Introduction

In May 1980, Raymond Carver met with his editor Gordon Lish and handed him a manuscript for a new collection of short stories. Carver considered the stories to be in a publishable state already, but encouraged Lish to make edits where he saw fit, offering to pay for the retyping if that was needed. The next month, Lish sent the first round of edits to Carver to which he responded that they looked great, although he hadn’t “been able to read more than the title page” (Stull, 991). Lish had changed the title of the collection from Beginners to What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (hereafter called WWTA). Carver sent money for the typing and left for a writers’ conference without ever having read the entire manuscript. In July, Lish sent the final edits which Carver finally read. He was horrified to find the changes to be much more substantial than he originally thought with the overall word count of the book reduced by more than half.

“A Small, Good Thing”, a story from this collection, was chosen for this edition because it is possibly the most shocking example of Lish’s edits. Some stories in the collection were merely trimmed up, but “A Small, Good Thing” was cut by 78%—a reduction of more than two thirds. It was also renamed to “The Bath”. The differences are so extensive that it is difficult to get a sense of the changes by simply reading both side by side. In both versions, a mother buys a birthday cake for her son who will never eat it. On the day of his birthday, he is struck by a car and taken to the hospital. His parents wait by his bedside for him to wake up while a baker makes angry calls to the house demanding that the birthday cake be picked up and paid for. Lish’s version ends with a menacing and ambiguous call answered by the mother where the unnamed caller tells her that the call is indeed “about Scotty” (Carver, 257). The reader is unsure whether this means that Scotty has died or if it is another call from the baker, still angry about the cake.

In Carver’s story, Ann and Howard eventually confront the baker about his harassment and he gets a chance to ask for forgiveness. He tends to the parents in their grief and shares food with them, literally breaking bread as a symbol of communion and forgiveness. In Lish’s version, this is all completely cut and the baker remains simply a voice on the phone.

Lish also removes almost all names from the characters, changing them to common nouns. Ann Weiss becomes “the mother”, her husband Howard is simply “the father”, and Dr Francis is “the doctor”. Even the dog, Slug, gets his name erased. This change removes a sense of intimacy with the characters as they become one-dimensional and generic. This, paired with the deletion of their inner thoughts and any sentimentality they show, the reader is left with only the small scraps of dialogue they say aloud.

Another large cut is a flashback scene to several years earlier where Ann believes her son has drowned in a flooded culvert. She stands at the edge of the water knowing in her heart that Scotty is trapped in there. She imagines men coming to dig up the culvert, working into the night. She imagines what life might look like after that point. Ann is ashamed to admit it, but she feels she could eventually come to terms with the loss of Scotty once she gets past the awful waiting. Then she drops to her knees and makes a promise to God that if He spares her son, she will make big changes in her life. While she is praying, Howard finds Scotty safe and dry in some bushes under the overpass. Removing this scene takes away Ann’s backstory. Of course Ann would be devastated if Scotty died, but in Carver’s version, there is also hope that she could be okay once she gets past this waiting again. But Ann did not change her life after Scotty was found safe so her promise to God adds an interesting aspect of blame, leaving the reader to ask if Scotty was hit by a car because she broke her vow to God.

Carver found these changes to be extreme and simply could not let go of “A Small, Good Thing” as well as many of the other stories. The next day he wrote a long letter to Lish begging him to reverse the changes he had made. By that point, the two men had known each other for more than a decade and Lish had already edited several stories for Carver. Carver thought very highly of Lish’s editing abilities and deeply valued the friendship they shared. The letter to Lish is dated July 8, 1980 and alternates between praise for Lish and outright begging.

Carver writes, “This whole new life I have, so many of the friends I now have, this job up here, everything, I owe to you…” (Stull, 992). While a few paragraphs later he pleads, “Please, Gordon, for God’s sake help me in this and try to understand” (Stull, 994). Carver was newly sober, only about 3 years, and just getting back on his feet after years of alcoholism. The stories written for WWTA were very important to Carver; to his mental and physical health, as well as his evolving style as a newly sober writer. Many of the stories had also already been accepted for publication in various literary magazines and seen by colleagues. Carver worried what people would think when they saw the edited versions published in WWTA. He told Lish in the letter that, “…if the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story, that’s how closely, God Forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and mental well-being” (Stull, 993). In a telephone conversation later, Carver eventually agreed to publish the edited stories anyway. WWTA was published April 20, 1981.

