Gawker
You know how all Raymond Carver's short stories are like, "We sat in the kitchen. It was raining. I poured another scotch. I drank it. She sat on the chair, drinking. We drank together a while"? Apparently they weren't always so minimalist. In fact, according to Raymond's widow Tess Gallagher, they were downright "expansive" before his editor Gordon Lish got hold of them, radically cutting them and in some instances changing their titles and endings. And in a recently-unearthed letter, Raymond seems to plead for Gordon to stop publication of the altered book. So Tess wants to bring out an alternate edition of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" that contains the unedited stories. Is this a terrible, terrible idea?
Gary Fisketjon, who was Raymond's editor later in his life, certainly thinks so: "I would rather dig my friend Ray Carver out of the ground. I don't understand what Tess's interest in doing this is except to rewrite history. I am appalled by it." The reader who brought this to our attention agrees with Gary: "This is possibly the worst idea of all time. Next to Stephen King refilming The Shining with the dude from 'Wings.' When it comes down to The Author Thought This' and 'The Editor Thought This' Everyone ought to go with the one who ain't The Artiste."
Even if you tend to agree with those dudes, this teapot-tempest still raises some interesting questions about the role of the fiction editor. It's not something that's actually talked about that much outside of book publishing and graduate English and writing programs: how do the books we read get to be that way? The work of the editor is supposed to be stealth and unnoticeable, but savvy readers can recognize a certain person's imprimatur, like a stealth voice behind the voice that amplifies what the author is doing without ever getting in the way of it. In this instance, it seems clear that Gordon did this job admirably well. But for various weird reasons, some having to do with booze, Raymond acknowledged that, though Gordon had improved the stories, he didn't want to accept the changes. So what's more important, the "better" book or the book the author wanted to write and see published?
Comments
I never even knew Gordon Lish was also a great editor. This makes me love him like I love cotton candy.
Make both available and let the public decide. Like Deep Impact and Armageddon. Or, more similarly, theatrical release versions of movies vs. Director's Cuts. Also, Elijah Pollack vs. Mordecai Stein.
Who knew Carver's work originally included so much bodice-ripping? And car chases!
Either the reader that brought this to your attention is one of my multiple personalities, or s/he was eavesdropping on this very same remake-of-the-shining-with-dude-from-wings conversation I was JUST having.
Kind of timely given this week's New Yorker piece on the new abridged versions of literary classics. They make a compelling argument in favor of the edited versions.
And PS: Wouldn't American Literature be Waaaay Better off with Hard-Core Editors in Hockey Masks with Chainsaws? Imagine if Sonny Mehta had a sack, for instance. We are adrift in mediocre authorial nonsense. Isn't it time to chop a few virgins up at the old abandoned Summer camp?
They tried to do this with Thomas Wolfe, but it turned out there wasn't a market for steamer trunks full of drunken scrawl on random notebooks after all, so the Maxwell Perkins Look Homeward Angel was allowed to stand. What I wouldn't give for Perkins or Lish to shape my prose.
Didn't Tess herself edit the balls out of Call Me if You Need Me? So she first gets to muck around with his unpublished stories and now is heading after the published ones? Eeek!
So I should die with people not knowing what it was I actually wrote? No thanks, I'd rather live, then.
PS Consumers have no rights.
Eh, come on, she's a widow. It's not like the sales of "SO MUCH WATER SO CLOSE TO HOME" t-shirts were allowing her to use brand-name Tylenol instead of the generic. Let her publish. Then we can all go, "editors, wow!" like PJP up there, and maybe Gary will get a raise! And then he can buy a "SO MUCH WATER SO CLOSE TO HOME" t-shirt. Though how you could live in this century and not know about Gordon Lish is beyond me. Wasn't thise whole deal painstakingly limned with side-by-side manuscript excerpts in the Times about five years ago?
Is anything stopping Fisketjon both letting this happen AND digging his friend Ray Carver out of the ground? Because that would be some publicity coup.
Wow this is the toughest question I've come across in weeks. I'm a huge Carver fan - I think he's one of America's most noteworthy modern writers. I can't imagine "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" being any better.
I'm curious if Tess' motive in bringing out another book is financial or if she's really wants to preserve her husband's original writing. If so...why speak up now instead of five years ago??
I stare vacantly into the distance. I consider the question.
Debate the relative artistic merits all you want, but if the author doesn't write it or sign off on it then it ain't "intent." And fuck you, Freud, my mother's got nothing to do with this.
Did Tess run out of money?
I would cut the editor.
