Bill Styron, "Letter to an Editor"

A modo de comienzo, un extracto de la correspondencia entre William Styron y los fundadores de The Paris Review, en sus albores:

The preface which you all wanted me to write, and which I wanted to write, and finally wrote, came back to me from Paris today so marvelously changed and re-worded that it seemed hardly mine. Actually, you know, it shouldn’t be mine. Prefaces are usually communal enterprises and they have a stern dull quality of group effort about them –of Manifesto, Proclamation of Aims, of “Where We Stand”– of editors huddled together in the smoke-laden, red-eyed hours of early morning, pruning and balancing syntax, juggling terms and, because each editor is an individual with different ideas, often compromising away all those careless personal words that make an individualistic statement exciting, or at least interesting.

En: The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, The Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953, Nueva York, Picador, 2003, con el que celebra los 50 añitos de revista, y que podéis encontrar aquí: http://us.macmillan.com/theparisreviewbook-1