NOTE:
While shooting a movie on the beach in Malibu, California, a bottle
washed ashore. The bottle was several years old, from the looks of it,
and inside was a message—if you can call this a message.
There were five sheets of paper, and on the sheets a single long
paragraph was composed in neat block letters. The writing was a
critique of some sort, literary criticism about the novels of a writer
I had never heard of. (Though I have now Googled "Gordon Lish" and
found out a great deal of information about him.) Why this was
written and crammed into a bottle and tossed out to sea is beyond me;
nevertheless, I present the text verbatim for readers to make of it
what the will. –Michael Hemmingson
Ladies and Gentlemen: of all his books, Lish's first novel, Dear Mr.
Capote, is his most accessible work, less experimental and minimal than
his later offerings, taking on a popular genre in the 1980s-90s: the
serial killer yarn. It is an epistolary text, comprised of letters (or
one letter) written to Truman Capote by a would-be serial killer who
has just turned forty-seven years old and intends to murder forty-seven
women, one for each year of his dreadful, empty life. Actually,
forty-six women, as he will then commit suicide and become the last.
His name is David, he works in a bank; he is married and has a son. In
his letters, he chronicles his slayings of random women in the city of
Gotham, by knife, so that Capote will have research material to write a
book greater than In Cold Blood. There will be vast sums of money made,
which he wants to go to his son, "the boy." David claims: "I am already
more famous than you are even if in the public nobody knows my name by
heart" (4) because he has already murdered a number of women that made
headline news—Gotham is living in fear of this unknown, homicidal
maniac on the loose. "Dear Mr. Capote," he pleads, "call Random House!"
David is not shallow and two-dimensional as his American Psycho
compatriot, Patrick Bateman; he is a complex man of deep, critical
thought—albeit insane, justifying the forty-seven people he must
murder, as if the Universe has honored him with a mission: he only
kills "the ones which when Nature calls sit down to
you-know-what"(4). He recounts seeing a woman in line at a
Chinese restaurant during lunch. He is fascinated by
her and follows her onto the street, stalking, ruminating in a tense,
obsessed voice, addressed to Truman Capote, but also to himself:
…So she turns toward Second. Nibble nibble nibble.
She's walking slow. Nibble nibble nibble. You know what? A
person which is pigeon-toed, it's funny when they walk slow. Nibble,
nibble, nibble. But don't ask me why. It just is.
The other thing is her shoes.
Like they're white and soft.
Hey, I can hear them, white and soft. Like this. Woof, woof,
woof. Only slower. Woof. Woof. Woof. More like that and very soft
(77).
He murders her, of course.
You don't really have to hurry more than what is reasonable. It’s
dead. I mean, she is. But if she's set right when you jab her, she can
stand and stand and stand. You'd be surprised. I'm not talking
minutes, of course. I just mean it's not like you do it and here she
comes before you have a chance to catch your breath. In other words,
she's going to stay on her feet for maybe upwards five, ten, fifteen
seconds, give or take. But it all depends on how she's set, all things
being equal (81-82).
One of his preferred methods of striking his victims is to stab them in
the eye, getting to their brain, where "you sometimes hear a
click. But you can't really see anything because the goo gets in
the way" (80). Why the eye and why women? "Better targets," he
confesses. "Bigger eyes" (10). David is obsessed with the female eye,
which he believes are bigger than men's eyes, giving him a wider "range
of females. I said it was the bigger eyes which is the reason. But
let's not forget there are these other things, which is these things
like this—mascara and eye shadow and eyeliner and eye pencil and
sometimes your cream a glitter" (18). Throughout the letters he brings
up his Other: Janet Rose, his first and greatest love, a young love,
deeply intimate rather than innocent. She was thirteen and he was
sixteen back then but she was far more experienced in matters of sex
and mind games than he. Precocious is not the proper word for
her—the scenes of oral sex are unequivocally rendered in great
detail (although David can never say the proper name for genitals,
calling hers a "you-know-what") with graphic exchanges of fluids. She
has many curious kinks, such as enjoying a hairbrush inside her vagina
or staring at her image and his in the mirror, all the while delivering
her own maddening monologues:
She says, "Look at us in the mirror together." This is what Janet
R. says, She says, "Look at us in the mirror naked together.
You're naked and I'm naked and we're looking at each other in the
mirror together. Do you see my boobies? See my cunny? You
can't see my hole when I'm standing this way, can you? Do you
want me to show you my hole in the mirror? […] Do you want
to get closer to the mirror now?" (165)
She goes on for pages—it is repetitive, perverse, and
intoxicating for David, claiming her words alone could make him reach
orgasm). He is obsessed with the memory of her and wishes to go
back. They referred to one another as "Mr. and Mrs.
