Books The Making of a Minimalist
posted by on January 2 at 10:43 AM
The recent “Winter Fiction” issue of The New Yorker (have you heard of it? It’s terrific!) contains a story I’ve been waiting my whole life to read: “Rough Crossings,” about the hardcore-kink editorial relationship between short-story superstar Raymond Carver and his friend/mentor/editor Gordon Lish.
That Raymond Carver, American Minimalist(TM) was a two-man creation is no secret, but the (mysteriously un-bylined) New Yorker piece lays out some impressive details of the Carver-Lish alliance.
Impressive detail #1: The original manuscript for Carver’s second collection of stories—the reputation-securing What We Talk About When We Talk About Love—was cut by Lish by 40 percent (to eliminate “false lyricism and sentiment”) before publication.
Impressive detail #2: The hand of Lish in the work of Carver grew to torture the latter, with Carver spilling his guts in hysterical letters to Lish prior to the publication of the far-more-expansive-when-compared-with-What We Talk About When We Talk About Love collection Cathedral.
These gut-encrusted letters are excerpted at length in the New Yorker, which also features the original Carver version of a Lish-edited classic, and a fascinating look at the original Lish edit.
Moral: Behind every good man is another good man, and sometimes these men grow to resent each other.
It was Carver I'm pretty sure who said (paraphrase), "It's all gravy from here," in (prphrse) A New Path to the Waterfall after retiring or being diagnosed for the grim reap.
My edition has an inside cover design by that paintr who exhibits a lot in Seattle - the trippy purplish ?Mexican artist, mural pointalist Chuck Close-ish. This cover has salmon disguisedly obvious in the foreground upstream.
Kudos to Tess Gallagher for carrying on the good man's name.
Having studied with Lish I can confirm he was big on minimalism. It had its uses. He was great at separating the fat from the lean in a story, but it wasn't a method that suited every style. It worked if your work tended toward that direction, but if you were a writer who preferred a more voluptuous tone, he was not your man.
Is Gish an amalgam of Gordon Lish? Or was Lillian Gish the silent third party?
3: Neither, I'm just dumb. Fixed now.
You're right. It was a totally fascinating article. As a writer myself, I've often struggled with the problem of who deserves the kudos for a piece (when I get them), me or the editor. Obviously, the impacts I make are much less than Lish or Carver, but still, it's a problem when you get edited and the piece becomes immeasurably better.
More important though, I was totally confused by the lack of the byline on the article. What gives? I've not seen that in the NY'er before. Is it Lish? Is it just supposed to be an editorial note that got out of hand, word-count wise? Inquiring minds want to know!
The lack of a byline is indeed mysterious. Nothing on the website, nothing in the issue...weird.
Man, when I was getting my MFA in 1985-1987, Carver was THE SHIT. My fellow students and I would name all of our stories with repeated words like he did:
What I Want When I Want It was one I can remember writing back then, and my friend Brent came up with Where You Are When I Want You Here. LOL My god...
We'd even get drunk and call Brent's girlfriend Tess. I had forgotten a lot of that folderol until I read that article.
For those who care, Lish really laid down A LOT of his own original content into Carver's. It seems like too much., for my taste and I can understand why Carver -- torn between the fame the previous edits had delivered and his desire to be his own man -- was going batty.
I'm interested to know if anyone has seen edits that Perkins did on Hemingway and Fitzgerald? I think I'd just quit reading if one day I found out the close of Gatsby was written by some editor...
At any rate, Carver's work stands the test of time and his partnership with Lish was overall a positive one for the art of literature.
And from the What Goes Around, Comes Around Department:
"After a tremendous struggle, Perkins induced Wolfe to cut 90,000 words from his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929). His next, Of Time and the River (1935), was the result of a two-year battle during which Wolfe kept writing more and more pages in the face of an ultimately victorious effort by Perkins to hold the line on size. Grateful to Perkins at first for discovering him and helping him realize his potential, Wolfe later came to resent the popular perception that he owed his success to his editor. This was true in part, for without Perkins' firm hand it is unlikely that Wolfe could have been published." -- Wikipedia
So does anyone have (dare I ask?) and opinion about whether the story is better in one form or the other? Personally, I think Lish improved minor details and ruined some major aspects of the story (for example, the anecdote about the old couple goes nowhere in the Lish version).
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