Chapter and Verse

Does literature today reflect the commercialism of the entertainment industry, or is it keeping a high standard and thus rendering itself obsolete? Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, and Israeli writer Nir Baram compare notes on Haaretz.

From the piece...

In your opinion, what is the ultimate achievement an interview with an author should aspire to? Do you think there should be a substantial difference in the questions, topics, emphasis, and tension between discussion about a certain novel and discussion about the outside world ‏(political and economical, etc.‏) between an interview with T.S. Eliot in 1959 and an interview with a contemporary author or poet?

“Temperamentally, maybe; I’m less interested in the theoreticians. There are exceptions. While we were editing the interview with Samuel R. Delany, the science-fiction writer and literary theorist, I became so fascinated I ran out to the bookstore and bought his autobiography ‏(which is wild‏). As a rule of thumb, we try not to discuss any one book in too much detail. You should be able to follow the interview without being an expert − or an obsessive fan. And as I mentioned before, we try to steer the interviews away from litanies of influence − unless they are truly surprising and revealing.

“We always ask questions about the writer’s process − about how the work gets done, from hour to hour, week to week − and often we ask about the writer’s artistic development. Usually this becomes a story about growing up. Apart from that, the interviewer and subject have to shape the interview according to their own best lights − because you know, each interview is a collaboration. Subject, interviewer, editor all revise the transcripts together, sometimes changing very little, more often writing and rewriting. Everyone has veto power. An interview can often take years. In a letter to his parents in 1953, George Plimpton − the first editor of The Paris Review − described the first interview ‏(with E.M. Forster‏) as ‘an essay on technique, in dialogue form.’ That’s what these interviews are − essays arrived at through dialogue.”

What’s the most important thing you have learned about literature since you became the editor of The Paris Review?

“One thing I’ve noticed is how relatively few young writers are working on short stories compared to 10 years ago. That’s not to say that there has been a drop-off in quality, only that students of creative writing are likely to launch straight into a novel or novella − to write the epic and skip the eclogue. Market forces have made themselves felt.”