Reviews of the collection were mixed, but mostly positive. The New York Times book review noted some strong stories but the reviewer was ultimately frustrated by the ambiguity “that [left] the reader holding the bag” (Broyard). Even in the positive comments, the reviewers seemed to be able to sense that something was missing. Another reviewer described the collection as “full of canceled or incomplete adventures, parties that are not over” and said that Carver’s writing was “haunted by things not said” (Wood). Carver must have also been haunted by the missing words because he published a mostly restored version of “A Small, Good Thing” in Ploughshares in the fall of 1982 which went on to win the O. Henry Award the following year.

To understand why Carver ultimately allowed the edited stories to appear in WWTA one must go back in time to his earlier life. He met his first wife, Maryann Burk, when they were both in their teens and were married with two children, all before Maryann’s eighteenth birthday. The couple spent much of their marriage chasing work. Carver took any job he could get while attending school and writing. In 1967, Carver was introduced to editor Gordon Lish. When Lish took over as fiction editor at Esquire he encouraged Carver to submit his work.

This was when Carver’s alcoholism got out of control. While working at the Iowa Writers’ workshop as a guest lecturer, he met fellow resident John Cheever and the two began to drink together. This led to a bankruptcy, an arrest for impaired driving, and the beginnings of some serious health problems. In 1977, Carver finally took his last drink and shortly after began an affair with fellow writer and poet Tess Gallagher, leading to a divorce with Maryann after 25 years of marriage. This leads us back to 1980 where Carver’s health was improving, his head was feeling clear, and he was excited to share his new work. It is not hard to imagine the pressure Carver must have felt to have his trusted friend, who he considered to be a genius editor, telling him that this was needed ensure his future success as a writer.

The publishing of WWTA did open up a lot of opportunities for Carver. His worked appeared several times in The New Yorker and he and Gallagher were profiled in Vanity Fair as a literary power couple. In 1983, Carver was preparing his next collection of stories Cathedral and insisted that “A Small, Good Thing” was to be included fully restored. He also wanted to have full creative control over his work and told Lish all edits would need to be approved. Lish declined to accept this arrangement and their professional relationship and friendship ended abruptly.

In 1988, Raymond Carver died and his widow, Tess, took possession of Carver’s papers until finally allowing Carver scholars, William Stull and Maureen Carroll, access to recover the collection Carver always wanted to publish. In 2007, the book Beginners was published and included all 17 stories that were previously published in WWTA, but this time with all of Lish’s edits removed.

For years, many fans of Carver had assumed the longer versions of his stories were expansions and now they were were revealed to be restorations. An article in The Guardian called Lish’s “The Bath” “feeble in comparison” to Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing”. “The true Carver, we now see, is gentler, fleshier, less brutal than Lish’s Carver” (Morrison). However, another reviewer preferred the “painfully bleak” ending of “The Bath” and did not like the more uplifting version Carver originally crafted, saying, “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” (Lasdun).

It is, of course, subjective which version one prefers. However, these edits bring up questions about the job of an editor. It is difficult to edit your own work, so it is crucial to have someone with less personal attachment look at it. However, Lish’s edits feel like an overstep. Poet Donald Hall who published the uncut version of “A Small, Good Thing” in Ploughshares said he was “hearthurt” at the changes Lish made. “I’ve wondered in my head why Lish did what he did. Was it unconscious jealousy?” (Max). Writer Don DeLillo believed “People wouldn’t think less of Carver for having had to lean so heavily on an editor; they’d resent Lish for complicating the reading of the stories” (Max). Lish himself felt demonized for his editing of Carver’s work, stating that for years Carver “could not have been more enthusiastic, nor more complicit—or complacent” (Paris Review, Lorentzen) during the editing process.

In this edition, “A Small, Good Thing” is presented as the author intended because he gave no consent for further edits. It is the same version that was sent to Gordon Lish in 1980. The job of an editor is to make the work better but it is, admittedly, a little unclear about how far an editor can go in achieving that goal. Regardless, while Lish may have had Carver’s consent to heavily edit other stories, with Carver “complacent” in that process, his consent does not extend unchallenged into the future. Consent needs to be given at every act and can be taken away at any point. Carver’s sobriety and fewer demands as a parent may have given him more time to write and less stress in his life. This appears to have allowed his style to evolve with more sensitivity and heart. A writer is entitled to change and it is possible that Lish did not like seeing this more expansive version of Carver who was leaving the label of literary minimalist behind—but it was not his job to erase it.