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A review by bunnieslikediamonds
The Paris Review Interviews, I: 16 Celebrated Interviews by The Paris Review
5.0
A wonderful collection of The Paris Review interviews, with all the greats from Hemingway and Capote to Parker and Vonnegut. Some give you insight into the writer's creative process, others tell you interesting facts about their lives. All are intelligent and entertaining. Reading the irreverent interview with Rebecca West is the most fun I've had in a while. Selected quotes:
On T.S. Eliot: "Goodness! T. S. Eliot, whom I didn’t like a bit? He was a poseur. He was married to this woman who was very pretty. My husband and I were asked to see them, and my husband roamed around the flat and there were endless photographs of T. S. Eliot and bits of his poetry done in embroidery by pious American ladies, and only one picture of his wife, and that was when she was getting married. Henry pointed it out to me and said, “I don’t think I like that man.”"
On Somerset Maugham: "He couldn’t write for toffee, bless his heart. He wrote conventional short stories, much inferior to the work of other people. But they were much better than his plays, which were too frightful. He was an extremely interesting man, though, not a bit clever or cold or cynical. I know of many affectionate things he did. He had a great capacity for falling in love with the wrong people."
On Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden: "Somebody told me I ought to read a wonderful thing about how a family of children buried Mum in a cellar under concrete and she began to smell. But that’s the sole point of the story. Mum just smells. That’s all that happens. It is not enough."
On Yeats: "He boomed at you like a foghorn."
She also says all sorts of nice and generous things about people, but those aren't as much fun to repeat.
All interviews (I think) can be found at http://www.theparisreview.org/.
On T.S. Eliot: "Goodness! T. S. Eliot, whom I didn’t like a bit? He was a poseur. He was married to this woman who was very pretty. My husband and I were asked to see them, and my husband roamed around the flat and there were endless photographs of T. S. Eliot and bits of his poetry done in embroidery by pious American ladies, and only one picture of his wife, and that was when she was getting married. Henry pointed it out to me and said, “I don’t think I like that man.”"
On Somerset Maugham: "He couldn’t write for toffee, bless his heart. He wrote conventional short stories, much inferior to the work of other people. But they were much better than his plays, which were too frightful. He was an extremely interesting man, though, not a bit clever or cold or cynical. I know of many affectionate things he did. He had a great capacity for falling in love with the wrong people."
On Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden: "Somebody told me I ought to read a wonderful thing about how a family of children buried Mum in a cellar under concrete and she began to smell. But that’s the sole point of the story. Mum just smells. That’s all that happens. It is not enough."
On Yeats: "He boomed at you like a foghorn."
She also says all sorts of nice and generous things about people, but those aren't as much fun to repeat.
All interviews (I think) can be found at http://www.theparisreview.org/.