Journalist, author, and founder of The Paris Review, George Plimpton died last September at the age of 76. In his honour and memory, we make available the following interview, which originally appeared in our second issue in the last year of the previous millennium.

“There is never any ending to Paris,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, in 1960. “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

During the years between the Great War and the Good War, Paris was a unique confluence of creative energies. Paris was the midwife to modern art and home to Sylvia Beach, who in 1922 published James Joyce’s Ulysses from her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company on rue de l’Odéon. St. Germain des Prés bragged an array of neighbourhood cafés such as the Deux-Magots, where on any given night you might see Picasso sipping a café crème with André Gide, or perhaps Morley Callaghan enjoying a fine à l’eau with F. Scott Fitzgerald. According to Gertrude Stein, this was the epoch of “young people who had no respect for anything and drank themselves to death. This was the Génération Perdue.”

But subsequent to the Lost Generation, a new group emerged, a group of “tall young men”, as E. M. Forster fondly referred to them. They included William Styron, Peter Matthiesson and George Plimpton and they came armed with several bottles of absinthe and a newly founded Left Bank literary rag entitled The Paris Review. Created in a climate where, as Styron opined, “literary magazines seem… on the verge of doing away with literature… smothering under the weight of learned chatter,” they welcomed to their pages “the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders.” And, in 1957, the eighteenth issue firmly established the Review, featuring George Plimpton mano-a-mano with a bilious Ernest Hemingway who would describe, among other things, his infamous “built-in shit detector.”

Almost a half-century has passed since that first meeting with Hemingway, but Plimpton remains the lifeblood of the magazine that can singularly boast contributing many famous phrases to the literary vernacular, as well as a compendium of rare insights into the Art of writing, whether fiction, poetry or drama.

Upon his return from overseas, Plimpton quickly displaced the Paris row houses with Manhattan stoops and fire escapes, bringing The Paris Review to America, which had become the cynosure of 20th-century literature. A natural evolution, as he himself came to embody somewhat of an Aristotelian ideal of the artist who seeks the delicate mean between the physical and the intellectual. Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and Harvard University, he is best recognized for what came to be known as “participatory journalism”. He recalls that it wasn’t something consciously planned and was the result of a challenge issued by the then editors of the Harvard Lampoon (perhaps as an attempt to dissuade the eager young Plimpton from applying for an editorial position), who demanded that he run the Boston Marathon. In decent athletic condition, though aware twenty-six miles was likely beyond him, he decided to tailor the race to meet his resources. Taking public transportation to a position in the race several hundred yards from the finish line, he burst from the crowd, a placard reading “1/4” pasted to his chest, and proceeded to overtake the leader. Upon seeing this robust new challenger, the leader joined Plimpton in a desperate sprint to the finish, narrowly beating him out at the tape. In the press tent after the race, having discovered that the young upstart had run almost twenty-six fewer miles than he had, a melee broke out; unfortunately, while lifting his arm to throw a punch at Plimpton, the winner collapsed from exhaustion.

Six years later, with the purpose of writing a waggish yet observant perspective-piece for Sports Illustrated, Plimpton boxed three (less than spectacular) rounds with the legendary, and then light heavyweight champion of the world, Archie Moore. The success of the piece allowed Plimpton carte blanche to determinedly blunder his way through just about every boyhood and aging armchair athletes’ fantasy. Among his adventures, a pre-season stint at quarterback for the Detroit Lions, “power-forward” with the Boston Celtics, and ankle-skating backstop for the Boston Bruins. Away from the fields of play, he also sat in as percussionist with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (the triangle), and endured more wearing assignments as a centerfold photographer for Playboy.

Plimpton is no stranger to the streets of Toronto. During his last visit he agreed to a cameo role in a film being shot here called Good Will Hunting. He jokes that he has several Oscars to his credit (including Lawrence of Arabia, where he played a Bedouin; and Reds, as Horace Whigham), but is of course, still awaiting his gold statuettes.

