For years, the perceived wisdom surrounding Raymond Carver’s life and writing was that once he sobered up and found his true love, not necessarily in that order, his work became richer, wiser, and more compassionate. This was visible in more than just his later stories, because he even revisited some of his earlier ones, expanding them from bleak to life-affirming. My favorite of these was the transformation of the cold “The Bath” into the warm “A Small, Good Thing,” which become a much better story for what we all thought was his later editing of it.

Our understanding of the how and why of Carver’s apparent maturation changed forever when D. T. Max published the article “The Carver Chronicles” in The New York Times. The world learned then that those later, more expansive stories were not so much revised as freed from a prison built by Carver’s early editor, Gordon Lish. As reported in the current issue of The New Yorker, here’s how Lish treated the contents of the short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love:

… two stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, many by almost half; many descriptions and digressions were gone; endings had been truncated or rewritten …

So it turned out that what we saw over the years hadn’t been a maturation of Carver’s writing after all, but rather a development of his ability to break free from the editor who had discovered him. What we’d thought were revisions weren’t actually revisions; they were restorations. Carver’s correspondence shows just how torn he was by this. On July 8, 1980, he wrote:

You have made so many of these stories better, my God, with the lighter editing and trimming. But those others, those three, I guess, I’m liable to croak if they came out that way. Even though they may be closer to works of art than the original and people be reading them 50 years from now, they’re still apt to cause my demise, I’m serious, they’re so intimately hooked up with my getting well, recovering, gaining back some little self-esteem and feeling of worth as a writer and a human being.

Up until now, I’ve only seen snippets of the actual editing done by Lish, but The New Yorker, thanks to the brouhaha over the possible publication of the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in a de-Lished state, gives us the before and after of what may be Carver’s most famous story.

Here’s the full text of Carver’s “Beginners” before Gordon Lish edited it.

And here’s the text of “Beginners” with Lish’s additions and deletions visible , so we can see how it became the version that we’ve come to know as “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

So now that I’ve had a chance to read them both—what’s my verdict?

It’s difficult to read with fresh eyes a story I’ve read dozens of times before, some of those times aloud to friends. It’s a story that touches me so deeply that I’ve even done an homage to it with my far-future tale “What We Still Talk About,” originally published in Pete Crowther’s anthology Forbidden Planets.

I may be too close to this one. While I read the raw text, my mind kept seeking the familiar, swerving back to the story as I knew it. So I’m not entirely sure that I can give the original version a fair reading. But my initial reaction is that while there were points at which Lish’s editing seemed to hurt, as I’d suspected there’d be based on my favorable reaction to the revisions/expansions I mentioned above, there were also points at which that editing seemed to help.

I’ll leave aside the line-by-line edits for the moment, and just mention two broader examples. The anecdote of the elderly couple, hurt in an automobile accident and more torn up about their inability to see each other than by their injuries, works better trimmed down. But the ending of the story, more expansive in Carver’s original version, seems more moving, more poignant, as first intended. So as it turns out, Carver and Lish were both right. Or at least that’s what I believe after an initial read. I’ll be studying these two versions for some time to come.

If nothing else, Lish no longer seems to be the complete villain that the earlier New York Times article left me believing. His reputation may actually be somewhat helped, rather than hurt, by the publication of the stories in their original state.