MAXINE GROFFSKY When friends in Paris asked, “What’s The Paris Review?” I jokingly answered, “C’est moi.” I put out issues thirty-six to fifty-six, and I was proud of the fact that I was the first editor who actually produced four issues in one year. For each issue, George sent me the interview, which was often delayed, and short stories. Tom Clark, the poetry editor, sent me his selections. I commissioned the art—the covers, the portfolio of drawings or photographs—and put in my fiction choices. So when George received the printed issue, it was sometimes a big surprise. Not sometimes, all the time.
The Paris Review in Paris: Maxine Groffsky.
© Harold Chapman/The Image Works.
TOM CLARK I became poetry editor in the fall of 1963, on Don Hall’s recommendation. One snag was that my predecessor, X. J. Kennedy, had accepted about six issues’ worth of poems in the final months of his editorship—against the calamities to come, I later surmised. I immediately wrote George to point out that unless that whole backlog could be summarily dumped, he’d have no need for a new poetry editor for at least another year or two, in which case, why did he need me? George, characteristically, said, “Fine, go ahead and dump it all.” So I wrote to all those professor-poets, and out went their poems. It was a horrible thing to do, of course, and I’m surprised that only two or three of them complained, to the effect that their hoped-for promotions hinged on their being published in The Paris Review, etc. Of course I felt bad about that, but probably not bad enough, and I was sure George didn’t care at all.
RON PADGETT Tom Clark was in some ways a surprising pick for Don Hall to make, since Don had coedited, only a few years before, a somewhat conservative anthology, New Poets of England and America. Whatever the reason, Don was able to like a poet like Tom Clark, and Tom published Frank O’Hara—posthumously, of course—and Kenneth Koch, Kenward Elmslie, Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, Aram Saroyan, John Ashbery, himself, and me. And let’s see, who else? Tom loved Jimmy Schuyler’s work. Oh, also poets such as Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Allen Ginsberg. Tom did the Paris Review interview with Allen and published a really wonderful poem of Allen’s to go with it. I can’t recall if he published Olson, Charles Olson; he might’ve. But that was generally Tom’s aesthetic at that time.
ARAM SAROYAN George coordinated the NEA’s annual, The American Literary Anthology, of the “best” poems and stories and essays that had appeared that year in literary magazines. There was a small cash award of five hundred dollars to each author and two hundred fifty dollars to the little magazine that printed the piece. Three writers in each category selected the work, and my poem “lighght,” from the Chicago Review, was chosen by Robert Duncan, one of the great American poets, if you don’t mind my saying so. Well, a Republican congressman from Iowa, William Scherle, brought the poem up on the floor of Congress, and they started gutting the NEA budget because you don’t give seven hundred fifty dollars for a single misspelled word. Henceforth they would use the word “lighght” whenever they wanted to cut the NEA budget; it was like a fiscal laser surgery tool. Then in the eighties when Reagan brought the poem up, George called me in Bolinas. And when I wrote a piece about it for Mother Jones, he did an intro for it, which was very kind of him. The piece was called “The Most Expensive Word in History,” by which I meant the millions denied the NEA, not the seven hundred fifty dollars. George was very open-minded and generous. The poem was fine by him. Only a few years before he died, he told me he’d gone to Iowa to campaign against Congressman Scherle when he was up for reelection. What a guy, I thought.
Dear Maxine,
The new issue has arrived, a handsome and interesting cover and it is a surprise and pleasure to find so many ads.
We are upset here on a number of counts. Why wasn’t the masthead changed as per a number of requests? There is going to be something of a stew here because of it. I am speaking specifically of letters written by Dan Lloyd, Molly and myself, all of which stated that Dan Lloyd, Laurie Sobel, Michael Newman and Molly McKaughan were to be added to the masthead in designated slots. You can imagine the disappointment at working very hard for the magazine, with recognition promised which for unaccountable reasons was not granted. Very awkward.
