On page 318 of Esquire‘s 75th anniversary issue, the magazine takes satiric note of “75 Years of Esquire Corrections.” One of these mock entries explains the real reasons for Raymond Carver’s fame:

Due to a printer’s error, 948 words were accidentally omitted from “Neighbors,” Raymond Carver’s first short story published in Esquire, in the June 1971 issue. Credit for Carver’s influential spare style, once attributed to a former editor at the magazine, should now be directed to a retired print manager in New Jersey.

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. (more…)