David Brendel - An Editor’s Burial: Journals and Journalism from the New Yorker and Other Magazines

(Or: Missing Something Left Behind)

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
WES ANDERSON AND SUSAN MORRISON

susan : Your movie The French Dispatch is a series of stories that are meant to be the articles in one issue of a magazine published by an American in Paris. When you were dreaming up the film, did you start with the character of Arthur Howitzer, Jr., the editor, or did you start with the stories?

wes : I read an interview with Tom Stoppard once where he said he began to realizeas people asked him over the years where the idea for one play or another came fromthat it seems to have always been two different ideas for two different plays that he sort of smooshed together. Its never one idea. Its two. The French Dispatch might be three.

The first idea: I wanted to do an anthology movie. Just in general, an omnibus-type collection, without any specific stories in mind. (The two I love maybe the most: The Gold of Naples by de Sica and Le Plaisir by Max Ophuls.)

The second idea: I always wanted to make a movie about The New Yorker. The French magazine in the film obviously is not The New Yorkerbut it was, I think, totally inspired by it. When I was in 11th grade, my homeroom was in the school library, and I sat in a chair where I had my back to everybody else, and I faced a wooden rack of what they labeled periodicals. One had drawings on the cover. That was unusual. I think the first story I read was by Ved Mehta. Letter from Delhi. I thought, I have no idea what this is, but Im interested. But what I was most interested in were the short stories, because back then, I thought that was what I wanted to dofiction. Write stories and novels and so on. When I went to the University of Texas in Austin, I used to look at old bound volumes of The New Yorker in the library, because you could find things like a J.D. Salinger story that had never been collected. Then I somehow managed to find out that UC Berkeley was getting rid of a set, forty years of bound New Yorkers, and I bought them for $600. I would also have my own new subscription copies bound (which is actually not a good way to preserve them). When the magazine put the whole archive online, I stopped paying to bind mine. But I still keep them. I have most every issue starting in the 1940s. Later, I found myself reading various writers accounts of life at The New YorkerBrendan Gill, James Thurber, Ben Yagodaand I got caught up in the whole aura of the thing. I also met Lillian Ross (with you), who, as we know, wrote about Truffaut and Hemingway and Chaplin for the magazine and was very close to Salinger, and so on and so forth.

The third idea: a French movie. I want to do one of those. An anthology, The New Yorker, and French. Three very broad notions. I think it sort of turned into a movie about what my friend and co-writer Hugo Guinness calls reverse emigration. He thinks Americans who go to Europe are reverse emigrating.

susan : When I saw the movie, I told you how much Lillian Ross, who died a couple of years ago, would have liked it. You said that Lillians first reaction would have been to demand, Why France?

wes : Well, Ive had an apartment in Paris for I dont know how many years. Ive reverse emigrated. And in Paris, any time I walk down a street I dont know well, its like going to the movies. Its just entertaining. Theres also a sort of isolation living abroad, which can be good or it can be bad. It can be lonely, certainly. But youre also always on a kind of adventure, which can be inspiring.

susan : Harold Ross, The New Yorkers founding editor, was famous for saying that the history of New York is always written by out-of-towners. When youre out of your element, or in another country, you have a different perspective. Its as if a pilot light is always on.

wes : Yes! The pilot light is always on.

susan : In a foreign country, even just going into a hardware store can be like going to a museum.

wes : Buying a light bulb.

susan : Arthur Howitzer, Jr., the editor played by Bill Murray, gathers the best writers of his generation to staff his magazine, in Paris. Theyre all expatriates, like you. In this book, youve gathered the best New Yorker writers, many of whom lived as expatriates in Paris. There is a line in the movie: He received an Editors Burial, and several of the pieces in this book are obituaries of Harold Ross.

wes : Howitzer is based on Harold Ross, with a little bit of William Shawn, the magazines second editor, thrown in. Although they dont really go together particularly. Ross had a great feeling for writers. It isnt exactly respect. He values them, but he also thinks theyre lunatic children who have to be sort of manipulated or coddled. Whereas Shawn seems to have been the most gentle, respectful, encouraging master you could ever wish to have. We tried to mix in some of that.

susan : Both Ross and Shawn came from the Midwest; Howitzer is from Liberty, Kansas, right in the middle of America. He moves to France, to find himself, in a way, and he ends up creating a magazine that brings the world to Kansas.

wes : Originally, we were calling the editor character Liebling, not Howitzer, because the face I always pictured was A.J. Lieblings. We tried to make Bill Murray sort of look like him, I think. Remember, he says he tricked his father into paying for his early sojourn in Paris by telling him he was thinking of marrying a good woman who was ten years older than he, although Mother might think she is a bit fast

susan : There are lots of similarities between your Howitzer and Ross. Howitzer has a sign in his office that says, No crying. Ross made sure that there was no humming or singing or whistling in the office.

wes : They share a general grumpiness. What Thurber called Rosss God-how-I-pity-me! moods.

susan : But you see a little bit of Shawn in Howitzer, as you mentioned. Shawn was formal and decorous, in contrast to Rosss bluster. In the movie, when Howitzer tells the writer Herbsaint Sazerac, who Owen Wilson plays, that his article is too seedy for decent people, thats very Shawn.

wes : I think that might be Ross, too! He was a prude, they say. For someone who could be extremely vulgar.

susan : In Thurbers book The Years with Ross, which is excerpted here, theres a funny part where Ross complains about a writer trying to sneak in a reference to menstruation, by having a woman character use the code phrase I fell off the roof. Id never heard that euphemism! I had to look it up.

wes : We cant have that in the magazine.

susan : Thurber also compared him to a sleepless, apprehensive sea captain pacing the bridge, expecting any minute to run aground and collide with something nameless in a sudden fog. You publishing a collection of stories as a companion piece to a movie feels like a literary version of a soundtrack. You can read this book the way you might read E.M. Forster before taking a trip to Florence. What made you decide to put this together?