Yeah, right, what a fucking victim Raymond Carver is. Ho My God! I'm surprised his unreadable drafts haven't balled into a zombie and don't walk the earth stabbing editorial assistants. Huge genius artist types should never sign book contracts or cash royalty checks--they should stay right here on the internet where you can be free to be as lousy and unedited a writer as you wish. Weeeeee!
There was a big piece on this in the New York Times Magazine, I believe, about 9 or 10 years ago, and it seemed clear to me at the time that the Lish edits were improvements. Then again, the new unedited On the Road is pretty awesome, and certainly worth looking at if you're a Kerouac fan. So maybe publish both and let the readers decide. It's like looking at the manuscripts of "The Waste Land" with Ezra Pound's edits. Even when you're like, "Yeah, that was a good call. That too," it's interesting to see what got cut out.
My first impulse was to side with Carver, but then I remembered that editors for the American version of Clockwork Orange snipped off the last chapter. Rolling Stone ran the missing chapter some time ago, and reading about how Alex grows up and becomes a family man made me hate the whole novel. So, go Lish!
In the original "Cathedral" the blind man is deaf.
Let's have a look at the intended texts. Who knows, maybe they'll be good in a whole new way and then we have twice the goodness to love! Wouldn't that be great!!!!???!!!
"We sat like stone lions in the kitchen of last resort. Raindrops kept falling on the roof like wet sands in a universal hourglass as the scent of my failure mixed with the burnt toast. Reaching gently so as not to disturb the gauzy shroud of silence over the table I poured another shot of SoCo and drank it like it was my first strawberry Quik. My estranged amanuensis Roquella sat on the Louis Cans she'd drug in from the parlor and flipped silently through the latest Saturday Evening Post. There was an article about nuns in Wisconsin who'd built a bomb shelter that also served as a fully consecrated Roman Catholic shurch in there that I particularly liked but I didn't tell her about it, she'd find it and like it or or not or like it and laugh which would be the wrong response but anyway the wafer crumbled she'd find it on her own. We sat like that, drinking and reading, silently for about 32 minutes until she started humming Happy Days Are Here Again and I couldn't help but join in with the full strength and volume of my piercing but embracing mezzo-soprano pipes."
@paulrevere: The victims are the readers, if the unpublished version is better. Have you read it?
tess always struck me as a sweet, super flaky lady (the kind of chick you see on a bicycle with a cast on her arm). i'd like to see a variorum edition, but clearly the originally published takes precedence. just keep lyle lovett out of it this time.
Every few years people realize Gordon Lish improved/damaged Raymond Carver's stories a whole lot. The NY Times mag "revealed" (it was not exactly new news) a few years ago that "A Small Good Thing" was a whole lot shorter (and I would say not as good, actually, but it is really a matter of opinion and taste) when it appeared in Ploughshares or some other little litmag entitled "The Bath". (A lot of people I've talked to think Lish is a complete asshole.) The version collected in "Where I'm Calling From" is the long non-Lish version, and this was Carver's decision. I think that's also the version most people associate with Carver. That Lish editing style -- ever read the old "Quaterly"? Pithy, tight, sort of airy and meaningless, soul-less. But then again Tess edited a posthumus book of Carver "poems" intersperced with fragments from Anton Chekhov (?!) that is kind of crappy. I think she misses him, but unfortunately he is dead. Anyway, if you are really intersted in Carver (like or dislike), you are tired of the reductive parodies like the one that opens this post. That shit was funny 20 years ago. Sort of.
I love the stories the way they are, and I would hope that if the edited versions were drastically different from what Carver wanted, he would have taken them elsewhere. What strikes me as bizarre, book-world-wise, is that someone as great as Carver had an active editor, while today someone like Foer gets to run amok with bells and whistles and no one tells him to stop being all precious and "postmodern."
I think I understand why Tess G. is doing this. She and Gordon Lish have been in a disgusting, small-minded, pissing match over who was the real genius behind Carver, and thus who is most entitled to rob Carver's grave in order to burnish their own literary reputation for posterity.
Lish has long claimed to have been that genius. Check out the opening paragraph of D.T. Max's 1998 Times Mag article on this subject:
For much of the past 20 years, Gordon Lish, an editor at Esquire and then at Alfred A. Knopf who is now retired, has been quietly telling friends that he played a crucial role in the creation of the early short stories of Raymond Carver. The details varied from telling to telling, but the basic idea was that he had changed some of the stories so much that they were more his than Carver's. No one quite knew what to make of his statements. Carver, who died 10 years ago this month, never responded in public to them. Basically it was Lish's word against common sense. Lish had written fiction, too: If he was such a great talent, why did so few people care about his own work? As the years passed, Lish became reluctant to discuss the subject. Maybe he was choosing silence over people's doubt. Maybe he had rethought what his contribution had been -- or simply moved on.
