George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  ROWAN GAITHER George told me he was down in Havana just after the Cuban revolution, when Hemingway was still there. Kenneth Tynan was there, too. They were all out at lunch, drinking heavily, probably, and a revolutionary appeared and said, “You’re Hemingway. We’re about to execute a prisoner. We would like to invite you to the firing squad to watch this execution.” As George tells the story, Tynan, being an opponent of capital punishment, declared that he was going to go to the execution and throw himself in front of the firing squad. Hemingway was just drunk. George said he was going to go along. They all set off. And along the way, it suddenly occurred to them that at the end of the execution, somebody was actually going to die. And it all got a lot less interesting. Then they began to think of some way to get out of it. According to George, it took them a surprisingly long time to realize what actually goes into an execution.

  DONALD HALL There was irritation among the founders with the way George was running the Review, the way we would miss issues. I remember taking one poem, which we held on to for two years. But in the meantime, the poet sent me six revisions of it. I kept sending them to Paris marked “This is the new revision—substitute.” When it came out, it was the original version. The poet was furious. Naturally. So it wasn’t going well, and there was sentiment, not overwhelming definite sentiment, to end the Review. But then I was suddenly overcome with my early enthusiasm for the magazine, and I made an impassioned speech for it to continue. And George felt that saved the day. Whenever we saw each other, he would bring it up.

  MARION CAPRON I think I know why George stuck with the Review, but I’m not sure he knew. George was clueless about his own character. True, he was complicated. It was hard for him to know himself, I’m sure. He didn’t know what he wanted, and certainly in that period, he had no idea what he wanted to do or what he wanted to be. He was writing in those days, but not as Norman Mailer did or as Peter Matthiessen did. He knew what he didn’t want. He didn’t want nine to five. He didn’t want a regular life, but he needed a calling card; he needed a peg to hang himself on. That’s what The Paris Review was. It served as something he could say he did. The fact that he only spent an hour a week on it didn’t matter. There it was, in print.

  The Paris Review in New York, 1965. From left, bottom row: Dorothy Fielding, Freddy Espy, Maggie Paley; second row: Susan Fielding (with horn), George, Tom Guinzburg, Sally Belfrage; third row: John Filler, an unknown person; fourth row: Billy Pène du Bois, Victoria Arends, Neil Wolf, Penelope Lee, Donald Hall, Frank Simon. Photograph © Richard Marshall.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN After I came back to the States in ’53, I never lost the thread of The Paris Review; I stayed in touch. I think George still thought of me as an editor, and I did work on certain stories. But I’d read somewhere that the natural life span of a little magazine was about eight years, so sometime in the late fifties or early sixties, I suggested to George that it was time to fold our tent. He had been saying, “Nobody works on this thing except for me, and I never would have gotten into this if it weren’t for you.” I said, “If you really feel that way—that you’re doing all the work and nobody’s helping you—then shut it down. It has had a very noble career already, it’s made its mark, we’ve published some very good stuff. I don’t see why we’re agonizing over it. It’s lived longer than most little magazines anyway.” This shot down his little argument. He needed the magazine. The Paris Review was the armature for everything he did.

  GEORGE PLIMPTON, UNPUBLISHED 1979 INTERVIEW WITH DAVID MICHAELIS We had one big fight over The Paris Review, here in New York in about 1960. Peter and Tom wanted to close it down. We had too much to drink one night during a meeting, and tempers began to flare. I kept trying to get people to stay on and work harder. I kept trying to hold them together, and I think they finally were impatient. So they said, “Look, we don’t want to work anymore, so let’s close the thing down.” And then I had to make a big choice in my own mind—do I want to go along on this alone and bring in other people? And of course that’s what happened.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN, UNPUBLISHED 1979 INTERVIEW WITH DAVID MICHAELIS I was amazed how concerned everyone still was about the magazine. But I don’t think [the meeting] is really important, to tell you the truth. It didn’t change anything; it wasn’t any watershed. Of course, at that time, you know, nobody but George really was still with the magazine.