I find the fiction contents mediocre this time. I am literally ashamed to read the Phillip Lopate junk—badly written, and lacking in any value at all as far as I can see. The Jong, the Roche and the Perec at least have the quality of experimentation and a command of the medium. Cohen bores me, but once again a gift is evident . . . though I’m blessed if I can see why we must promote it as much as we do. This is the fifth time he has graced our pages—which may put him at the top of the list for frequency of publication. He’s simply not that good. But it’s the Lopate that disturbs me. I have written so many times that as the Editor I must see what goes into the magazine under the category “fiction.” Why do you deny me this? I’ve always stated that if you in Paris find a piece of material selected here second rate or questionable, it would be very much my principle to remove it. Apparently I cannot express to you the horror of opening up the magazine and finding a piece in it so thoroughly embarrassing.
I have not had a chance to look at the poetry yet but the names seem appallingly familiar. I wrote a long tough letter to Tom Clark the other day in which, among other things, I pointed out that in the compilation of the index the poet who has published more work in The Paris Review than any other is indeed Clark himself. I urged him to cast his net in different waters, and his reply suggested that he had done so, but it’s certainly not evident in the present issue....
I do apologize for what may seem somewhat snippy remarks about #56. But I cannot bear the procedures that somehow get the issue spoiled by the mawkish, amateurish nonsense [by] this cat Lopate’s. I presume he is of the same school as that friend of Kenneth Koch’s, Mitchell Sisskind, whose work we apparently published because it is so marvelously bad. I reread Sisskind just to see if he and Lopate might not be the same person and discovered that Sisskind is considerably better. Really, we must never do anything like that again. It won’t be the guilder-dollar crisis that drives us under but selections made by some other authority than their integral excellence.
Incidentally, we have been having discussions here about the considerable strain put on the magazine by the dollar crisis and I’ll try to get a memorandum to you about this as soon as possible. Enclosed is the quarterly check—and I hope things aren’t so bad there that it will disappear in an evening of café hopping. . . . [August 14, 1973]
MAXINE GROFFSKY Why did the Review move back to New York? For several reasons. Although I loved living in France and working with George on the magazine, by fall 1973 I acknowledged that my job in Paris was not a career and that it was time for me to do something else. And at the very same time, George was having his own doubts about the future of the magazine. Since we owed a lot of money to our Dutch printer and it had become cheaper to print in the States, we both knew it made sense to close up shop in Europe. George was even considering closing up shop altogether or getting someone else to take over. I told him, “George, you’re the magazine, and if you don’t do it, it’s another magazine.” He decided to find a way to pay our debts and bring the Review to New York. So I started packing up the office and in the middle realized I wanted to go home, and left almost as precipitously as I had originally gone to Paris. The Review’s trunks were shipped in mid-January and I followed by plane two weeks later. George gave me a great welcome-home party, and since I had to get my new life in order, I had little to do with the magazine afterwards—except, of course, for going to those fabulous parties at George’s.
BLAIR FULLER Looking back on it, I feel that the Review actually reached a turning point long before it was moved to New York. It was when George decided to have a contest. He talked Sadri Khan into putting up a thousand dollars in the name of his father—so it was called the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. It seemed just laughable, but it turned out that George had d
one a very, very intelligent thing. Till then, the magazine had published mostly unknown writers of the sort that would remain mostly unknown. Now, with this contest, all that would change. He had gotten three excellent people as judges of the contest—Saul Bellow, Hiram Haydn, and Brendan Gill of The New Yorker. He also wrote a letter, which I never saw, to all the agents and so forth, announcing the contest and the “big name” judges. Then, sometime in the middle of the winter, we got a letter from George saying, “Well, we have winners of the contest and the judges have chosen all the wrong people.” I’m not kidding. That’s just what he said. “They made all the wrong choices.” One story was by a very good short-story writer named Gina Berriault; another was by a guy who taught poetry at San Francisco State named John Langdon, and as far as I know, it’s the only short story he ever wrote. The third one was by a black writer whose name I’ve forgotten, but I thought that story was interesting, too. So what was George complaining about? Well, it turns out that while those guys got the prizes, George saw the real gold in at least four other writers who had submitted stuff that hadn’t won anything. There was a wonderful story by Richard Yates called “A Wrestler with Sharks.” Jack Kerouac had sent a chapter of On the Road, really the most lively, attractive chapter in that whole book. Evan S. Connell had submitted a part of Mrs. Bridge, and Nadine Gordimer, future Nobel Prize winner, had a story. We did publish the winners, of course, but George had every reason to be proudest of publishing the losers. He was a damn good editor, you know; he’d spotted those people.
