From The Times Literary Supplement
July 29, 2009
The real Raymond Carver
How an editor’s pencil created an author’s literary style – and how an author’s wife has
undone it
James Campbell
Raymond Carver wrote several drafts of each of his poems and short stories, “cutting everything
down to the marrow, not just to the bone”. His stories, in particular, bear the traces of unending
polish, of “putting words in and taking words out”. In the lives of most of Carver’s characters,
history refers to a time when they were better or worse off, happier or unhappier, drinking more
or less, than they are now. The narrative method of his early work was situated squarely in the
tradition derived from Ernest Hemingway, deploying plain vocabulary, short sentences, the
repetition of certain words and phrases, and above all the concealment of essential facts so as
to implant a timed explosive in the reader’s imagination. Carver was Hemingway (most of whose
fiction is located abroad) transposed to the blue-collar American margins, populated by men and
women who seldom think about the world beyond – a land of bad marriages, cramped living
rooms, truculent children, and unharnessed addictions of the old-fashioned sort.
The pleasure of reading Carver, who died in 1988 at the age of fifty, derives partly from his
bizarre scenarios and from absurdist dialogue which yet retains the quality of overheard
conversation; equally, it comes from pace and phrasing, even paragraphing and punctuation,
which the author controls with what are practically musical skills. In the early stories, there is
often an ambiguity in a line of speech, or a cloud over the action, which ultimately contributes to
the reader’s thrill of engagement. “Why Don’t You Dance?”, the opening story of What We Talk
About When We Talk About Love (1981), describes a “yard sale” and a couple’s purchase of
bed, desk, record player and other items from the “old guy” who has dragged his house
furnishings outside in the hope of raising some cash. Near the end, he and the young woman
dance to a dated tune, while her drunken boyfriend lies on the open-air bed, asleep.
The girl closed and then opened her eyes. She pushed her face into the man’s shoulder. She
pulled the man closer.
“You must be desperate or something”, she said.
Later, relating the experience to friends, “She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more
to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying”. There the story ends.
Half a dozen pages long, it is a miniature masterpiece, illustrating the way surreal situations
emerge from ordinary life, and how suppression of desire, as much as desire itself, determines
fate.
As the world now knows, the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,
including “Why Don’t You Dance?”, were substantially, if not brutally, edited by Gordon Lish,
who was Carver’s editor first at Esquire magazine, then at McGraw-Hill, publisher of the debut
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collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), and later at Alfred A. Knopf, which issued
the “breakthrough” book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. From the start, critics
admired the author’s spare manner and his ability to evoke “a whole culture and a whole moral
condition [in] the most seemingly slight sketch” (Frank Kermode). After that, Carver, in the
words of his second wife, literary executor and tireless promoter Tess Gallagher, “would come
to affect world literature”. No exaggeration there. He became one of those writers who are easy
to imitate, but perilously so, for no imitation could emulate the authority of the real thing.
But what is the real thing? In the original manuscript of “Why Don’t You Dance?”, before Lish’s
blue pencil descended, the girl's sympathetic words to the yard sale vendor, “You must be
desperate or something”, are not uttered while the pair are dancing. The sentence is adapted
from an earlier remark she makes to her boyfriend when they first inspect the items for sale.
“They must be desperate or something.” The vendor has yet to make an entrance. It was Lish
who changed the words and placed them in her mouth as she “pushed her face into the man’s
shoulder”, making it the emotional high point of the narrative. Lish also removed elements of the
girl’s speech as she relates the experience to friends: “Oh, my God. Don’t laugh. He played
records. Look at this phonograph”, etc. Overall, however, Lish excised only 9 per cent of the
story – almost the smallest portion of any in the untitled manuscript that Carver submitted to the
publishers. Most of the stories in it were cut by 50 per cent or more, before it was presented to
the reading public as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. “Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit”,
originally called “Where Is Everyone?”, was reduced by 78 per cent – in other words, just over a
fifth of what Carver wrote survived into the finished book. The same treatment was administered
to “The Bath”, and to a slightly lesser degree (about 70 per cent) to “Sacks”, “After the Denim”
and “So Much Water So Close to Home”.
