Black Garterbelt

...To See What Condition My Condition Was In

Why? Because the endless parade of inch-deep critiques into blogs was getting me down.  So were the James Wood and BR Myers defenders.  I have no idea why you'd care to spend your time defending either of these fellows--especially Myers--but if you do, you have to come up with something better than the standard cry that bloggers are amateur, low-class, and mean.  Half the goddamn lit blogs love Wood, and the other half has combined to put forth a critique or two that goes beyond name-calling.  Paraphrasing Eddie Murphy, we manage to fit some ideas in between the curses.  Stop clutching yr pearls and respond to the substantive part of the critiques, would you?

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We need to establish the Camile Paglia Threshold.  If you read Ms. Paglia, probably out of morbid curiosity, you know that every once in a while, every few months, say, she might write something that smacks of insight.  Unfortunately, what you have to wade through to get there is so void of intelligence and chock-full of sophistry that the end result is that gullible readers are sure to get progressively dumber just by being exposed to her meandering, boomer-punk piffle.  (Example: Wading through paragraphs of global warming denialism to get to the revelation that Al Gore can come off a bit smug.)

In other words, it ain't worth it.

The first head on the block under rule of this threshold is my old friend BR Myers.  Does he stumble across a decent point every once in a while?  Sure.  But if he can't get in a few criticisms of Denis Johnson without indicting the whole literature-reading public as collaborators in the intellectual crimes of Bush and Co., or smugly dismissing an opening sentence that he's completely misunderstood, then he's off the job.  Reading him is like commissioning solid gold shovels in the hopes of digging for buried tin.

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Also, what Jeff said.

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Re: Carver: In my heart of hearts, I think that revisiting, restoring, and republishing (RRR'ing) these Carver stories is a mistake.  For me, Carver restored his reputation with his late, sans-Lish work, and with some of the stories that have already been republished in "restored" form (e.g., "A Small, Good Thing").  However, every time the Lish business--and by "Lish business" I mean the fact that Lish must more or less be credited as co-author on some of the early Carver stories by almost any reasonable definition of "author"--is trotted out, Carver takes a hit.  What happened between this particular author and editor is what it is; even as a Carver fan, I think it looks unseemly, and Carver's subsequent and by-now well-rehashed misgivings, when he wasn't so fragile and in need of a mentor/friend/authority figure, would seem to bear this out. 

At one point, Carver needed, or at least allowed, Lish's writing and editing to greatly intrude upon his own writing.  (The editing he needed, I would argue.) Later, this intrusion was neither needed nor wanted, and Carver proved he could very well stand on his own as an outstanding author of short stories.

As a reader, I cleave to the later Carver.  Thus, as Carver's literary executor, I wouldn't voluntarily invite any further scrutiny into the early, collaborative Carver if I could help it.

There could well be some academic value to a RRR version of Carver, meaning that some who might not be able to get to Carver's papers would be interested and enriched by this volume.  That pool of readers is likely close to infinitesimal in number, in my view, though, and and I'd say that the further complication of Carver's legacy isn't worth it.

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As far as Nabokov goes, I don't see the value in burning TOOL-in-manuscript.  To protect...what exactly?  His reputation can stand the perusal of some novel fragments, which would most certainly be taken for what they are.  This isn't a posthumous volume cobbled together by some shabby opportunist, and Nabokov has suffered at the hands of some wildly unscrupulous opportunists and survived, already, regardless.  Both Nabokov's widow and his son have failed over a span of 30 years to burn this material, as ordered, and Dmitri, certainly a careful curator of his father's legacy, has been known to drop juicy hints about the manuscript (e.g., TOOL is "the most concentrated distillation of [my father's] creativity.").  Dying wishes are not without merit, but I'm guessing that very few people actually get buried facing down so the world can kiss their asses, if you know what I mean.

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Who gives a fuck about an Oxford Comma?/
Somethin' somethin' Michelle Obama

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Dan has had interesting things going over at his place, re: Carver and Nabokov, but I should clarify something:

The Rake further suggests that it would be useful for other contemporary writers to publish earlier drafts of their work, allowing the reader to pursue the pressing question "How Was It Done?". For those interested enough in a particular writer to want to read discarded drafts and other marginalia, it is probably true that such an offering would simply satisfy a curiosity and wouldn't really affect their estimation of the writer's published work. I myself have never been much interested in the "how" question. I'm more concerned with the "what": What kind of work is this? What's going on? If reading alternative versions of a work of fiction helps me to better answer these questions, I am willing to examine them. If what I find there somehow enhances my subsequent reading experiences, it will have been a worthwhile exercise. If it merely illustrates "the actual human effort behind the pages, the grinding, nuts and bolts stuff," as the Rake further puts it, it doesn't seem worth the time, since I'm pretty sure I already know that writing involves much grinding.