WRITER
RAY CAVE Most of sport is what the people competing are going through, what they’re thinking, what they’re doing, and nobody approached George’s ability to write about that inside of the game. It takes a George to ask the question “What’s it feel like, if you’re the quarterback, when you put your hands up under that guy’s ass? How’d you do that?” People find that sort of question irresistible. You’d spend an hour telling him how you did it, right?
PAT RYAN I followed Ray as George’s editor at Sports Illustrated in the seventies. With his distinctive voice, it’s really ludicrous to say you edited George. You’d agree on a story and cheat on his deadline so it got delivered on time, but after that you didn’t mess with his distinctive voice. You might ask a question, and he’d immediately rewrite the sentence or paragraph. He loved clarity. What I did mainly was protect George and his copy from legions of less talented and envious staff. They had no conception how hard he labored at his writing. (How could they? It looked effortless.) And because they didn’t know him, they slammed him as a dilettante. That was the knock.
MAGGIE PALEY I think George earned his first serious income as a writer from Sports Illustrated. I don’t know how this happened, whether he approached them with a proposal or what, but I am sure he was thrilled to get an assignment. There was a lot of financial anxiety when I was with him in the early sixties. He didn’t share it with me, of course, and maybe anxiety is too strong a word. I suspect he had a small income, and Sadri was still publisher of the Review, so George wasn’t carrying the whole of that obligation. On the other hand, New York was a lot more expensive than Paris, and what with his club dues, and his nightclubbing, and his rent at 541, George’s lifestyle wasn’t getting any cheaper. So there was a good deal of scrambling for money in those years. Scrambling was part of his nature, of course, and writing was the thing he most loved to do in the world, but still, he was happy about the money that would be coming in from Sports Illustrated.
BLAIR FULLER To someone of George’s class, wealth came in many forms. The first thing he thought to do for Sports Illustrated was a piece about Harold Vanderbilt, the great prewar defender of the America’s Cup and the inventor of contract bridge. Well, it happened that Nina [Fuller’s first wife] and I went to Florida one winter when George was down there interviewing Vanderbilt in his mansion in Palm Beach. I called George and he invited us to come to lunch. We arrived and went over to a tennis court within a courtyard where Vanderbilt was playing with a pro. The pro, of course, was hitting the ball right to where the old man could hit it back, while his wife was on the sidelines, crying, “Good shot, Harold!” The most striking thing to me was that “Harold” was wearing makeup. Maybe it was sunscreen of some sort, but it looked like makeup that an actor would be wearing, foundation sort of stuff. It all seemed a little cockeyed. We had a perfectly pleasant lunch, but then, that evening, we went to this party where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor turned up, surrounded by toadies. George was quite at home there, in his element, really. He seemed to have struck up a good relationship with the duchess; in fact, I had a conversation with her myself during which she actually made a good impression on me. She was straightforward, apparently intelligent, and curious, while my impression of the duke was appalling. He looked like a sad little boy feeling deprived. He couldn’t take his eyes off the duchess wherever she was in the room, as though he was always looking for her affirmation. I talked with him, too. I was standing next to him and he asked me, “Where are you staying?” I said, “Well, my wife and I have just been in Miami. We came up here for the day.” He said, “Miami?” I said, unbelievable, that someone known to have been a Nazi sympathizer would say such a thing only ten years after the war. But, you know, in the end George got something out of this besides a four-part laudatory piece on Harold Vanderbilt. Shortly after that part, Mrs. Vanderbilt, apparently in her cups, complained to George that she had read the stories in the Review and she was disgusted that everybody was so bizarre, so poor, so wretched, so crazy, that she would put up a prize for the best story about nice, normal people. George was really in some anguish about this. He said, “Golly, we would really like to have that prize money, but I don’t think we can give it out for the kind of story she has in mind.” I said, “No, we really can’t.” And I had the idea—well, at least I believe it was my idea—to say to him, “I wonder if she could be persuaded to make it a humor prize.” And she was persuaded.
