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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.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.
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’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.
Comments
I thought the Lish edit was much better!
Thanks for pointing me to this. By the way, I’m enjoying your blog!
Thanks a lot! Back atcha (blog and show). May radio live forever!
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.
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.
Gordon Lish was a mixed blessing. Some of his edits improved Carver’s work but others are terrible. Lish butchered “A Small Good Thing” (which he retitled “The Bath”),”So Much Water so Close to Home,” and “Distance” (retitled “Everything Stuck to Him”). His heavy-handed editing did much to get Carver labeled a minimalist. Hemingway’s minimalism may have influenced some of Carver’s earliest stories, but his truest instincts were more Chekhovian, as evidenced by his return to earlier, more expansive versions of the stories already noted, once he was free of Lish’s influence. That said, Lish worked hard to draw attention to Carver’s work, and some of his edits, as in the story “What we Talk About When We Talk About Love,” were right on. Carver was right to break with Lish, however, as evidenced by masterpieces like “Cathedral” and “A Small, Good Thing,” stories that will stand with the greatest ever. In the end, Carver wrote Carver’s stories, however much Lish might like us to think otherwise.