  GEORGE PLIMPTON, UNPUBLISHED 1979 INTERVIEW WITH DAVID MICHAELIS I would feel like a limb was gone if The Paris Review stopped—like a crutch had fallen out from underneath me. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve never stopped it. I mean, there are choices you have to make, and it’s odd that of all choices I’ve made in my life, the most sensible one would probably have been to drop The Paris Review so I could put all that energy into something else. But I’ve never been able to do it.

  MARION CAPRON We had meetings, often at restaurants. There were no great policy decisions made at these meetings. I was so terribly self-conscious in those days that I couldn’t remember for the life of me why they were held at all. The main thing I remember was when Sadri, our publisher, came to visit the Second Avenue office (and my pad by that time). I remember he walked into our bathroom, which had a tiny, tenement-sized bathtub, and he said, “Oh, that’s just like the one I had as a child, but mine was in gold.” I said, “Sadri, I’m five feet eight, and it doesn’t do.” The strange thing is I don’t remember anything about our relations with the Paris office. This is strange because it could be argued that they were doing most of the work over there—putting the issues together, layout, cover, illustrations, the art portfolio, the ads, the printing and shipping. All we were doing was selecting the short stories and interviews—and paying the bills; and Nicky was doing that.

  JOAN DE MOUCHY I met George in Paris April 1953, a month or so before my unfortunate marriage to Jimmy Moseley. A year and a bit later I would be divorced and back home, which was the embassy, with an infant daughter and not much of a clue as to what I wanted to do. A few months later, Peter Duchin, a childhood friend, turned up in Paris with Bob Silvers, and during dinner Bob asked if I would like to come work at The Paris Review. I said, “Sure, why not?” The office was at 16, rue Vernet, just off the Champs-Élysées. There were some odd characters in that office. One of them was a man named Art French, who did the long march with Mao and was married to a colored woman with whom he had two mulatto children. I remember when Art decided that his children didn’t have souls until they were seven years old and that he could bump them off if he wanted to. I spent hours with Eddie Morgan, Sam Farrell, a wonderful Irish fellow, and several other colleagues persuading Art French that he could not bump off his children and that they did have souls even though they were not yet seven years old.

  TEDDY VAN ZUYLEN Silvers and Duchin lived on a barge that was tied up somewhere near the Place de l’Alma, if I remember correctly. It was probably the most uncomfortable setup you’ve ever seen in your life. I don’t know how people could live there—even one person was difficult, but two seemed absolutely miserable. Peter didn’t have any money; he had an allowance, which he squandered on women, probably, taking them to nice hotels: I don’t know if he had very much money left over to go to restaurants. In any case, my apartment in Paris became kind of a refectory. When people were hungry, they would come to my place and have dinner. By 1954–55, George, of course, was back in New York, but when he was in Paris, he’d come to dinner as well. We had a very good chef, so it was kind of nice. I thought, “What the hell? I have to give them back something. We’re part of a gang here. Everybody contributes what they have.” Bob didn’t have any money, either, but don’t forget, this was very much a bohemian era of our lives, and we didn’t care in those days how we lived. We had been to boarding schools, then college dorms, so we were used to living uncomfortably. The charm was that there were other barges very close by, so there was a communal barge life, in a way. In those days we were looking desperately to be as unidentifiable, in a social sense,
as possible. So living on a barge was great.

  JOAN DE MOUCHY We were also always in need of new mailing lists, to encourage people to subscribe. I remember having drinks with Art Buchwald in the bar across from the Herald Tribune and talking with him about the Review. He suddenly said, “You want a mailing list? Hold on.” He walked across the street and came back with a large pile of the brown paper strips that went around the newspapers for mailing to their subscribers and just handed them to me. Such things happened in those days.

