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Editor's Note: Sept. 25 is the anniversary of a sad loss for The Hamptons, the death of the irreplaceable, beloved and consummate Hamptonian, George Plimpton. In September 2003, our Senior Arts & Entertainment Reporter Douglas Harrington, as the then Editor-in-Chief of the now out of print magazine The Improper Hamptionian, conducted the last interview with George Plimpton just days before his death. It was an interview that celebrated the 50th anniversary of Plimpton's greatest literary passion, The Paris Review. Plimpton died the night before the interview hit the streets. With Mr. Harrington's permission we re-print it here.

The irreplaceable, beloved, and consummate Hamptonian, George Plimpton. Photo by Christopher Felver

New York City - The Paris Review was founded by Peter Matthiessen and Harold L. Humes in the summer of 1953. It has a worldwide following of loyal readers and contributors, having weathered the onslaught of cable television, electronic media, and the era of the 60 second sound bite. Plimpton was its first editor and still remains at the helm. In celebration of this literary classic's 50th Anniversary, I interviewed George Plimpton for this, "The Writers' Issue."

Douglas MacKaye Harrington: How did it come about that Peter Matthiessen offered you the editorship of The Paris Review at the time of its founding?

George Plimpton: I am not really sure, you should probably ask him. We are old friends; we have known each other since the age of eight. I think he knew that at Harvard I was editor of the Lampoon, so I had that experience. Then of course I was studying at Cambridge, which he knew, and I had come to Paris on a spring break and we talked about the magazine then and he proposed that I come to Paris. I didn't quite know what to do with my life at that time and it seemed like a marvelous opportunity so I accepted.

DMH: I had read once that, early on, you would watch the bookstalls to see who was buying The Paris Review and you actually saw Hemingway pick it up. Is that how the Hemingway interview came about?

GP: Yes. There used to be a bookstore at the Ritz Hotel on the Place Vendôme and coming back from a wedding I saw this man buying a copy, No. 2 with a white vase on a blue cover. Sure enough, it was Mr. Hemingway. I met him in the bar afterwards and asked him if he would be interested in the interviews that we had begun running in the magazine as a regular feature. It was how he started himself, in magazines like that in Paris in the 1920s. So he had that sort of affection for small literary publications, particularly out of Paris. So he agreed, although he did not much like talking about writing, his craft.

DMH: Was Gertrude Stein still alive at the time The Paris Review started?

GP: Yes, she was. I never went to 27 Rue de Fleurus, where she lived. I think she died either that year or the next. Anyway there was no contact, unfortunately.

DMH: Was it a difficult decision to move The Paris Review out of Paris and into New York?

GP: It was all a financial decision, Paris got expensive. Printing abroad got very expensive; we printed in Holland and shipped the magazine over here. We maintained an office in Paris for a long time run by Maxine Groffsky, who lives in Wainscott and now runs a literary agency. She was the main force for keeping an office in Paris. There was a considerable correspondence between New York and her office.

DMH: That was, of course, prior to the PCs and the Internet.

GP: Yes. Even the telephone was a huge expense; she would go to Holland to oversee the printing. Finally, in 1973, she decided to come back to the States and that is when we pretty much closed up the office there. There is still a presence in Paris, Harry Matthews. Occasionally we correspond with him about something regarding the magazine.

DMH: Did you ever consider approaching the French government, considering the magazine had been founded in Paris and took its name from the city, and ask them to subsidize it?

GP: [Laughs.] No one ever thought of that for some reason. The French certainly knew about it and recognized it. I remember President Mitterand, when we had our 40th Anniversary, sent us a letter of congratulation. He was a great friend of William Styron who was one of the early founders.

DMH: Didn't Mr. Styron write the mission statement in the very first issue of The Paris Review?

GP: Yes, he did.

DMH: The Paris Review was founded as an alternative to the literary magazines at the time that seemed to be more concerned with literary criticism rather than being vehicles for the voices of new writers - fiction, poetry, etc. Is that still true today or does an unknown writer face the dreaded, "No unsolicited material accepted."

GP: No, not at all. We are constantly searching for new voices, as you put it. Every manuscript is read. So really, we hue to the same principles we did back then.

DMH: Can you explain the editorial acceptance process? I understand that there is a sofa filled basement somewhere where volunteer readers come in and consider the submissions.

GP: That is here in the apartment. I live on the East River on 72nd Street in a turn of the century, five-floor walk-up. We live on the second floor and on the first floor is a little The Paris Review office and then there is a staircase that goes down into the cellar or the boiler room, whatever one wants to call it. Down there the younger editors or readers sit and look through all the stuff that comes in, and there is a lot! There are about 20,000 manuscripts a year. A lot of that is unsolicited and a lot of it is poetry, of course. All of it is looked at.

