Giles Gordon
Giles Gordon was a Scottish literary figure born on May 23, 1940, in Edinburgh, known for his multifaceted career as a publisher, literary agent, and writer. Coming from a family of artistic distinction—his father was an architect and his mother a concert pianist—Gordon faced a challenging early education at the Edinburgh Academy and briefly studied visual arts before shifting his focus to publishing. He became editorial director at Victor Gollancz in 1967 but left the publishing world in 1973 to advocate for writers' rights as a literary agent, gaining acclaim for securing significant deals.
As a writer, Gordon explored various forms of narrative, particularly in his experimental prose pieces that examined representation and the intricacies of human relationships. His notable works include "Pictures from an Exhibition," which eschews traditional storytelling, and "About a Marriage," a stark portrayal of marital dynamics. His most acclaimed novel, "Enemies: A Novel About Friendship," reflects on the complexities of relationships and the elusive nature of language. Gordon's literary contributions earned him recognition, including a fellowship at the Royal Society of Literature in 1990. He returned to Edinburgh in the 1990s and continued to influence the literary scene until his passing on November 14, 2003, after a fall.
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Giles Gordon
Writer
- Born: May 23, 1940
- Birthplace: Edinburgh, Scotland
- Died: November 14, 2003
- Place of death: Edinburgh, Scotland
Biography
Giles Gordon’s father was a distinguished architect, and his mother was a concert pianist. Gordon was born on May 23, 1940, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and educated at Edinburgh Academy (he later claimed the experience was traumatizing). He briefly studied at the Edinburgh College of Art but found that he had neither the talent nor ambition for the visual arts. He decided to pursue publishing, first in Edinburgh and then in London. In 1967, after a number of other positions, he joined the publisher Victor Gollancz as editorial director. Over the next several years, Gordon grew outraged over the treatment writers received and left publishing in 1973 to become a literary agent. Over the next twenty years, he earned a reputation for championing writers’ rights and securing spectacular deals that became the talk of the industry.
Although he had published poetry in the early 1960’s, in the early 1970’s he turned to fiction. For the next decade he would both explore the writing process and anatomize the psychology of relationships in his writing. Pictures from an Exhibition, for instance, is a series of brief experimental prose pieces that “animate” paintings. Dismissing plot, character, and theme, and jettisoning concerns with recreating a semblance of the “real” world, these self-reflexive pieces explore the implications of representation itself. By contrast, About a Marriage draws heavily on Gordon’s own troubled relationship and bluntly and realistically records the banality of marriage, its frustrations, its inevitable infidelities, and the consequent guilt.
In Girl with Red Hair, Gordon returns to the experimental mode, parodying the murder mystery by assembling witnesses, suspects, and investigators but denying the reader any reliable certainty. Farewell, Fond Dreams and The Illusionist, and Other Fictions are both collections of cerebral, demanding prose exercises that explore the dynamics of narrative itself, the tactics of such intellectual encoding, the spellbinding magic of words in conjuring what we inevitably accept as real, and the loneliness implicit in depending on language as the real world stays stubbornly unreachable. His 1977 novel Enemies: A Novel About Friendship, a hybrid that unites his interests in relationships and the narrative process, is his most-successful work. Two emotionally wrought families share a tense holiday that ends with a wholly inexplicable climax—a gorgeous garden simply vanishes—that is an intriguing metaphor for the elegant evasions of language and its ability to tidy up the mess of our emotional lives.
By 1980, Gordon had abandoned fiction (he had found little critical enthusiasm), although he went on to write or edit more than twenty other titles. He was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1990. In the 1990’s, he left London and returned to Edinburgh, where he continued his work as an agent, cultivating, through urbane columns and book reviews, his reputation as a literary trendsetter. He died after a fall on November 14, 2003. Passionate about writing, Gordon, whether as publisher, agent, or writer, believed that the best writing challenged and provoked but ultimately rewarded the investment of reading by using language to reveal its own power.