  NELSON ALDRICH I came to Paris in the fall of 1957, right out of college, to go to Sciences Po [Institut des Sciences Politiques]—a foolhardy thing to do for someone who knew very little French. However, relief appeared that Thanksgiving when Joan Moseley, as she then was, invited me to dinner at her apartment. A few other Americans were there, among them Bob Silvers, who allowed as how he was soon going back to the States to work for Harper’s and needed someone to take his place on the Review. I don’t think he’d finished his sentence before I raised my hand, and to my great delight he took me on, at least provisionally. I actually had some experience editing a literary magazine, a mildly incendiary thing called i.e., the Cambridge Review, which I’d helped put out at Harvard. I also got the best possible tutorial in magazine publishing from Bob, who, as Joan used to say, had the patience of Job when it came to explaining anything, and not just the niceties of keeping the Dutch printer happy. He did keep postponing his return to the States, though. At that point he’d been in Paris, happy, extremely well connected, for seven years. One more, he told me, and he might have stayed forever. In any event, one day not long before he left, I got a welcome-aboard letter from George, whom I’d never met, written almost entirely in Porcellian Club jargon. This was odd, since, if he knew I was a member, he should also have known that I was so ghostly a presence in those precincts that I couldn’t be counted on to understand what he was saying. Nevertheless, I was overjoyed—as much as anything to have an excuse to stay in Paris for a few more years.

  JOAN DE MOUCHY My most vivid memory of Nellie Aldrich’s term at the Review was the day that Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso appeared at rue Vernet and proceeded to bugger on the office floor in an attempt to get me to leave. I was alone working late when they showed up, obviously quite drugged. They chorused together, saying, “Oh, we want Ezra Pound’s text.” I said, “We don’t have Ezra Pound’s text.” “Oh, we know you have Ezra Pound’s text.” “We don’t have Ezra Pound’s text.” This went on for a while. Then they looked at each other and said, “Let’s do it.” So, with lots of lurching, gurgling, and mumbling, they undid their trousers and proceeded to get on with it on the office floor. I remember that just before they had gotten totally into it, Nellie called up to check in. I could not describe my predicament but said, “Will you please come over to the office and tell them that we don’t have Ezra Pound’s text?” Nellie gasped, “Oh, my God, I have a black tie on! That won’t help at all!” Ultimately, I passed the telephone to Corso, who Nelson knew from Harvard, God knows how, and he told them, “We don’t have Ezra Pound’s text,” very firmly. But they were still so drugged and cross with me that they kept on buggering. I decided not to move, because I knew that if I left, they’d rip the whole office apart, and I was going to have to clean it up. So I just sat at my desk licking stamps for future mailing-drive envelopes and pretended to ignore them.

  NELSON ALDRICH As it turned out, I stayed at the Review for only a year and then went on to a better-paid job at the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which by 1959 was already a well-known CIA front, but no less admired for that. Two things I recall of my tenure at the Review: my shame at not getting out more than two issues a year and my gratitude to George for being so forgiving.

  JOAN DE MOUCHY George would show up about once a year. His first prerequisite was to organize a party at my apartment, to which he would invite every writer, artist, plus down-at-the-heels bums and anybody else he had come across in the last year. The guests came in droves, looking forward to free drinks and food. They were a motley crew to look upon but were representing talent of all sorts beneath their various guises. Nonie Phipps, who was living with me at the time, announced yearly that she wasn’t going to stay when we had these parties, because revolting people kept going down the hall and throwing up in her bathroom. First of all, it seemed as if the people George invited hadn’t eaten since 1902; and as for the booze, their only idea was to get totally loaded as quickly as possible. Riffraff aside, one found Bill Burroughs, Jimmy and Gloria Jones, Maurice Girodias, Irwin Shaw, and everybody you could possibly think of in Paris in those days that had anything to do with writing or art. Sadri Khan, then our publisher and a good and understanding friend, was extremely kind and would regularly extricate me when things got fraught, leaving George to cope. One year all the paintings in the entry hall were stolen. Lady Granard owned my building and was the twin of Nonie’s great-aunt Gladys Phipps. Thanks to this Phipps link, the lawsuit that they were about to embark on was canceled.

