My Romance
– novel as literary gush written in one continuous paragraph with a
flourish at the end: the novel's concluding short sentence is set off as
paragraph number two.
The book's dust jacket tells us what
eventually became the novel evolved from an improvised monologue
delivered at a writer's conference. This should come as no surprise
since My Romance will bring to mind David Antin speaking his improvised “talk poems” in from of a live audience.
However,
there are important differences. David Antin peppers in a few items
about himself but he's always talking about the outer world, society and
culture, people and the arts. Not so with Gordon. Gordon insists his
tales are unlike a conventional story happening out there in the world;
rather, his fictions occur in the moment, in one place – and that one
place is inside his narrator's head.
Using his monologue as raw material, Gordon sat at his desk and wrote out My Romance,
a story about a writer/editor/teacher by the name of Gordon Lish giving
a speech at a summer writing workshop on Long Island. And here's the
curious thing: if Gordon's short novel was, in fact, a public speech (or
made into an audio book), it would last more than 3 hours. Gordon is a
dynamic speaker but only a special audience could sit still for that
length of time. This to emphasize My Romance is a work of fiction in the form of a novel.
Yet,
in an interview, Gordon asserted: “What I’m up to, or what I appear to
be up to, the seeming actuality of so much that I put on the page, as in
My Romance, has been done for a longish, longish, longish while under the rubric of novel or imaginative writing.”
Gordon's
statement gets back to a blurb from the dust jacket: “As in much of
Lish's work, the reader is invited to consider tantalizing conundrums
about fact and fiction and fact in fiction. Whether or not the events Lish relates in My Romance happened, there is no question that they are true.”
How
true? Events are true, at least for the narrator, since, after all,
that's where the action is taking place, in the narrator's head.
Does all this sound a tad solipsistic? Yes, indeed...Gordon has been accused of such. But let me quickly add My Romance makes for a quick, fun, absorbing read.
My Romance also makes for a relatively straightforward read. Unlike Dear Mr. Capote
featuring narrator as psychopathic killer, the narrator here is named
Gordon Lish with apparent similarities to the author: he teaches
writing, suffers from psoriasis and comes from a family of hat makers.
And the entire book is one continuous rant. None of that sectioning off
into different chapters with what could be different narrators as in
Gordon's Zimzum.
Additionally, get ready to laugh out loud
on nearly every page. I can just imagine the reaction of all those
women and men at the writers' conference politely remaining in their
seats while Gordon Lish goes on and on and on and on, forever spinning
out details on things like the difficult names of the medications he
must take to help deal with his psoriasis, his family history revolving
around ownership of his father's Audemars Piguet wristwatch, why he
wears the size pants and shoes he wears, his nervousness when speaking
in front of people. If you were a writing student, how long would you last before thinking
to yourself - enough already with the personal minutiae, please start
talking about writing!
Quick sample of Gordon in My Romance action: "I
am desperate standing up here. I feel a certain desperation standing up
here. I do not want just to stand up here and read stories to you. It
is not good enough for me to just stand up here and do my best to read
to you from up here. I want instead to speak to you from up here. I just
feel that I have to speak to you from up here."
When addressing his writing of My Romance in an interview, Gordon dropped these three gems:
"Everything
I do is an effort to remake myself. I’m not interested in remaking
anybody else and I’m not interested in recreating anything outside of
myself. I’m interested in finding, in the page, a replacement for what I
feel I’ve been deprived of in actuality."
"I use my dick,
mainly, to write the first time and I’m using my brains to do the
revisions. I mean, not my brain. I’m using rather practiced sequences of
motions that have to do chiefly with mind or chiefly with know how."
"I
never sit down with ambition to produce something that I’ll then rid
myself of or keep some semblance of and work through and improve. No, I
write it as ably as I can, as truly as I can, as carefully, as closely
machining a sentence with ferocity of attention that I would hold to be
as good as you’re going to get, as good as I’m going to get, ever."
Lastly,
about the novel's title - narrator Gordon speaks about his romance with
a gal at the office but I strongly suspect his abiding romance centers
around reading fiction and writing fiction. Just a hunch.
Gordon Lish, born 1934
Comments
Post a Comment