First-Nighter" and when there is a lack of understanding or
communication, they play a game, saying, "Red Dog One to Blue Dog Two,
do you read me?" which exhibits a trace of childhood to this
relationship. Needless to say, they have pronounced their undying
love for one another, an endless love, but like all young love,
something happens to disrupt the flow of overwhelming feelings. It
seems all tragic love stories must have one final, painful encounter,
to bring closure to the agony of youthful, futile adoration—Romeo
and Juliet is the classic example, but Scott Spencer's Endless Love and
Jack Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy come to mind, where the characters,
separated from one another, have grown, changed, but make love one last
time, an act they eventually regret. This is true for David and
Janet. He crosses paths with her some months later. He runs
to her, cries, "My beloved! My beloved!" (214). She is
indifferent, she says he should leave her alone, that she has a
boyfriend now; then she suggests they can go somewhere and be together
"for old time's sake" (215). They go to the apartment where a
friend of hers lives, she has they key, it's where she has sex with her
new boyfriend. She says the friend will watch them, listen, and
maybe join in. They stand naked in front of the mirror and do the
things they used to do. But Janet seems to come unraveled, she
keeps calling to her friend to come in and join, but there does not
seem to be a friend—or is there? The friend joins in, but
so do many other people from their past, even David's wife, so that it
has now become an orgy. The orgy, however, is most likely in
David's mind. He starts to become angry: "You hear me, all you sons of
bitches in your fancy fucking famous places? You're fucking
nobody because I am who you are" (256). He is convinced the
newspaper is watching him, the kitchen is watching him, and the eyes of
the world are on him. The reader is left with the sensation that David
may have killed her, knowing this would be the last time with Janet and
not being able to deal with that loss of love. "My darling.
My beloved. There is no world, no window. There is just a mirror"
(257). And that is it. Lish does not show, nor overtly
hints, that David has murdered the girl, but what else could there be?
He is obsessed with stabbing women in their eyes because of his memory
of seeing Janet in the mirror, of Janet watching him, staring at him,
her eyes always on him: this girl he desperately loved and who
eventually rejected and hurt him. By stabbing women in their
eyes, he destroys those mirrors, and makes them, as suggested by Deluze
and Guattari, "the body without an image" (Anti-Oedipus 8). Then again,
maybe none of this happened; perhaps it is all the fantasy of a madman
stuck in the bughouse of his skull. In a 1984 radio interview with Don
Swaim, Swaim wonders whether or not David has actually killed
anyone. "Was this something in my lack of reception, or was this
meant to be somewhat in the air?" he asks. "So far as I can see every
reader has had it a different way," Lish replies, "it is intended that
one sees that he has not killed anyone at all, that's he's incapable of
killing. He would like to be able to do so, that's certainly is his
ambition, to kill enough people in order to generate an exciting enough
story to provide a bestseller in order to secure the future of his son
is indeed a notion of his but never achieves any kind of reality
[…] The clues to suggest as much are subtleized in the
extreme—I think you mainly get it in a scene near the back
end of the book when his wife is heard speaking, and she says in that
peculiar voice, that voice that is peculiar to her: 'You couldn't off
anybody.' […] I think the indication is rather oblique but
there that he is in fact not killing." It does not matter whether David
is really a serial killer or—like Ellis' Bateman at the end of
American Psycho—it is all a ruse, the fabricated violence of an
overactive, needy imagination. Many critics agree that Lish is
not an easy read—he has a language all his own, a voice like no
other writer; each sentence, each syllable, needs to be paid close
attention to. "I wanted a voice that sounded like nothing else you ever
heard before," he tells Swaim. "I wanted a book that was erotic as I
could make it, I wanted a book that was as shocking as I could make
it." "Picture a man possessed by, saved by, whatever ruins of
temptation and salvation have made their way to his man-self," writes
Peter Markus in a review of the 2006 paperback edition of Zumzum. "Now
picture 'Gordon Lish,' a man possessed by his own fear and his own
fearless desire." Dear Mr. Capote is possessed by that meddling fear
and desire—so what about the body of his literary output?
