George, Being George

by Nelson W. Aldrich

  DANIEL KUNITZ He was wonderful with the kids, when he was with them. George was a wonderful role model in a lot of ways. George was such an upstanding guy. He never swore. He had unshakably good manners. He was a true democrat, small “d,” and had a lively social conscience. He had these strong moral ideas about the way one lives one’s life, and he was the hardest-working man I’ve met anywhere. When he was with the kids, he was great. I always tell people when I’m interviewed about George that his first book was a children’s book. People are always shocked by that. It wasn’t just that his first book was a children’s book, but that he wrote several. His imagination, at its core, was childlike. His children had to have responded to that, the more so when they were young.

  OLIVIA PLIMPTON I remember he told us a ghost story about when he was sleeping in a castle that was haunted by the Gray Lady. I’m not sure if he was making this up, but he said he saw the Gray Lady, and it freaked me out. He said she was there, and she came up to his bed. It scared me so much that night, I couldn’t sleep.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON George had fantasies about the girls’ future, like any other father. One morning he was sitting on the sofa with the girls, who were around four, I guess, and didn’t read yet. Livvy liked to pretend to read and that morning she reached up behind them and took a book from the bookcase and started to read it—upside down—to Laura. “Helena Charles pulled herself together . . .,” she began. At which point George perked up and said, “Well, that’s about as good an opening line to a novel as I’ve ever heard!” As for Laura, I think he saw another side of himself in her, and fantasized about her being a celebrity. Laura had different ideas: She wanted to raise cheetahs, or else become one.

  OLIVIA PLIMPTON I just always liked to watch him, even though I didn’t understand exactly what he was writing. I always wanted to write something when I was little, but I didn’t really do it until a couple of years ago. I’ve written a lot of stories, but most of them I’m not really finished with. I write the beginning of something, and then I never finish it. I just have one I’ve actually finished. It’s called “The Treasure of the Nile.” It’s kind of weird. I think it’s finished, but I want to add more to it.

  LAURA PLIMPTON We went down to the [Review] office sometimes and bothered people and looked around. We used to go cockroach hunting in the basement. We put on rubber gloves and big boots and rain jackets, and we put them in little plastic bags. We found a really big one once and brought it upstairs to show our mom.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON After the twins were born, I stayed at home more and more. I couldn’t keep up with the social life and still get up at six in the morning. I think he resented my being absent from his life. So he would just go out and find someone to listen to his stories. He was seventy years old and getting more crotchety as he felt his powers slipping away. The mildest remark would set him off: “Dammit, you always have to spoil my plans!” “You always have to find something wrong!” “You always have to criticize!” I wasn’t criticizing him; I was merely offering a different perspective, perhaps a more realistic one, on how to get things done. He had welcomed that in the early days, but now he saw it all as being criticized, and he was very defensive about it. He wanted his way, and he acted like a petulant child when he didn’t get it. This is what no one saw but me—and Freddy, no doubt. He couldn’t negotiate; it was his way or none at all. So I would get up and walk out of the room and he would call after me, “There you go, walking away from me again!” He would work himself up into tears, literally, tears of rage.

  SOL GREENBAUM I know Sarah was very upset, and rightfully so, that so much of his money was going to Freddy. He paid all her expenses and was giving money to her every month. Occasionally, she would call me and complain that she wasn’t getting enough. He had no legal obligation to support Freddy. It was a difficult situation. Even after George passed away, she felt he didn’t do enough for her. That’s typical.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON In his hierarchy of things to support, The Paris Review always came first. Then Freddy, then us. He felt that I could support myself without him, and therefore he felt no responsibility to help me run the household. He was making some money, but his speaking engagements had seriously dwindled—his audience, the generation that had watched him play with the Lions, were old now. He had gone from making twenty thousand dollars for a speech to, in most cases, less than five. He even did a commercial for a swimming pool builder on Long Island. He was sitting in a pool, naked from the waist up, looking like the old buzzard he was. It was just humiliating, all for a few thousand dollars.

  GEORGE SECURES THE REVIEW’S FUTURE

  DAVID MICHAELIS Back in 1979, when I interviewed George for an article I was trying to write for Esquire about the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Paris Review, he clearly stated that if the magazine ever stopped, he would feel as if he had lost an important part of himself. I thought it was very genuine, his feeling. I thought he also felt that he had been left with it, in many ways. There were some hard feelings hanging over from the time when it was almost shut down by the various editors. But he had stuck with it and been very loyal to it, sort of like George Bailey with the building-and-loan bank in It’s a Wonderful Life. And it had paid off, in the sense that everybody finally came back to celebrate when it reached its era of gray eminence. That was nice for everybody. Styron and Matthiessen, John Marquand, Donald Hall, Maxine Groffsky, all of them there in George’s apartment, and they were just in heaven. I remember Jill Krementz photographing them all there. They were thrilled to be back together. It was lovely. All of them claimed pride in this beautiful thing that they had done. And all of them took a little bit of credit, when George had really been the one left holding the bag. That was when they were in their fifties, with no idea that the magazine would have another twenty-five anniversaries to go.