The editors of Pagitica, Jason Gileno and Marcus Robinson, invited George Plimpton to Bigliardi’s Steakhouse in downtown Toronto, an unacknowledged literary and sporting landmark a few minutes north of Maple Leaf Gardens. Despite the shortness of time, the expletives from the Woodbine inveterates and the trumpeter’s intrusive proclamation of a race about to begin, we sat down to speak of Paris and other things… And George Plimpton, with great dignity, proceeded to give an intelligent and thoughtful interview.

Pagitica:

You are interested in fireworks and are the Fireworks Commissioner of New York. How did that relationship begin?

George Plimpton:

Well, John Lindsey who was the Mayor back… whenever it was, had asked me to be his Commissioner of Parks. I didn’t really believe that I was very well suited for the job and because I had a young family and everything, I said to him, “I can’t do it, Mr. Mayor.” So then he said “what about Commissioner of Cultural Affairs?” Now, these were legitimate commissionerships! I told him that I was terribly honoured, but I that I couldn’t do it, and he said, “Well what would you like to be Commissioner of?” So I said “Fireworks!” Of course, there was no such thing, but it has continued through all of the administrations. I am supposed to resign each time there is a change of administration, but I don’t.

Pagitica:

It’s a lifetime appointment?

George Plimpton:

Only on the grounds that if I resign from a commissionership which doesn’t exist, the town hall gets fidgety and wonders what the hell is going on. So I’m still the commissioner. It doesn’t really mean very much, except that I try to promote fireworks as best I can. I tried to promote fireworks for New Year’s Eve but we ran into all sorts of problems. I mean, they’re doing some but not as much as they should be doing.

Pagitica:

Many years ago, you said that The Paris Review would never cultivate any “isms”. Has the magazine remained true to that statement?

George Plimpton:

Yes. Because if you do, you’re sort of stuck with that “ism”. If it’s Dadaism, you last for an issue or two issues, or if — I can’t think of any “isms” around at the moment — you follow the policy of New Criticism or any of the other “isms”, you get stuck and get bracketed, and then you have to change your “ism”. And sometimes that’s hard to do. Our views have been very eclectic. I suppose the way you can tell with magazines is to look at the poetry. The poetry reflects the wishes of the poetry editor, in our case. Each of them have had reigns of seven years, approximately. There was a time there when Tom Clark was an editor and he was very fond of the Beat Poets - Ginsberg, O’Hara, Olsen… and published them. Whereas Donald Hall, our first poetry editor, had nothing to do with that group at all.

Pagitica:

Given that The Paris Review came out of a group of intellectuals and artists and not investment bankers, how did the idea to design this sort of marketing strategy arise?

George Plimpton:

Paris at that particular time, was full of writers. But I didn’t particularly want to become one. I was studying at Cambridge and I wanted to possibly teach or get involved in television, which at that time was just beginning. And then I was called by my old friend Peter Matthiessen and I think that from the very beginning, we had ideas on how we could make the magazine sell. We put a fancy cover on it, comparatively. Most of the journals at the time had what was inside the magazine, on the cover — period. They were like law-school journals. But we had an art editor, William Pene Dubois, which was quite rare for literary publications. And criticism… we took that out of the magazine. When it really got going, we thought about getting it distributed. We had people on the street with it; we put posters up everywhere. We really didn’t have much money. Each of the editors put in 500 dollars, and there were three of us. Of course, that went a long way back then. You could print the whole magazine for that much money. Then again, if you look at the first issues of the Review, they are pretty unrefined…

Pagitica:

Esquire called The Paris Review “New York’s Literary Establishment”. When you first began the magazine did you ever think it would become a part of the Establishment?

George Plimpton:

I’m not sure when you start a magazine and you are 22 years old if you are connected with anything except your own guts. No, I don’t think we were connected with the New York Establishment because I’m not sure I even remember what it was. We’re talking 45 years ago. The New York Establishment at that time would have been… I don’t know — we were in Paris! Esquire did a big article on literary influences and they had a thing called the red-hot centre — and that was The Paris Review. I never really quite understood it. But when we got back to the U.S., there were a lot of parties at my house and a lot of people came. There was good company and booze and a view of the river, and I was a bachelor at the time. We used to frequent the same restaurants. I guess if you were looking around and looked a young crowd of people starting off, many of whom were writers and many of whom went on to become very good writers, I guess you could call that the red-hot centre. But it’s hardly an intellectual establishment… because we were all so different. Norman Mailer, Willie Morris of Harper’s Magazine, Peter Matthiessen, Jules Feiffer… I mean the list of people goes on and on. Now, there used to be a Partisan Review and that was probably the group that was the most important intellectual group. That publication was Socialist dash Communist dash the Trotskyites dash the Stalinists. The main political concern was whether you were a Stalinist or a Trotskyite. That was the hot bed of all of that. They would be the group… in fact, one of the reasons I think we chose the name The Paris Review was because we thought maybe we’d be mistaken for the The Partisan Review and people would subscribe. We certainly didn’t establish anything like that because there was no single political bias one way or the other. It is very hard to start an intellectual centre if you don’t have anything like that.

