Part 2 (Obituaries) - King's College - University of Cambridge

182
OBITUARIES
after finishing at Harvard, to come up to King’s for two years on the GI Bill.
He read English, supervised by Dadie Rylands. Already both athlete and
aesthete, he was a member of both Chetwynd Society and Ten Club.
When he went down George started his literary career in Paris by founding
the quarterly called The Paris Review. On the night he died, its 50th-anniversary
issue had just been sent to the printers.Throughout its life George had edited
and fostered it from his apartment in New York overlooking the East River.
He promoted the series of extended interviews, now famous, beginning with
E M Forster and Ernest Hemingway. Later there were interviews with A S
Byatt, T S Eliot, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Vladimir Nabokov, Ezra Pound
and many others. A series of anthologies of the interviews has helped a
multitude of aspiring writers; The Writer’s Chapbook contained his own
compendium. It was the journal that helped to launch Jack Kerouac, V S
Naipaul, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Jay McInerney and Jeffrey Eugenides.
George later turned his hand to oral biographies, which featured Robert F
Kennedy and most recentlyTruman Capote. His eclectic output also included
The Rabbit’s Umbrella for children.
George is known better in the USA than in this country for his particular form
of “participatory journalism”, which is sometimes referred to as giving the
Walter Mitty view of sport. But that is a misnomer, because Walter Mitty was
a fantasist, while George did it for real; and whereas Walter Mitty always
triumphed, George’s opponents were so superior that he inevitably lost.
Playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions produced Paper Lion, perhaps his most
long-lasting book. Pitching at some of the best batters in the USA yielded Out
of My League. Boxing three rounds with Archie Moore, then light-heavyweight
champion of the world, before the whole of socialite New York resulted in
Shadow Box. Golf with Sam Snead produced The Bogeyman.Then there was tennis
with Pancho Gonzalez, motor racing with Jackie Stewart, goalkeeping to Pele,
basketball with the Celtics and goalstop for the Boston Bruins. Many such
encounters inspired articles for Sports Illustrated, for whom he wrote for almost
50 years. One such article started as an April Fools’ Day spoof but ended as the
book called The Curious Case of Sidd Finch. It concerned a Buddhist pitcher capable
of delivering a fastball of 168 mph. He had many believers.