DMH: Do you accept all genres?

GP: We publish every genre you can think of except criticism. We have never done very much in that order; we have never done reviews. It is an oddly named magazine. It no longer comes out of Paris, number one. It is not really a review, number two. It was called a review because that was the general type of literary magazine of the sort - The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, The Partisan Review. I always thought The Paris Review was a good name because I thought people might mistake it for The Partisan Review and subscribe.

DMH: What is your present circulation?

GP: We print about 15,000. A third of that is subscribers and the rest go to bookstores and stalls.

George Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, and actor and is best-remembered for his sports writing and for founding The Paris Review.

DMH: Can you pinpoint a favorite writer interview that you did personally?

GP: I suppose it would be the Hemingway interview. He only gave two in his life. The one in The Paris Review and the other was to a high school class in Ketchum.

DMH: It must have been a tremendous coup, coming so early in the history of the magazine?

GP: Indeed it was.

DMH: Can you recall the most improper piece of fiction The Paris Review ever published?

GP: Improper in which use of the term?

DMH: I don't mean in the way we use the term at The Improper Hamptonian, meaning thought provoking, as that is given with The Paris Review. Perhaps I mean scandalous.

GP: We had a terrible time publishing abroad because we had to face the Customs and the Customs was even tougher than the U.S. Mail. Every copy that came out of Paris came into the docks in New York and a man called Mr. Dempsey inspected them. He was convinced that every magazine that came in could be picked up by children. He read everything! Even a four-letter word would catch his attention and get the issue barred. For us to publish scandalous material was out of the question. I had a chance to publish part of "Lolita," but I knew it would never get by Mr. Dempsey. We had a chance to publish Henry Miller, but we knew we just couldn't do that sort of thing. Scandalous to us meant a piece of work that was so brilliant that it caused notice - something like Philip Roth's first short story that we published, "The Conversion of the Jews." It would produce the sort of stir that you are taking about, without necessarily being pornographic. Using scandalous in that way.

DMH: Of course, when The Paris Review was founded in 1953, it was at the height of the McCarthy era. Did you feel any repercussions from the House Committee on Un-American Activity?

GP: No, but I got into trouble with Congress. I published an anthology called "The American Literary Anthology" - the best work published from small publications, a little bit like the Pushcart Press. It was the best of the quarterlies. Among other works, it included a one word poem by Aram Soroyan, a calligraphic poem. The one word was "lightht." His idea was that if you put it on the page in a certain way, it would give the impression of light. For this the author, Soroyan, was paid $500 and the magazine in which it had appeared, The Chicago Review, got paid $750 of the taxpayer's money. You can imagine what a stir it caused. I was called down to try and explain this. Imagine trying to explain calligraphic poetry to a bunch of Congressmen sitting angrily at one end of the table. The National Endowment for the Arts really thought it was in terrible trouble because of this. There was also a piece by Ed Sanders, who was the Fugs poet, describing a jar of cold cream that Allen Ginsberg used to lubricate Peter Olovsky. You can imagine what a stir that caused.

DMH: With the severe conservative congressional scrutiny being placed on the NEA, I get the feeling sometimes that funding is being used as a subtle form of censorship. Do you sense that or have a fear of that at all?

GP: One year we turned down an NEA grant because there was a clause in it which bothered us. That it could lend itself to their authority. That year, although the amount was $10,000, we turned it back. Our publisher, Deborah Pease, wrote a letter that said we could not accept it unless this paragraph is removed and it indeed eventually was removed.

DMH: Let me conclude by giving you an opportunity to explain what The Paris Review Foundation is all about.

GP: Well, we sold our archives to the Morgan Library and a fund was set up. This 50th year we are having a party at Cipriani's on 42nd Street and selling seats and tables and so forth to raise money to supplement the fund. The fund is really there as a safety net for 'The Review,' so that in hard times it can continue. We hope to raise a lot of money to make that.

DMH: So The Paris Review is alive and well in its 50th year. How hands-on are you still?

GP: I sit on the floor above it, so I can't help but be hands on. It's my life, my love. There are other things, fireworks, as you may know, birds and finishing books and articles and God knows what else, but my primary fascination and love is this magazine. Peter [Matthiessen] and I joke about it. He often says in public that he destroyed my life by getting me over from Cambridge. I have thought about the other things that I might have done. At very low points in the magazine's history I have sort of slammed my fist against my head and said, "What am I doing?" I don't get paid anything. In a way that helped because it has made me go out and try and find different ways of staying alive, which has meant writing very successful books and television and movies and all that sort of stuff. It all afforded me an extraordinary life.