Tag: Gordon Lish

A Gordon Lish Sentence That Cracked Me Up

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Today, I listened to Iambik’s audiobook version of Collected Fictions, a selection of stories written and read by the inimitable Gordon Lish. Lish reads a few choice stories from four of his volumes in a wry, gruff tone; he’s got a wonderful rhythmic style, and he pauses to reflect on some of the selections before and after reading them. I’ll give the volume a proper review down the line, but I wanted to share a passage–a long sentence, really—that made me laugh out loud from the story “Mr. Goldbaum,” from the 1988 collection Mourner at the Door. I actually own Mourner at the Door, and had read “Mr. Goldbaum” sometime earlier this year or last year, but I don’t remember it being nearly as funny or touching. Must be Lish’s delivery. Anyway, the Lishness, which can be appreciated entirely out of context–

What if your father was the kind of father who was dying and he called you to him and you were his son and he said for you to come lie down on the bed with him so that he could hold you and so that you could hold him so that you both could be like that hugging with each other like that to say goodbye before you had to actually go leave each other and did it, you did it, you god down on the bed with your father and you got up close to your father and you got your arms around your father and your father was hugging you and you were hugging your father and there was one of you who could not stop it, who could not help it, but who just got a hard-on?

Or both did?

Picture that.

Not that I or my father ever hugged like that.

“He’s a good editor. Maybe he’s a great editor.” — Raymond Carver on Gordon Lish

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We continue to raid The Paris Review’s vault of interviews. Here’s Raymond Carver on Gordon Lish–

INTERVIEWER: Where does Gordon Lish enter into this? I know he’s your editor at Knopf.

CARVER: Just as he was the editor who began publishing my stories at Esquire back in the early 1970s. But we had a friendship that went back before that time, back to 1967 or 1968, in Palo Alto. He was working for a textbook publishing firm right across the street from the firm where I worked. The one that fired me. He didn’t keep any regular office hours. He did most of his work for the company at home. At least once a week he’d ask me over to his place for lunch. He wouldn’t eat anything himself, he’d just cook something for me and then hover around the table watching me eat. It made me nervous, as you might imagine. I’d always wind up leaving something on my plate, and he’d always wind up eating it. Said it had to do with the way he was brought up. This is not an isolated example. He still does things like that. He’ll take me to lunch now and won’t order anything for himself except a drink and then he’ll eat up whatever I leave in my plate! I saw him do it once in the Russian Tea Room. There were four of us for dinner, and after the food came he watched us eat. When he saw we were going to leave food on our plates, he cleaned it right up. Aside from this craziness, which is more funny than anything, he’s remarkably smart and sensitive to the needs of a manuscript. He’s a good editor. Maybe he’s a great editor. All I know for sure is that he’s my editor and my friend, and I’m glad on both counts.