on Gordon Lish

Apparently, this week (or maybe last week; I'm having a hard time keeping up with the newspaper these days, much less online media), is "Fall Fiction Week" at Slate. One of the features there is Gerald Howard's reminiscence on editing Gordon Lish. Howard notes Lish's somewhat famous "slash and burn handiwork" (which as far as I'm concerned is what made Raymond Carver readable; it's inconceivable to me how anyone could prefer the sentimental ramblings of "A Small, Good Thing" to "The Bath"), and describes working with Lish (when Howard was an editor at Norton) on the publication of Lish's infamous novel My Romance. The essay doesn't really offer much of interest—a broad recounting of Lish's editorial influence at Esquire and in the classroom (Lish's work for Knopf gets but one passing mention, and The Quarterly none at all), along with the contention that Lish himself exhibited "control-freak obsessiveness," as evidenced by his desires to write his own jacket copy, choose the art director for the cover of his book, and oversee the typography of the novel—the horror! a writer who cares about the public presentation of his work!—as well as by his lawsuit against Harper's for their publication of a letter to his writing students.

I suppose Howard's brief background on what Lish meant to fiction is necessary for many readers, given that Lish's public profile is now far diminished from what it was from the 1970s through the 1990s, but to fail to include The Quarterly as part of that discussion, or to limit the discussion of the writers Lish edited to those such as Carver, Joy Williams, Cynthia Ozick, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison seems to ignore much of Lish's importance today. The Quarterly was, for my money, the literary magazine that mattered most in the late 1980s and early-to-mid-1990s, and though the writers Lish was publishing at that time—Diane Williams, Noy Holland, Ben Marcus, Yannick Murphy, Christine Schutt, Victoria Redel, Jason Schwartz, Dawn Raffel, Brian Evenson, Gary Lutz, Mark Richard, et. al.—never achieved the widespread commercial/critical reputation of some of Lish's earlier writers, they have certainly been more important to me and to a new generation of writers (even if only as an unrecognized, trickledown influence) than, e.g., Carver. (Though Robison, Hempel, and Hannah are indeed high on my list.)

Howard contends that the failure of My Romance came about because

by 1992 [Lish] had made himself into such a figure of controversy and a target for mockery that bookstores ordered the book in meager quantities and only a couple of critics allowed themselves to be captivated by what I felt—and still feel—was its nervy brilliance.

"Nervy brilliance" aside (I read My Romance over ten years ago, and though I admired it in some ways, don't retain a detailed enough memory of it to offer any specific criticism), I highly doubt that bookstore owners and book buyers were aware of Lish as a "target for mockery," though some reviewers assuredly were. And since when is "controversy" not a selling point? The fact that My Romance sold in the neighborhood of five hundred copies ("That is not just bad; that is pathetic," Howard claims) tells us less about Lish's personality and more about the fact that a novel that is essentially a transcription of an improvised speech to a writers' conference is going to appeal only to the bravest readers of fiction. Howard says that he chose to describe Lish's novel, in the jacket copy, as akin to "a Charlie Parker solo." This representation may be accurate, but hardly strikes me as an ideal way to market a novel: few readers, I imagine, want to read 150-odd pages of improvisation, even when that improvisation is stylized and controlled, just as few people would want to listen to solo saxophone at similar duration. (I recall best about My Romance the narrator's asides concerning his diminishing audience as the book went on.)

Fiction that demands from its readers patience, a willingness to read on in the face of ambiguity; fiction that frustrates or challenges a reader's narrative or generic expectations; and fiction that is less interested in amateur psychologizing than the usual "realist" fiction: this sort of work, with a few exceptions, is rarely going to receive either a generous or an immediate reception in the marketplace, dominated as it is by a conception of fiction as simply another form of consumable entertainment, and in which the "literary" fiction of the twenty-first century still looks much like that of the nineteenth century, the so-called new merely the old repackaged. As an editor, at least, Gordon Lish generally delivered readers a new new.