Down and Out in Paradise by Charles Leerhsen

Author:Charles Leerhsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

No, that’s not terribly good, either. A poet I showed it to for her evaluation called it “a poem trying too hard to be a poem.” But Rose had taken an immediate liking to Tony the man and felt moved to help him get better. Together they reworked a semi-fictional sketch of Tony’s—about a twenty-something chef who gets turned away by drug dealers because they can’t make out the track marks on his arm and therefore think he may be an undercover cop—into something publishable. “FAO,” as the story came to be called for obscure but no doubt valid artistic reasons when it appeared in Between C & D, marked Tony’s first foray into print. He wasn’t kidding himself, though. He knew he had a lot to learn about the craft of fiction, and because he always read a lot about writer’s lives—how, when, and where they worked; their relationships with their editors; their favorite cocktails; and so on—he thought he knew just the literary guru he might learn it from, the guy everyone said was the best. In a letter to Rose, he said he looked forward to “life after Lish,” when doors both real and metaphorical would swing open before him.

Poor Tony. Gordon Lish was, like Andy Menschel, a force to reckon with from Hewlett, Long Island. At Esquire magazine and later the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf, he’d forged a reputation as a sometimes brilliant but often overly aggressive editor who injected too much of himself into the work of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Cynthia Ozick, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel, and Don DeLillo. Or tried to. Some authors pushed back against his brash blue-penciling, while others, because they were more easily cowed or sincerely believed he had improved their writing, let his changes stand. It would later emerge that Lish had taken the liberty of transforming Carver into the pioneering minimalist that many came to admire by making massive cuts and changing his endings and titles (“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” had originally been called “Beginners”). Even Carver had to admit that his stories were often better for being made leaner and somehow more mysterious—and they certainly were better read than previously. But Lish ultimately alienated too many influential authors and agents, and after he was eased out at Knopf, he picked up the thread of a teaching career at Yale and, later, Columbia, conducting seminars in fiction writing at the homes of trembling students.

The heartbreaking thing was that not all of his acolytes trembled with fear—at least at the start of each seminar. Some trembled with excitement and anticipation as they settled in with eager faces and sharpened pencils among the classmates who, it soon became clear, were there mostly to have their emotional resilience pushed to its limits. Captain Fiction (as Lish called himself) liked to demonstrate early and often that the put-downs he’d scribbled on manuscripts at Esquire and Knopf paled in comparison to what he was happy to tell a fledgling writer to her face, with a full complement of peers watching.

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