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January072008

The Raymond Carver Rights Debate

Filed under: Headline Shooter   Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

NPR has the story. From their web summary:
In 1981, Knopf published a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver called What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The book was a critical success. Reviewers praised its minimalism and Carver's spare style. It was, perhaps, more spare than Carver intended.

Carver's editor was Gordon Lish, and since the author's death in 1988 at the age of 50, scholars have discovered that Lish edited Carver's stories heavily — some would say drastically. Lish cut description. He changed story endings. And in many cases, he eliminated more than half of what Carver had written.

Now Carver's widow wants his readers to see the original stories. She's pushing to have What We Talk About When We Talk About Love republished. [The] New Yorker magazine has printed one of those stories in its annual fiction issue. Knopf says it owns the rights — but to what?
I had a letter today from a young Carver fan who's been feeling a little conflicted about his fandom now that he knows about Lish's interventions. With his permission, I'll add it to this post. Update: Here it is. This letter is from Matthew Wright, who discovered Carver as a teenager in a small town about three hours away from Yakima, Washington, a central Carver site.
I'm a 21-year-old who loved reading Carver in high school, which was only about 3.5 years ago. I bought two of his short story collections, "What We Talk About" and "Cathedral" and now, yesterday, in Life and Letters, I read "Rough Crossings, The Cutting of Raymond Carver," and I don't know what to think. Is this just now coming out? Did people know about this? Know that at first Carver wanted Lish to edit the fiction, but when he did (cut it by forty per cent), Carver said no way, don't publish it? And then it was published anyway, into the story we now know as "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." It's practically as much Lish's story as is is Carver's. Did you know about this? Did anyone? I feel cheated.
As for me, when I read "Beginners," I was enormously relieved: I liked it, and I still liked Lish's version. I've known a few celebrated writers whose grace, eloquence, and relevance can be credited almost entirely to their editors, but it's clear to me that Carver isn't one of them.

NPR's David Gura interviewed David Remnick for the story, and it seems as though we have the answer to the question of who wrote the introduction to the Carver-Lish section. (Gura: "David Remnick, who edits The New Yorker, wrote an introduction to the piece." Later: But read this post's comments; the author/s may still be unrevealed. If you know one way or the other, won't you write in? As you know, I won't quote or name you without your permission.)

In the interview, Remnick says, "Writers are not Frankenstein monsters. They're not idiot savants. Writing is really, really hard. And what Carver risked in every story is for everyone to see and to read and to feel." He adds a bit later: "It's my feeling that Carver learned something from Lish, and internalized something from Lish's edits, and it helped him develop this aesthetic that we know as Raymond Carver's style, which may be fuller and lusher in later stories and more spare and laconic in the middle stories, but nevertheless is a recognizable voice from beginning to end."

Speaking of debates, I'm digging the lively, diverse discussion at City Room about the MetroCard's needlessly flat design, a topic I've considered as well (on the stylish design-essay website A Brief Message). One of the card's early promoters posts a clarifying comment, and it's a rousing conversation all around.
5 comments

Comments

I thought the Lish edit was much better!

carolitaJanuary 07, 2008

Thanks for pointing me to this. By the way, I'm enjoying your blog!

DOJanuary 08, 2008

Thanks a lot! Back atcha (blog and show). May radio live forever!

Emily January 08, 2008
Back to that intro question, briefly...not that I'm determined to ferret this out or anything, but I notice that Michael Hemmingson (I presume, anyway) comments here:
Why are so many people wondering who wrote it. I was William Stull, a prominent Carver scholar; it’s fairly obvious and no big secret,

I know because I am writing a biography on Carver and a book on Lish’s impact on American fiction.
Assuming Hemmingson means "It was William Stull," perhaps that's the answer; perhaps David Gura was mistaken, or Hemmingson is, or both. I think it attracted attention because, as Dean Olsher noted in his post, it's just curious whenever something's unsigned in the contemporary New Yorker.
Emily January 08, 2008

I am an Iranian translator and I have translated works of Raymond Carver into Farsi. He is a great writer be it with Gordon Lish or without him. Tess Gallagher is a great poet and writer and a soulmate to this master.

asadollah amraeeJanuary 10, 2008

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