Conversations with Gordon Lish

David Winters, Jason Lucarelli, David Winters, Jason Lucarelli

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781496816269
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Journalistische Biographien

Known as "Captain Fiction, " Gordon Lish (b. 1934) is among the most influential--and controversial--figures in modern American letters. As an editor at Esquire (1969-1977), Alfred A. Knopf (1977-1994), and The Quarterly (1987-1995) and as a teacher both in and outside the university system, he has worked closely with many of the most pioneering writers of recent times, including Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, Sam Lipsyte, and Ben Marcus. A prolific author of stories and novels, Lish has also won a cult following for his own fiction, earning comparisons with Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett. Conversations with Gordon Lish collects all of Lish's major interviews, covering the entire span of his extraordinary career. Ranging from 1965 to 2015, these interviews document his pivotal role in the period's defining developments: the impact of the Californian counterculture, the rise and decline of so-called literary "minimalism, " dramatic transformations in book and magazine publishing, and the ongoing growth of creative writing instruction. Over time, Lish--a self-described "dynamic conversationalist"-- forges an evolving conversation not only with his interviewers, but with the central trends of twentieth-century literary history.
This book will be essential reading not only for students and fans of contemporary fiction, but for writers too: included are several interviews in which Lish discusses his legendary writing classes. Indeed, these pieces themselves amount to a masterclass in Lishian literary language--each is a work of art in its own right.

A Conversation with Gordon Lish

Rob Trucks / 1996

From The Pleasure of Influence: Conversations with American Male Fiction Writers (Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2002), pp. 89–123. © 2002 Purdue University Press. Reprinted by permission.

This interview was conducted in 1996 and published in 2002.

“I believe that we all want to stick out in the world,” Gordon Lish once said, “that the least of us has a profound impulse to distinguish himself from everyone else.” “Sticking out” is the least of Gordon Lish’s accomplishments. He is a near-mythic figure within New York literary circles as the most visible teacher and editor of American writing in the past thirty years.

Lish worked as an editor at Esquire and Knopf and was founding editor of The Quarterly. He taught at Yale and Columbia before taking his fiction workshops private, and several articles have referred to him as “the most sought after, most expensive” writing teacher in the nation.

As a fiction writer, Lish has published several books, most notably, Dear Mr. Capote and Peru as well as Epigraph, released just prior to this discussion. In the previous year Lish had signed an agreement with New York publishing house Four Walls Eight Windows to publish his new fiction, as well as revised editions of his earlier books.

This interview attempts to focus attention on Gordon Lish’s writing rather than his other exploits. We met at the offices of The Quarterly on Manhattan’s East Side in December of 1996 and, not surprisingly, talked for some time of writers and writing before the tape recorder was turned on.

Rob Trucks: You’ve done many interviews that have focused on your role as an editor and a teacher, and those roles can’t be ignored in this conversation, but I would like to, as much as possible, focus this discussion on your writing.

Gordon Lish: Rob, I’m delighted that’s the case. I’m all too often, I think, made to make responses in respect of my having edited and taught. In both of which instances I’m probably as despised as I am as a writer. I mean, it doesn’t really matter. I’m not going to do any better in this category, but it’s refreshing anyway. It’s new.

Q: Your influence as an editor and a teacher has been well documented, but what writers have had an influence on your own work?

A: I think if I were to speak to the question of writers that have influenced me, it would be convenient to deflect the force of the question by citing philosophers I read who have, in fact, influenced me enormously, and I cite one of them, in fact, in the novel that brought you to my doorstep, Epigraph, which is to say Julia Kristeva with specific respect to her book Powers of Horror. But it’s fiction writers that you’re looking for.

Q: Not necessarily. Kristeva’s obviously important and I’m certainly curious as to her influence. You mention her as far back as Zimzum, and she has the epigraph to Epigraph.

A: I want to make it very clear that her fiction has not amused me in any kind of way, but I’m able to read it. But, of course, I wouldn’t even attempt to read it given that I would have to then be reading into English and I’m willing to take the view that any writing of any prospect of making its way with me would have to have been done in English. The kinds of things I’m looking for in a piece of writing can only have been put there by somebody writing in English, or writing in American English.

I read and reread Gilles Deleuze’s Thousand Plateaus. I read everything I can by Deleuze and Guattari. Giorgio Agamben I’ve read all of and reread and am rereading now. That would be true of at least two Kristeva titles, Powers of Horror and Strangers to Ourselves. I think I’ve read that one three times. I’ve read all of Bloom several times. That is to say, I’m not interested in Bloom, the critic, but Bloom, the theoretician, yes. I’ve read all of Donoghue. I don’t think there’s anybody writing English sentences that produces better ones than Donoghue.

