The troubling truth

...For this is the message found in his books and where he achieves the only power that should concern us: as a teller of truth...

...How impossible to order them rightly, to detach one separately, or to give the effect of the whole...

...Yet it is alive too and deep, this stream . . . Whatever sentence I extract whole and entire from the cauldron is only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught while a million others leap and sizzle...

...In the New Republic, Sven Birkerts, one of a new breed of neo-conservative literary critics, misreads Lish and some of his authors, like Amy Hempel, and suggests that . . . their work represents an abrogation of literary responsibility...

...the subject of endless speculation about his supposedly Machiavellian teaching methods in the pages of Spy magazine...

...Lish is fascinated by children because each one of them is like the original human placing an expectant foot on earth...

...There is something almost pre-modern in Lish's understanding of how we awaken to the world and find ourselves assaulted by a never-ending stream of images...

...Gordon Lish's critics are quick to jump on him (and his so-called disciples) because they are presumed to offer us only a tiny segment of life, and a nasty one at that...

...But there is a God, so you give From tnc ^t igraph to Peru which is the child's poem, "One two buckle my shoe," to the six-year-old's mad rhyme of "hot," Lish shows us the fevered underside of Croce's idea of language as 503 perpetual creation...

...There is a randomness to the way thought follows thought in his characters' minds, and a weird, almost primal rhythm to his prose, that makes some passages in his books seem closer to mirroring the way we think than any of his modernist predecessors...

...And yet, there is nothing without words...

...But what if there is no peace to be found and the return to the past reveals simply the horrors that were always there and continue to thrive in the unconscious...

...There is nothing one can fish up with a spoon, nothing one can call an event...

...We make things exist...

...Memory becomes a kind of cul de sac in which we are constantly flung back into the past, just as we think we have hidden ourselves in the present...

...His six-year-old in Peru is a murderer, after all...

...It's hoi, " "It's lot," "It's not," "It's top," "It's mop," "It's mop," "It's nop," "Tip top," "Sip," "Hip hop," and so on and so forth — and on and on and on...

...The act of writing serves merely as a vehicle for becoming famous, not for what the writing might tell us about the way we live...

...But in Lish's view, everything we can believe or conjure or fantasize begins to live in our line of horizon...

...And how we could be swept away as it took possession of our consciousness and grew, so that all life would be overwhelmed by that one moment...

...What is handed down as part of the cultural memory is inconsequential data...

...In his attack on Hegel's idealism, Adorno wrote: "the whole is the untrue ." To seek the whole story, the narrative that will explain the scope and range of life, is an understandable dream...

...But it would be a mistake to sentimentalize Lish's idea of the child shadowing our passage into adulthood...

...and most curiously, in an article in The New Republic this fall, as something akin to a literary monster — because of his triple hat of author, editor, and teacher — who is almost singlehandedly destroying modern writing...

...Language brings us (literally) out of our minds...

...It's the closest you ever get to feeling that you yourself are God or that if there wasn't any God, then that this would be the same thing which he was, that it was God who could rhyme all of the words, or at least which did once...

...their books lie unread by anyone but graduate students, their personal misery is resurrected as somehow meaning more than the common sorrow of yet another life unhappily lived...

...He approaches them on the street and gets their attention, not by touching them, but by saying a single word: capstone or impediment or effectuate or scintilla...

...To read him is to remember the peculiar power of the mind, of how we can make something exist simply by thinking it...

...As a writer, Gordon Lish is obsessed with our attempts to become unentangled by the past...

...Consciousness for Lish functions as a kind of weapon, sometimes self-inflicted, sometimes pointed out towards the world...

...It is the solitary word, somewhat out of the ordinary, that distracts them from their anonymous walk down the street and forces them to turn around and stare...

...Lish's characters are obsessed with understanding what has happened to them, but the very limitlessness of experience propels them into the nightmare of knowledge: There was just the day which was so hot and sitting on the curb and thinking to myself...

