New Voice

I wrote, in the first of these posts on Carver, that I would address the question that Eileen Battersby was moved to ask, upon her reading of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and Beginners, side by side – why Carver allowed Lish to cut the book in the way that he did, why he didn’t fight for the original version of the book. It is a somewhat naïve question, and there are a number of answers, or a number of aspects to the answer. One I have addressed – some of the cuts worked. There is, or should be, nothing unusual in this, it does not mean that the author is not as good as we thought he was, it just means that the editor is doing his job.
The question is interesting though, because to answer it we must look at that relationship, between author and editor and, indeed, just what it is good editors are supposed to do. Why Carver would allow Lish to publish a radically altered version of the book submitted is more understandable if we examine their relationship, and the importance of the relationship between author and editor. Joan Didion, in fact, pretty much answers this question for us, by describing in ‘After Henry’ (the essay/eulogy written about her deceased editor, from the book of the same name) the peculiar, mysterious, somewhat ephemeral nature of just what an editor is supposed to do:

What editors do for writers is mysterious, and does not, contrary to general belief, have much to do with titles and sentences and ‘changes’. …/ The relationship between an editor and a writer is much subtler and deeper than that, at once so elusive and so radical that it seems almost parental: the editor, if the editor was Henry Robbins, was the person who gave the writer the idea of himself, the idea of herself, the image of self that enabled the writer to sit down alone and do it. (Live and Learn, Harper Perennial, p.375)

We can see, then, how it might be difficult for a writer to insist strongly against something an editor is vehemently arguing for, if this editor is a parental figure, one who gives a writer the idea of himself. And Gordon Lish did have this kind of relationship with Carver. In his essay ‘Fires’ the two influences Carver identifies as having a positive, constructive influence on his writing are John Gardner and Gordon Lish (his own children are also listed, in fact as the main, if malign, influence). If as Ms Battersby says, Carver was not a rookie, when What We talk About was being published, nor was he an established writer, he was only a published writer at all because of Lish, and this publication offered him hope when he was struggling with his personal circumstances and struggling to see himself as a writer:

My life soon took another veering, a sharp turn, and then it came to a dead stop, off on a siding. I couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t back up or go forward. It was during this period that Lish collected some of my stories and gave them to McGraw-Hill, who published them (Call If You Need Me, Harvill, p.105).

The reason Lish had stories to collect is because he began accepting them and publishing them for Esquire magazine – Lish took Carver from being unpublished to publishing a collection, a young writer would inevitably trust an editor who had affected such a change in his life, the change, for an aspiring author. So if an editor who had succeeded in publishing one book, suggests or demands changes for the second, the author is gong to listen and he is going to trust, especially an author who is desperately trying to escape from a life that had “come to a dead stop”. A man who has tried for so long to become a writer is going to do what he has to do to remain a writer. We blame Lish for his insensitivity to the prose, or to his charge’s talent, but we can’t blame Carver for trusting his editor.

I also wrote, in that first post, that I was going to explain why I considered Carver the ‘biggest gun’. What I meant was that I was going to write about why I like Carver’s work so much. It is not for any particular technical reason, or as a result of any forensic reading, or comparative context – it is solely an emotional response, entirely subjective, to a style, to characters, to the stories. I mentioned that Carver deals with normality, and it is this that appeals to me – his understanding of our longing for normality, how tenuous, ephemeral, even absurd our conceptions of normality (of our normalities) are, and how quickly they can be undone and rendered irrelevant. This moment, from ‘A Small, Good Thing’ captures this beautifully:

She saw a big car stop in front of the hospital and someone, a woman in a long coat, got into the car. For a minute she wished she were that woman and somebody, anybody, was driving her away from here to somewhere else, a place where she would find Scotty waiting for her when she stepped out of the car, ready to say Mom and let her gather him in her arms. (Beginners, Jonathan Cape, p. 63)

What We Talk About/Beginners, is full of people whose normality has become destructive, unhealthy and even desperate. People find themselves doing things, behaving in ways that they can’t quite believe. The best example of this, the best example I’ve read of the ways in which we incorporate behaviour into our conception of normality and thereby render it permissable, no matter how strange or unlikely, is portrayed in the story ‘Careful’ from the collection Cathedral. In the story, one of Carver’s alcoholics is adrift in a fog of his own making, lost in a normality utterly personal and unique and divorced from the normality that once was his, in his married life. He is living in a bedsit and is pretty much oblivious to the fact that his normality is the normality of a man on the cusp of an abyss. I say pretty much oblivious because he does have a moment, not quite an epiphany but a moment of understanding, one that sums up this whole ‘normality’ thesis:

One morning he woke up and promptly fell to eating crumb doughnuts and drinking champagne. There’s been a time, some years back, when he would have laughed at having a breakfast like this. Now, there didn’t seem to be anything very unusual about it. In fact, he hadn’t thought anything about it until he was in bed and trying to recall the things he’d done that day, starting with when he’d gotten up that morning. At first he couldn’t remember anything noteworthy. Then he remembered eating those doughnuts and drinking champagne. Time was when he would have considered this a mildly crazy thing to do, something to tell friends about. Then, the more he thought about it, the more he could see it didn’t matter much one way or the other. He’d had doughnuts and champagne for breakfast. So what? (Cathedral, Harvill, p.104)

I’ve thought about this passage and this story regularly since I read it. It struck me as especially accurate, and insightful, it struck me as a truth, if I can be so old-fashioned. I have thought about the story and the characters and the situation portrayed in the same way I think about things from my life, the way I remember and think about people I’ve met, things I’ve done, I think about them as if they were a part of my lived experience. I also think about ‘Where I’m Calling From’, ‘A Small, Good Thing’, ‘Are These Actual Miles’ and many more stories from different collections. This is why I think he’s so good, I don’t think about other writer’s work in this way, except for Hemmingway a bit – I think sometimes about the waiters from the well-lighted café, I find myself sometimes absently repeating to myself “our nada who art in nada”, and a couple of other writers’ work and characters and this, for me, is as good a yardstick for measuring the quality of a writer as anything else. I was surprised, almost shocked actually, to read in the foreword to Where I’m Calling From that this is the yardstick that Carver uses to measure success:

V.S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story is “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing”. First the glimpse given life, turned into something that will illuminate the moment and just maybe lock it indelibly into the reader’s consciousness. Make it part of a reader’s consciousness. Make it part of a reader’s own experience, as Hemingway so nicely put it. Forever, the writer hopes. Forever. (Where I’m Calling From, Harvill p.xiii)