Stephane Michaka is a gracious and thoughtful French writer whose novel about the complex relationship between Raymond Carver and his editor Gordon Lish, Scissors, has been lately translated into English and published by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Random House.
I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Stephane about Scissors. It’s interesting to get a European perspective on Raymond Carver, a writer I think of as being so quintessentially American.
Michaka gave me leave to adjust his responses as English is not his native language. No changes were necessary. This is the writer’s first interview in English.
Dennis Haritou: Your novel is based on the agonistic relationship between Raymond Carver and his editor Gordon Lish. But your characters are at least one remove from being those people. As I read it, I was asking myself: “Is this Raymond Carver’s story or isn’t it? How would you answer that question?
Stephane Michaka: Scissors is definitely about Raymond Carver. I have used publicly known facts from his life and the plot often directly alludes to what happened between Raymond and his editor, Raymond and his wife, etc. But what I was really interested in, in fact obsessed with, was the extent to which Carver’s life resonates for so many people. It is the spiritual journey of an Everyman who happens to be a short story writer. I think I wanted to tell that story before hearing about Carver and Lish, even before becoming a Carver fan—which I am, of course. So I would answer, Yes, it is Raymond Carver’s story, but a blurred Carver. In my novel, he is only ‘‘Raymond’’, an anonymous writer. My characters are at a remove from the real people that inspired them because I wanted readers to feel they’re almost looking at mythical figures or archetypes : the Writer, the Editor, the Writer’s Wife. There are so many mythical overtones in Carver’s life: A fifteen-year-old kid tells his high school sweetheart: ‘‘I want to become the next Hemingway.’’ And the girl falls in love with him right on the spot and sacrifices most of her youth trying to make it happen for him. And she makes it happen but the cost is huge for both of them. It speaks to so many people, whether you grow up in the Pacific Northwest or in France, whether you write or are a handyman or both. It is a beautiful story and also a cautionary tale. It is Raymond’s story, but as David Mamet beautifully said of Death of a Salesman: ‘‘It was our story that we did not know until we heard it.’’ That’s why the remove in Scissors
Dennis Haritou: It’s one of the most intriguing devices that I’ve ever encountered in a novel: Embedded in Scissors are four Raymond Carver-like stories that you have written. The stories are so dramatically effective that I wondered at first if they really were Raymond Carver stories. What was it like to write those stories? As a writer, did you feel that you were channeling Raymond Carver? Or was it not like that at all?
Stephane Michaka: I guess I was influenced by a couple of movies that focus on writer’s lives, such as Paul Schrader’s Mishima or Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry. In those films, you are presented with both the writer’s everyday life and his fictional imagination. My four short stories, being related to my main character’s life, were bound to echo some of Carver’s themes and writing technique. Indeed, the first story is inspired by one incident Carver tells in his essay ‘‘Fires’’: his anxiety attack at not being Ernest Hemingway but a regular guy sitting in a laundromat with the kids’ laundry. So again, the starting point was Carver but I went to look elsewhere. In my own experience and also in other writing voices. Scissors is a lot about trying out different narrative voices and I hope that’s what my four stories do. The first one—‘‘Who Needs Air ?’’—is the closest to Carver, both the man and the writer. But I don’t see the other stories as channeling him. Because Carver has had such a huge influence on short story writing, we tend to refer to him every time we read a ‘‘He / She’’ story, or something with four people in a room talking about love. But he himself took his writing devices from Chekhov, Isaac Babel and Sherwood Anderson, to name only a few. What I was purposely doing was tap into this lode which is our everyday life—the common stuff of most short stories. Three of the stories in Scissors relate things that happened to me in the past few years. And I wrote my novel in French, not in Carver’s idiom which is a very poetic and, in my view, inimitable way of writing fiction. John Cullen, who did a wonderful job translating Scissors, was very aware of that and his translation is by no means ‘Carveresque’. It’s enough that my novel is based on his life ! One can only hope to find one’s own voice, and Carver himself points the way in his essays, with such phrases as ‘‘no tricks’’ or ‘‘writing as an act of discovery’’—of self-discovery, he meant. That’s what I was trying to channel.
Dennis Haritou: Douglas in your novel plays proxy for Raymond Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish. Douglas seems to have his own agenda as an editor. He is more than a literary midwife. He actually has a hand in re-creating the stories to satisfy his own ego. There’s a touch of the satanic about Douglas. Is that the way you saw him?
