Now approaching his 80th year, the writer, teacher and editor Gordon Lish has dedicated his life to redefining the frontiers of American fiction. It's no overstatement to say that Lish is to the second half of the 20th century what Gertrude Stein was to the first. Mention Lish to most readers, though, and they'll react in one of two ways: if not with a flummoxed "Who?" then worse, with an "Oh … do you mean the guy who chopped Raymond Carver?"
Ever since DT Max's incendiary exposé for the New York Times, Lish's name has seemed inseparable from Carver's – whose early stories he radically revised, and who admitted to Lish that "if I have any standing in the world, I owe it to you". Yet it's time we reclaimed Lish from Carver's shadow, as a literary landmark in his own right. Until such a revaluation takes place, Lish will remain, as his friend Don DeLillo has put it, "famous for all the wrong reasons".
Crucially, the Carver issue has unfairly obscured Lish's own unique contribution to fiction. From the menacing monologue of Dear Mr Capote to the outrageously ironic Zimzum, Lish has produced a wealth of avant-garde prose, worthy of the pioneers of literary modernism. His writing represents the US's answer to Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. Until recently, this remarkable oeuvre was out of print; it took until 2010 for an independent press, OR Books, to assemble an edition of Lish's Collected Fictions.
What's more, Lish deserves a place in literary history for his teaching of creative writing. At Yale and Columbia, and latterly at private seminars held in the homes of his students, Lish advanced a distinctive and demanding approach to the craft of fiction. Informed by the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva, he preached what his student Gary Lutz has called a "poetics of the sentence" – an almost mystical attunement to language's hidden rhythms and resonances.
Sometimes described as "cult-like", Lish's classes became incredibly controversial. There are stories of one student fainting during these arduous all-night affairs; in 1992, he sued Harper's for reprinting his teaching material. But we're best served by looking beyond such scandals. As a teacher, Lish should be judged by the success of his students – an extraordinary array of writers, who have spread his ideas across the literary landscape. From Ben Marcus and Sam Lipsyte (both championed in the UK by Granta) to the brilliant Christine Schutt (who British publishers urgently need to take notice of), Lish's influence can be felt in many of today's most exciting prose stylists.
It's notable, too, that several of Lish's proteges are now teachers themselves, appointed to prominent positions in US universities. Marcus and Lipsyte teach creative writing at Columbia; Brian Evenson at Brown University; Padgett Powell at the University of Florida; the list goes on. In this sense, the "school of Lish" has been central to the symbiosis of writing and teaching in postwar America – a major cultural shift that Mark McGurl has identified as "the programme era".
So, in short, forget about Carver: there's much more to Lish than the myths suggest. Instead, let's read Lish as he really is: a writer of bleakly beautiful masterpieces such as the recently reprinted Peru, and a teacher whose true impact is one of the great untold stories of modern fiction. Here in Britain, the literary establishment has largely reneged on innovation; even our more progressive voices mourn the "death" of the modernist experiment. So why not look across the Atlantic, and learn from Lish? Maybe we'll find that the avant garde is alive and well, where we least expected to find it.
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