For many years, Gallagher, in partnership with William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll, the
editors of Collected Stories, has been campaigning to get the un-Lished version of What We
Talk About When We Talk About Love, which they have called Beginners (the original name of
the title story), into print. In Gallagher’s view, Beginners represents the authentic Carver, the
writer she knew and encouraged in the composition of his next book of stories, Cathedral
(1983), which displays more abundant narrative talents than Carver’s readership had come to
expect.
What We Talk About was welcomed for its masterful minimalism, but the amplitude of Cathedral
was there all along (to follow Gallagher’s logic), just waiting to be liberated from the suffocating
suppressions imposed by Lish. In a Paris Review interview in 1983, Carver himself rejected the
label that had been pinned to him and for which he was celebrated. “There’s something about
‘minimalist’ that smacks of smallness of vision and execution that I don’t like.” Gallagher, Stull
and Carroll’s campaign can be seen as a determination to track back through his oeuvre to the
source of his intentions. (Jonathan Cape will publish Beginners as a discrete volume in Britain in
October.) No less understandable than Gallagher’s position is that of Carver’s publisher, Knopf,
which controls publication rights to his work, and which for some years has obstructed
publication of the ur-manuscript, on the grounds that What We Talk About requires no
explanation. It is what it is – it is not standing in for some other “pure” text unsullied by messy
editorial fingerprints. Every notable book, they argue, is the product of a collaboration between
author and publisher, and while What We Talk About may exist at the extreme edge of editing, it
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is not unique. One need only think of The Waste Land or the current controversy about
Hemingway’s posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast or the works of Franz Kafka – or indeed
the three tales included in Collected Stories which were “found in March 1999 by Tess
Gallagher and Jay Woodruff” who transcribed them from “typescripts and handwritten drafts”,
without benefit of the late author’s guidance. As with other restored or revised texts – in this
case, unrevised – the appearance of Beginners prompts some awkward questions. Does the
emergence of the “real” stories undermine the reality that the most Carveresque of Carver’s
books has had for almost thirty years in the minds of readers? Characters who appear sane turn
out to have been mad originally. Characters who smoke didn’t do so in 1980, on their entry into
the world. They are the children of Raymond Carver, but their identities were altered by the
midwife, Gordon Lish.
Whichever side of the argument might appear to be the most reasonable, the eventual
publication of Beginners now seems to have been inevitable. For a long time, there have been
rumours that “Lish wrote Carver”, and that Gallagher, as a New Yorker article of December
2007 put it, “thought that Lish had been claiming too much credit for Carver’s achievements”.
Stull and Carroll even set up a website in support of their campaign, with sample comparisons
of two stories in edited and unedited versions (not as favourable to their mission as they’d like to
think). Now an accord has been reached with the Library of America to produce a volume that
gathers all Carver’s stories from the major collections, and includes, by way of an appendix, the
uncut manuscript of Beginners (it occupies 204 pages in Collected Stories, compared to 103
given to What We Talk About). Readers are thereby enabled to tackle the stories one by one, in
the different versions, and reach their own conclusions.
Not all of Lish’s interventions resulted in improvements. In some cases, he cut out the back
story: nine pages of “Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit”, for example, leaving only two and a half.
“Viewfinder”, in which “A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my
house” (the opening sentence survived Lish’s pencil), seems over-contracted in its What We
Talk About version, as do others. The capacious spread of the stories in their original form is
something readers will recognize as belonging to the Carver of Cathedral, though by then he
had matured as a writer and had curbed (somewhat) his characters’ tendency to become prolix
and sentimental. But there is scant room for argument about the abrupt, elliptical tone of early
Carver, which intoxicated a generation of readers and writers. Carver was the singer but Lish
was his producer, and the mood of the sessions is largely his creation. In “Mr Coffee and Mr
Fixit”, the narrator is talking about Ross, who is having an affair with his wife:
Ross. What a name! But it was different then. In those days I mentioned weapons. I’d say to my
wife, “I think I’ll get a Smith and Wesson.” But I never did it.
Ross was a little guy. But not too little.
Compare that with the Beginners version:
I wish him well now. But it was different then. More than once in those days I mentioned
weapons. I’d say to my wife, I’d shout it, “I’m going to kill him!” But nothing ever happened.