  MAGGIE PALEY By the time I came on George’s scene in the early sixties, there was no longer any official Paris Review office in New York, just George’s apartment on the third floor of 541. (I think Bob Silvers was still living in the one-bedroom on the first floor that later became the Review office.) George’s place had a thin little kitchen and a thin little guest room where Terry Southern would crash, plus his own bedroom and an office where he would write and make phone calls. It was the huge living room that everyone remembered who saw the place; it had maybe six windows overlooking the river. I used to think that George spent an awful lot of time watching the boats go by, but then I thought, “Who wouldn’t?” I remember a couple of Bernard Buffet paintings on the wall, souvenirs of Paris, but dating by the minute. There were also some odd chairs and drab sofas where he and I would sometimes work on interviews he’d done for the Review. This was after I’d made the transition from girlfriend to assistant editor.

  1965 Paris Review Revel at the Village Gate.

  From left: Andrei Voznesensky, Allen Ginsberg, George.

  Photograph © Henry Grossman.

  LILLIAN VON NICKERN As business manager, I went into the office at 541 occasionally, but most of the work that I did for them, from the 1960s on, was at my apartment in Woodside, Queens. The address was on the front of the magazine, so for years people sent unsolicited manuscripts to my home (a few came in person, unannounced). I had married by then and had a young baby. Eventually, I had three children in the house. And at one point five dogs. My husband and I owned two Baskin-Robbins [ice-cream stores], so I was doing that, too. Manuscript work was done out of George’s apartment. George always was the final say on everything that went into the Review. Whoever was in charge of the office over there in France would decide on certain things, and they would be sent here, and George—well, it was a back-and-forth thing.

  MAGGIE PALEY George was always coming up with ideas of how to make money for the Review. “Enterprise in the service of art,” he called it. The Revels were one idea he had. The first one was in 1965 at the Village Gate. It was a “hot ticket,” the first fund-raiser I knew of in New York that mixed the Society world, the entertainment world, the literary world, and people who couldn’t afford to pay—artists and various other bohemian types. I don’t know if we made any money, but it was a great success.

  LILLIAN VON NICKERN The Revels were a lot of fun—one at the Village Gate, then another on Welfare Island, then another at the South Street Seaport—and they brought a certain amount of attention, which was very good for raising big donations. In that respect they worked out, but as for the Revels themselves, we were fortunate if we broke even.

  MAXINE GROFFSKY My involvement in The Paris Review began in 1962 when I announced to George that I was running off to Paris with Harry Mathews. George said, “Oh, wonderful! Do you want to do The Paris Review?” I told him that I didn’t know if I was going to stay there, since I had only known Harry for two weeks. Bennett Cerf
had given me a leave of absence, saying I could come back whenever I wanted to. So I suggested a friend from Random House: “Larry Bensky’s going to Europe. Ask him.” When Larry started as Paris editor, I helped him. We first worked out of a dingy space at 16, rue Vernet, off the Champs-Élysées. In 1964, thanks to Colette Duhamel, the Review moved to a wonderful courtyard office on the rue de Tournon, down the block from the Luxembourg Gardens and Café le Tournon, where everyone hung out in the founding days. So we had come home in a sense. By 1966, Larry wasn’t really around much anymore. He wasn’t very happy at the Review, or didn’t seem to be, and I was doing all the work. So then I told George that I wanted the job, and he gave it to me.

  HARRY MATHEWS It was fine, Maxine working for George, because they never had anything to do with one another. George had the final say on everything that went into the Review, but then Maxine took extraordinary initiatives on her own and confronted George with them. For instance, in one issue, I wrote a poem that incorporated lines from all the poems in that issue. I told her about this. I don’t think George ever noticed, but one reader did notice, and wrote to the magazine. Her boldest initiative was—I had written The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, which was just unsellable, and Maxine, out of the goodness of her heart, published it in four issues of The Paris Review. I don’t think that George minded at all her putting in the first installment, but I don’t think he realized there were going to be three more installments. In George’s memoir of those years, which he published several years ago in The Paris Review itself, the question around the New York office was “Is that shit still going down?”