Granted, we all "already know that writing involves much grinding," but I am quite interested in the character of the grinding. This is why I--and I understand it's probably just me--read and re-read Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself even though I don't have much interest in reading Mailer's novels.  The Fourth Advertisement, which is about the last draft of The Deer Park, I never get sick of, simply for the way Mailer compellingly describes coming up against his own mammoth ambition and his physical and intellectual limitations (and the publishing industry's), and failing.  Again, I'm in the minority, surely, but I think this is gripping stuff, if quite apart from the pleasure, depth, and challenge of reading a novel.

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David Foster Wallace in Harper's?  It's difficult to get too excited, even if the prose is good. He does give the finest description of an infant's pulsating snot bubble that I've ever read.  I'm a father, this is not a Daddy Blog, and I'm serious.

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See you in a fortnight. Or something.

I Was a Teenage Carverian

I've procrastinated enough regarding the latest round of Carver/Lish revelations.

So much so that the New Yorker has helpfully printed a reader's letter that more-or-less encapsulates my feelings about the matter.  Thank you, Mr. Keith Mikolavich of Oakland, CA:

...Sometimes writers need editors to protect them from themselves.  It seems that Carver needed Lish, and then needed to break away to forge expansive stories like "Errand" and "Blackbird Pie," which, alongside his earlier, minimalist pieces, reveal his continual growth as one of the great American practitioners of the short story.

Now, I find myself a little indifferent this go-around, after being fairly scandalized when I first read "The Carver Chronicles" as a young Carver acolyte.  Carver's objections to Lish's edits, though deeply felt and meant, I'm sure, seem more than a little maudlin almost a decade after the initial reveal.  And I couldn't care less about Lish's occasionally ruthless cutting, although the instances of the old sorcerer literally injecting his writing into Carver's stories, where much of it remains, word-for-word, to this day, still strikes me as very unseemly.  Reading the restored "Beginnings" (aka "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love") makes it clear that early Carver left to his own devices tended to plod about and tell too much, though why Lish's "deadpan last lines" were often accepted verbatim and not reworked is baffling. 

(The temptation to perform some amateur psychology here is great, but suffice to say that Carver's greenness, his admiration of and gratitude towards Lish, probably granted the latter enough sway to occasionally ghostwrite, at least at first.)

But here's where we are with all this:

Now Tess Gallagher is hoping to re-publish all the stories in Carver's second book in what she believes is their "true, original" form. The story published here, "Beginners," was the submitted draft of a story that Lish cut by more than a third and retitled "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." Gallagher is eager for people to read "Beginners." And yet Lish's work helped transform a more conventional story into an exemplar of an astringent and original aesthetic—the aesthetic that helped win Carver his initial following. "I see what it is that you've done, what you've pulled out of it," Carver wrote to Lish about "Beginners" in his long, aggrieved letter, "and I'm awed and astonished, startled even, with your insights." Carver may well have regretted, to some degree, the way a number of his stories appeared in "What We Talk About," and, in the compendium "Where I'm Calling From," which appeared a few months before he died, he republished three stories in their "original" form. But most of the stories, including this one, he republished as Lish had edited them.

"An editorial relationship is a private one, and nobody can see it fully and completely," Gary Fisketjon, an editor who helped Carver make the selections for "Where I'm Calling From," said recently. "Clearly, there was a catastrophic breakdown here that's interesting but ultimately unknowable." What can be known is that, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, Carver's relationship with Lish was at an end. Lish told D. T. Max, "I don't like talking about the Carver period, because of my sustained sense of his betrayal, and because it seems bad form to discuss this." Gallagher, for her part, thought that Lish had been claiming too much credit for Carver's achievements.

I can't object to the stories in question being re-published in their "true, original" form, but I'm hoping that the emphasis falls on original rather than true.  In other words, re-publishing is fine insofar as the people behind it realize that what they're putting out is going to be mostly of scholarly interest and probably will not serve to change any minds.  We've already been exposed to Carver with and without Lish--and to some early Carver stories "restored" to their more expansive versions--and a fair number of readers, myself included, prefer the later, Lish-less Carver of "Cathedral," "Blackbird Pie," and "Errand" to the so-called minimalist Carver guided (and in some cases, partially composed) by Lish.  There's already plenty of Carver's output upon which to form a strong opinion.

Not that an of-scholarly-interest or serious-fans-only edition of Carver is a bad thing; in fact, I've been wondering why the publishing world doesn't explore this expanded-remastered niche in the same way the recording industry does.

I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me*

Your pal the Rake, for one, is going to kick off the new year by embracing some filthy habits.

Black Garterbelt is back tomorrow, with some long overdue thoughts on Ray Carver, Gordon Lish, and books expanded and remastered.

(*--Darnielle.)