...And I would add, comprehensiveness and scope...

...Lish is obsessed with what we can learn, but he inverts the romantic notion of knowledge as liberation by telling us that we never get far from where we began...

...Lish is fascinated with the revelation of our most terrible thoughts because in speaking them, we disclose what is truest about ourselves...

...His characters remain trapped in the past because memory's return only replays all that has happened to them...

...His characters speak themselves to a frenzy to try to empty themselves of the memory of what they've done, as if discourse could wash away a stain...

...To create an image of how life appears to one is the only "responsibility" we can reasonably expect of any artist...

...There is a rawness to his characters' response to the world and a sense of being so freshly stunned that they seem to have dropped into the present age from some other period...

...But this desire often forsakes the world as it is for a fantasy of how it ought to be...

...A word for anything imaginable exists, and then a word that means the same thing, and a word that sounds like it, and on and on until language itself dissolves in unmeaning...

...It is instructive to watch someone being adopted by the media and turned into a "personality" before-our eyes...

...And all there is to know is waiting for them to come upon like a loose board in the floor...

...Within the past year or so, Gordon Lish has been called "Captain Fiction," in the pages of Vanity Fair...

...As the narrator in Peru reflects from middle-age upon the time he killed his playmate, Steven Adinoff, in the sandbox, he speaks about how it felt then and says,' 'I'll tell you something else — which is that the way you felt when you were six is the way you still feel...

...Listen, sometime, to a person chatter in a foreign tongue that you don't understand and consider how odd the trail of nonsensical syllables appears to the uneducated ear...

...In the modern literature that has endured, memory is a way of recharting lost territory...

...Or imag501 ine murdering someone and keeping it secret from even those closest to you...

...But violence is a necessary subject for him...

...Literary responsibility" is the kind of pious term that has a nice ring and is essentially meaningless...

...This is the state Lish brings us to in our own language, the place where words begin in all their complexity and mystery...

...The pressure of that secret would build over time until it began to choke you...

...When reading his books, one cannot imagine a street in a suburb he might describe, or a department store in Manhattan, or even a television set in a bedroom, without his character being part of the act of seeing it...

...Capote slays his victims by the grotesque act of stabbing them in the eye...

...To enter the world of Lish's fiction, we must think for a moment of the most unspeakable thing we have done — or thought of doing — and then imagine it unfolding before us as a real event...

...But we are unequipped to choose the thing — if anything exists — that might save us or at least halt for a moment the unrelenting barrage of images that pass before us...

...Memory is meant to return us there, but instead it is the judge we each possess that reminds us what is truest about ourselves and just how far we have strayed...

...by naming, we give things a form by which they appear as something other than the self...

...There is a desperateness to this scavenging of graveyards, as if every life of even fleeting notoriety must be examined for clues to life's purpose...

...There is little to be learned by the example of even the most famous of contemporary lives, yet there is now almost no secondary literary figure who is not the subject of a biography...

...Arnold Bennett would be proud...

...Think of Joyce's Dublin or Nabokov's Russia...

...But it would be tempering his seriousness to imply that the violence in Dear Mr...

...This terrible wildness, this feeling of being swept away by the power of our own imagination reveals the hugeness of the world and what tiny things we are in proportion to it...

...a "cultural commissar" with '' more power than The New Yorker,'' in The Mississippi Review...

...504...

...We don't need scores of books on Virginia Woolf...

...The language of reminiscence seeks the emptiness we all desire in our hearts but fail to find, the kind of purity with which we begin life and lose ever after...

...Gordon Lish's fascination with memory, fear, & violence WRITING THE TROUBLING TRUTH ROBERT JONES The public fascination with the rness^ F. Scott Fitzgerald made of his life encouraged the confusion in popular culture that sees serious writers as something like movie stars who can type...

...The very democracy of fame in which everyone becomes equally well-known and, within that context, equally pointless, declaws even the mightiest...