Pagitica:

Political biases or not, what is the moral responsibility of a writer?

George Plimpton:

For me? (laughing) Very little. None! But there are writers who think that their function is to shape… for instance, during the Vietnam War Peter Matthiessen wrote a long short story which was an attack on the CIA Forces, — engagé, as the French would say. And then the French, of course, we were all in Paris at the same time, and it was very important to be engagé… Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were writers who believed that it was the function of the artist was to change a society that they thought was not functioning properly. But surely, in my own case, I don’t write that sort of stuff anymore.

Pagitica:

What is your most vivid memory of Paris? Would it be perhaps the Café Tournon or the first offices of The Paris Review…?

George Plimpton:

None of the above… When you reflect on Paris, I think you remember the broken hearts… the physical side of it. There is one instance, memorable enough involving a man who was a great friend of Lady Brett.

Pagitica:

The Sun Also Rises Lady Brett?

George Plimpton:

Yes. This man had been to the funeral where she was buried in Mexico City or someplace like that and the coffin was being carried up these cathedral steps and someone slipped, and the coffin bounced down the steps and out she came. King! That was his name. And I never knew if that was a true story or not because I never really checked into it. Certainly a vivid enough picture… It is very difficult to answer question like that because most of the moments when you think back on Paris, you think of being with a woman. Of course, I remember a lot about The Paris Review. There’s a lovely phrase, I think its John Ashbery’s, “when you fall in love in Paris, you can never fall in love the same way again, not even in Paris.”

Pagitica:

Is that still true today…? I mean, Paris has changed so…

George Plimpton:

Oh yeah! I went back to Paris in the spring, to do a film on The Paris Review… it was magical. We went back to the same place where The Paris Review started, which is on the outskirts of the city, in the Montparnasse Railroad yards. That had changed… it had been torn down. And there was a big complex there. And yet, about a block away, there was a street fair going on. It was the music fair in Paris, which is wonderful. They have bands playing on every street corner, all the way from jazz bands to people playing the pipes from Provence. And there was this little street fair going on with children dancing. It was just pure magic… pure magic. And in the rue de Rivoli there is this huge Ferris wheel… I think it’s the biggest Ferris wheel in Europe, and we went up on that thing… way up to the top. Of course that wasn’t there in my day; but still, to look out at that city and remember it… One thing about Paris is that they don’t knock very much down, except on the outskirts. They just simply prop it up, so it’s pretty much the same. An expense, sure… you give a groan and you pay a lot, but you’re still in the same place.

Pagitica:

I imagine that there were times when living in Paris was less than magical…

George Plimpton:

There where hardships… but when you’re twenty-three years old, you don’t care about the cold, you don’t care about walking long distances. You just never can quite get over the magic of where you are. Better there than… Hard to get started in Hartford, Connecticut or Hamilton. Sure you can start in Hamilton, what’s wrong with that?

Pagitica:

Was it magical while you were there or is this just an example of sentimentalism?

George Plimpton:

I think whenever you are distanced by time, from a place it does begin to take on a patina…

Pagitica:

Does it still exert an influence on the magazine or has it become a metaphor?

George Plimpton:

Well, I’m awfully glad we called it The Paris Review, although, it is neither brought out of Paris nor is it a review. Paris always has that magic touch to it. We used to have arguments about what we were going to call it. At one point we were going to call it “Baccarat”. Terrible name…

Pagitica:

In those early days, did you know that you were involved in something that would achieve such longevity?

