The Gordon Lish Lineage of Jewish American Writing

No American editor of the last half century has been profiled and talked about more regularly and energetically than Gordon Lish. As the Paris Review put it, “Not since Maxwell Perkins has an editor been so famous—or notorious—as a sculptor of other people’s prose.”

Though he’s now in his mid-80s and not exactly pulling strings anymore, you can still find a few voluble Lish devotees and detractors at any book launch, MFA program, or editorial office in the country. Unfortunately, though, both his most ardent fans and harshest critics tend to do the same thing to him that he’s been accused of doing to others, and especially to Raymond Carver: they look right past the guy, ignore most of what he has written, and shape him into the symbol that they require.

To those who venerate Lish, he’s a champion of dynamic and unconventional American prose. To those who decry him, he’s your classic overbearing white man—heavy-handed, an egomaniacal emotional manipulator, a racist, and potentially a sexual predator. Either way, he’s an extreme case that illuminates what can go right or wrong in the writer-editor relationship. Both views of Lish have their basis in fact. But neither of them quite captures who Lish is in his own eyes.

One curiously occluded truth about Gordon Lish is just this: he’s Jewish. It’s strange to have to point this out, because it’s not the kind of thing that we pretend not to notice about American cultural figures anymore. But recognizing this aspect of Lish’s identity turns out to be the key to understanding his legacy in contemporary American writing.

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You won’t learn that Lish is Jewish from most of what you read about him, online or off. In many profiles of Lish, like one published last year in Publisher’s Weekly, Jewishness just doesn’t come up. On the long, detailed Wikipedia page devoted to him, the only mention of his religious background is the tag “Jewish American novelists,” which hides among 25 other categories bunched on the bottom of the page, including “Novelists from Arizona” and “Philips Academy alumni.” In an hour-long podcast about Lish, famed guy-who-knows-things Ken Jennings mentions his Jewishness in a throwaway aside and says Lish was “working class” (he wasn’t).

Plenty of writers that I know, some of them students of Lish’s own disciples, can tell you all sorts of stories about who Lish published, how he led his workshops, and reel off the jargon he developed (“torque,” “consecution”), but assume he was a standard-issue American WASP.

Which is strange, because Lish himself doesn’t hide his Jewishness. In general, he’s not the reclusive type—he published his phone number, still current, in one of his recent short stories—and he’s brought up the subject of his Jewishness to interviewers, though they never seem to take him up on it. Lish’s authorized biographer and most enthusiastic contemporary evangelist, David Winters, asked him a few years ago what he thought of MFA programs. Here’s what Lish said:

I did a lot of traveling, before my wife got ill, and I saw the whole university scene. I never liked what I saw. One time, sitting in on a class at the University of Texas, I just stood up and said, “I can’t bear to observe this.” Fiction matters to me more than anything else in the world. It matters to me more than my life does. It’s like saying I’ll die for being a Jew, I’ll be killed for being a Jew. Or I’ll be killed for having psoriasis. These particularities come closer to naming and identifying me than anything else, and my feeling about prose fiction is that it’s on a par with these concerns. And here was someone coming into my synagogue, as it were, and desecrating the whole place.

Winters did not ask Lish to elaborate on his metaphor of his life’s work as a synagogue, or about how his “feeling about prose fiction is that it’s on a par with” being a Jew.

This is typical of the way Lish has talked and written about himself. Thirty years before that interview with Winters, Lish explained his ambitions as a writer and editor in an unpublished letter to his friend Norman Mailer. Knowing he was talking to a landsman, he dispensed with the ecumenical terminology and went straight for Yiddish: “I’ve spent a lot of life,” he wrote to Mailer, “hoping I’d have a torah somewhere in the same ark as yours is—the same schule even.”

Anyone who has read even a few of Lish’s novels or short story collections should not need this explanation of just how important Jewishness has been to him. It’s there, front and center, in his earliest fictions, which were inspired by Cynthia Ozick and J. D. Salinger. It persisted in some of his strangest and most indelible books, like Peru (1986) and Extravaganza (1989). And its prominence continues unchecked, in his most recent collection, White Plains, which bristles with Yinglishisms.

