In reading the Edmund White interview that Jansy quoted from, I was, as a former editor myself, interested to see that VN was “very nice” about some editing White had done on the Inspiration piece. In her recent biography of Raymond Carver, Carol Sklenicka reports another of VN’s encounters with an editor in which the outcome was not so pleasant. Those who are interested in this amusing story can read it by searching Amazon for “Sklenicka Carver” and then clicking on the “Look Inside” button for Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life. If you then search the book for “Nabokov,” you can find the story on pp. 283-284. The editor in question was Gordon Lish. The quotation from Frederic Hills (VN’s editor at McGraw-Hill) is from a letter to Sklenicka. 

Carver, of course, was himself a famous writer of short stories and one of the founders, as it were, of the school of minimalism that flourished in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s and is still a potent force in college writing programs. Lish was almost equally famous as the most powerful editor in the country (at Esquire and Knopf and at his own literary magazine, The Quarterly) during this same period. He notoriously cut and rewrote some of Carver’s most influential early stories. The argument over which is the “real” (and the best) Carver rages to this day. The Library of America Carver volume contains, at the author’s widow’s insistence, both the original and the Lish-edited versions of many of the stories. A sample of Lish’s editing of Carver is available at the New Yorker site:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/12/24/071224on_onlineonly_carver

So the struggle between Lish and VN would not have been exactly onesided, both men being geniuses in their respective fields. I for one would like to see those manuscript pages of LATH that Lish took his pencil to. 

Jim Twiggs