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to collect is because he began accepting them and publishing them for Esquire magazine – Lish took Carver from being unpublished to publishing a collection, a young writer would inevitably trust an editor who had affected such a change in his life, the change, for an aspiring author.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)

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.

This is what I wanted to do with my own stories: line up the right words, the precise images as well as the exact and correct punctuation so that the reader got pulled in and involved in the story and wouldn’t be able to turn his eyes away from the text unless the house caught fire. (Harvill, pxii)

And this from the essay ‘On Writing’:

…And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right, they can hit all the right notes. (Call If You Need Me, Harvill, p92)

Rather than minimalism or brevity, Carver’s emphasis is on precision and on accuracy and it is this that makes, for me (and not always, but for the most part) Beginners the superior version, because the stories are more accurately rendered. The extra scenes, the extra images and the extra detail are essential to the story Carver is trying to tell, the scene, for example, in ‘A Small, Good Thing,’ in the bakery, with the soft warm rolls that I can taste and smell when I think of this story, makes this version an entirely different story than ‘The Bath,’ which doesn’t contain the scene, and therefore a more faithful, more accurate one – that is, more faithful to the impulse behind the story, the impulse that led Carver to write the story.
I will return to this point and to this impulse in later posts, but I want to dwell for a moment on the exceptions here, on the reason I say that for the most part Beginners is superior to What We Talk About…. Carver, as many have pointed out (in answer to the question of whether or not the author would have welcomed this collection) had published the restored version of some of these stories already, in Where I’m Calling From,, most famously perhaps ‘A Small Good Thing’ and ‘So Much Water Close to Home’ (twice filmed, incidentally, by Robert Altman in Short Cuts and less successfully by Ray Lawrence in Jindabyne) which become dramatically different stories. Some of the stories, however, he collected in Where I’m Calling From, without revising, or restoring them, implying that he preferred the versions that Lish had suggested. An example is the final story , ‘One More Thing’ in What We Talk About… which is far tighter and more effective and more accurate, than the version in Beginners. ‘One More Thing’ ends thus:

“I just want to say one more thing.”
But then he could not think what it could possibly be. (Vintage Classics, p. 134)

This ending accurately conveys the desperation of the situation presented in the story and the nature of its development, how things began to go badly, to slip out of control, not due to the charcaters deliberate, willed actions, but almost in spite of them. There is a sense of unreality and impotence about L.D. and the situation he finds himself in, and this is nicely symbolised by his desire to say something and his inability to identify and articulate this something. In the version in Beginners, L.D. does say one more thing, taking about love, however, it lacks the power and accuracy of the seemingly more ambiguous ending above.
It is not, therefore, a case, as it has been portrayed, of one version, the version Carver liked (Beginners) versus the bad version, the version nasty Gordon Lish imposed upon the young author. A good example of this is the story ‘Distance,’ in Beginners, or ‘Everything Stuck To Him,’ in What We Talk About…This story is also published in Where I’m Calling From, as ‘Distance’ but this version combines elements from both the original longer story and from ‘Everything Stuck to Him.’ I read both books concurrently, reading a story first from What We Talk About… and immediately afterwards in Beginners. Reading this story I was struck, again, by the more effective ending of the Lish influenced cut, however the extra detail in the main body of ‘Distance’, when the boy drives over to Carl’s to tell him he won’t be going hunting, was essential to the story. Carver, it seems, felt similarly and the version published in the collection Where I’m Calling From combines the extra detail in ‘Distance,’ with the shorter, superior ending of ‘Everything Stuck to Him’.
This ending, or the difference in both endings is a good example of the accuracy and precision that Carver strives for and indeed the positive role of an editor. Lish’s role has been maligned in some of the commentary that I have read, and many have expressed dismay at the extent of the influence an editor has over a completed text. I will go into this in more detail in my next posts, however, surely one of the roles of an editor, an essential role, is to provide some clarity to an author, to understand the author’s impulse and intention and help him achieve this. The ending of ‘Everything Stuck to Him’ is an example of the editor recognising what the author is trying to say and helping him get there with greater accuracy, an accuracy this author is always striving for. In this instance, certainly, Lish’s influence is what you would expect of an editor. This is the ending from ‘Distance,’ in Beginners:

Absolutely, he says. Put your boots on and let’s get under way.
But he continues to stand at the window, remembering that gone life. After that morning there would be those hard times ahead, other women for him and another man for her, but that morning, that particular morning, they had danced. They danced, and then they held to each other as if there would always be that morning, and later they laughed about the waffle. They leaned on each other and laughed about it until tears came, while everything outside froze, for a while anyway. (Jonathan Cape P176)

This is the ending, then, from ‘Everything Stuck To Him’ in What We Talk About…, the ending that Carver retained for the version of ‘Distance’ that he published in Where I’m Calling From:

He says, Put your boots on and let’s go.
But he stays by the window, remembering. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else – the cold, and where he’d go in it – was outside, for a while anyway. (Vintage Classics P112)

We know, from the way the story is set up, that there were hard times ahead, and other women and other men, we know from reading the preceeding stories in the collection that this is what happens, almost always, invariably. It doesn’t need spelling out at the end, the story up to now, though not ostensibly sad, has been infused with the sadness of the unstated, subsequent hard times and other women and other men.