George Plimpton:

No… and if I had, I don’t think I would have done it. Because during all these years that I have run the magazine, it has all been pro bono. So the result is I’ve had to do all of things that I never would have dreamed of doing… like advertising… Pop Secret Popcorn… Buicks… The other day somebody called up and wanted me to do a voice over for Levis Jeans.

Pagitica:

“Enterprise in the service of art?”

George Plimpton:

Exactly… a phrase of Malcolm Cowley’s I think. But it’s not exactly “enterprise in the service of art” as it is enterprise in the service of George Plimpton! (laughing) I’ve had children to feed and a wife… two wives! I wasn’t wealthy at all but I was lucky enough be able to rely on… not very much mind you, but a certain amount of income. In Paris particularly where you could live on 30 dollars a week! Was it even that much? No, no, 20 dollars! You could live… well, 30 dollars went a long way! (Laughing.) You could have a meal, a good meal, for ninety cents.

Pagitica:

But can you separate the two? Without The Paris Review would you have been doing commercials and…?

George Plimpton:

It’s hard to say. What would I have done…? I might have gone into television… NBC maybe.

Pagitica:

What does the fact that there seems to be no single methodology that leads to a literary masterpiece say about the art of fiction?

George Plimpton:

Somerset Maugham says, “There are three rules to writing a novel, but nobody knows what they are.” There are people, Nabokov, for instance, who knew exactly what he was doing when he sat down and wrote because he talks about how his characters don’t run away from him, discipline, and he knows where he’s going, and knows the last line, and all that. Other people, like poor old Joe Heller, who had to sit around and wait for a stupid line to pop into his head before he could write anything. The muse must strike…

Pagitica:

What are your opinions on criticism? In Canada we are known for our extensive literary criticism. We know where literary criticism belonged in The Paris Review, in the back… if at all, but where do you think it finds its place in society?

George Plimpton:

Well, it’s huge! You have to have someone sitting around telling you if someone is good or not. You probably shouldn’t, but you have to.

Pagitica:

Because your peers won’t do it?

George Plimpton:

Oh no. Your peers won’t do it at all. They’ll just tell you it’s terrific. I think good tough views on everything, much less literature is terribly important. “Critic” is a very important word. The reason we put it in the back of the issue was that there was so much of it that there wasn’t any fiction being published. No, I would rather read the New York Review of Books than most novels, to tell you the truth. First of all it tells you what you probably should read. Sometimes you wish it didn’t exist… because you yourself become the victim of it. My oral biography of Truman Capote was damned in the New York Times, Sunday section, by a woman called Julia Reed, who felt that we didn’t need to know anything more about Truman Capote. She is a Mississippian, a Southern writer, and there had been one book done fifteen years before by a writer called Gerald Clarke. But her reason is that she couldn’t find anything in my book that she didn’t know… which is utterly ridiculous. I’d like to test her on it. She’d get about a ten, or a zero. But it destroyed the book as a best seller. It got within one rank of the best-seller list and didn’t get there. I’m pretty sure, because of that review.

Pagitica:

So the critics wield a certain power in public opinion that…

George Plimpton:

Huge! But in the opinion of booksellers particularly. But criticism is necessary. It’s interesting how many writers in The Paris Review Interviews said that they don’t read their reviews. I don’t believe that for a minute. They all do. You can’t help it. You want to find out how people feel about your book. People who are not telling you in person, because those people will often say, “it’s quite marvelous.” Can you imagine going up to someone and saying, “that’s the worst trash I’ve ever read…?” You’re not going to do that. You’ll get a blow in the face. But to write to persuade some critic or to satisfy an audience… well… some writers will do that, the writers of popular novels, but if you are going to be a serious writer you’re going to have to write to satisfy yourself.

Pagitica:

You had a brief collaboration with William Styron…

George Plimpton:

Yeah, it never worked out. We were going to write a movie together. It was about a magician who wasn’t very good at what he does… a failed artist perhaps? He was a refugee from somewhere… maybe Yugoslavia. There was an interesting piece in The New Yorker recently on Nat Turner… do you know about Nat Turner? Well Bill Styron wrote the…

Pagitica:

…Confessions of Nat Turner

George Plimpton:

Yes. And a New Yorker historian has taken a rather good look at Nat Turner. Bill used to say that you could learn all you need to know about Nat Turner in one hour, by reading one paper, The Confession, which, you know, Nat Turner actually wrote. Bill’s idea was that he was a religious fanatic and American Blacks disputed that hotly. And there are some people who tend to think that he was part of a very large revolt, with tendrils everywhere… quite a fascinating article.

