It’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, including Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Barry Hannah and Joy Williams. In an interview with the Paris Review in 2004, 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 right.”

His collaborations have 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, and often rewritten, some of Carver’s best-loved stories. For the Collected Stories, published in 2009, Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, printed some of them in both edited and unedited versions. The critical reaction was divided. In the New York Times book review, Stephen King described the effect on one story as “a total rewrite … a cheat”; in the New 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.”

More than a dozen books have appeared under Lish’s own name – including the novels Dear Mr Capote (1983), Peru (1986) and Zimzum (1993). These have won Lish a small but passionate cult following as a writer of recursive and often very funny prose. For decades he taught legendary classes in fiction, both at institutions such as Yale and Columbia and in private sessions in New York and across America. Though he titled one of his books Arcade, or, How to Write a Novel (1999), he, like Socrates, never put his teachings on paper. They survive in his students, many of whom are now prominent writers and teachers of fiction, among them Christine Schutt, Sam Lipsyte, Gary Lutz and Ben Marcus.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Raymond Carver in Paris, April 1987. Photograph: Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis

Christian Lorentzen Do you consider yourself a writer or an editor?

Gordon Lish I’m not a writer. I’ve no stake in my being thought of as a writer. Yet if I do write, I want it to be as exacting as I can make it. I want whatever I doodle to be well doodled. Most of the writing I’ve done has been under other names, as a ghostwriter, to maintain my family. Or else by writing potboilers. Not that such endeavours could necessarily be told apart.

CL How did you first start editing Raymond Carver?

GL My editor, Curt Johnson, came out to Palo Alto to see his people, and also his contributors to his lit mag, December. I was both. Carver had been a contributor and, I guess, a good buddy of his. So we were supposed to meet, and Johnson phoned to say, I can’t keep my appointment with you, I’m stuck here on California Street with a guy who’s too drunk to get home and his car won’t start. I rode my bicycle over there. That was how I met Carver. Then it was revealed that Carver worked across the street from my office. He was a textbook editor at Science Research Associates. When I got the idea to start up a new lit mag, I thought, Well, here’s somebody who will give himself to the endeavour. On one or two occasions, he came to my apartment and I fed him lunch and we talked about starting something called the American Journal of Fiction. There’s a photograph of Carver sitting at our dining table, sky-high candlesticks on it, with Ray wearing a shirt of mine. Took the picture for some book he was bringing out. By that time, Frances [Fokes, Lish’s first wife] and I had divorced, and I was readying myself to leave town because Frances had threatened Barbara [Works, his second wife]. She felt that she had nearly been run down in the street by Frances. Barbara was scared. So was I. We arrive in New York, I get the Esquire job, and had asked Carver if he would collect my mail for me and keep an eye on Frances and the kids – which he never, he in time confessed, did. In exchange for this, I was happy to look at his stuff. I was eager to read the work of anybody who wasn’t an Esquire regular. I read all the slush, for instance – and was less given to reacting to agented material. I wanted newcomers and was faced with the problem of satisfying editor Harold Hayes and publisher/founder Arnold Gingrich’s notion that I was going to turn up something hitherto unseen – the New Fiction. I saw in Carver’s pieces something I could fuck around with. There was a prospect there, certainly. The germ of the thing, in Ray’s stuff, was revealed in the catalogue of his experience. It had that promise in it, something I could fool with and make something new-seeming. “Fat” was the first one I revised, but Gingrich nixed it. I got it into Harper’s Bazaar.

Carver wasn’t the only one, you understand. I probably expended rather more assiduity in his case, yes. The degree of my industry was to revise a piece three, four, five times in a day. I did that on weekends, too. Not just with Ray’s work. I was keeping myself alive by doctoring books as well, because the Esquire salary was woefully inadequate. I would get work from McGrawHill or Harcourt Brace – one of those outfits that was inclined to arrange for a largish advance for a book they could not then publish without its enjoying a good deal of fixing. It never worked out well, however. There was always bad feeling in the end, always lunacy, particularly with ghost jobs. I can’t think of very many times I did such work and it didn’t end badly.

CL Do you feel you’ve been demonised for your editing of Carver?

