What We Talk About When We Talk About Carver

One of the strangest author/editor relationships of modern times is the one that Raymond Carver had with Gordon Lish. The new Library of America volume Raymond Carver: Collected Stories, edited by William Stull and Maureen Carroll, shows us for the first time how strange that relationship really was.

As fiction editor at Esquire, Lish was responsible for bringing Carver to national prominence during the 1970s; he also edited Carver’s first story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? that came out in 1976. Lish tended to edit with a heavy hand, and it was this volume that gave Carver a reputation as a “minimalist,” a term he didn’t particularly care for.

But with Carver’s second collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (WWTA), Lish went totally out of control—or rather, took too much control into his own hands. The text notes in the Collected Stories quantify the extent to which Lish made cuts in the stories. This is just a partial list:

“Where Is Everyone?” cut by 78% (to appear in WWTA as “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit”)
“Gazebo” cut by 44%
“Want to See Something?” cut by 56% (to appear in WWTA as “I Could See the Smallest Things”)
“The Fling” cut by 61% (to appear in WWTA as “Sacks”)
“A Small, Good Thing” cut by 78% (to appear in WWTA as “Bath”)
“If It Please You” cut by 63% (to appear in WWTA as “After the Denim”)
“So Much Water So Close to Home” cut by 70%

Cuts of up to 78%? The list reads like a Red Tag Clearance Sale in Literary Hell.

Carver was shocked, to say the least, when he saw the cuts Lish had made. In an extraordinary letter written on July 8, 1980, Carver went so far as to beg Lish to halt production of the book. He felt he would be humiliated if the stories—some of which had recently appeared in literary magazines—showed up in a collection in truncated form.

Carver was ever polite, even self-deprecating, in his correspondence with Lish, and was willing to take all the blame for canceling the volume. Upon receiving the letter Lish called Carver, and managed to plant some seeds of doubt in Carver’s mind as to whether the collection should proceed as Lish planned. In a follow-up letter of July 14th, Carver asked Lish to “take another hard look” at the stories; but as we know, the collection did come out with virtually all of Lish’s edits intact.

WWTA was a success, although some critics felt that Carver was pushing his minimalism to the limit. Reading these stories again, and comparing them with the same stories from Carver’s original manuscript—all of them appearing for the first time in the Collected Stories—is a startling experience. What Lish did to the stories is appalling. He not only changed titles and character names willy-nilly, he often changed the very nature and intent of what Carver was trying to say.

Lish’s versions were Carver’s stories with much of the humanity sucked out of them. Lish turned them into dry, brittle objects; and where Carver’s characters were mean, Lish made them meaner. It says a lot about the stories that they still packed a wallop, even in truncated form. But to get the true flavor of Carver’s fiction, it is necessary to read them in their entirety.

Some of the stories were restored to their original versions during Carver’s lifetime, in Where I’m Calling From and other collections; but now, thanks to the Library of America, we can follow the complete path of one of the strangest journeys that an author and editor ever took together (or, more accurately, apart). It’s required reading for anyone who cares about the way fiction is made.