Q: The authors that you mentioned, except for Bloom and Donoghue, all write in other languages, yet you said that you were only interested in American fiction writers. That rule obviously doesn’t apply to philosophy.

A: Yes, all are in translation with the sole exception of Bloom and Donoghue.

Among fiction writers, living fiction writers, none would be more immediately retrieved by me across that paddle of responses that would count more than DeLillo, surely. And then secondarily, Ozick. I would be a liar if I were to fail to remark the affection that I have had for certain of Harold Brodkey’s short pieces, so called. As he himself was given defensively to observe, not all that short. I rather imagine that certain of Brodkey’s short pieces probably surpass, in magnitude, my own novels, thinking of “Largely an Oral History of My Mother,” of the story “S. L.”

These pieces, incidentally, appeared, and one wants to underscore this observation, for malicious reasons, in The New Yorker, under the editorship of Bill Shawn. One wonders if The New Yorker, by implication I suppose my observations suggest, would publish such work now. I know they were happy and delighted to publish Brodkey’s pieces on his dying of AIDS, which I didn’t think quite fit the bill for me.

But in any case, I read Brodkey’s novel, A Party of Animals, in manuscript, over the course of one night, starting as soon as I got home from my office, having been given the manuscript by Bob Gottlieb, not by Brodkey, whose editor I was officially at the time, and the gist of that is that Brodkey’s delivering his manuscript to Gottlieb was his way of severing relations with me, although later on he elected to repair that severance. Not all that effectively certainly, and not in a way that would interest us here. But the point is that I took the manuscript home that night, started reading it about seven and, despite the distractions of family life, stayed with it, I suppose, pretty incessantly until ten in the morning, having completed the reading of well over a thousand pages and coming to the view that this was the surpassing novel by an American of the century.

I would now amend that view, holding Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian for that post, for that distinction, if my reading of these things has any value at all.

You’re speaking to me on a day when I feel myself rather more vacant from myself than I have ordinarily felt, but each day I’m getting the sense of my losing my purchase on that personality that I had sought so hard to disguise myself within and to present myself under the auspices of, and I don’t do that anymore, or I’m losing my grasp on that presentation of myself, and I’m willing to therefore offer, with my comments, the ironic interpretation that they may be completely without value. I mean, everybody else may come to that view, but I know I have come more and more, certainly, to that view.

But anyhow, “influence” is a considerable word and requires every kind of examination, and one does not want to give it, but in an “in my face” or “in your face” kind of way, Brodkey’s fictions and DeLillo’s fictions and Ozick’s fictions and McCarthy, with particular respect to that book Blood Meridian and alternatively Outer Dark, I find them unbudgeable acmes of expression in the language and cannot claim, as distant as my work may seem from any of the aforementioned, that they are not, to a greater extent than anything else I might posit, on my mind as I write. Is this work, in its appetite, rather to say its absence of appetite, does it make a legitimate claim to a place in the national literature alongside a Blood Meridian? That’s a most disturbing question.

What I’m trying to get at is that what I want from my own activities as a writer is, to put it plainest, everything. What I want is some kind of sufficiency in reply to the incommensurable insult of death. I want everything from the page and reckon that, even though my everything may be an entirely different coloration than McCarthy’s everything, there is an absolutism, or ultimacy, in which these artifacts can be measured, one to the other. To find oneself insufficient in the face of that, insufficient in the face of DeLillo’s 1,414-page manuscript for the novel Underworld or DeLillo’s Mao II, which I’ve just read for the fourth time, it is distracting at the very least.

Is it disabling? Not quite disabling. So it appears because I continue to scribble away, and not without, I beg you to believe, the intention that the mark made by those works will be competitive. I don’t wish to make the claim that my aims exist apart from what is also in that category. I’m not willing to say that I write for myself. I’m not willing to say I write for God. I’m not willing to say I write without a great concern to see the work translated into time and space and therefore occupying, maybe not making, a place for itself with other works that have made themselves.

I don’t think I will ever, given on the one hand the terms of my ambitions and on the other hand the terms of my limitations, however much I may believe absolutely in the Swinburnian notion that one stands on his limitation, one stands on his limitude, and in standing on his limitude, one shall be as lavish as one requires. It’s only from standing on one’s limitude that one can achieve that absolute lavishness. Despite all that, I’m not disabled but am much dismayed to reckon with my failing limitations, my failing powers to face my limitations, as measured against the acmes that I’ve remarked: DeLillo, Brodkey, McCarthy, and Ozick.

