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. 89ā123. Ā© 2002 Purdue University Press. Reprinted by permission.
This interview was conducted in 1996 and published in 2002.
āI believe that we all want to stick out in the world,ā Gordon Lish once said, āthat the least of us has a profound impulse to distinguish himself from everyone else.ā āSticking outā is the least of Gordon Lishās 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 āthe most sought after, most expensiveā 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 Lishās writing rather than his other exploits. We met at the offices of The Quarterly on Manhattanās 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: Youāve done many interviews that have focused on your role as an editor and a teacher, and those roles canāt be ignored in this conversation, but I would like to, as much as possible, focus this discussion on your writing.
Gordon Lish: Rob, Iām delighted thatās the case. Iām all too often, I think, made to make responses in respect of my having edited and taught. In both of which instances Iām probably as despised as I am as a writer. I mean, it doesnāt really matter. Iām not going to do any better in this category, but itās refreshing anyway. Itās 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 itās fiction writers that youāre looking for.
Q: Not necessarily. Kristevaās obviously important and Iām 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 Iām able to read it. But, of course, I wouldnāt even attempt to read it given that I would have to then be reading into English and Iām 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 Iām 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 Deleuzeās Thousand Plateaus. I read everything I can by Deleuze and Guattari. Giorgio Agamben Iāve 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 Iāve read that one three times. Iāve read all of Bloom several times. That is to say, Iām not interested in Bloom, the critic, but Bloom, the theoretician, yes. Iāve read all of Donoghue. I donāt think thereās 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 doesnāt 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 Brodkeyās short pieces, so called. As he himself was given defensively to observe, not all that short. I rather imagine that certain of Brodkeyās short pieces probably surpass, in magnitude, my own novels, thinking of āLargely an Oral History of My Mother,ā of the story āS. L.ā
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 Brodkeyās pieces on his dying of AIDS, which I didnāt think quite fit the bill for me.
But in any case, I read Brodkeyās 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 Brodkeyās 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 McCarthyās Blood Meridian for that post, for that distinction, if my reading of these things has any value at all.
Youāre speaking to me on a day when I feel myself rather more vacant from myself than I have ordinarily felt, but each day Iām 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 donāt do that anymore, or Iām losing my grasp on that presentation of myself, and Iām 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, āinfluenceā is a considerable word and requires every kind of examination, and one does not want to give it, but in an āin my faceā or āin your faceā kind of way, Brodkeyās fictions and DeLilloās fictions and Ozickās 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? Thatās a most disturbing question.
What Iām 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 McCarthyās 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 DeLilloās 1,414-page manuscript for the novel Underworld or DeLilloās Mao II, which Iāve 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 donāt wish to make the claim that my aims exist apart from what is also in that category. Iām not willing to say that I write for myself. Iām not willing to say I write for God. Iām 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 donāt 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. Itās only from standing on oneās limitude that one can achieve that absolute lavishness. Despite all that, Iām 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 Iāve remarked: DeLillo, Brodkey, McCarthy, and Ozick.
Q: What is your greatest limitation as a writer?
A: Iām a small man. I believe that the body is continuous with the sentence at its best. I donāt 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. Heās not as big a man as Brodkey is or as Cormac McCarthy is. Iāve seen McCarthy and heās a fairly sizable fellow. Thereās something to it, in my judgment. How does this speak to the matter of gender I immediately am made to wonder, but weāre 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 whatās 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 Iām able to examine my experience as a writer now, is that Iāve 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 wouldnāt logic argue that your earlier writings, when you were likely in better physical shape, come closer to the vibrancy, the absolute youāre trying to achieve?
A: It doesnāt. Iāve looked at it. Iāve 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 Iām infinitely more able now than I was then, but that ability is all craft. Itās not desire.
Q: The ability is deftness?
A: Thatās what it is. Itās 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, thatās another question entirely.
My physical response to Blood Meridian is, āGee, thatās my kind of stuff.ā Thatās 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 couldnāt do it. And if I produced five hundred pages of that, Iād 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 thatās what animates me, then weāre in the realm of ultimate matters. Weāre in the realm of absolute matters, and itās precisely that McCarthy does what ninety-nine percent cannot do that makes it the only thing to be done. Itās necessity itself to somehow seek to surpass McCarthy.
Q: Doesnāt that take us too far into the realm of competition?
A: Itās all about competition. Iām all about competition. The horror of that is, since I invoke that, itās 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, āWell, thereās a kind of thing that I do and itās forgivable if I do that kind of thing as well as I am able,ā Iām left entirely dissatisfied with the experience. It isnāt enough for me. Iām the kind of person who if I come to the shopping mall, when the sign says, āSomething for Everybody,ā I immediately want to rewrite that, to revise the statement to read, āEverything for Gordon.ā And thatās the kind of shopping mall I want to be in.
Q: But arenāt 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 isnāt 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 donāt 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 Iāve 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 itās a kind of no-option situation since my construction of life is a sort of no-option situation. Nevertheless, given the alibi of psychopathology, Iām not daunted by this. I mean, Iām not daunted by the absolute numbers...