New Voice

Reading the Carver and Lish versions side by side proves an exercise as irritating as it is interesting: one wonders at how Lish could possibly justify what is best described, solely on the comparative textual evidence supplied here, as a slash and burn approach to editing. (Eileen Battersby, ‘Raymond Carver in his Own Words’ Irish Times, Sat Oct 31 2009)

In my last Secular Sundays I selected a number of examples, from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and Beginners, that complicates somewhat the assertion made by Ms Battersby, above. Instead, there are clearly instances where the cuts work, and Carver evidently agreed. These, however, are the exceptions. Beginners is a better book, the stories are better, not only because they are more consistent and, well, just more, but because they are different stories, for the most part. And it is in the difference that the quality lies.

In Lish’s edit, the characters are more brutal, harsher; they are denied their confused humanity just as Carver is denied his literary voice. (Eileen Battersby, ‘Raymond Carver in his Own Words’ Irish Times, Sat Oct 31 2009)

Humanity is the important word here – the vital difference between the versions of the stories in these books is empathy. Ms Battersby details the numerous small instances of crude and clumsy editing, but more than this and more than removing words, length, Lish effectively removes the empathy and thereby removes the impulse, the very meaning behind Carver’s stories. Empathy, for his characters, for the situations they find themselves in, empathy for these troubled often desperate lives is the reason why Carver wrote the stories.
Certainly, the stories are longer, but as I mentioned previously, they are not verbose, nor are they all that expansive. There is still the sense of most of the story happening off the page, the reader’s hand is not held, we are not given detailed psychological explanation of why, say, Ed/Carl in the title story of both books acted as he did. Sure, the guy loved Terri, but we are not told why this love manifested itself in such extreme ways. Ed/Carl’s behaviour is not excused nor condoned or even understood, it just is – the pressures of life and relationships, of working a lousy job or of having no money can break a person, can cause them to do crazy things. Most importantly for Carver (and I will return to this), there is a sense of the different normalities these pressures can create for people – Ed/Carl’s normality was to love someone so obsessively he found it necessary to drag her around a room by the heels, Mel et al’s normality was to sit around a table, a brief moment of respite in a nomadic existence (“We lived in Albuquerque, but we were all from someone else. Beginners, p.177), on a Saturday afternoon, packing away considerable quantities of gin. Carver doesn’t explain or judge, but what he does do, especially, and almost exclusively, in Beginners is to empathise. This is the characteristic feature of his stories in general, for me. His characters are people adrift in normalities that are full of violence and nastiness and drunkenness and full of characters struggling and failing to change these normalities – in fact, most take flight or are in the process of taking flight from one ‘normality,’ that they realise has become ‘abnormal’ to the promise of another more normal normality. If you follow.
This empathy and, therefore, the entirely different impulse and motivation behind these stories is clearly evident while moving from one version of a story to another. ‘A Small Good Thing’, I have mentioned briefly is one of the more obvious, ‘The Bath’ being almost unrecognisable from the restored version. The reader, moving through the collections concurrently, first notices the dramatic difference in the third story, ‘Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit’ in What We Talk About… ‘Where is Everyone’ in Beginners. None of the people in this story are particularly sympathetic, and the rather desperate normalities they have created for themselves are seemingly skewed – the alcoholism, failed/failing marriages, unemployement, tense, uneasy personal relationships:

But during those days, when my mother was putting out to men she’d just met, I was out of work, drinking and crazy. (Beginners, p.11)

The situations are similar in both versions but by dwelling on the tense relationships between these characters, and the moments of unexpected tenderness between them, they reveal the potential within these characters, the potential that has been all but squeezed from them by the pressures exerted on them. The following passage from ‘Where is Everyone’, which was not included in ‘Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit’ (which is, as a result, a harder, colder story), reveals not only one of these unexpected moments of tenderness but suggest the pressures these characters experience, pressures that are exerted, for the most part, off the page:

She bent and kissed me. Her lips seemed bruised and swollen. She drew the blanket over me. Then she went into her bedroom. She left the door open, and in a minute I could hear her snoring.
I lay there staring at the TV. There were images of uniformed men on the screen, a low murmur, then tanks and a man using a flamethrower. I couldn’t hear it, but I didn’t want to get up. I kept staring unitl I felt my eyes close. But I woke up with a start, the pajamas damp with sweat. A snowy light filled the room. There was a roaring coming at me. The room clamoured. I lay there. I didn’t move. (p21)

The empathy doesn’t disguise the lives that these people have developed – the lips seemed bruised and swollen because he knew his sixty five year old mother had been kissing a man earlier, but it does suggest the pressure and stress (the existential anguish represented by the roaring of the white noise) of these lives and the despair and anguish suffered by the characters.

‘Tell the Women We’re Going’ is an unusual story, atypical, almost, in both versions, of Carver’s work. While violence is important in Carver’s stories, it usually lurks off the page, it is threatened or implied, made manifest in the story as menace. When violence does erupt it is often the clumsy violence (examples of Ms Battersby’s ‘confused humanity’) of those who unexpectedy, almost unwittingly, find themselves lashing out, usually drunkenly. So a man puts too many logs on the fire in an apparent attempt to set his estranged family’s home alight, or he cuts the phone line, takes hold of the heavy ashtray, and merely retreats, each action independent and without premeditation, reacting to a normality that has developed apart from the characters’ wishes, as in the story ‘Pie/A Serious Talk’. The random, cold and cruel violence in ‘Tell the Women We’re Going’ has an almost Southern-gothic type of feel to it. It feels out of place in both versions, but the Lish cut is especially incongruous. The menace in the story quickly (too quickly) and almost absurdly becomes violence. The abrupt ending, with the almost dispassionate description of the murder, leaves us with a story driven only to deliver its overly dramatic, sensational ending:

He never knew what Jerry wanted. But it started and ended with a rock. Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon and then on the one that was supposed to be Bill’s. (p56)

In Beginners, the story dwells on the circumstances leading up to the killing. We get more of a sense of the pressures, the pressures of struggling wih lousy jobs and a large young family to support and too much booze and the violence, when it happens, is stupid and clumsy (as clumsy as the prose in the quotation above) and fits to the rest of the story and a little better with Carver’s confused humans.

These are two examples of endings, but throughout Beginners we discover extra sentences and extra paragraphs that add an essential depth of feeling and empathy to the stories, so essential as to constitute entirely different stories, born of a different impulse, written to different agenda, and potraying, therefore, a very different country, Carver country.