...Fear is the natural partner to the awakening of consciousness, and the more we know about experience, the more we learn to be afraid...

...Long after ROBERT JONES, who works for a major publisher in New York City, writes frequently on literary subjects for Commonweal...

...Its extreme images allow Lish to describe the pressure of guilt upon thought and how the memory of the unspeakable and the compulsion to confess form the ground to experience...

...Writers like Gordon Lish understand how humbled we are by the vastness of experience...

...And of some writers, like Virginia Woolf, there is no aspect of her life, including her account ledgers, that is not exposed...

...There is always deep below it...

...We tend to see the mind as something independent of the world outside...

...They lay claim to the harmony found in experience after the fact...

...As the epigraph to his collection of short stories, What I Know So Far, he chose this quotation from Adorno: "Of the world as we know it, it is impossible to be enough afraid...

...To recognize Lish's difference in this regard from other writers, think of one of the great passages in stream-of-consciousness writing, Bernard's final summation in The Waves: But it is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress, a convenience, a lie...

...Lish, too, describes what consciousness is like...

...If experience is viewed as one hallucination unfolding into the next, and each one imploding in its turn upon the mind, then language is the only means we have to objectify this experience...

...If what is known about them is how many dogs or nervous breakdowns they have had, or in Lish's case, rumors of the spell he induces in his students, then the work drifts away from center stage...

...But to what purpose...

...Even when describing the loss of the self, Bernard marvels at the richness of the parts that make up the whole of life and celebrates how consciousness — vast, potent, and imprecise — brings into harmony only one small aspect of the mutable variety experience offers us...

...For the narrator in Peru, it is witnessing on television the massacre of inmates during a prison break in Peru that returns him to the murder of Steven Adinoff...

...Lish tells us that the very structure of seeing is a linguistic one...

...Through the relentless repetition of how he beat the boy with the toy hoe, Lish describes our imprisonment in the past...

...But he is as far as one can go from reveling in the 502 haphazard continuity found in Woolf s "rushing stream of broken dreams...

...The characters in Lish's novels have each done — or imagined — something unspeakable and are compelled to tell it...

...Indeed it must manifest intelligence, moral seriousness, and re-lentlessness...

...One of our greatest myths is that in knowledge is freedom, and that by understanding the world, we find our place within it...

...Gordon Lish has plenty to tell us about the way we live now, but it is easier to hear about his seduction of young minds, so that he is portrayed as the Reverend Moon to the literary set...

...Lish suggests that language and memory lack the convenience of forgetting...

...What is significant about Fitzgerald's peculiar fame is that even when he was alive, he was more famous than his novels...

...there is no world seen without the self...

...Once something is named, it is irrevocable...

...This is not simply the case of the exterior world emerging through the thoughts of his characters...

...And in these murders, Lish gives us one of the most arresting images imaginable for the power of language to hold us in its thrall...

...Lish's capacity to shock is partly to reawaken us to the fantastic ways we imagine the world...

...Getting older doesn't get you any further away from the feeling, it just gets you further away from telling the truth about it to anybody...

...And yet, the writer's subterfuge is to seize the smallest part and reveal the truth entirely through the language of fragments...

...Capote or Peru serves only to make a point about language — or as if Lish were merely obsessed with the play of the sig-nifier following its endless chain of associations...

...Lish shares with Freud the idea that human beings step into a malevolent world and thereby receive their education to reality...

...Capote, or the child murderer in Peru, ^~ and because of this, he is frequently, and facilely, dismissed as a sensationalist...

...Accustomed as we are to the elegiac pull of the great modernist writers, we have come to see memory as a kind of imaginative resting place...

...I tell you, when I was six, I had the thought that I had to keep everything, but everything in my mind, that it was my job, that it was up to me to keep it all going by keeping it all in my mind...

...The killer in Dear Mr...

...If fiction is to survive as more than a coterie sport, it must venture something greater than a passive reflection of fragmentation and unease...

...But for Lish, we are never assimilated to this catastrophic entry into experience...

