The Paris Review Years

MARY LEE SETTLE INTERVIEWS The Paris Review Years Matthew J. Bruccoli In 2004 I was marinating a biography of George Plimpton and phoned myfriend Mary Lee Settle to talk about her connection with George and The Paris Review. Our conversation was recorded, with Mary Lee's permission. After we talked about our admirationfor George, she commented on her work in progress—which now belongs with the unpublished treasures ofAmerican literature. The best thing Mary Lee said about the profession ofauthorship was: "A whole industry depends on us and treats us like shit. " Matthew J. Bruccoli: Were you there at the birth ofThe Paris Review? Mary Lee Settle: I wasn't there at the birth, but I was there very soon after. MJB; With George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen. ... MLS: And Doc Humes. MJB: And Thomas Ginzburg. MLS: I never knew Tom over there. He'd already left. MJB: And did William Styron have any role? MLS: He had a role. I think he had a sort of...officially the big writer, blah, blah, blah. But I never saw him; he was in Rome at the time. Oh, and Max Steele. Max Steele wrote a novel called Debby (1950). Anyway, he was over there, and he was working at Rue Garancière, and he was a southerner. He was from North Carolina, and he had just won the Harper Prize for his first novel. So Max was the other one that was working then. MJB: Originally it was sort ofa cooperative venture, but George emerged as the honcho. Was that because he was the only one who was willing to take it 90 seriously? MLS: No, no, everybody took it seriously, but George was the groupie sent from heaven. I loved him so much, but what he had was this sheer admiration for anybody who could do what we could do. And he took over as editor. Peter helped him, but Peter was working on a book. Max was getting his brain shrunk. Doc Humes was going bananas. MJB: I've tried to read his book, Underground City, that George raved about. MLS: Well, he raved out of sheer loyalty. Now, the reason that I know more about Doc Humes is that I owned ten shares of his brain. There was a man called Claude Cockburn, who was Frank Pitcairn of The Daily Worker in London. He was a friend of mine, and he was drunk in the back bar of the Café Royal in London one night, and he asked to borrow ten pounds. I lent him ten pounds, and he paid me back with ten shares in the communist weekly known as The Week. Well, this, of course, was great for the CIA, or OSS, or whatever they called themselves at that point, and I didn't give a damn. Anyway, later since George didn't have any shares in The Week, and I didn't have any shares in Doc Humes' brain, we traded off. It wasn't ten—it was five shares each. This was the level of financial responsibility at that point. They published my first story ["Congress Burney," 1954-55]. It wasn't very good, and, if you remember, when we were all there for the anniversary party in New York, and we saw the documentary about the thing that I said that Peter Matthiessen had told me I couldn't use "shit" and "sumac" in the same paragraph. Peter came up to me later that night, and said "Did I really say that?" I said, "You certainly did." MJB: I'm particularly interested in The Paris Review, because ofits role in making the authorial interview a legitimate genre. MLS: It certainly did. MJB: Did that just happen, or did somebody say that nobody is taking interviewing seriously? MLS: I don't think they thought like that. I think theyjust thought, hey, what a great idea it would be if we would turn Hemingway loose. I 91 wasn't in on those conversations. MJB: Thefirst one was George doing E.M. Foster, and he did it because Foster was afellow ofhis college at Cambridge. He was there; he was available. MLS: I think George made it...