A Review of Gordon Lish's Krupp's Lulu
Ken Sparling

"The other community is not simply absorbed into the rational community; it recurs, it troubles the rational community, as its double or its shadow." -Alphonso Lingis (The Community of those who have Nothing in Common, 1994, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, pg10)

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It's always the particular nature of the affliction torturing a single soul that we find interesting. Most interesting, always, is our own particular affliction. But at some point, we are ready to escape our own affliction, we are tired of our own affliction, we are hungry, and our own affliction no longer feeds us. At some point, in other words, we are ready for Lish.

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Lish is trouble. Lish will trouble you in the way you are troubled when you feel like you can't remember something. Or when you suddenly remember something. When you wake up in the morning and you feel okay - maybe even feel good - and then you suddenly remember something.

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Lish remembers things. He remembers pretending two fingers on his hand are a person walking around.

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Loss. Knowing you've lost. Each little movement. You've lost. Look up. You've lost. Step forward. You've lost.

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He covers the thing in words. He drowns the thing in words.

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You see him. He doesn't hide. All those words, each one, you know it was put there. No one writes like that. Except someone who means to write like that. Lish means.

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"He could jump, the little man could jump, it was still okay as a game if, okay, if the little man jumped..." For a moment you're with Lish. When he says, "okay", you think, now we've got it. We'll get it. We'll get there.
Where is it we are going, though? This is the trouble. This is the trouble with Lish. The trouble Lish allows.
We're in trouble. We thought we were going somewhere. We thought our little man could fly. But even at the age of seven or eight, we knew we'd been grounded. We knew we were in trouble with this project of ours, this project of getting places, of getting our little man to fly.

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Lish goes nowhere. He shows us our own going nowhere. Allowing that. Loving that. Being that moment of going nowhere, that moment that grows into a lifetime and then it's gone. It's too bad it has to end, too. Too bad our trip has to end with us being right back where we started. Nowhere. The trick is to stay there, to stay right nowhere with Lish.

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If you can find it in your heart to stay with Lish, stay with him for just one fucking moment even, and not go tearing off to wherever it is you're tearing off to today, if you can stay with Lish and not try to tell him a thing or two about going places, about the places you are going, if you can find it in your heart to allow Lish.

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The little man was Gordon. Gordon made him go. Gordon knew he was making him go. No matter what he hoped for. No matter. These stories, no matter where Gordon hopes to make them go, he knows it's always Gordon.

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I don't think Lish even knew what his favourite thing was in that story about lint. I think when he started that story he had no idea what his favourite thing was going to be. Gordon Lish is a liar. He told us he's a liar. Oh, he was clever about it. He didn't say: "I'm a liar." He tried to blame someone else. He tried to blame someone called "they". And since I'm not Lish, I have to assume I might be "they". "Nothing," Lish tells us (me) (they), "would please me more than for me as an artist to be free to sit here and tell you the truth. But they won't let me do it."

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Lish might be a lot of things. Sometimes I'm not sure what he might be. Sometimes I don't think Lish is sure what he might be. There will be people who are willing to tell you what Lish is. But then, there are people who are willing to tell you what they themselves are. My dad's second wife, for instance. You want to know who someone is, go see my dad's second wife. Don't waste your time on Lish.

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Here in Toronto, we have one of the tallest free standing structures in the world. The CN Tower. The CN Tower is a big dick rising from Toronto's harbour. Gazing upon it is like looking down at your crotch to see if you are hard. Building the CN Tower was something akin to deciding to get a hardon just so you can measure the length of your dick. Whereas, someone else might measure his dick by gazing into the eyes of the other he has penetrated.

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There are books that promise hope only by the fact of their existence. A slim hope bound in a cover. Hope a slim poem. The poem a desperate fall off the page. A renaming of the hunger that won't let go. Each poem a self-acknowledged failure to sate the hunger. Each a celebration of that failure as pure hunger. Every gesture doomed. Like windshield wipers.

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There were times as I read Krupp's Lulu - I'm thinking here of the story about the window shade man - when I can't say that I understood exactly what Lish was saying, but it seemed to me that this in no way robbed what he said of meaning. I believed, you see. In reading this man's stories, I believed in this man, Lish. That was enough. Lish means something, I tell you. Even if I can't tell you what he means.

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When I looked up from reading the window shade story - I was in a park near a school I went to 30 years ago - when I looked up I saw something falling out of the air, lots of something, and I thought it might be raining, I thought rain was coming across the park toward me and would hit me any minute. It was some kind of particles falling out of the air, falling and falling, and I thought for a moment I was seeing into some dimension I'd never seen into before, some measure of the world, some measure of the air of the world, that I hadn't known.

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Lish is not afraid of the single insignificant gesture. He is not afraid of the gesture's insignificance. He is not afraid to love the gesture, to allow the gesture grace, to love the gesture in its moment, to cherish it in the moment, to ply it with a love that seeks no movement forward, a love that makes no effort to place the gesture, to give it a framework, a progression, a story, a life. He celebrates the "occasion of the gesture's occurrence, of all the infinitely divisible occurrences swarming furiously upon the moment."

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Finally - in the final analysis - we must, I think, agree that Gordon Lish is a piece of lint. The way a piece of lint rises up briefly when you clean the dryer filter, rises up as though it can fly - as though it can get away - then settles behind the dryer, knotted and trapped and forgotten, balled up inescapably among the other bits of lint that somehow all get attracted together.
Lish is also the guy with the unravelled hanger, poking at the lint behind the dryer. In some ways, he is the piece of lint that actually managed to escape. The piece of lint that floated up, unexpectedly, and slipped away, almost without thinking, when God turned to toss the lint from the filter into the garbage.
Lish came back. He's the piece of lint that all the other pieces of lint are cheering for. The quarterback who goes all the way. Makes it to the big time. Then comes back to pull lint out from behind a dryer. All that other lint that might have stayed behind the dryer, Lish pulls it out with the hanger, holds it up. Blows on it. "This is what happens when you dry clothes," he tells his lint friends. "This is what happens when you keep stuff clean."
We're not interested here in the clean, carefully folded laundry. We've got no plans on this rainy afternoon. The children will push and prod us, make us do things we never thought we'd do. Crawl around on all fours. Read fairy tales for hours. Fall asleep while they dismantle the house. Today is the day to clean out the lint behind the dryer.
"I've got to clean the lint. Tell the kids to stay away."
Look at that lint down there. How to get at it?
Can't.
Might as well go back to bed. Gotta slip past those kids, though, and their relentless motion nowhere. Give em a kick in the ass. Get them moving. Away. Out of my hair. Give me a quiet afternoon. I'll go nowhere with Lish.

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Afterword

If you're reading this, you probably have an interest in Gordon Lish. You may even be a friend of Gordon's. Or an enemy. But one way or the other (or any way at all) you know that Gordon matters. And if you know that Gordon matters, it means you really do know what matters. This by way of a little advertisement for a bookstore in Toronto called Pages. If you live in Toronto, or you're ever visiting, make sure you go to Pages, the only bookstore in Toronto that had a copy of Krupp's Lulu on the shelf when I needed it. (And when you need these things, you need them right away (not in six weeks, not even guaranteed overnight).)

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