Life & Letters | 7 November 2009

Way back in 1984 when I was editing, rather incompetently, the New Edinburgh Review, I published a story by Raymond Carver. It was entitled ‘Vitamins’. I can’t remember how much I knew about Carver then, or even how the manuscript arrived on my desk. Probably it was sent by his agent, and was taken from a new collection, Cathedral which was to be published by Collins. It is a good story — I’ve just read it again — and less minimalist than some of the work by which he made his name.

Which is very much to the point, for it seems that these stories owed a great deal to his editor, Gordon Lish, and that Carver himself was not entirely happy, to put it mildly, with Lish’s surgery which cut some stories by half, or even more than that.

‘Even though they may be closer to works of art than my original,’ he wrote to Lish, ‘they’re still apt to hasten my demise’. In short, the style, with its abrupt transitions and unspoken sentences, which came to be called Carveresque, might more accurately have been termed Carver-Lish or Carver-Lite. In the collection which Carver called Beginners and Lish re-titled What we talk about when we talk about love, it wasn’t only cuts that were made. In one story a man murders a woman in Carver’s original version, two women in the published one.

Now Carver’s second wife Tess Gallagher, whom he met when he was no longer a ‘practising alcoholic’ and with whom he lived for the last dozen years of his life, has now brought out a new edition of these stories, with the original title Beginners which she claims is the book as Carver himself wrote it, before Lish got to work on it.