RAY CAVE Nobody else in sports journalism, only André Laguerre of Sports Illustrated, would have listened to a proposal from an amateur, even a passionate amateur like George, to do a story about another amateur like Harold Vanderbilt. All the other guys, though brilliant writers, were pros. George was an amateur pro, the best. André Laguerre was the best, too, the best magazine editor I’ve ever known. He was a writers’ editor; and Sports Illustrated was known in the Time-Life Building as by far the best written of their magazines. Laguerre was Time’s London bureau chief when Luce asked him to come back to New York to run a sports magazine. People thought this was a bit bizarre, because Laguerre was a man of some eminence. He had been de Gaulle’s press aide. I asked Laguerre once why he came back to take charge of a bungling sports magazine, and he said, “It all happens in sports. Sports, competition, is more important to our lives than some damn U.S. Senate committee hearing or the prime minister of England saying X and then two months later Y. It matters a great deal.” That’s why he was willing to undertake it. Now, the key to this—and Plimpton benefited from it—is that Laguerre’s definition of sport far transcended anything that you and I could imagine. It encompassed any activity that engaged us in a competitive sense. The corollary was that there was no writer in the world that he didn’t feel free to approach: Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Doctorow, O’Hara, Fowles. You’d ask them if there was anything they’d like to write for us, and they’d say, “Of course we have something we’d like to do.” That’s the proof that Laguerre was right.
ROBERT SILVERS He didn’t want to be an outside observer; he didn’t want to be a reporter, although he could write superb pieces for magazines if he wanted. His idea was to go into the secret world of the professional; the reporter would stop at the locker room door, then go to his perch in the press section, while George would be in the locker room putting on his uniform and going out with the players. Completely different. On the other hand, he did an enormous amount of research for each piece, on each sport. He tried to pick up e
verything he could.
Dear Mr. Commissioner [Pete Rozelle]—
I have sent you under separate cover a copy of Out of My League, an account of an afternoon I spent in the Yankee Stadium pitching to some of the best players in the business. The book grew out of a series of articles I was commissioned to do for Sports Illustrated, a series describing what happens to the average week-end athlete competing at the highest possible level of athletic prowess. In this capacity, during the past two years, I’ve suffered not only at the hands of the baseball players, but in the ring against Archie Moore, on the golf course against [Sam] Snead, on the tennis courts against Pancho Gonzalez, and in a number of other contests, all of which, I need hardly say, have been equivalently unequal. I have experienced, however, what everyone imagines himself doing from time to time—getting out there and trying it—and I have put it down in words as truthfully and seriously as I can.
It is my hope, of course, to do something for Sports Illustrated (and a second book) on professional football, and it’s to this end that I’m taking the liberty of writing you. . . .
But anything I do with the League, before tackling the owners and coaches, must start with your permission. I hope that can be forthcoming. The point is, I think, that I’m doing this series not as a stunt, but as a serious inspection of a world of great athletes, which, while carefully observed by reporters, is rarely described by participants—and hardly ever by a representative of those myriads of onlookers, devoted to the game, who often imagine what it would be to train with a team and try it for an afternoon. . . . [ July 29, 1961]
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