Post-war Gertrude Stein

David Winters leads a round table discussion on Gordon Lish.

If I’ve learned one thing from reading Lish, and from reading around him, it’s this. Writing ought to amount to an act, as we’ve said; a “risk.” And, following Alec Niedenthal’s apposite phrase, this risk should stake life itself on the creation of an infinite sculpture. The world, as Wittgenstein says, is everything that is the case. But writing is whatever is not. And in saying “no” to the world, so long as this “no” is said strongly enough, art perhaps promises us nothing less than the “yes” of salvation. None of us studied with Lish, so we can’t ascertain the accuracy of some of our statements.

Really, in this sense, Lish remains a mystery. But I think we can make whatever we want of that mystery, just as Lish urged writers to make their own mysteries on the page. What can we learn from Lish? Well, we can take away a set of techniques, to be sure; “rules,” if rules are useful to us. But we can also salvage something that looks almost lost in our time: a sense of the real, lived stakes of writing, its risks and its rewards. About this, maybe it’s best if the last words belong to Lish himself: “Listen to me — whatever your life is, there can be an excellence in it, a garden of achievement that no jealous god can drive you out of and whose walkways, however narrow, can keep you safe and steady on your course for all the rest of your given days.

David also reviews Jason Schwartz’s John the Posthumous, published by the mighty O/R Books:

Schwartz’s extraordinary style is entirely his own. Schwartz’s extraordinary style is entirely his own. Yet no writer’s style comes from nowhere; even the most striking styles are imprinted by influences, or “precursors,” as Harold Bloom puts it. If anyone has played a part in shaping Schwartz’s prose, it would be Gordon Lish — the editor who published Schwartz’s early stories in The Quarterly, and his first book, A German Picturesque, through Knopf in the ‘90s. Lish’s term for the recursive technique sketched out above is “consecution” — a way of writing by “walking backwards,” as some have described it. Through consecution, the narrative progresses by mining what has just been written: each sentence treats the previous one as a store of potential to be unpacked, or subverted. Of course, this is a simplification — the approach encompasses an entire aesthetic philosophy — but suffice to say, there’s a logic to Schwartz’s manipulations of meaning; a method in his madness.

See also, Gordon Lish Edited This.