An old cover of The Paris Review
Rónán Burtenshaw
The Paris Review is a quarterly literary publication based in New York’s voguish district of TriBeCa – “the TRIangle BEneath CAnal Street”. It occupies one of the upper floors of a non-descript office building on 62 White Street. The Review was established, as it announced in its debut edition, “to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines.”
I visited its office for an event in the midst of a sweltering heatwave in New York, with temperatures above 100F or nearly 40C. As I was sweating, my group waiting for the ivy-green doored lift on the ground-floor, we were joined by a young man. His careful balance of nonchalant trendiness and immaculate clothing immediately made me more conscious of my fashion deficit. This awareness, I think, is an inevitable result of being an Irishman in New York.
The Paris Review’s office itself is best dealt with in sections. The small desks, covered in papers and books, betray the work of a diminutive, vibrant publication. The paintings and prints donning the walls are adorned by distinguished names of the American art scene, giving insight into its standing and history. A bar – which I’m not sure is a permanent fixture – helps the office fit in nicely with the surrounding Tribeca area. There were also birds, either stuffed or artificial, hanging from the roof over the seated area. This surreal display was, I’m sure, meant to be symbolic but I neither had the sense to ask what this represented nor the nous to figure it out myself.
After being warmly introduced to the (also immaculately dressed) editor, Lorin Stein, I spent some time interrogating the guests about the publication itself. I was surprised to discover the magazine that had helped launch the careers of writers such as Adrienne Rich, Naipul, Mona Simpson and Jack Kerouac had a circulation of only about seventeen-thousand. Time’s characterisation of The Paris Review as the “biggest ‘little magazine’ in history” seemed appropriate.
Throughout these exchanges I found myself thinking about the distinction Oscar Wilde drew between journalism and literature: “journalism is unreadable, while literature is unread”. I was a journalist among writers. My vocabulary, of a depth and breadth suited to functionally expressing the kind of clichéd, moderate topics of contemporary media, felt clumsy. My recent reading history focused on non-fiction – dealing with a ‘reality’ with which I was trying to engage. My thoughts were drawn to the too many great texts of literature which remained, to me, “unread”.
I shielded my literary ignorance under the cloak of the reputation that Trinity has in that field. This, I hoped, would lend to me some scarcely deserced credibility in discussing these issues. A relationship of sorts exists too between The Paris Review and TCD, with connections drawn from printing selections of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy to an interview I have just finished reading with William Trevor.
The further I immersed myself in conversations, the more endearing I found the workings of The Paris Review. It receives its submissions – short stories, poetry and artwork – only by mail. These are then read by The Paris Review’s interns, the publication’s first point of contact. This combination of old-time style and faith in the next generation of would-be writers and artisans struck me as a sign of class.
The focus of that evening’s gathering was an “intimate reading” by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides of extracts from his new book The Marriage Plot. Eugenides had won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his “great American novel” Middlesex. His 1993 novel, The Virgin Suicides, was adapted for film by Sofia Coppola in 1999.
He arrived at the office sporting a rather conspicuous black eye, the infliction of which he set about explaining to the audience. The bizarre story of a confrontation with drunken frat-boys who were “singing songs about their dicks” on a train was hilarious. Eugenides weaved through the story with the craft of a storyteller, offering peaks and troughs, false climaxes and comic twists to regale. It also served to relieve the slight awkwardness of an assembled crowd of strangers and the stuffiness of the New York summer heat.
He then progressed to extracts from his forthcoming novel. The protagonist, Madeleine, is a final-year college student at Brown University who finds herself the centre of affection for two rather unusual male characters. The Leonard character, a bandana-wearing, charismatic hermit and philosophy student, has been widely associated with the recently-deceased David Foster Wallace. Matthew Grammaticus, by contrast, is closer to the author himself – a quick-tongued Detroit-native with Greek roots – who, Eugenides remarked on the night, had also passed through “a religious conversion of a sort”.
It had been a long time since I had been to a reading and I had forgotten the calming, enjoyable experience of being read to. The excerpts were read in a loud, confident voice, adapted for the characters with such a sense of feeling that I was almost instantly drawn inwards. My mind offered me images of the characters and scenes that were very much my own, building upon Eugenides’ words with features of my memory. This, I later thought, was a great quality of fiction – to provide a framework for our imagination to engineer our own unique interpretations of what was written. I regretted having de-emphasised that experience and allowed stories to be told to me, so often, with pictures and sound-effects attached.
In the Q&A session afterwards a woman in the audience asked of Eugenides how he understood women so well. I was tempted to ask the same question about college students – before reconciling myself with the over-estimation young generations tend to put on the differing experiences their parents had at the same age. Eugenides, a member of the faculty at Princeton’s creative writing programme, expertly captured the intricacies of college romance; impulsiveness, awkwardness, neurosis. It was a refreshing portrayal, offering honesty on these topics I think those of us currently engaged in them would recoil at presenting. There were times when his descriptions made me move uncomfortably in my chair – my mind drawn to my own experiences.
I left the reading thinking about contrasts. New York had been loud to the senses. Undisguised in its enormity, it was brassy and absolute. And I’d certainly enjoyed that. But The Paris Review offered the other side of this intriguing city. The evening had engaged me on a much more human level with sublety and nuance, qualities for which New York is not renowned.
But there was also the contrast between the writer and the journalist. I was thinking about that much more clearly now. The Paris Review’s debut editorial said, in humble terminology scarcely fitting the reputation the publication now holds, that they would welcome “good writers and good poets… So long as they were good.” My passion for storytelling rekindled, I opened the summer 2011 issue and began reading. It was, as I expected, good.
The Paris Review’s website can be found at http://www.theparisreview.org
A one-year international subscription costs $55. Details here: http://store.theparisreview.org/collections/subscribe
Any Trinity students interested in submitting work to The Paris Review can find submission details here: http://www.theparisreview.org/contact
Jeffrey Eugenides’ forthcoming novel, which is mentioned in this article, is available from October 2011.