Stephane Michaka: Yes, but not in the sense that he’s an evildoer. I have worked closely with several editors, both as a writer and as a translator, and I was often impressed with the ideas they suggested—their knack for bringing a manuscript to a wholly different level. I believe there is such a thing as editorial genius, just as there is writing genius. Only, we seldom know what editors do, or which editorial intuitions helped shape a great novel. We know how Ezra Pound improved T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and the letters of Maxwell Perkins show what a perfect guide he was for Scott Fitzgerald. But Douglas belongs to a different school—the Lish school, obviously. And there may be only one Gordon Lish: a demonic personality who not only cuts and rewrites his writers but makes them household names—as his job at Esquire and later Knopf enabled him to do. He has clout and charisma. So I was trying to create a character that would be as unique as Gordon Lish. A Svengali but also someone who believes in good writing. Someone, as Raymond says in Scissors, ‘‘who has a vital need to hear good stories’’. I think the urge to go beyond their editorial mandate is something the best of editors have to contend with. Don’t they sometimes dream of being their writer’s dark angel—by rewriting him or her ? They sometimes do—dream, not rewrite. But at least one does rewrite and that’s what Lish famously did. Tess Gallagher aptly called him ‘‘the trespassing editor’’. After Scissors was published in France, I took the opportunity of a stay in New York to try and meet Gordon Lish. I spent two hours at his place and he was extremely courteous. He did not mind a bit that I had written a character based on him. Other writers had done it before and he couldn’t care less. I did find him, not satanical, but demonic, as some artists are. Speaking of his job as editor, he told me: ‘‘You feel a kind of thrumming in the body, with good writing.’’ That is what I was hoping to convey with this character based on him. Not just an egotist, but an editor as artist, even if he is a trespassing one.
Dennis Haritou: Douglas takes Raymond’s story “Petunias” and transforms it almost out of all recognition. He cuts its length from 15 pages to 2 ½. And he renames the story “Compost”.
But you leave the reader with the impression that Douglas may have improved Raymond’s story. I don’t think the reader can decide. Do you think that Douglas has improved Raymond’s stories in the editing process? How?
Stephane Michaka: Of course, the reader cannot decide, because he only has ‘‘Petunias’’ and not ‘‘Compost’’. The edited version is left out of the novel. As in a classical tragedy where you don’t bring bloodstained bodies on stage but send a messenger to tell what happened. I really wanted to focus on Raymond’s feelings. The question of whether his story has been improved is of no import to him. All he sees is that it has been heavily cut. That is, his emotions, his life with Marianne, his spiritual journey, all are annihilated by Douglas. And he depends on this man for money, for stature, even for a certain degree of immortality—i.e. publication. Should he refuse the cuts and give up publication ? His stories are his soul. It’s a terrible dilemma. What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world… In the end, that is the question at the heart of Scissors.
Dennis Haritou: It seems that all the important people in Raymond’s life want to get their fingerprints on the writer’s creative process. His first wife, Marianne, wants to read into Raymond’s stories a biography of her life. And Joanne, Raymond’s second significant relationship sees her role as high priestess of his literature as his executor. His editor, Douglas, seems to want to leave his touch through his editing of Raymond’s stories, even when some of his editorial choices may be merely attacks of possession on the text that he didn’t have the creativity to write himself. Do you think that’s the way it is for artists? That the people who surround the writer try to live off them?
Stephane Michaka: No, I believe it’s more often the other way round. Writers live off the lives of their family, friends and acquaintances. It’s their narrative fuel. On the other hand, there is an impulse, in certain people surrounding an artist, to help, to assist, to nurture, and sometimes, yes, to reclaim something that passed into the work. But in my experience, it happens in a very subdued way. I tried to suggest, in Scissors, that it takes many supportive people to bring a writer to fruition. Or simply to help someone grow from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ (another mythical aspect of Carver’s life is his victorious struggle with alcohol). Our friends’ and family’s support is all. If we can have it.
Dennis Haritou: Stephane, thanks for being so gracious about considering my questions.
Stephane Michaka: Thank you, Dennis, for paying such close attention to my novel.
Dennis Haritou: I can’t resist this last question. Scissors is about the creative/destructive relationship between a writer and his editor. How did you get along with your editor?
Stephane Michaka: I was very lucky to have found the best editor for Scissors. Lilas Seewald, who is an editor at Fayard, has worked with Michel Houellebecq and is currently the French editor of Norman Spinrad, Eric Miles Williamson and Larry Fondation. She is of the Lish school, not in the way she attacks manuscripts but in her unquenchable thirst for good writing. It was hard work but she helped me improve the novel and she made sure that it would see the light of day. Scissors is dedicated to her, another rare artist editor.
