Gordon Lish's 1983 novel, Dear Mr Capote, begins: "This is the twelfth start of the letter I am writing. Here is the reason it's the twelfth start. The reason is to try out voices!" This gag – the narrator is, or is pretending to be, a serial killer boasting to Capote about his crimes and inviting him to help monetise them – is not only an oblique gag about the writing process itself, it's a gag about the teaching process.
Lish's chief fame resides in being the man who, as an editor at the publishing house Alfred A Knopf, cut out up to 70% of Raymond Carver's short stories – if anyone should have been called "carver", it was him. He is also known for his punishing but remarkably successful creative writing course (no one allowed to go to the loo, but a potty in the corner for those in extremis, according to one account). Last year the Guardian website published a piece about him listing, in the piece itself and readers comments, about 50 writers whom he has helped; and if it is true that he licked Ben Marcus into that strange shape, then that alone is testament to his talent, influence and worth.
But Lish is also a prose writer. After all, at some point, you have to get up and show that you can walk the walk. He took his time, though. Dear Mr Capote was his first novel, published when he was nearly 50. And although there have been more novels since then, he has become known mainly for short, fragmentary fiction, reminiscent in tone of the more strangled meta-fictions of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, which wrestle with the problems of language and narrative.
Lish has been compared to Beckett and Bernhard, and you can see why. The opening words of this collection, from the story "My Personal Memoir", are: "There was a game we played. Maybe it wasn't a game in and of itself. Is a ball a game? Sure, a ball is not a game. But you can make a game with it, can't you?" In the next piece, "Für Whom?", the narrator, also going back to his childhood, affects not to know the name of his sister (and the title is a good joke, as the story involves his bashing out Beethoven's "Für Elise").
There are crazy recursions and back-trackings and qualifications in the tellings of these stories, so the kind of intelligence at work here can seem, to the casual or baffled reader, to have forgotten to tell any kind of story at all beyond trying to tell the story in the first place, and that is frequently indeed the whole point; but so often there is a story lurking within, the whole idea being that the story is so painful it cannot be faced head-on.
Lish's fictions have the choice of evading an issue, then, or addressing it. Goings in Thirteen Sittings is his first collection of new work for 16 years, and as he is now nearly 80 certain topics have a more charged potency than if they had been the work of a younger writer. When the child asks his mother in "Sleepage" if he is going to die, the urgency that the man actually typing those words feels will be more acute. And, in a motif that extends beyond this book, the narrator is always called either Gordon, or Gordon Lish, or sometimes "Gordon (Gordon!)" as if surprised at his own appearance in the narrative. The picture on the back cover shows Lish aged eight, "shoeless, in mismatched socks", in order to distinguish himself from the five other people in the creased photograph. Despite the socks, though, he's the one who looks as if he's in command of the situation.
Whether all this is your cup of Assam I leave to you to decide. Lish can divide the most highfalutin of critics. "As works of art, they seem to me negligible," said a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement in 1998 (did that contribute to the 16-year silence?), but others have lauded him, and his former students in particular – they are a pretty formidable bunch – stick by him in honourable fashion. He seems to have outlasted most of them; and the stories in this volume might be the work of an old man, but they are not the work of a tired old man. The best of them have a vivacity, freshness and cheek that you rarely see anywhere else.
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