Carver's Beginnings

Later this month a new Raymond Carver collection will be published and will include unedited versions of the stories from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The compilation has been in the works for several years with much of the spearheading done by Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher. Her belief, which is shared by others, is that Carver's editor, Gordon Lish, trimmed the stories down almost to the point of suffocating them and changed their meaning entirely.

Carver: Collected Stories is intended to show Carver without the restraints of his editor and how his earlier work was just as detailed and nuanced as his late period stories such as the ones found in Cathedral. Lish, in Gallagher's eyes, did not sculpt her late husband's work so much as distort it into something entirely different. These new unedited stories are titled Beginners and are the original drafts of what became Carver's breakthrough collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. As a London Times article notes, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love consists of 103 pages, while Carver's original manuscript was 204. Nearly half of the stories' contents were cut; on average it was about 70% per story.

Such judicious editing and reshaping of work begs the question of who was really behind the genius of Carver's writing. Which set of stories is the "real" Carver? Knopf, Carver's original publishers and part of the group who initially resisted the publication of the new stories, argues that,

What We Talk About requires no explanation. It is what it is – it is not standing in for some other “pure” text unsullied by messy editorial fingerprints. Every notable book...is the product of a collaboration between author and publisher, and while What We Talk About may exist at the extreme edge of editing, it is not unique.

This posthumous publishing of an author's work is nothing new. Also released this year, Hemingway's unfinished novel, A Moveable Feast, Nabakov's incomplete novella The Original of Laura, and Graham Greene's series of stories, The Empty Chair. Other unpublished works or personal documents made public include the journals and letters of Sylvia Plath, the letters of John Keats, the letters of Truman Capote etc. etc. The list goes on and on. What ends up happening, though, is these fabled pieces of work get published and then, inevitably, get reviewed as being mediocre at best and not nearly as revelatory as they had been hyped to be. Such is the nature of unpublished work. It wasn't published for a reason; because it wasn't very good.

Are Carver's unedited stories, "lesser works"? Some of that depends on one's aesthetic taste. Some prefer the stripped down style of Carver's debut collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? while others prefer the more robust stories of Cathedral. Is one style more "real" than the other? Not in my mind. I agree with Carver's publishers. A published book is a collaborative effort between author and editor, between author and friends, between the author and the world in which he lives. Authors are a product of their environment and circumstance and so is their writing. Take away any single element from any author's life and their writing will change. Writers also frequently change their style. Just look at Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey and compare it to Sense and Sensibility. The self-consciousness concerning the novel as artifice present in Northanger Abbey is completely absent from her other work. Carver, like Austen, and many other authors, changed his style as time progressed and no longer desired the minimalist writing championed by Lish.

To publish a collection of stories for the purpose of vindicating an author's talent is harmful to both the author's original work and his legacy. In the case of Carver, I think Gallagher is trying too hard to portray her husband as a victim and a gifted writer stunted by his editor. That's not to say the stories shouldn't be published, I just don't think they should be published under the pretense of revisionism. Gallegher's goal seems to be to redefine people's opinion of Carver.

Instead of reshaping opinion, the collection should be used to broaden our understanding of the author and his collaborative writing process. Story drafts are much like artist's sketches in that they provide insight into the creative process that leads to the final product. Carver's story drafts are not the master key that will allow the reader to unlock his genuis, but rather one more piece of the puzzle. Carver's legacy, like Kafka and Dickinson before him, is being controlled without his consent. Thankfully, also like Kafka and Dickinson, his work is strong enough to withstand the meddling of outsider's hands and outlast even those who outlasted him.