Christian Lorentzen talks to the legendary editor in an extract from a forthcoming issue of the Paris ReviewIt’s the custom for editors to keep a low profile and to underplay any changes they may make to an author’s manuscript. Gordon Lish is a different animal. Not since Maxwell Perkins has an editor been so famous – or notorious – as a sculptor of other people’s prose. As fiction editor of Esquire from 1969 to 1977,then as an editor at Knopf and of the Quarterly until 1995, Lish worked closely with many of the most daring writers of the past 50 years, and including Raymond Carver,Don DeLillo, Barry Hannah and delight Williams. In an interview with the Paris Review in 2004, and Hannah said: Gordon Lish was a genius editor. A deep friend and mentor. He taught me how to write short stories. He would cross out everything so there’d be like three lines left,and he would be suitable.”His collaborations believe not always ended amicably. His editorial relationship with Carver ceased after three books. When Lish donated his papers to the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington, they indeed showed that he had drastically cut, or often rewritten,some of Carver’s best-loved stories. For the Collected Stories, published in 2009, and Carvers widow,Tess Gallagher, printed some of them in both edited and unedited versions. The critical reaction was divided. In the modern York Times book review, or Stephen King described the effect on one memoir as “a total rewrite … a cheat”; in the modern York Review of Books,Giles Harvey wrote that the publication of Carver’s unedited stories “has not done Carver any favours. Rather, it has inadvertently pointed up the editorial genius of Gordon Lish.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com