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Re: VN and Zamyatin
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Jim: the Carver-Lish story raged in the Time Literary Supplement a few years
ago, triggered as I recall by Carver¹s widow¹s memoirs (What It Used to Be
Like; A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver, Maryann Burk, 2006) Your
link to Sklenicka¹s book is most welcomed, since I¹m intrigued by the
unexpected Lish-Nabokov connection, not mentioned in the TLS. Since Carver
eventually rejected Lish¹s outrageous re-writing, calling it "surgical
amputation and transplantation," VN¹s antipathy to Lish¹s plumpen snippers
comes as no surprise. I see it as more one-sided than you do -- in VN¹s
favour.
From my Devil¹s 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 ³very nice² about some
> editing White had done on the Inspiration piece. In her recent biography of
> Raymond Carver, Carol Sklenicka reports another of VN¹s 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 ³Sklenicka Carver² and
> then clicking on the ³Look Inside² button for Raymond Carver: A Writer¹s Life.
> If you then search the book for ³Nabokov,² you can find the story on pp.
> 283-284. The editor in question was Gordon Lish. The quotation from Frederic
> Hills (VN¹s 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 Carver¹s most
> influential early stories. The argument over which is the ³real² (and the
> best) Carver rages to this day. The Library of America Carver volume contains,
> at the author¹s widow¹s insistence, both the original and the Lish-edited
> versions of many of the stories. A sample of Lish¹s 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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ago, triggered as I recall by Carver¹s widow¹s memoirs (What It Used to Be
Like; A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver, Maryann Burk, 2006) Your
link to Sklenicka¹s book is most welcomed, since I¹m intrigued by the
unexpected Lish-Nabokov connection, not mentioned in the TLS. Since Carver
eventually rejected Lish¹s outrageous re-writing, calling it "surgical
amputation and transplantation," VN¹s antipathy to Lish¹s plumpen snippers
comes as no surprise. I see it as more one-sided than you do -- in VN¹s
favour.
From my Devil¹s 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 ³very nice² about some
> editing White had done on the Inspiration piece. In her recent biography of
> Raymond Carver, Carol Sklenicka reports another of VN¹s 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 ³Sklenicka Carver² and
> then clicking on the ³Look Inside² button for Raymond Carver: A Writer¹s Life.
> If you then search the book for ³Nabokov,² you can find the story on pp.
> 283-284. The editor in question was Gordon Lish. The quotation from Frederic
> Hills (VN¹s 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 Carver¹s most
> influential early stories. The argument over which is the ³real² (and the
> best) Carver rages to this day. The Library of America Carver volume contains,
> at the author¹s widow¹s insistence, both the original and the Lish-edited
> versions of many of the stories. A sample of Lish¹s 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
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/