Why offices shouldn't go paperless: a Paris Review discovery

Sure, old file cabinets are hunks of junk, but where would the cause of literature be without them? How many times have you heard about the discovery of a writer's manuscript in an old drawer or ancient stack of yellowing paper in an office?

If it weren't for such finds, the Paris Review would've needed something else to fill Pages 148-169 of its new spring issue: These pages contain a "lost interview" with Leonard Michaels, which David Reid and Ernest Machen conducted with him in 1986 "amid the great hubbub" of Michaels' life and in spite of his reservations. The interviewers write that the interview was never published (though they don't explain why) but that a typescript was found in the Paris Review offices last year. You can read a sample of the interview for free, although it doesn't include some of his insights into the writing process, such as this one:

Interviewer: There are novelists who think that writing short stories is like painting china compared to writing novels.

Michaels: I don't know who you have in mind, but please don't tell me. It's a question of attention span, or maybe toilet training, for those novelists. Maybe they assume that a character is, like themselves, capable of astounding concentration on a subject, unrelieved for years and years. From early to late, in a seven-hundred-page work, their hero goes on and on, disburdening himself of a sentiment of being and a vision of the world as if, at the end, he will be congratulated by his mother. I've never met anyone, except for people who are profoundly depressed or trapped in some neurosis, who exhibited a novelistic consistency. Usually they can't remember where they were or what they did last week.

Of course it's surly: It's Michaels! This interview is a welcome, unexpected invitation to reconsider an important writer's work. Hard to believe it's more than 20 years old. Sounds like it was recorded yesterday. Thank goodness for that file cabinet.

Nick Owchar

Photo credit: UCR /California Museum of Photography