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The Paris Review has the well-earned reputation of being the benchmark for literary interviews. Playboy, Rolling Stone, and Esquire have all had their share of high-profile and high-octane encounters with famous writers, but the Paris Review has, hands down, recorded the lion’s share of important interviews with a virtual who’s who of twentieth century letters. For over fifty years writers of note have looked to a Paris Review interview with almost the same envy as the National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize. It’s not just a matter of intellectual ego gratification either. In conducting this sort of interview, there are two main traps the interviewer should avoid; hero worship and gratuitous bear baiting. For the most part both of these hazards are navigated without mishap. In fact, I would say out of these two volumes Kurt Vonnegut was treated most harshly by his interviewer, which in a turn of the screw I think of as typical of the Paris Review, turns out to have been Kurt Vonnegut himself.

Some of the writers interviewed in these first two volumes are well represented elsewhere and their interviews while good are not indispensible, but the preponderance are either rarely interviewed at all or are not handled with this much interest anywhere else. Even Graham Greene who has been the subject of volumes is more revealed in this relatively brief treatment than in any other vehicle I have come across. The same is true of Dorothy Parker. One brief exchange from her interview says more about (and for) her than all of the hackneyed biographies put together:

Interviewer:
Do you think Hollywood destroys the artist’s talent?

Dorothy Parker:
No, no, no. I think nobody on earth writes down. Garbage though they turn out, Hollywood writers aren’t writing down. That is their best. If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you. I want so much to write well, though I know I don’t, and that I didn’t make it. But during and at the end of my life, I will adore those who have.

Honestly, there’s not much you can say about this sort of book; either you like them or you don’t. I happen to like this sort of book very well, thank you, and of books of this sort the Paris Review Interviews are exemplary.

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