Pagitica:

Did it make reference to the Styron work?

George Plimpton:

A lot of reference. The guy who wrote it did a lot of work. For instance, he went down to the place in Virginia where this all happened. There are still people there who tell tales from that particular time. Fascinating piece. Bill had just seen a cross… a stick sitting there in the middle of that county, he was up on a high school expedition, and this thing froze in his mind and compelled him to write this story many many moons later. Quite extraordinary really. For example, no one’s really sure if Nat Turner really made this confession, or if this is exactly the way he said it. Again, you’d have an interpreter writing it down as his interpretation of it, which is not that he was a religious fanatic but that he was a revolutionary. But what the writer of the article is doing is taking all of these different views presenting what sort of a man Nat Turner really was. It was a wider interpretation than Styron did. The blacks hate the idea that he was a religious fanatic… sex-starved and all of that. All of which Styron gave as his hypothesis about this man.

Pagitica:

He didn’t call it a biography. It was a work of fiction…

George Plimpton:

Oh yes! He wouldn’t dare call it a biography. There is that wonderful passage in it where Nat Turner kills the girl chasing through the fields and the butterflies are flying through the meadow… that is completely imaginary.

Pagitica:

There are certain writers that you couldn’t get interviews with, J. D. Salinger, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Thomas Pynchon. If you had an opportunity to ask one question, what would that question be and to which of these writers would you ask it?

George Plimpton:

“Can I have ten more questions?” (laughing) I know everything about Solzhenitsyn so you can cancel him off. Pynchon… I don’t know how much he would have to say… I wrote the first review of his first book, as a matter of fact, V.

Pagitica:

What would you ask him?

George Plimpton:

It would have to be a question that he would have a hard time answering, and at great length. “Would you please tell me about,” then there’s just “comma comma comma…” I’d be curious about the need for secrecy. What is it like being completely away from the world of literature? I know he knows some people, but what is it like being this stranger, being an outsider. He’s married to a rather famous agent. I may have seen him at a dozen parties and not known who he was. One would want to know, however.

Pagitica:

Did Hemingway really write standing up, and Robert Frost on the sole of his shoe?

George Plimpton:

I never saw that but I saw Hemingway’s desk! A typewriter… “These Must Be Paid” I remember was on the clipboard, the sort that every housewife has… he would take that off and write dialogue I guess, which was easy for him, right on the clipboard.

Pagitica:

And as long as he did 500 words a day, he was happy?

George Plimpton:

He had this big piece of cardboard there. And… there were bigger numbers on the days he wanted to the next day, go fishing on the Gulf Stream. Once I went there and… he handed me something, a chapter on Gertrude Stein and he gave it to me, and said, “You’re responsible for this.” I had no idea what he was talking about. He knelt right here with his face just over my shoulder as I read this thing. The typescript was very much worn. And what he meant by that was when I’d asked him for an interview, in Paris, because he was the first person I saw buy a copy of the magazine, I said to him, “why don’t we do this… why don’t we wander around Paris. We’ll go to 27 Rue de Fleurus, where Gertrude Stein lives and we’ll go to the Closerie des Lilas and we’ll go to The Dôme, and to the racetrack…” He said, “That’s the worst goddamned idea I’ve ever heard.” (Laughing) And that was the last I’d thought about it. But then when he said, “You’re responsible for this,” it occurred to me that he had written about 27 Rue de Fleurus. Well, Hemingway scholars say “you’re not responsible for A Moveable Feast,” but I like to think that I had something to do with it.

Pagitica:

What about Norman Mailer? Is it true that he used to work out his tensions by organizing head-butting contests?