Things lurched on. I never met the man, though we talked on the phone a few times. I did find a
couple of pictures of him once when I was going through my wife’s purse. He was a little guy,
not too little, and he had a moustache and was wearing a striped jersey.
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Lish’s Ross wears a “button-up sweater” instead. Carver’s narrator is married to a woman called
Cynthia; Lish changed her name to Myrna. Carver called his story “Where Is Everyone?”, which
Lish altered, as he did the titles of nine others, out of a total of seventeen.
In some cases, Lish changed not only the atmosphere but the content, too. One of those on
which he performed transformational surgery is “So Much Water So Close to Home”, cut by 70
per cent before being included in What We Talk About. In that version, it is the story of Stuart, a
decent man married to Claire, who goes on a fishing trip with friends. Reaching camp after a
long drive and a trek, the men discover the naked body of a young woman in the river, “wedged
into some branches”. Faced with aborting the holiday or continuing with their fun, they make the
wrong choice. “I’m as sorry as anyone else”, Stuart says. “But she was dead.” Although they
have done nothing illegal, they are made to pay through bad publicity and, in Stuart’s case, a
marital storm. At the end of the story as readers know it, Stuart makes an approach to Claire
while their son Dean is outside and, in contrast to earlier occasions, he is accepted:
He drains his glass and stands up. He says, “I think I know what you need.”
He reaches an arm around my waist and with his other hand he begins to unbutton my jacket
and then he goes on to the buttons of my blouse.
“First things first”, he says.
He says something else. But I don’t need to listen. I can’t hear a thing with so much water going.
“That’s right”, I say, finishing the buttons myself. “Before Dean comes. Hurry.”
The story closes there. The Beginners version is a more intricate affair. Claire, the narrator in
both cases, is shown to have experienced mental or emotional disturbance in the past, set in
motion again when she learns of Stuart’s behaviour in the case of the dead girl. Speaking of
herself in the third person, in the midst of a five-page Lish excision, Claire says:
She goes away for a while to a place the doctor recommends. His mother comes out from Ohio
in a hurry to care for the child. But she, Claire, Claire spoils everything and returns home in a
few weeks. His mother moves out of the house and takes an apartment across town and
perches there, as if waiting.
In the published version, there is no mention of Claire’s mental history (that “so much water
going” offers the barest clue) and Stuart’s mother – “a tall, cold woman with white-blond hair”
who gives Claire “the feeling that she is always judging, judging” – has been killed off.
In the Beginners manuscript, Claire’s narration dwells on male fascination with the dead body:
how the fishermen’s flashlights “played over” it; how the twenty-four-hour autopsy involved “men
. . . examining it, putting things into it, cutting it, weighing, measuring”; how the investigators
seek “evidence of rape. I’m sure they hope for rape. Rape would make it easier to understand”.
Much of this was ditched by Lish. Rape is never mentioned. In Beginners, Claire does not say
“That’s right” to her husband’s amorous approach. Far from helping Stuart with the buttons of
her blouse, she rejects him with “Stop, stop, stop” and a “stamp on his toes”. Stuart responds
with vicious obscenities. The following day she moves into the spare bedroom and has a lock
fixed on the door, which Stuart breaks at midnight, “just to show that he can”, standing in front of
her in his underwear before taking refuge in the whisky bottle. The story ends with Stuart’s
“cold” mother moving into their house to tend Claire, whose obsession with the dead girl
continues.
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Story after story reveals the extent of Lish’s influence. In “A Serious Talk”, Burt finds some
“colored cigarettes” on a table. “Who smokes colored cigarettes?”, he asks his wife, who is in
the process of leaving him. “I do”, she replies. In the Beginners version, called “Pie”, the
cigarettes are “lavender-colored”. When asked about them, Burt’s wife answers “Terri” – their
daughter. A discussion ensues about Terri and her boyfriend, none of which survived into the
published book.
We are bound to wonder what the author himself would have wanted, were he still around to
offer his opinion about the unearthing of Beginners. In future discussion of Collected Stories,
there is likely to be much mention of Carver’s anguished letter to Lish, written on July 8, 1980,
after he finally got round to reading the revisions. Lish had previously sent him an edited and
retyped manuscript, which Carver apparently failed to inspect, despite having paid for the
typing. “Dearest Gordon, I’ve got to pull out of this one”, the letter begins. In a rambling missive,
Carver talks about his poor health, his recovery from alcoholism, his intention to commit suicide
(“I kept thinking, I’ll wait until after the election to kill myself, or wait until after this or that
happened”), and his fear that “if the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form,
I may never write another story”.
