The Press: Big Little Magazine

• Share

The "little" magazines have fallen on thin times. Published in Paris attics or Greenwich Village cellars, printed on butcher paper, and usually as short-lived as May flies, little magazines were the focus and the forum of the experimental '20s, awaited by literati with breathless interest for the latest chapter of James Joyce, the newest obscurity of Ezra Pound, the next outrageous typographical innovation devised by e.e. cummings.

But the experimenters ran out of experiments; the four-letter words migrated to clothback books and the little magazines were left without shock value. The surviving quarterlies, usually backed by rich men or foundations and run by professors, have taken on the ivy-clad tone of a graduate faculty tea. Critics quarrel with critics in thin, querulous prose, and authors are made to feel unwelcome.

In this dimming constellation, a bright new light is a little-known publication called the Paris Review—a magazine dedicated to the proposition that authors are more interesting than critics. Founded in Paris five years ago by a group of bumptious young Americans just out of college, the Review offered as its star turn a series of Q. and A. interviews with writers on the art of writing fiction.

The Iceberg. Brash young Review-men got E.M. Forster to explain why he stopped writing novels in 1924, James Thurber to discuss the difference between American and British humor, William Faulkner to talk about his technique, recorded equally penetrating chats with Francois Mauriac, Joyce Gary, Robert Penn Warren and other literary lights. Result: 21 interviews in the Review and a book (Writers at Work; Viking; $5).

This week the Review celebrated the fifth anniversary of its founding by peddling a 28,000-copy issue featuring a long, intimate interview with Ernest Hemingway. The interview was obtained with an enterprise characteristic of Review's methods. Young (31) Editor George Plimpton introduced himself to Hemingway in the bar of Paris' Hotel Ritz, spent two weeks watching bullfights with him in Madrid, later flew down to Cuba for long hours of talk in Hemingway's Finca Vigia home, broken by long hours in a fishing boat with the old man and the sea. The resulting interview has a refreshing flavor matched against the pedantic fuss-budgetry of critics in rival quarterlies. Sample: "I always write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know, you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. If a writer omits something because he does not know it, then there is a hole in the story."