Flash Gordon

Newsweek interview Gordon Lish.

That wasn’t how everyone saw him, though. A couple of years before I’d first encountered Carver, New York Times Magazine writer D.T. Max traveled to Indiana University, to whose library Lish had sold his papers. There, he found the fullest evidence yet of how deeply Lish’s scalpel had cut. In 1981’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, “Lish cut about half the original words and rewrote 10 of the 13 endings.” Even though Max concedes that “some of the cuts were brilliant,” the narrative of an alcoholic backcountry Chekhov hobbled by a domineering New York editor, only to regain his literary selfhood late in life, became the prevalent leitmotif of the Lish-Carver tango.

Lish is acutely aware of the controversy, and it still pains him. Carver’s stories, he says, “were de-feebled by my exertions.” Carver, he tells me, was “a fraud. I don’t think he was a writer of any consequence.”