...The tension in every mind between an essentially truth-telling consciousness and the utterance of the unspeakable is fundamental to Lish's vision...

...But for Lish, there are no fresh starts...

...He does not give us the familiar, repressed human mind, but one that sees everything as if for the first time: not just things and events, but ordinary human emotion...

...But even less do we need full-scale biographies of decent but unexceptional writers like James Gould Cozzens and Louise Bogan...

...In the fifty years since Fitzgerald's death, our literary icons are even more victimized by the prevailing cult of personality, so that now more than ever, a writer's work is incidental to the life...

...The perversity of the human mind is that this fear accelerates the compulsion to know...

...This is not to say that we are all monsters, but that in our secrets, we are most stripped of evasion and the social conventions that make us able to slip more easily into lies...

...But what should trouble readers is what Lish says about how we are imprisoned by memory and are undermined by fear...

...An impossible weight is placed on the mind to absorb everything it sees and somehow make sense of it...

...Memory attains a kind of mythic power to liberate and remake the world through language, so that we might come to peace with the past...

...In Peru the narrator tells of how he went outside to play and it began to rain and so he sat inside the garage and: kept feeling funny and out of the ordinary, as if I were in some kind of trouble and that certain things I didn't exactly know about yet were probably dangerously unfinished, lying lopsided somewhere and being dangerous, and it made me feel a terrible wildness, this strange feeling, it made me feel as if I had to feel the wildness if I was ever going to get rid of the strange feeling, which I think, to my way of thinking as a child, was the worse one, the feeling before the feeling of wildness, the feeling of incompletion and of chaos, a feeling of things getting started and of never getting them over with...

...And it is only in this attempt to create a distance from ourselves, however tenuous or even illusory, that we can make the amorphous movement of experience seem concrete...

...Lish takes nothing for granted, even the fact that we speak and see...

...They want what each of us wants: a second chance...

...Lish goes the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" one better by replacing it with: "I think, therefore it is...

...And despite his torture in his last years at being unable to write and shame at having been reduced to a studio hack, he came to personify a kind of glamour that the public associated with writers...

...The likes of Philip Roth and Eudora Welty compete for space opposite starlets and sports stars in the pages of weekly magazines...

...Listen again to the narrator in Peru speak about how it was when he was a child: It's actually incredible, but I used to think that if I didn't pay attention to something, then it would just go away, just not be there anymore, whereas I knew that what my problem with this was always going to be was that I couldn't not do it, that I just couldn't not think of things . . . that I was just like God was, that I was always going to be thinking of every single solitary thing, of even of the smallest things there were...

...And each is haunted and paralyzed by the memory of that event...

...Peru" means many things in his novel, but I believe in part it is an anagram of the word "pure...

...His books possess unnerving power because in them we rediscover the strangeness of our minds and the queer sounds we utter to explain ourselves...

...We carry in our hearts the dislocation of the child being struck with the dizziness that is the first awareness of our separateness...

...Popularizing is a kind of strait jacket that presents writers publicly in ways that are easily digestible, so that any threat in what they say, or what they represent, is defused...

...One can only be thankful for the obscure origins of Homer and Plato...

...In his work, memory is fed by guilt and is the place where the truth hides in our minds, sometimes dormant, but never absent or able to be erased...

...There is a giddy ecstasy to the realization of our power to be so wildly self-creating, but also an exhaustion and despair...

...Of all the writers at work in America, there is one who is presently receiving an astonishing amount of press attention, not so much for the books he writes — which are among the best of contemporary fiction — but for his rather expansive personality...

...He often chooses violence as his theme — for example, the serial killer in Dear Mr...

...His novel Peru, published last year, tells us that personal history can never really be remade, but is replayed incessantly in images unloosed by the imagination...

...His and Zelda's escapades were known to people who did not ordinarily read, and his years in Hollywood and the excesses that felled him made him seem no different from any other actor on a downhill binge...