The Paris Review board has told current editor Brigid Hughes that her contact will not be renewed when it comes up again in March. A search is on once again for a replacement who can fulfill George Plimpton’s shoes. Depending on whom one talks to & reads, this is either absolutely necessary or an utter betrayal of Plimpton’s own editorial instincts. The more pedestrian reality is that it is neither. It is instead a rather ordinary occurrence in the conjunction of money, power & poetry, not at all unlike the way in which Poetry saw its board cast the editor out after it had received an endowment in excess of $100 million not so long ago.

 

The Review, unfortunately, has no such endowment. Yet, at least. What it does have is a serious brand & a backlist. And a board. And quite a board it is. While the group pretty much did nothing beyond put on and attend fundraisers while Plimpton was alive, it was – and is – a board that Plimpton himself constructed as replete with money & power as any such institution in the world of letters.

 

Board president Thomas Guinzburg was one of the journal’s founding editors, as was novelist Peter Matthiessen. It was Matthiessen and fellow novelist Harold Hume who first thought up the review in 1951. But it was their buddy George Plimpton, installed as the editor, who really made the journal an extension of his persona, that of a flamboyant preppy posing equally as a world weary bon vivant – and in Plimpton’s particular case, as a self-deprecating amateur in any number of outlandish sports events.¹ Somebody talked Sadruddin Aga Khan into serving as their founding publisher & off they went. They couldn’t afford to pay serious money for their major contributions, which meant that they would have to focus on up-and-comers for the bulk of their content. But somebody had the ingenious thought that they could afford to interview the truly famous, since they would be paying the interviewer rather than the interviewee. Thus was the brand born.

 

In addition to spending two years in the Marines & receiving the Purple Heart in World War II, Guinzburg had been the editor of the Yale Daily News & was less than two years removed from his undergrad days when the Review started in 1952. Nine years later, he was the president of Viking Press, which he ran for 14 years, and then of Viking-Penguin, which he ran for another four. He subsequently served as a chair for the American book awards & as a consultant to Doubleday & to the Turner Broadcasting System. His current commitments, beyond the Review, include serving as Governor, Yale University Press; Director and Executive Committee Member, Citizens Committee for New York City; Vice-Chairman, The Dream Team, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; Executive Committee and Sponsor, I Have a Dream Foundation; Vice-Chairman, Council of Branch Libraries, New York Public Library; Presidents Council, Memorial Sloan-Kettering; Founding Member, Special Projects Committee, Memorial Sloan-Kettering; and Society Nominating Committee, Memorial Sloan-Kettering. He is also the former director of the American Book Publishers Council and co-chair of the Council of the New York Public Library. It would be impossible to imagine a more established – or establishment – resume in the world of letters.

 

But Guinzburg is not the sole board member to have used his days at the Review wisely in launching a career. Robert Silvers left to co-found The New York Review of Books. Like Guinzburg, he is still an active member of the board. Other former Review staffers on the board include Matthiessen, Jeanne McCulloch, now an editor with Bloomsbury Publishing, and Antonio Weiss, now a partner in Lazard, the boutique banking firm. The other board member with serious editing credentials is Terry McDonnell, managing editor of Sports Illustrated & former editor of both Esquire & Rolling Stone. A more tangential editorial role belongs to Review board secretary James Goodale, former executive vice president and general counsel of The New York Times. A famous first amendment lawyer – his 1975 article in the Hastings Law Journal is seen as the first clear articulation of the concept of the reporter’s privilege – Goodale’s legal resume is as impressive & establishmentarian as Guinzburg’s publishing one.

 

Also on the board is Drue Heinz, for whom the Drue Heinz Literary Prize at the University of Pittsburgh Press is named. Part of the Heinz catsup family, the website “Scotland’s Top 50 Powerful Women,” notes that in addition to her giving in the U.S., she has made generous bequests to the British Museum and London Library and is “close friend of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.” She is included on that website primarily because she likes to spend every August at her castle near Edinburgh.

 

Rounding out the masthead on the Review’s website are Plimpton’s widow, Sarah, new age philanthropist Bokara Legendre² and Richard Fisher, Chairman Emeritus at Morgan Stanley.

 

This is a board for a little magazine with just 5,000 subscribers? It is really more like having your own thermonuclear missile for a home burglary prevention system. One feels sorry for Brigid Hughes, who at 32 is still twenty years younger than the Review itself & has never worked anywhere else, but just how did anyone think that this sort of board would not sooner or later assert itself? One senses that the board did what Plimpton himself would have wanted them to do in putting Hughes into his slot after his death in 2003. But sooner or later this concoction of power was going to need to do something just to feel its own governing presence. Now it’s time to find an editor that matches this very different set of requirements. A lot of the rumors point toward Bill Buford, the former editor of Granta, who took a moribund review and increased its circulation into six figures without improving the content. That has a certain sense to it.

 

The Paris Review is, as I noted, a serious brand. Its interviews, especially in the early years, largely defined the form as we know it today.³ Happily, one thing the Review is now doing is putting its interviews up in PDF format on its web site. Its reputation for poetry has varied widely with its poetry editors over the years – far better in Tom Clark’s hands than in Richard Howard’s – and its reputation for fiction has, in good part, had a lot to do with the publication’s close relationship to the New York trade houses that can make somebody like Matthiessen successful.

 

But it’s really just a little magazine – in recent years, it hasn’t been able to hold a candle to Can We Have Our Ball Back or Jacket or Shampoo. Indeed, it’s barely more lively than the mausoleum of the living dead that is Poetry. How does somebody like Guinzburg, who was himself just two years out of college – albeit an older grad, complements of the War – when the Review first started, think it can reinvent itself as relevant today? I’m wagering that this is an impossible set-up. There is no way that this board can either reinvent the spark of youth underneath all the baggage that it is bringing to the table or transform the Review into something of value but altogether different (e.g. Granta for grownups). But the inertia of any object in motion is that it tends to stay in motion. At least until it hits the brick wall that is the real world. Whoo-hoo, Paris Review, full speed ahead!

 

 

¹ Amateurism was still very much a class marker in the 1950s. The whole idea of prohibiting professional involvement in certain sports was created in order to keep out those who could not otherwise afford to participate. Plimpton’s adventures as a Detroit Lion, boxer or whatever may have spoofed the phenomenon, but they were also really the last hurrah of that era in sport.

 

² Full disclosure: Legendre has served on the board of trustees of the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I served as the director of development in the 1980s. Our periods of involvement with the Institute, however, did not overlap & I’ve never met her. She has also served on the boards of Esalen, Threshold, the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and Tibet House. I suppose I should note that I have also had poetry published in The Paris Review.

 

³ Anyone who thinks that the current phenomenon of email interviews is a recent debasement of the form should look at the pastiche that is Robert Creeley’s 1968 interview.