Larger Than Art

John McPhee writes about his editors in a recent New Yorker (“The Writing Life,” The New Yorker, 7/2/12). The piece actually centers around two subjects, money with respect to his Farrar, Straus &  Giroux editor Roger Straus (a scion of the Guggenheim fortune) and the attitude toward the use of the words “fuck” and “motherfucker” by two renowned editors of the NewYorker, William Shawn and Bob Gottlieb. However significant the manifest content, it’s only the window dressing for a more profound subject, which is that of the guru. Shawn in particular was a larger than life, imperious and mysterious personality, a short bald man whose particular form of self-invention probably owes a good deal to the mystique of the patrician literary world of mid-twentieth century America which The New Yorker’s Brahmin German Jewish esthetic epitomized—and perhaps to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Would writers pay court to such figures as Shawn or even Gottlieb today? Gordon Lish, an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, whose harrowing writing workshops were recently portrayed in the Broadway play, Seminar, was perhaps the last of these cranky old men of letters. The current editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, for instance, is a hard working journalist himself, who displays none of Shawn’s antics. From the little one is able to glean he appears to be a product of the Enlightenment, at least in publishing terms, a John Locke to Shawn’s Edmund Burke. He gives all signs of being an empiricist and rationalist who would discountenance Shawn's brand of charisma. The art world of midcentury America had its own share of brilliant, tyrannical intellects, Clement Greenberg being the most noteworthy, who held sway over generations of artists. But democracy has always facilitated mercantilism, and while The New Yorker is not run by the aristocratic Shawn, it’s owned by the Newhouse's Advance Publications and one could argue that the gallerista Larry Gogosian holds more power over today’s art world than an intellectual like Greenberg ever could.

Shame Sliding

 

     There is a school of thought claiming that Gordon Lish ruined Raymond Carver by making him an unwitting minimalist. There is another school that says Gordon Lish made Raymond Carver. George Saunders is what Raymond Carver lovers who like the unedited versions of his work unconsciously crave, though Carver unedited never soars to the glory that is Saunders. The best line in “Home,” the Saunders story in the summer fiction issue of The New Yorker is “I was on a like shame slide.” But there are all kinds of wonderful locutions in this narrative about a returning Iraq vet that are reminiscent of the violence that hangs over early Pinter plays like The Caretaker and The Homecoming. This interchange between the vet Mikey’s mother and her lover Harris takes place early in the story:
 

     “I love him like my own son,” Harris said.

     “What a ridiculous statement,” Ma said. “You hate your son.”

     “I hate both my sons,” Harris said.

     Renee is Mike’s sister, and she is married to Ryan. Ryan’s parents, who are visiting their grandchild, share their opinions about the well-to-do Flemings, who have flown in planeloads of harelipped Russian babies. “Those kids went from being disabled in a collapsing nation to being set for life in the greatest country in the world,” says Ryan’s father. As the dialogue continues to its morbidly hysterical climax, the father adds, “A truly visionary pair of folks.” Saunders then provides his own Pinteresque caesura.

     There was a long admiring pause.
     “Although you’d never know it by how harshly he speaks to her,” she said.

     “Well, she can be awfully harsh with him as well,” he said.

     “Sometimes it’s just him being harsh with her and her being harsh right back,” she said.“It’s like the chicken or the egg,” he said.

     “Only with harshness,” she said.

  

     Mikey’s wife has walked out on him, and when he comes to see his kids, her new husband, Evan, won’t let him in. The two men try to take an attitude of equanimity. Saunders’s characters live in a state of physical and emotional dispossession, but they are acutely aware of their own language. “One way we were playing it reasonable was to say everything like a question,” says Mikey.

     Mikey utters the story’s best line as he pulls up to the house of the family he is no longer a part of. He imagines his wife Joy explaining it all to his kids thusly: “Although Evan is not your real daddy, me and Daddy Evan feel you don’t need to be around Daddy Mike all that much, because what me and Daddy Evan really care about is you two growing up strong and healthy and sometimes mommies and daddies need to make a special atmosphere in which that can happen.” On the way to his former wife’s house Mikey also has a memory of being hired by “this guy” to “clean some gunk out of his pond.” He ends up killing tadpoles with his rake, and when he tries to save them it only makes matters worse. So he keeps on “rake hurling,” which in turn reminds him of his behavior at Al-Raz, where he was stationed. “It wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm that it was normal was to keep doing it over and over.”

     I was on a like shame slide. Saunders is what people have in mind when they criticize Gordon Lish for taking the guts out of Carver, but no one, not even Lish, would have gotten rid of Saunders’s guts—a self-reflexive cartoon that is pure genius.

Towering Words

Wells Tower is Raymond Carver minus the specifically lower-class settings and the minimalist language. It’s fun to think about what Carver’s editor Gordon Lish would have done if he’d gotten his hands on Tower’s work. Would he have proposed the same kind radical streamlining that has generated such controversy in the recent considerations of Carver’s oeuvre? Would he have tried to limit the palette, turning Wells into the equivalent of the 12-tone composer he made Carver into? Would he have eliminated the din and fashioned the prose into something spare and metallic to reflect the theme of dispossession? On the basis of the recently published New Yorker story, “The Landlord,” Wells deals with dispossession as Carver did, only in a different arena and with a broader scale, showing that it’s not merely the province of those who occupy modest digs in the Northwest. Significantly, the story is about someone who owns something, rather than a Carver character who can’t pay the rent. But the ownership itself is jeopardized by the kind of desperate and unruly tenants you might find in a Carver tale (both Armando Colon, the tenant, and Todd Toole, narrator Coates Pruitt’s foul mouthed maintenance man, fit the bill neatly). Sociologically, Tower’s characters fit beautifully into the era of sub-prime mortgages, which helped some members of the middle class leverage themselves into a state of economic oblivion. Pruitt’s 31-year-old daughter Rhoda is a sometime artist who has come back to live with him. She had an accident “while getting the hang of a radial-arm saw” and “the shock of the injury caused some of her hair to fall out.” Here is the manifesto for her latest artistic project: “To some extent, your problems with the real estate stuff, and my parallel humiliation at having to move in with you. But in a broader sense it’s about our collective lack of integrity and total fucking childishness in the wake of the financial crisis, i.e., the national epidemic of petulance and bratty outrage over the fact that poor people don’t get to buy castles on credit anymore, that execs don’t get G.D.P.-size bonuses, that not just any housewife with a real-estate license gets to be a millionaire, and that you can’t stick a chopstick in a dog turd and sell it at Gagosian for the price of a yacht. ‘A Pestilence of Petulance’ is what I’m tempted to call it but probably shouldn’t.” Even Lish might have been tempted not to edit that.