New issue of Critique: Studies in Contempoary Fiction 52.4 contains my 10,000 word article, “Saying More Without Trying to Say More: On Gordon Lish Re-Shaping the Body of Raymond Carver and Saving Barry Hannah,” which is also, in a slightly expanded version, the second chapter in my overdue study on Lish contracted with Routledge. Did initial research in 2008 at Indiana University; submitted paper in 2009 while in Los Angeles and quickly accepted; published 2011 while I am in New York.
The new Fall/Winter 2009 issue of The Hemingway Review , published by The Heminwgay Society and Univ of Idaho Press, contains a short research essay I wrote on the “Bimini” excerpt from Islands in the Stream that Esquire published in 1970. Gordon Lish was fiction editor at the time, when Howard Hayes ran the men’s journal.
When I was researching Lish’s papers at Indiana Univ. last year on two Helm Fellowships, I found letters from Mary Welsh Hemingway to Lish — they spent much time together, and she was not happy with the cover photo of her deceased hubby, nor the situation with the excerpt (which the magazine had paid $30K for — probably $200K in 1970 money!).
Gordon Lish, of course, has again lately been the subject of much debate in the press now that Raymond Carver’s Beginners and a new biography is out, which is anti-Lish.
My Carver bio, which will be out in 2011 from McFarland and Company, will tend to be pro-Lish editing — for the most part. I contend Carver would not be he institute he is without Lish’s help; he would have been a obscure but respected minor short story writer published by small and university presses, not McGraw-Hill and Knopf, which Lish had to go up to bat and do songs and dances to secure book contracts.
Have obtained a copy of the Oct. 1970 issue of Esquire, with Hemingway’s “Bimini” from Islands in the Stream, and Richard Brautigan’s “Lost Chapters of Trout Fishing in America.” This is a Gordon Lish-era issue; the Hemingway excerpt is the basis of an essay I wrote that will be in this year’s number of The Hemingway Review.
What’s cool is that it is over-sized, printed on thick slick paper, with ads for 8 Track tape memberships, a photo spread of Johnny Carson in his late 1960s suits, an eassy about Robert Redford…
I was 5 years old when this issue came out.
