.” Across the basket were two strings, and there was a sign on the strings saying, “Don’t Put Anything in This Basket.” George said, “Well, you see, there’s the basket of the managing editor, but it has these strings on it.” He rather ceremoniously took off the strings. Then we rummaged around and found a number of things in drawers, which we put in the basket—bills from the printer, a note on bookshops where we might sell the Review, a list of people we might approach to get more advertising, and so on. So we put the things in this basket, and, thanks to John Train, I became managing editor.