But most people who know Lish’s name don’t read his fiction, understandably enough. As a writer, he never did get a Torah into the ark at Mailer’s shul, as he’d be the first to admit; in his Paris Review interview, he said, “I’m not a writer.” And if Lish’s sense of being Jewish informed only his own writing and his personal life, it really wouldn’t matter to all those who admire or abjure him as an editor and guru. But it did matter: the truth is that Lish’s Jewishness pervasively influenced his editorial record, more powerfully than was the case for any other American editor you can name.

Lish’s first real achievement as an editor was the creation of Genesis West, a small literary magazine he ran in Palo Alto in the early 1960s. By his own account, Lish founded it as a way to meet more interesting friends, but it holds up remarkably well, with sharp design and arch editorial squibs that anticipate the early efforts of Dave Eggers. The contents aren’t bad, either: Paul Bowles’ translations of Maghrebi stories, fiction by Amiri Baraka and a poem by John Lennon, interviews with and contributions from 1950s hotshots like George P. Elliott, Herbert Gold, and Leslie Fiedler.

But what really leaps out from the pages of Genesis West, in retrospect, is the depth of Lish’s devotion to Grace Paley. He published one of her stories in the debut issue, Fall 1962, and in the contributors notes there he refers to her 1959 collection, The Little Disturbances of Man, as “a work of unqualified genius.” He couldn’t print her stories all the time, of course, but he did find opportunities to sing her praises in almost every issue. Over the journal’s run, Lish published only a single piece of literary criticism, in the Fall 1963 issue; written by a CCNY professor, Irving Malin, the essay’s subject was Paley, whom in that issue Lish calls “the finest short story writer in America.” Genesis West’s final issue, from 1965, includes not one but two of Paley’s stories, remarkably enough reprinting the one that appeared in the debut issue. Looking back, in 1973—and by then, he was riding high as the fiction editor of Esquire—Lish explained to his colleagues that publishing Paley in Genesis West had been “the proudest event of [his] life.”

There are plenty of reasons to love Paley’s fiction, of course, but one of them is that she draws upon a certain kind of Jewish voice—inflected with immigrant Yiddish and Russian and the conversational stylings of New York City—to create an intimate, lush, and consistently surprising prose. In the essay Lish published in Genesis West, Malin called this Paley’s “Jewish vision” and asserted that her stories were “vitally complex because of their style.” This was at least one of the reasons that Paley’s work mattered so much to Lish, and you can see her influence not only in Lish’s own prose but also in everything he went on to publish and teach.

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In the 1970s, another writer came to figure preeminently in Lish’s literary landscape, and I’m not talking about Carver. Instead, it was the most committedly, thickly Jewish writer in postwar America, Cynthia Ozick. Though her name usually does get mentioned, dutifully enough, in lists of Lish’s favored authors, the intensity of their connection has never been fully appreciated.

Sending her story “Usurpation” to him, in 1973, Ozick noted that it was “both too long and too Jewish for Esquire,” and when he got his bosses to accept it, she was astounded. “I know (and you know),” she wrote to him, “that there is no other fiction editor of a Big General Magazine extant who would have the guts to publish a story as profoundly Jewish as this one.” She was probably right. The story won first place in the O. Henry Awards—the first of four such wins for Ozick (more than any other writer, living or dead)—and Lish was so committed to supporting her work that when a new boss, Clay Felker, told him he couldn’t publish Ozick’s “Levitation,” five years later, he threw enough of a temper tantrum to get himself fired. In short, Lish was the first editor to see that Ozick’s short stories deserved a large audience.

Lish was willing to lose his job over Ozick because they had become friends and because she had won prestigious literary prizes for him. But it was also because she could speak for him as a Jew, with more knowledge and fervor than he could muster. In a 1974 Esquire memo, he argued in favor of publishing an essay of hers: “I will hear quarrels against Ozick’s prose here and there, the staging, the organization—but that is about all. She is saying something I feel—every Jew REALLY feels—is undeniably true.”