George Plimpton:

Well, he was very competitive and he used to have all these games… some of which were thumb wrestling and… well, the most aggravating of them were the head-butting contests which he used to have with Greg Hemingway [son of Ernest]. They were like two rams coming together! I never really understood why. There would be sort of a crash and you would look over and there would be Norman or Greggy on the floor! And he’d have staring contests. Now this was a long, long time ago, when Norman was… exuberant. He has since, you know… He’s still a great big, pleasant… wily… interesting man, but the physical part has gone out of it. Well, he has a cane! You can’t head butt anybody if you have a cane. And his character has changed. He’s married a wonderful woman. She’s calmed him down.

Pagitica:

Tell us a little about The Paris Review Revels?

George Plimpton:

Oh the Revels! Well, the Revels were different. The parties with Norman… with the head-butting, those were at my house… The Revels were parties we’d organize to try to raise money for The Paris Review. We spent a lot of time on the magazine trying to think of ways to raise money, to keep it going. One of these ideas, which we named the Revels, were parties carefully planned to have a sort of excitement to them so that they became parties that were unlike any other. And they were all over the place. They were on Roosevelt Island, they were at a wonderful place called the Cheeto and even Studio 54, we had one there. I’ve always thought that we were one of the first large gatherings to use multi-media — things on the wall. We had 15 movie projectors projecting all sorts of things on the wall — backwards and forwards: Mickey Mouse cartoons and Crazy Cat… rockets going up and coming back down. It became a staple of nightclubs and discotheques for awhile. It sort of faded away with all of the other fads but it was interesting at the time.

Pagitica:

Speaking of parties, tell us about your experience at the Playboy Mansion?

George Plimpton:

Which one? (laughing) I did a photo shoot as a part of the “participatory journalism” series I’d been doing. It’s quite interesting, Playboy uses a particular camera, a Dierdorf, I think it’s called. It is a rather large, awkward camera but the reason it is used is because of the tone. You know that soft, almost velvety look to the Playboy shots…

Pagitica:

Too well! (laughing)

George Plimpton:

Yes. Well, the Penthouse cameras are all 35 millimetre stuff, but Hef likes the tone of the Dierdorf… almost a healthy peak. And they’ve used that Dierdorf ever since. Some of the other ones have sort of a fake quality to it. Calendar art is very bad.

Pagitica:

Have you maintained those relationships?

George Plimpton:

With Hefner you mean? Or with the women?

Pagitica:

Either or!

George Plimpton:

With Hefner, yes. Old friends. In fact he wanted me to run his magazine for him.

Pagitica:

Did you think long and hard about that? Giving up The Paris Review and…

George Plimpton:

No. I used to go up to Chicago a lot and stay in the State Street place. There were two rooms there, with a bathroom in between and whoever was in the other room was almost invariably the Playmate of the Month. We’d share the same bathroom. And a lot of times Spectorsky, who was the editor at the time, this is 3 or 4 years after it started, he was sick of it. I used to go up there and hang out in the pool room and Spectorsky would take me out on the yacht. And I remember telling him that I wouldn’t do it because I so loved being up there in that house. The Playmates and the Bunnies all lived on the top floor in sort of an attic. And at the bottom was of course, the swimming pool. And it had a pole… a fireman’s pole that went down into it. And underneath, at the bottom of the swimming pool was a bar where you could look through a window and see what was coming into the pool. I used to spend hours down there waiting for the Bunnies to come down and plunge into the pool.

Pagitica:

Were you single then?

George Plimpton:

Yeah. Not only that but the pool had a little tiny grotto with a waterfall and I used to hide back there. I used to come out looking like a frog… all wrinkled. One day I was down at the underwater bar and suddenly there was a huge splash! I thought, oh my god, and into the pool jumped, not one but two, fat comedians, male.

Pagitica:

(Laughing) Kind of like bird watching and not quite getting what you’re expecting… We can’t end without asking you a quintessential Paris Review question. What do you write with, a pen or a pencil?

George Plimpton:

(laughing) I find it very hard to write on the computer, but I try. I write on scraps of paper… felt tip pen.

Pagitica:

But not standing up…?

George Plimpton:

George Brown, who was Hemingway’s trainer, used to say he stood because he had hemorrhoids… which is rather disappointing.

***

“There is never any ending to Paris,” Hemingway went on to write, “and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”

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