Stan: 

I'm glad you enjoyed the stuff about VN in Sklenicka's book. This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of Raymond Carver, whom I knew slightly and whose work and life are special interests of mine, but the idea that Lish's editing was a disastrous and arrogant thing is highly debatable. My own position, and that of many other readers, was well stated by James Lasdun in the Guardian in 2007. Here's the link for anyone who's interested:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,2196751,00.html

To put the matter very briefly, I believe that in almost every case, the Lish versions are superior to the originals. And by the way, it is not Carver's first wife, Maryann, who has caused all the ruckus but rather his second wife, the poet Tess Gallagher. It hasn't helped, of course, that Lish himself has at times said more than he should have. 

We can discuss all of this off list if you're in a mood to argue about it.

As for VN, I'm not at all convinced that LATH wouldn't have benefited from some fairly rough treatment. And I would like to see those edited pages. But I agree that, given the size of VN's reputation at the time, Lish should either have accepted or rejected the chapter without marking it up. The interesting question to me is why Hills, knowing Lish's own reputation, would send the manuscript to him in the first place.

Jim Twiggs


From: Stan Kelly-Bootle <stan@BOOTLE.BIZ>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Sat, March 27, 2010 3:32:10 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] VN and Zamyatin

Jim: the Carver-Lish story raged in the Time Literary Supplement a few years ago, triggered as I recall by Carver’s widow’s memoirs (What It Used to Be Like; A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver, Maryann Burk, 2006) Your link to Sklenicka’s book is most welcomed, since I’m intrigued by the unexpected Lish-Nabokov connection, not mentioned in the TLS. Since Carver eventually rejected Lish’s outrageous re-writing, calling it "surgical amputation and transplantation," VN’s antipathy to Lish’s plumpen snippers comes as no surprise. I see it as more one-sided than you do -- in VN’s favour.
From my Devil’s DP Dictionary (McGraw-Hill): Editing (n) Textual harassment.
SKB

On 26/03/2010 16:57, "James Twiggs" <jtwigzz@YAHOO.COM> wrote:

In reading the Edmund White interview that Jansy quoted from, I was, as a former editor myself, interested to see that VN was “very nice” about some editing White had done on the Inspiration piece. In her recent biography of Raymond Carver, Carol Sklenicka reports another of VN’s encounters with an editor in which the outcome was not so pleasant. Those who are interested in this amusing story can read it by searching Amazon for “Sklenicka Carver” and then clicking on the “Look Inside” button for Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life. If you then search the book for “Nabokov,” you can find the story on pp. 283-284. The editor in question was Gordon Lish. The quotation from Frederic Hills (VN’s editor at McGraw-Hill) is from a letter to Sklenicka.


Carver, of course, was himself a famous writer of short stories and one of the founders, as it were, of the school of minimalism that flourished in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s and is still a potent force in college writing programs. Lish was almost equally famous as the most powerful editor in the country (at Esquire and Knopf and at his own literary magazine, The Quarterly) during this same period. He notoriously cut and rewrote some of Carver’s most influential early stories. The argument over which is the “real” (and the best) Carver rages to this day. The Library of America Carver volume contains, at the author’s widow’s insistence, both the original and the Lish-edited versions of many of the stories. A sample of Lish’s editing of Carver is available at the New Yorker site:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/12/24/071224on_onlineonly_carver http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/12/24/071224on_onlineonly_carver>

So the struggle between Lish and VN would not have been exactly onesided, both men being geniuses in their respective fields. I for one would like to see those manuscript pages of LATH that Lish took his pencil to.
Jim Twiggs
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Search the archive Contact the Editors Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla View Nabokv-L Policies Manage subscription options

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.