More than just speaking for him, it was Ozick who helped Lish to develop his own voice. He had dabbled in fiction writing in the 1950s and early 1960s but published next to nothing. When Carver’s collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? appeared in February 1976, Ozick didn’t care about the stories themselves, but reacted to the jacket copy, which she knew Lish had written: “There is no mistaking your prose for anyone else’s,” she wrote to him. “You know what I am daring to ask. What is the reason you put this masterly gift to the service of others? Why are you an editor?”

Six months later, Lish published anonymously in Esquire a pastiche of J.D. Salinger that included a long paraphrase of Ozick’s prize-winning story. That was the beginning of Lish’s career as a writer of fiction, and everything he has written since has been, in one sense, an answer to the question that Ozick dared to ask him.

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It wasn’t an accident that Lish found his way to Paley and Ozick. When I interviewed him this spring, Lish cheerfully explained to me that he had always been conscious of being Jewish in a field—prestigious literary periodicals—where the people running the show were George Plimpton and Reed Whittemore, Ivy League WASPs. “It was an us-and-them paradigm,” he said, and this “seemed to me a contending that bore in on me in the course of my deliberations or in the expression of my affections as an editor, throughout the course of my career as an editor. No question about it.”

Lish acknowledged, too, that Jewish writers aroused a special kind of attention in him: “One had a weather eye out for these persons, by name, and once one had entered into the work, one found reasons to keep on looking at it.” The biggest Jewish names of the period—Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer—he published a little, without enthusiasm. But many of his favorite writers drew on Yiddish speech patterns to develop fascinating, complex first-person prose styles—Leonard Michaels, Stanley Elkin, Harold Brodkey, and of course Paley—and they became central in the repertoire of models he shared with students in writing workshops over the ensuing decades.

This is where Lish’s influence lives on most powerfully. Some of his students internalized not just his lessons about prose and how to teach it, but also the alternative canon of Jewish writing in America that he promoted. Sam Lipsyte, a beloved teacher and sometimes director of the MFA program at Columbia, explains that reading these writers was a big part of what he received from Lish: “I’d read Ozick and Paley and Brodkey before, but it was the way [Lish] talked about certain stories of theirs that made me revisit them and read them in a more interesting way.” He credits Lish with turning him on to Elkin’s classic story “A Poetics for Bullies,” and Michaels’ early stories, too: “That was major for me.”

Lipsyte, in turn, passed along those writers to his own students, people like Adam Wilson and Rebecca Schiff. The novelist and short story writer Justin Taylor pointed this out in a review of Schiff’s collection The Bed Moved in 2016, situating it in a “family tree of authors mentored, influenced, published, rejected, or otherwise fathered by editor-teacher Gordon Lish” that features its fair share of Jews (“Lish, Lipsyte, Lutz—and, hey, yours truly!” Taylor wrote), and which sometimes “overlaps” but usually “run[s] parallel” with the mainstream “American Jewish tradition” of Malamud, Bellow, Roth, Singer, and so on.

Lish didn’t somehow create Grace Paley or Stanly Elkin or Sam Lipsyte, and when he edited them he wasn’t as overwhelming an influence as he was on Carver. He can’t be given credit for their careers; if he hadn’t liked and printed their stories, others would have; others often did. And for people who need Lish to be the editor whom they can credit for all avant garde American prose since the 1970s, or for those looking for a case study in how overbearing, manipulative, and exclusionary editors and writing teachers can be, the idea that Lish’s greatest accomplishment was his ardent support of an alternative to the mainstream of Jewish fiction in America might feel like a disappointment, or a sideshow.

But read the work coming out of the MFA programs, or some of the most exciting American fiction published in the past decade by and about Jews, and Lish’s achievement begins to come into focus. We might need to start filing him in our minds less as and heir to Maxwell Perkins, and more to Gertrude Stein. After all, she was another Jewish writer not often thought of as one, and more often given her due for shaping the development of American prose. Lish could, of course, do a whole lot worse.