Q: What is your greatest limitation as a writer?

A: I’m a small man. I believe that the body is continuous with the sentence at its best. I don’t have the stamina, the physical strength to produce the kind of text that persons in better possession of their bodies would have.

You know, my friend DeLillo can get out and run six miles. He’s not as big a man as Brodkey is or as Cormac McCarthy is. I’ve seen McCarthy and he’s a fairly sizable fellow. There’s something to it, in my judgment. How does this speak to the matter of gender I immediately am made to wonder, but we’re not going to engage that topic, I do hope. But I can make the claim for myself that my body precedes me out of the page, and with all the vicissitudes that have always interfered with its translation into what’s exterior, my having had disfiguring skin disease all my life, my having been a little guy, and therefore extremely, extremely dexterous in beating big guys in games until I got to a certain age when bigness mattered more than skill mattered, more than adroitness mattered, or deftness mattered.

What I think is my defect now, as I’m able to examine my experience as a writer now, is that I’ve passed that point where mere adroitness, mere deftness will do, and massiveness, size, bulk, and all of the vulgarity of that notion is certainly the ground on which I hold myself to failure. And the work will always fail on account of that.

Q: Then wouldn’t logic argue that your earlier writings, when you were likely in better physical shape, come closer to the vibrancy, the absolute you’re trying to achieve?

A: It doesn’t. I’ve looked at it. I’ve had the luck, under the agreement made with Four Walls, to look at the early work and revise the hell out of it, and I know I’m infinitely more able now than I was then, but that ability is all craft. It’s not desire.

Q: The ability is deftness?

A: That’s what it is. It’s just adroitness. I know the moves now. I know how to make it down the court and elude those who would interfere with me, but whether I can make the kind of score that I wanted to make, that I set out to make, producing on the page the vision that brought about the impulse, that’s another question entirely.

My physical response to Blood Meridian is, “Gee, that’s my kind of stuff.” That’s wall to wall my kind of stuff, and I would be competent of being driven by a notion like that but absolutely incompetent of bringing it to bear, bringing it into any kind of compositional reality. I couldn’t do it. And if I produced five hundred pages of that, I’d probably end up reducing it to fifty pages.

Q: But the fact is that Blood Meridian is beyond the capabilities of ninety-nine percent of us. Is it a sin that neither you nor I will produce a Blood Meridian?

A: It is, Rob. It is. For me, it is. If we take the view that the only reason to do this is to somehow make a reply, make a reasonable reply to the unreasonable character of existence, to time, because that’s what animates me, then we’re in the realm of ultimate matters. We’re in the realm of absolute matters, and it’s precisely that McCarthy does what ninety-nine percent cannot do that makes it the only thing to be done. It’s necessity itself to somehow seek to surpass McCarthy.

Q: Doesn’t that take us too far into the realm of competition?

A: It’s all about competition. I’m all about competition. The horror of that is, since I invoke that, it’s precisely that view that undoes me. If I could take a more libertarian view about myself, if I could be more forgiving, if I could say, “Well, there’s a kind of thing that I do and it’s forgivable if I do that kind of thing as well as I am able,” I’m left entirely dissatisfied with the experience. It isn’t enough for me. I’m the kind of person who if I come to the shopping mall, when the sign says, “Something for Everybody,” I immediately want to rewrite that, to revise the statement to read, “Everything for Gordon.” And that’s the kind of shopping mall I want to be in.

Q: But aren’t we doomed for failure if we realized at the outset that we cannot achieve Blood Meridian?

A: But somebody did. But somebody did, you see. Somebody did. A man did it. Somebody wrote Moby Dick, one has to remind oneself.

Q: But isn’t there pleasure in achieving as absolute a work of fiction as you yourself are capable of?

A: Only defeat. Only defeat because it is, again, the affirmation of nature, of time that you are not enough. You are not sufficient. You are defective through and through. You die. No, it is not acceptable to me that I be served up my portion since the receipts that I will eventually be given by time exceed my portion. All shall be taken from me, and I need all right now.

I want all the women. I can recall when I was twelve, thirteen years old having the view that the only prospect that was reasonable would be that I would bed all the women. I don’t know what this meant to me at age twelve and thirteen. I know that there was a joke that was commonly about in those days about a guy that was whacked out who had precisely the same vision. But I’ve been locked up twice and probably not for trying to bed all the women but for having notions that it was a doable thing.

I continue at age almost sixty-three to feel that it’s a kind of no-option situation since my construction of life is a sort of no-option situation. Nevertheless, given the alibi of psychopathology, I’m not daunted by this. I mean, I’m not daunted by the absolute numbers...