If I don’t speak now, and speak from the heart, and halt things now, I foresee a terrible time
ahead for me. The demons I have to deal with every day, or night, nearly, might, I’m afraid,
simply rise up and take me over.
Stull and Carroll print this letter in full – it is longer than many of the stories in the book it refers
to – but are more discreet about subsequent communications, which have been published
elsewhere, which retreat from its positions. Two days later, Carver asked for some changes,
“small enough, but I think they’re significant”. On July 14, less than a week after his cry of
despair, he wrote: “I’m thrilled about the book . . . . I’m stoked about it . . . . I am just generally
excited”. Far from fearing he would never write another story, he was “already starting to think
about the next [book]”. He repeated his request for minor changes, asking that Lish “entertain
those suggestions seriously, even if finally you decide otherwise; if you think I’m being my own
worst enemy, you know, well then, stick to the final version of the second edited version”.
Lish has generally kept quiet about what he calls his “surrogate work”, but in an article in the
New York Times Sunday magazine in 1998 (“The Carver Chronicles” by D. T. Max), he recalled
his response to Carver’s plea of July 8: “My sense of it was that there was a letter, and that I just
went ahead”.
As usual, the notes in the Library of America volume provide a mini-biography of the author.
Gallagher has described Carver as someone with “the instincts of an outlaw”. He was born in
Oregon, the son of a sawmill worker, and grew up in Washington State. While still in his teens,
Carver married a high-school student, Maryann Burk (she set down her own Carver chronicle in
a book published in 2006), and by the age of twenty had two children. “What shall I say? I didn’t
have any youth”, he told the Paris Review. The couple drank a lot (as Carver’s parents did), and
eventually their daughter did too. “You’re grownup now, and lovely”, Carver wrote in a poem,
“To My Daughter”:
You’re a beautiful drunk, daughter.
But you’re a drunk.
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The notes are punctuated by phrases such as “He relocates to Chester . . .” (1956); “He returns
with his wife and son to Yakima, where they live on the charity of relatives” (1957); “In August,
Carver, his wife and daughter move to Paradise, California” (1958); “In the spring, Carver
moves to Chico . . .” (1959). By 1967, half a dozen moves later, the couple had filed for
“bankruptcy protection”. The following year his first book was published, a collection of poems,
Near Klamath. Carver held “multiple academic posts simultaneously without informing his
employers about his obligations to the others”, and even during the successful part of his life
with Gallagher he habitually told lies. Wriggling out of attendance at a conference, Gallagher
reported in Carver Country (1990), he pleaded that his mother had just had a stroke, whereas in
fact she was “thriving in Sacramento”. Previously a morning, noon and night drinker, Carver
gave up alcohol for good in 1977, coinciding with his involvement with Gallagher. He was
diagnosed with lung cancer in 1987, the year before his death.
The debate about whether the minimalist works are paradoxically richer – because of what they
conceal – than the later, more bountiful ones will continue. Although he reclaimed his artistic
integrity after What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver never wanted his stories
to go out into the world free of editorial influence. Even in 1982, as the two men discussed
Cathedral, Lish was “the best editor there is”. In restoring Beginners, Stull and Carroll have
“transcribed Carver’s typewritten words that lie beneath Lish’s alterations in ink on the
typescripts” – itself a form of distortion, in the absence of the author’s validation. What is certain
is that the Library of America Collected Stories is a fascinating event, and that if you haven’t
read it you cannot claim, in the fullest sense, to have read Raymond Carver, whoever he may
be.
Raymond Carver
COLLECTED STORIES
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Cathedral
Stories from Furious Seasons, Fires, and Where I’m Calling From
Other Stories and Selected Essays
Beginners
Edited by William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll
1,040pp. $40. Library of America.
978 1 59853 046 9
James Campbell’s book of essays, Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers and writers in the dark,
was published last year. He is the author of a biography of James Baldwin, Talking at the Gates,
1991.