  BRIGID HUGHES Did he want the magazine to continue? I think he did, and he didn’t. I regret that we never found some way to sit down and talk about the future of the magazine with him.

  At his desk, 1997.

  Photograph © Jonathan Becker, all rights reserved.

  SARAH DUDLEY PLIMPTON His modesty wouldn’t allow him the vanity of believing that he had created an enduring brand. Neither of us could imagine that things would turn out as well as they have for the Review. So I told him I thought he was The Paris Review and that nobody could do what he did, and anything else would be imitation, so the magazine should end with him. That was the last time he ever asked for my advice about the future of the magazine.

  OLIVER BROUDY We talked a little bit about whether the magazine should go on after his death, but it was a question he always dodged carefully around. It was something that touched him deeply. I think he didn’t really know. He was unsure about his own mortality; the thought of death was like meeting someone he didn’t understand through one of his established channels. He couldn’t really fit it in somewhere. When he did, it was with that kind of British good sportingness. You saw a bit of the same thing when you talked with him about the possible death of the magazine. There was something that baffled him a little bit, and it was painful to see him baffled in that way.

  BEN RYDER HOWE I thought that George’s modesty got in the way of a frank discussion about the magazine’s fortunes. His modesty was endless. While we were planning the fiftieth anniversary, we were talking about various ways to promote it, and we wanted him to be the focus of the celebration; but he said, “I don’t want this to be about me.”

  JONATHAN DEE When I was there, we got to the hundredth issue, and he said off handedly more than once, “Maybe we should stop at a hundred.” Then he’d leave the office and we’d all look at each other, wondering if we were about to lose our jobs.

  BRIGID HUGHES We talked about it in the late nineties. Everyone thought that George was going to live into his nineties, and we were going to be old people, and whoever he was going to pass it on to, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be any of us.

  JAMES GOODAL
E As best as I can determine, James Linville was the one who came up with, or at any rate effected, the idea of selling the magazine’s archives. That money eventually helped settle the issue of the Review’s future. Which, in my view, was a great thing.

  JAMES SCOTT LINVILLE In 1991 or so there was this massive rainstorm, and a gutter broke in back of 541. A door had been left open and water was pouring into the basement, as I saw when I went back to check on the stock of art prints. The basement back then, before it was renovated and turned into an office, was always a mess, and now it had flooded. There was water an inch deep on one side, and on the other green rat-poison pellets that were dissolving. And that’s when I noticed all these steamer trunks with the magazine’s old Paris address. There was our history, literary history, just sitting there, rotting. I said to George, “We have to do something about this. Researchers are going to want to study these papers, and we could sell them to a library to keep the magazine going.” He said, “Ugh,” as if it were all just a nuisance and all that old paper just brought back memories. I said, “Listen, I have an interest in this. If you let me do it on my own time, on weekends or whatever, and take a commission on the sale, I’ll make sure it gets done.” In the end, it took a good eight or nine years. For three of those years, while I compiled a massive catalog to help sell it, I had all 110 boxes of material in my living room, next door, at 535, with no space to walk around. Frankly, it was a pain in the ass to live with, and there were times I’d come home to them, with no space to walk around, and say to myself, “Ugh.”

  GLENN HOROWITZ When Jamie came to me and asked if I would assist in finding a home for the archives, I agreed and George agreed, though I always suspected that George never thought there was any real value in this material. From the beginning, his perception was that this whole sale wasn’t going to amount to very much.

  JAMES SCOTT LINVILLE In the course of putting together the archive, I’d bring things up to him. There was the day the early Philip Roth letters turned up, which George was always sure had been lost or sold by one of the bad-egg editors or something. And when the Hemingway letters turned up, and the Kerouac letters, I brought those into his office and showed him and he started to understand what the project was about. One that I came across was the beginning of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, accompanied by a postcard from Allen Ginsberg and a letter from Nelson Aldrich saying, “You have to publish this.” That was the one that got away . . . or rather that was flubbed, because he hadn’t published it.

  SOL GREENBAUM The archives were sold to the Morgan Library. The money was put up by Drue Heinz and eventually amounted to eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars, I believe.

  ROBERT PARKS The library very specifically wanted to strengthen its holdings of twentieth-century literature, and this opportunity gave us a wide range of writers over the postwar period. The Writers at Work interviews were a real draw for us. The documentation is extraordinary: For many of them you have the recorded interviews, the person’s voice. And since the interviews were always sent back to the interviewee for editing, there’s a paper as well, so you have a record of the whole process. These interviews are about creation, and they are an act of creation.

