Appendix C

Reviews of Beginners - 2007

From The Guardian - October 22, 2007
“Less said the better” by James Lasdun

In The Bath, a slightly creepy baker calling about an uncollected birthday cake becomes - by one of the most diabolic sleights of hand I know of in any short story - a personification of all the forces in life that oppose happiness, well-being, existence itself. His call resolves nothing, but its cruelly timed incursion gives a story of individual loss (the family’s child has gone into a coma after being hit by a car) a shattering universality.

Well, it turns out that Carver wasn’t quite the coolly surgical artist that these impeccable deployments of the said and the unsaid suggest. His editor at Knopf, Gordon Lish, cut the stories radically before publication, jettisoning as much as half of the original in some cases, reshaping them and changing the way they ended. Carver wasn’t at all pleased with the results and begged Lish to withdraw the book from publication - to no avail. The book came out, was rapturously received and Carver’s reputation was made.

…

The case is complicated by the fact that Carver himself, unlike Eliot, seems to have persisted in preferring his own original versions (though this is a murky matter too). He went on to publish a rewrite of The Bath entitled A Small Good Thing. In it, the painfully bleak ending is replaced by an upbeat reconciliation scene, with the baker turning out to be a sweet, vaguely Christ-like guy, and the parents reconvening at his store where he plies them with some heavily symbolic warm bread and pastries - a scene of saccharine religiosity that betrays the hard truth of the tale, replacing it with the sentimental wishfulness of the teller. A lot of people prefer it, but then a lot of people prefer bad art that makes them feel good to good art that makes them feel bad. I call it a rewrite because at the time I thought that was what it was: I assumed Carver had got religion and no longer found his earlier vision of things palatable. The writing too, more digressive than before, seemed of a piece with his later stories which, to my mind, were becoming steadily less compelling (his poems, on the other hand, were getting better and better - they really do convey a large-souled, “affirming” sensibility). But according to Stull and Carroll this “rewrite” was in fact the original version of the story, and Carver was merely reclaiming his own work.

The implication is that if he had lived he might have done exactly what his widow is proposing to do now, possibly even going a step further and suppressing the Lish edition. Certainly he seems to have felt uncomfortable with the Carver persona created by the collaboration (if that’s the word) with Lish. And judging from these earlier versions, as well as his post-Lish work, that persona is at best only a partial reflection of Carver’s actual temperament as a writer.

Who are we, then, to oppose such a project? Ethically, I think that even allowing for all the uncertainties, the rights and wrongs of the case probably stack up in Tess Gallagher’s favour. But in literature there’s no right and wrong, only good and bad. Pragmatism trumps “authenticity”, a dubious notion at the best of times. Auden didn’t want his great poem September 1939 included in his Collected, but at this point it belongs to us, not him, and we have no intention of letting it disappear. The great taxi scene in Conrad’s The Secret Agent is said to have been partially written by Ford Maddox Ford, but we wouldn’t dream of cutting it in the name of “authenticity” or anything else. Bowdler’s Shakespeare on the other hand… Etcetera.

If the restorations of Carver improved what we have, I’d be all for them, but in my opinion they don’t. What Lish’s editing brought forth from Carver’s writing was very, very good. What I’ve seen of the material Stull and Carroll want to restore is, frankly, pretty awful. It’s the kind of thrashing around writers do when they want to force meanings on their stories that aren’t in fact supported by the stories themselves. You can feel the volume being cranked up; big, empty phrases filling the air, physical gestures becoming overblown.

From The Guardian - November 1, 2009
“Beginners by Raymond Carver” by Tim Adams

I started to read Beginners by comparing it line for line with the original. The extent of Lish’s intervention quickly becomes apparent, and also his intent, which was to make Carver in some ways a less nuanced writer, accentuating his “blue collar” credentials, stripping away sentiment. If this sounds like an act of bullying ego, it probably was, but it is also worth remembering that What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was, and is, an extraordinary book, probably the most influential story collection of the past 30 years.

After a while, I stopped the compare and contrast and just read Beginners straight through. It, too, is an extraordinary book, more generous and rambling in tone than its distilled counterpart. All through, I was heartened by the sense that the writing was still recognisably Carver’s, before being struck by the incongruity of that thought.

Editing of Lish’s kind is a dark art, but not so unusual. I used to work for a literary magazine, Granta, where the editor, Bill Buford, brought a Lish-style idea of editing to all the content. In some pieces, long stories of 10,000 words or more, not a sentence of the writer’s original draft stood. Many writers were grateful for these interventions: they had never sounded so good. Some, of course, balked at the mauling. Carver’s friend Richard Ford, for one, would always take Buford back through any story and painstakingly argue for the choice behind every word and comma until the original was restored exactly, not in every case better, but all his own.

Perhaps Carver lacked the conviction for such an effort of will or, perhaps deep down, he feared Lish knew best. Whatever, the publication of this book will set in motion a new publishing trend – the author’s cut. Not all of the results will be as good as Beginners.

From The Guardian - October 17, 2009
“Beginners by Raymond Carver” by Blake Morrison

The Lish version, “The Bath”, is feeble in comparison; the story barely gets going before he shuts it down.

The least hint of sentiment or melodrama evidently alarmed Lish. There are a couple of stories here in which ageing couples offer a model of love and morality – until Lish cut them down to size. Affirmative endings, however tentative, were deleted, too. In the last story, “One More Thing”, the alcoholic LD is finally chucked out of home. “I just want to say one more thing,” he says to his wife and daughter as he leaves with a handful of possessions. “But then he could not think what it could possibly be,” goes the Lish version, ending it there. In Beginners, far from being stuck for words, LD blurts out how much he loves his wife and daughter. “Is this what love is?” his wife asks. Maybe Lish felt that Carver had posed that question once too often, and that the final sentence (“Her eyes were terrible and deep, and he held them as long as he could”) was portentous. But his editing destroys the denouement. In allowing Lish to take control, Carver swapped one dependency (the bottle) for another (the blue pencil).

For his part, Lish treated Carver as a wayward genius – a drunk, or ex-drunk, who needed taking in hand. It’s not a case of hero and villain: on his good days at the office, Lish helped Carver to achieve what he was after (not least a far more memorable and selling title than Beginners). But he also squeezed the life out of him. The true Carver, we now see, is gentler, fleshier, less brutal than Lish’s Carver. The true Carver accommodates digressions and back-stories. The true Carver isn’t Carveresque.