It would be prudent to take a brief look at Lish's other novels, and
how they relate to his first. All of his novels, except
one, are written in frantic first person; they tend to be
autobiography, or at least reflexive, as the narrator is "Gordon Lish,"
sometimes referred to in the third person.10 His second novel, Peru, is
the apparent memory of a middle-aged man, who believes, at age six, he
committed an act of violence against another child. "I should probably
be talking to just six-year-olds […] Who wants to remember the
way things really were? You have to really think about it and
think about it to keep things which happened from getting mixed up with
the things you're always making up" (107). He is calling into question
the validity of memory—are the events of a life we recall truly
true, partially fiction, or completely wrong and fabricated? How
accurate is memory—this is a fairly new debate in academic life
studies as well as world history. The two characters in Extravaganza,
while telling jokes, explore the same territory of questioning the past
and its truthfulness—it is a third person text about Smith and
Dale, two vaudevillians who have a lot in common with Vladimir and
Estragon, Laurel and Hardy, the Smothers Brothers, Cheech and Chong,
Penn and Teller, and even Jack Black and Kyle Gass of Tenacious D: two
disparate, comic voices commenting on—things. "What" things
are difficult to determine, because none of the anecdotes and jokes
make sense, or are simply absurd and amusing (Beckett again). It is
futile to look for plot and structure in Lish's four subsequent novels:
My Romance, Zimzum, Epigraph, and Arcade or: How to Write a Novel. My
Romance is a 142-page single paragraph (except for the last sentence,
which has an indent) in the form of a speech "Gordon" gives at a
writing conference, talking about editing, drinking at work, and the
loving relationship with his wife, Barbara. Zimzum is a 98-page novella
that deals with memory again, where "Lish" recalls going to the beach
as child and makes a list of every woman he has had sex with or wants
to have sex with, noting what he did or wanted to do to their bodies
and his. Epigraph returns to the epistolary genre, a somber work in the
form of several letters about life after his wife's death from
cancer—going into retirement with a hermit existence, alone in
his apartment, the only drama being the brief encounters with widowed
neighbors seeking a senior citizen's connection. Finally, Arcade
is his most blatant try at the metafictional form overdone in the 1970s
and 1980s by writers such as Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick, and
George Chambers: another memory work, the cover copy advises: "This
book is empty, the pursuit of the blank, a smug admission of flawed
booklessness." It contains an 84-page paragraph of ruminations on
the Lish family and them, for unknown reasons, has twenty blank pages,
some text, then ten blank pages, some text, and then six blank pages,
and the moves toward an end, where, in a section titled "A Word From,
You Know, From the Author of This," Lish takes a breather to state:
I'm sorry, but isn't it high time there was a statement fighting back
against them always accusing me of never writing novels but only of,
you know, of me sitting here keeping trying to get away with these like
these sort of thinly—thinly, I said—don't they always say
thinly?—these sort of thinly disguised autobiographies, if you
will or wouldn't? Because it is a dirty stinking rotten
lie! Like you take everything in this book, it is all made up
(165).
Lish is telling his readers not to believe everything he writes, or
says, and to be prudent enough to always question the truth of the
text. He admonishes in Zimzum, "God, you've really got to watch it when
you sit yourself down and start making things up" (97), which is damn
good and nifty advice—nibble nibble nibble [Here the text ends as
there were no more pieces of paper in the bottle—M.H.]
WORKS CITED
The following was not included in the message in a bottle but I thought it prudent to include a short bibliography. –M.H.
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. NY: Random House, 1966.
Deluze, Giles and Félix Guatarri. Anti-Oedipus. NY: Viking Press, 1977.
Kerouac, Jack. Maggie Cassidy. NY: Avon, 1959.
Lish, Gordon. Dear Mr. Capote. NY: A William Abrams Book/ Holt Reinhart and
Winston, 1983.
_________. Peru. NY: A William Abrams Books/Dutton, 1986.
_________. Extravaganza. NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1989.
_________. Zimzum. NY: Pantheon, 1993; NY: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006.
_________. Epigraph. NY: Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1996.
_________. Arcade or How to Write a Novel. NY: Four Walls, Eight Windows, 1998.
Markus, Peter. "Horny dilemma: a former Esquire editor's linguistic acrobatics."
MetroTimes 30 August 2006.
Spencer, Scott. Endless Love. NY: Knopf, 1979.
Swaim, Don. Audio Interview with Gordon Lish. June 29, 1983.
http://wiredforbooks.org/gordonlish
