For years gurus have both repelled and attracted me. One of them ran an ashram in India where I lived for a while with my first husband. No sex for enlightenment, no divestiture of your life savings–simple bhakti yoga, devotion to the guru, who would show you the emptiness of all desiring and thus the love which moves through all things.
The indubitable draw was the workshop’s leader, Gordon Lish, a senior editor at Knopf as well as a writer and a teacher. Lish is a household name in the world of contemporary fiction: in Esquire’s 1987 map of the literary universe he was placed at the “Red Hot Center.” Named Captain Fiction in Vanity Fair (for–perhaps?–the khaki clothes he likes to wear as well as for the devotion he gets from his crew on the good ship Literature), he runs a weekly workshop in Manhattan with a regular waiting list of 80 to 100. Students fortunate enough to have gained entry revere him (the word is not too strong) and point to their work as proof of his power. Some of them fly to New York every week to see him. Workshop sponsor Diane Williams, a Chicago frequent flyer, with a substantial list of publications, said to me dead-earnestly, “I want to know what he knows.”
By this time I was dying to go. It turned out there were scholarships available this time, and I had been offered one; I had nothing to lose except time. I’d go out of sheer curiosity, to find out what all the fuss was about. If for some reason I were impelled to read him my story and he didn’t like it, I’d simply disregard him. I’d already published 11 stories, some in magazines that paid money, so really, basically–I plumbed my imagination–what could he say to me? And there was always the off chance–since, as every aspiring writer knows, Lish is the guy who discovered Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah and Amy Hempel, wrote their names into the annals of American literary history–when he heard my story (did I dare even think this?), despite all the others he’d criticized or condescended to, I’d be Captain Fiction’s First Mate!
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For the most part these were not artists or even artsy people, the kind who wear headbands and earrings that pull at the holes in their ears. In the backs of their minds there must have been tiny springs burbling, a sense of a power leashed that, with a little digging, the right tools . . . But they sat quietly, anonymously, manuscripts tucked away in purses and briefcases or lying face down on the table. Notepads out, pens in hand, postures at attention.
Williams led me to a table in the center of the room, directly in front of Lish. For the next two and a half hours I sat on a hard chair while 54-year-old Gordon Lish, in khaki from head to foot, lean as a Marine, walked back and forth in front of a chalkboard and, without smiling, with a dead-blank face, letting his voice and hands portray the urgency of his message, told us how to be great writers:
“Let go of everything you think you know. Your ego and your successes, they are puny.” And: “You must see in yourself you are all things. The prospect of being Anyman, not who you are. Then you become susceptible to the spirit that can make you God.”
Some people looked a little glazed. Others watched with small fascinated smiles. He seemed to have selected certain people to look at, working the room like an evangelical preacher, gathering up first the easy ones, the ones waiting for the slightest breath to sweep them away. These would be his core, the central mass to which more and more would adhere. “My spirit is infinite,” he said. “I am like God.”