  JAMES GOODALE So now, after agents’ fees, the Review had seven hundred thousand dollars; but the question of the magazine’s future still lay there. So what I told George was “I think we ought to perpetuate The Paris Review. It offers unequaled market access for the unpublished writer, or even for the young established writer. That’s a terrific asset, particularly in a society that is going more and more money-mad and doesn’t have a huge literary tradition nationwide anyway. I think you owe it to yourself to do something.” George didn’t believe me. He said, “You don’t know what you’re doing. There’s never been a literary magazine that’s lasted as long as this one, and there will never be a literary magazine that will last longer. You’re wasting your time.” But I knew that a magazine could be run by a foundation; I don’t think many lawyers would have known that, but because of my own screwball background, I knew it had been done with Harper’s. So we got George and Tom Guinzburg and Peter Matthiessen to agree to take their interest in this newfound eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars—they were owners, after all, having invested five hundred dollars cash way back in Paris—and put it into the Paris Review Foundation.

  SOL GREENBAUM I think Peter and Tom balked a little bit about giving the proceeds from the Morgan sale to the foundation. Frankly, I felt that The Paris Review was all George. These other guys had done nothing for so many years. But he said the three of them had put up their five hundred dollars for seed money and that they were stockholders. Humes, so far as I could tell, hadn’t put up any money. As a matter of fact, stock had never been issued to anyone. Goodale had quite a difficult time making everything legal. In the end, the stock was valued at nine hundred thousand dollars, so they all got a nice tax deduction out of their gift.

  ANTONIO WEISS George set the foundation in place to survive him; you would never have guessed he would think about that. But he did. He sold the archives and invested the proceeds; he converted the magazine from a for-profit to a nonprofit enterprise. He endowed the place and assembled a mix of editors and close friends who could be in a position to support the Review financially or to lend it editorial counsel. So what is that? It’s someone preparing his legacy. Now, he never said, “I want all this in place in case I should die,” but it was perfectly clear to all of us what he was planning. It was surprising.

  SOL GREENBAUM It was hard for him to let go. In his heart, he didn’t want to establish the foundation, but in his mind, he understood how necessary it was. He was very uncomfortable. I attended all of those board meetings. For the first time, people were making suggestions about what he should be doing. He accepted them, but he wasn’t used to it. Peter, Tom, Bob Silvers, Terry Mc-Donell—all the board members were his friends.

  GLENN HOROWITZ What made the archive so valuable? The Paris Review was, by any stretch of the imagination, a powerful, unique, and enduring voice in nonmainstream American literature. Most importantly, they preserved it all. As such, it was filled with chatter, at the most primitive level, the most unedited level, the chatter that made up the cacophony of American literature of the fifties and sixties and seventies, when American literature was about the only game in town that didn’t lose in any sense. Letter by letter in the alphabet, it had correspondences, typescripts, the galleys of really the great names in not just American, but English literature. It was a beautifully preserved archive. It has, it seems to me, thousands of research opportunities: From the perspective of a scholarly institution, it would seem to me to suggest endless and original ways for scholarship. It’s a beautiful archive, and it sold much too cheaply.

  HIS “BIG BOOK”

  ANNE FULENWIDER There was a myth when we were at the Review. I don’t know if it was true or not, but there was some kind of surmise that George wasn’t doing what he really wanted to do, even though he was having such a good time. There was something else that he was going to get around to doing. Some people thought it was this great novel, and some people thought it was a great memoir. I wouldn’t begin to psychoanalyze George, but I do feel like there was some great mystery there about what he really wanted to do, and if there was such a thing, why he wasn’t doing it.

  MAGGIE PALEY You know that “I could have been a contender” line? I’m told it was one of George’s routines. I myself heard him say it after Doc Humes’s memorial service at St. John the Divine, when we all went over to Muffin’s [Alison Humes’s] apartment. Peter Matthiessen talked, and some other writers, and George got up and said, “I could have been a contender,” and clearly to me he was saying, “If I hadn’t done The Paris Review, I could have been a major writer.” I thought he meant a novel, or perhaps a great memoir, because he was certainly major at the journalism he did write.

  TERRY MCDONELL The big argument about George and his own writing was why did he spend so much t
ime on that Review instead of on his own writing. When that argument came up, he’d get mad. Deep in his heart the Review was the place he felt most comfortable, his spiritual hideout. As a writer, he was half an inch away from Thurber—if he had cared, I mean. It would have been hard for a minute, or a week, or a year or two, but there was a short story in everything he did and wrote. But it’s a mistake to think he was a Walter Mitty. Thurber if he’d cared, but not Mitty. Walter Mitty was a wimp; George was heroic.

  THOMAS MOFFETT George was on a ship in the Galápagos when he found out that he’d been offered seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars for his memoirs. I got the call first. The agent was really excited. I said, “George is on a ship. I’ll try to reach him.” So we got a guy on the phone, and they got the ship on the phone—it was someone speaking Spanish—and then George came to the phone and we patched him through to the agent. I think he was on the bridge of the ship when he found out about the deal. It was for a lot more than he expected, and I think the size of the advance was daunting for him. Back in New York, he would float it around the office, saying, “Should I do this? I guess I should do it.” Everyone would say, “Of course you should do it.”