GL Indubitably. But if you look at the worksheets in the Lilly Library, they astound. No one who has not looked at the evidence could otherwise imagine what had, in fact, occurred. For all those years. Carver could not have been more enthusiastic, nor more complicit – nor complacent. That mood reversed rather sharply when he appeared at the YMHA, and I met Carver and Gallagher for drinks across the street. Things between us were quite obviously going south. I took it that from that point forward she was increasingly participating in what work Ray turned out. We finished Cathedral (1983), with which, it is argued, I didn’t have anything to do at all, but I did, to be sure, although drastically less than with the first two collections – yet that was that for Ray and me.

CL What did you have in mind when you were editing Carver’s stories?

GL If I had anything in mind when I did what I did, it was James Purdy, maybe Grace Paley a little bit, but Purdy more than anyone else – stories like “Don’t Call Me by My Right Name”, “Why Can’t They Tell You Why?”, “Daddy Wolf” –writers I’d published in New Sounds in American Fiction, this with Cummings, a subsidiary of AddisonWesley. I think the heroising of Carver is nuts. As is the defence. You take any cherished object and show, No, no, that was made by Morty Shmulevitch on a lunch break as a full-time jeweller, it’s unacceptable to the fans. Nobody can quite process it, conceive of the case.

CL If a story comes in from an unknown writer and you know you have to do so much stuff to make it worth running in a big magazine like Esquire, why accept it at all?

I think the heroising of Carver is nuts

GL To produce this so-called New Fiction. One had to devise it out of what one had, and I had Carver and plenty of others from slush. Doing, as you put it, “so much” was not a difficulty for me. I probably welcomed the opening.

CL When you gave your archive to Indiana, did you know it would set off a controversy?

GL I may have hoped so. When I was divorcing Frances, Andreas Brown offered me $2,000 for the paraphernalia that had accumulated in the production of the Chrysalis Review and Genesis West. It was staggering. We lost at least that much every time we put out a number. I saw the sense in saving everything that came to me. Everything. Under a typewriter at Esquire and at Knopf and at the Quarterly, I kept a carton, and I’d drop everything in it, seal it up, and start another. When Barbara was diagnosed with ALS [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis], the last neurologist to confirm the terrible news allowed as there was nothing to be done but to get money. I then sought to sell the papers, worksheets and the like. Did I think the Carver would prove, at some point, combustible? Did I hope it would? Would it, on so doing, confirm recognition of a kind I believed deserved? I’d be a liar if I answered otherwise.

CL What did you think when you saw the worksheets after many years?

GL I was pleased. Delighted. Even flabbergasted. But Carver’s were not the only ones I’d worked on to that extent. Not the only ones by a long shot. There were many. I’ve been decried for a heinous act. Was it that? Me, I think I made something enduring. For its being durable, and, in many instances, beautiful.

CL If you don’t think of yourself as a writer, how come there are books out there with your name on them?

GL Because I could get away with it and because it was persuasive to women. I think I’m an editor, a reviser. I think I’m a teacher. Not a writer. My son Atticus is a writer. I have the view that, in a word, in a breath, in a turn, the sublime can be created. I can do that in revising. As an editor, I stand by my taste and not by anybody else’s. Am prepared to run riot exercising my druthers. Am also, as a writer, just as convinced of my elections. But regarding talent, nah, I have nothing of consequence, although I’m a sucker for my own work.

I’m afraid of my wives, my friends, my father, you. I find succour in the composition I’m conniving with

CL Was it ever your ambition to approach the sublime?

GL Oh sure. But never came close. You have to have an interest in the world to capture the sublime. I’m not interested in the world. You have to have an interest in people. Apart from my relations as a father, a husband, a lover, I’m not interested in people. I’m not really terribly interested in anybody else’s heart or mind, or even in my own. The great affection of my latter years, I attend to her bearing but not as I imagine others would and do. I’m not exactly autistic, but if you called me that, I wouldn’t object. Hey, I’ve been fired from every job I’ve ever had. I can manage, if I choose to manage, but I don’t choose to. Really, the society of others – certain friends, family and lovers aside – is not a prominent need in me.

