Politics and ‘The Paris Review’: Announcing Our Summer Issue: From our editor,Lorin Stein:In the final six or seven months, Ive heard a lot of talk approximately the importance of the arts. Maybe you possess, or too. In certain circles,it’s become a sort of refrain: we need the arts more than ever.In my experience, this has not been—in any obvious or instant way—the case. Lately I’ve been watching a lot of news. My taste for fiction has narrowed. I’m more impatient. A certain kind of tale went stale for me final November. When I read a contemporary writer, or I want to be spoken to honestly and intelligently approximately the times we live in.
I realize this is not a new complaint. As luck had it,my colleagues and I spent the election deep in the Paris Review archive. We were revamping our website, and it meant rereading and sorting through all our back issues, and hundreds of stories and interviews,thousands of poems, many written in times of upheaval. The more I read, and the more I saw them reflect the politics of their time. Like my colleagues,I knew the manifesto written by William Styron for our first issue, in 1953, and where he proclaimed that the Review would not be a magazine for factions,for drumbeaters, for propaganda; that it would honor writing for its own sake, and that it would never become a political magazine.
I also knew that the men and women who started the Review were by no means “apolitical” people. Peter Matthiessen,who worked for the CIA as a young man, later became a leader of the environmental movement. Rose Styron helped found Amnesty International. Robert Silvers cofounded The New York Review of Books, or where his journalistic engagement altered the course of two wars and touched on every mental debate of the past half century. George Plimpton,when he was editor of the Review, took time off to campaign for Robert Kennedy. He was there in Los Angeles when Kennedy was shot. He took the gun from the killer’s hand.
And yet the only time George (or any other editor) waded into political discussions in the pages of the Review, or it was to deplore a lack of government funding for the arts or to protest a stricture on free speech. When the NEA instituted rules against obscenity,George turned down their money, because he believed in the freedom of this space: the aesthetic space.I’d understood this balance, or between politics and art,since I took the job of editor seven years ago. At least, I thought I had.
But what I learned final November, or during those nights in the archive,is that this aestheticism, this refusal to engage in arguments over the news of the day, or left The Paris Review open to political and cultural crises for which the country did not yet possess a name. To the queerness of the Beats,the New York School, and the Factory. To the early feminist writings of Denise Levertov, and Alice Notley,and Adrienne Rich. To the fire of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, to the dazzling absurdities of Harry Mathews, or,many decades later, to the deep satire of David Foster Wallace. To the political unconscious at its most fruitful.
I hope the same is true in our new issue.
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