Quarrelsome: To Have Written a Book + Annals and Indices by Gordon Lish – Manuel Marrero
November 25, 2024
What is this, austerity collateral? A genius’s bizarre runoff? Two books in one year from the man who made Raymond Carver and other notables’ careers is a reckoning from on high, a pressure valve turning with a sigh. We have never been so impoverished of imagination and resources. The totemic cultural figurehead writes to and effectively for himself in darkness. Self-styled “celebrated elder statesman, an eminence gris, a graybeard, one who deigns not to permit his highflying thought to mingle with the sordid passions of what we might laughably call the reading public” and guru Gordon Lish tortures us with the wretched vile thing of hyperreal truth, companion pieces of solipsistic excess and indulgence that work as violent works of activism against audience, and there’s a noble savagery to the effrontery, a pretentious technical elegance that’s to be admired. Reader-hostile, contemptuous, these are meek descriptors. I enjoyed the term “bitch on wheels,” all the Yiddish and mondegreens, pyrotechnics, ruthless consecution and dramatic swerve. Reading both were a feat of endurance. It’s a call to arms to create challenging work. They are exhilarating at times.
Kicked out of big publishing? Start a press to publish your b-sides. To hell with the nonprofit industrial complex and its many illusive smokescreens. Its subterfuges of independence. Maybe others will follow. The neurotic horniness quintessential to his work is here aggressive and black as a fat lecher’s mojo, peppered with pseudo intellective, demented gymnastics libidinal and sadistic, a sensitive maximalism obsessed with murder and language in a way that conflates the two. It’s charitable to imagine a morale renaissance for raw literature that dies on impact. Lish gives you courage to be brazen or worse, and self-abasement has potential to solve the vitality crisis in art, but the problem is an epistemic one of meaning and passion, more so than a question of theory. There’s not a hell of a whole lot here that isn’t ponderous.
As a logophile though, it’s candy. I’ve been using the term bitch on wheels more. The intertextual gymnastics and dada stage direction have the lurid gravity of mortality. There’s a texture to an ossified abstruseness and a dignity to disabuse himself of effort, the last criteria, the final boss to be taken to task. If fuckery from a sachem of fifth wall breaking cleverness doesn’t tap you out, you won’t get a ceasefire from Lish. When theory and formalism descend, all the forensic psychology, the hiding oneself in literature, become tedious, indulgent, maddeningly self-referential, and the hardcore BDSM of Lish’s ethos a flickering kaleidoscope of hallucination by a dirty old man spitting. The high modernist logorrhea is a special kind of dance that someone like Joyce or Beckett could pull off, and Lish in Dear Mr. Capote and Peru, but this is, at best, for completists. If you get some kind of voyeuristic glee from watching a man emotionally waterboard himself, it’s for you. Who else is it for? Lish will be remembered more as a literary midwife, followed by an editor, teacher, and last as a hyperverbal provocateur on pages between spines.
I read both these books and the first one was initially very strong to peter out into nonsense. It relitigates the central murder of Peru, in which a child from a neighboring village is slain in a sandbox with a hoe by Lish’s self-insert, treating it as fiction and non-fiction, in confrontational, prying dialogue, attempting to resolve the irresolvable conceit of Peru, questions about the nature of memory and reality, the tricks of perspective, down to the cellular-level abstract properties of deception and deflection. Eventually we are left with glossolalia, literally gibberish and commentary on the gibberish, on the fact that it is willfully gibberish, and a compendium of rarefied gardening terms, returning us to the hearth of his imagined wholesome family. Lish’s purpose seems to be to confound and anticipate it.
He trips the Möbius bands of continuity into the second book with the more obtuse title, loudly unreadable and unintelligible, an assortment of “call them, erythemas, if you will, lesions, let’s say,” teeming with pop culture references and “the child bride in the picture,” Penelope Lin, a devised paramour who figures heavily, maybe or maybe not based on Elsie Kachel Stevens, to whom the first book is dedicated, with whom Lish was infatuated. The most memorable module here is called “Recovered, Uncorrected, Not Read,” a high velocity run-on sentence written phonetically and eschewing punctuation, a familiar enough style done competently enough. The rest commits so hard to the bit it imagines his own funeral, widow and son survived, and devolves into a list of celebrities. As a primal grunt it’s got value as a market correction.
It made me reflect on what I’m willing to publish. Is writing something down in itself catharsis enough? Does the reading public deserve the unalloyed, often inscrutable truth? Manifestation is one practice near to sorcery whereby saying or writing something can help enact intentions. As a prolix wordsmith, but more so as a histrionic, he destigmatizes and valorizes the trespasser, trains a firing squad on expectations to standby and stand down forever. As a convulsive hypergraphic myself who processes thought via the act of writing, necessitating egolessness as both self- and totalizing universal love to facilitate a kind of exposure therapy for the sake of sincerely constructive and destructive criticism, I recognize that one reader’s path to endearment is another reader’s off-putting, disqualifying malaise. Do we get to publish hoe-scaring content because we’re such mild-mannered sweet boys? It’s a whole hoe-scaring industry we are in because hoes love to be scared and industrial grade production of frisson must continue unabated. Hinting at a cultural reset, too long in the tooth to be toothless, not so much passing a torch as doing something spiritually significant and uniquely American in America, where dysfunction and toxicity rule as markers of romance, Lish knows we must be unafraid to cross lines in every capacity, a psycho brooking zero dissent on sensitivity readers, without plausible deniability, without anything to lose let alone a reputation to protect or a career at Condé Nast to flout, a brand pig burning the off-ramp at ninety years old and salting the wake, wielding soft power through delegations and deputies of his school of thought, leaning into nerves and leadership, blindingly rare lodestar he is, still hoping to find a nice lady and domesticity waiting for him at the end. The effect is something you feel in your body and do with your mind to other bodies. It is fiction like a twitch is movement. A tremulous bravado accompanies the logos of absolute truth which Gordo strains to reach. In the land where they burn you to the ground for standing on business, I wish Mr. Lish a soft landing.