To bring about the kind of work that has been brought about by a person we would cite as possessed of the power to sweep us away, one would have to be interested in others, in nature, in the machinery of the given. One would have to be interested in what’s without. I so often don’t even notice it. If I were to walk to the grocery, I will glance at a woman on the way but walk right past a war breaking out, not thinking anything of it. I would note a datum in the margin. Not so with DeLillo, for example, his apprehension of the details of the world. Not so with Cormac McCarthy. I’m a poseur, a potzer – not a writer in the sense that matters. Shit, are you kidding? The sublime.

CL You brought it up, the sublime.

GL Right. But not with respect to my own writing. Only, if ever, through my acts of revising the materials of others.

CL You approach the sublime through editing?

GL By revising, let’s say, yes. Or so I prefer to claim.

Am I a zealot, out on my own limb? Yes, with a vengeance!

CL Do you think that’s the case with Carver, or are you thinking of other writers?

GL I’m thinking of anybody whose work I’ve fooled around with. Had I not revised Carver, would he be paid the attention given him? Baloney!

CL You enter into counterfactuals. The question is muddled by history.

GL Bullshit! I was there before there was a record to suffer muddling, confusion, sides taken. I can’t believe that what I had in my hands from Ray would have made its way into the hearts of those who have apparently been so undone by the work. Which work had been deformed, reformed, tampered with in every respect by, yeah, me. Contaminated, uncontaminated, that’s a discrete consideration. But readers were seduced, and, I’m sorry, but it was my intervention that seduced them. In it, in doing this, I fashioned a golem that would be cheered to see me destroyed. It’s nothing but a botheration to me. What have I done? What have I done? I did no different, or no differently, with others’ work, and some were supremely grateful for it, and not silent about their debt.

CL You were talking about your inability to apprehend the word when you walked down the street or to put your experience into words. What is the difference between that and sitting down with the text as an editor?

GL Entirely separate actions of the mind, of the heart. Words seem to me safe sites for me to inhabit. I think I’ve always been afraid of everything actual, and less afraid – or not afraid at all, finally – of what can constitute the made, and the made apart from the given. I’m afraid of my children. I’m afraid of my wives. I’m afraid of my friends, of my father, of you. I find succour in my playthings, the components of a composition I’m conniving with. I expect I’m just a fearful fellow, paranoid. It has lots, I’d guess, to do with my size, my skin [Lish has had acute psoriasis since childhood], my sense of being Jewish. But when I read, when I edit or revise, I don’t fear anything in the least. I feel at home, at peace, assured. I feel welcomed – from what prompts I do not know. I was a boy who listened to his mother. I can recollect better my father’s diction than I can my father. I was made to keep to my bed a lot – and this habitat sponsored in me much in the way of solipsism. I was never anxious when off by myself.

Gordon Lish: famous for all the wrong reasons Read more

CL How can you tell what’s good? How can you tell shit from Shinola?

GL Because I’ve got the fucking gift for it. Instinct, call it. Whatever the property, in truth or in delusion, I depend on it. Without a hitch. I would regard myself as infallibly able to make distinctions between this and that, distinctions others would either not make or would withdraw from acknowledging.

I would think, How can they not see? I would sit with Harold Bloom with some regularity, hand over a book I thought highly of, say, by Jack Gilbert or McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and wait for him to refuse even to look. Or if he did look, he’d not seem to see in it what I’d see. Later, when he was assembling his western canon, he stuck in, I believe, Blood Meridian and the great Suttree. All of McCarthy is great, save perhaps the novels that were so widely read – All the Pretty Horses and The Orchard Keeper.

These determinations I make, rightly or wrongly, don’t come about by close study but rather by sense, in the instant, no room for a second thought. My tampering, if that’s the word, with this or that is an act I undertake by reason of the same sensation. Is it intuition? Or is it an act of recognising? I feel I know something – in the Gnostic manner, say. I cannot be talked out of it, nor, for wage’s sake or to hide in the general opinion, talked into it. I don’t go along – but am furious when others don’t go along with me. How can they not revere what I revere? How is it that my gods are invisible to them? It’s inexcusable but, of course, wretchedly expectable. Am I a zealot, a terrorist, out on my own limb? Yes, with a vengeance!

CL Are you interested in anyone else’s opinion?

GL No, not really, or, more truly said, not at all. Would I be persuaded by anyone else’s opinion? Fat chance!