In that same article, Max describes how Gallagher claims to have come up with the idea, if not most of the story, for Carver's masterpiece "Cathedral," which was a post-Lish story.
Read it and decide for yourself. My opinion, having been a book editor: editors edit and should shut the fuck about it. What's worse, in this particular situation, is the snobbish, East Coast attitude that undergirds that response of Lish and Gallagher: that someone as relatively unlettered as Raymond Carver (Chico State College, barely) needed them more than other writers need their editors and lovers; that he was something of an idiot savant who needed constant care.
How many editors even understand what they're editing? Have you commenters met any editors? And Gary Fisketjon is the genius who brought us McInerney.
Emily, please tell us more about your former profession!
Tess is crazy. She pulls all her own eyelashes out one by one. Living vicariously through her dead husband? I think so.
Gary kinda rhymes with dependent-on-writers salary.
Tess kinda rhymes with my husband is dead and I am his literary executor and I am not sure what to do with that, and oh my gosh fiction is dead and all I am left with is this man's legacy which is both disappearing and misunderstood, and I am unsure how to feed myself or keep Ray in his proper place in history, what a mess.
I'd take ANY new Carver incarnation of it would remove from my brain the image of a sullen Jennifer-Jason Leigh making gross vagina noises in "Short Cuts."
Yes, the _victims_ are the *readers*. Become a graduate student, ATIPOFTHEHAT. And sift through every last drunken napkin! Enjoy being BREATHLESS!!
@heartbreakturnip: You last point may be more about his alcoholism than about Chico State--go, Rooks!
More than the remake of The Shining, have y'all read the unedited version of The Stand? That's some backbreaking work Stephen King's editor did there.
As evidenced by the fact that I have actually read The Unedited Stand (I don't recommend it), I like to read both the edited versions and unedited (when available) versions. Educational, you know? I would like to see the alternate edition of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." And it sounds like Gallagher would be honoring Carver's wishes, and that's important too.
But then again, I know I make some pretty dumbass wishes when I'm drunk, and the next morning I wish they hadn't been honored.
@paulrevere: I said the victims are the readers if what was cut is better than what was first presented. People who wish to become graduate students can do so.
For another really good example of this problem, look at my unedited novel Stale Cheese Puffs in My Cupboard. My cat made some edits that really improved it, but I just want to go with my original version, where my super takes four weeks to fix my leaky shower instead of three.
The editor dude should just tell the widow to Please Be Quiet, Please.
More importantly, whose job is it to make sure there are no typos? I'm almost done with that Junot Diaz book (LOVE it!) and there are typos galore! Well, maybe just a few. Still, pretty sloppy for a highly anticipated first novel. Yes, i'm a lawyer, uptight about typos.
It would be misleading to publish the earlier version as an “alternate edition.” It’s like when the New Yorker printed previously unpublished—purposfully unpublished—drafts of poems by Elizabeth Bishop last year without comment. Helen Vendler ripped Alice Quinn a new one, and I think she was justified: Bishop did not want those poems presented as finished work.
On the other hand, if the text is published as a “draft,” then I think the publication can be justified as scholarly work. There are many examples of this. In poetry, there is, for example, the facsimile of “The Waste Land” with heavy emendations by Pound. In fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s editor is known to have been very active in the process of revision.
"Victims?" I mean, "victims?" Nobody really reads books, you know. The stories *can't possibly* be Better. BETTER? When they do get inevitably get published, please return to these comment boxes dressed only in a hairshirt. And save the word "victims" for something, anything, anyplace else. If the word "victim" was stricken from the American lexicon for a decade, many people would explode into confetti.
@lalalina: *sigh* I'm a lawyer, uptight about typos.
@CoachHogan: Mind meld on Eliot.
@MissPants: How do you pull your eyelashes out? All together in one go?
Poor Tess, she just needs to take a Barthes and chill out.
This is even dishier than that TMZ post on the role of the unreliable narrator in post-modern fiction.
REMEMBER: YOU ARE A LITERARY VICTIM UNLESS YOU GET TO ROOT THROUGH YOUR FAVORITE AUTHOR'S UNDERWEAR DRAWER AND TRY ON THEIR ILL-ADVISED EDIBLE STRAP-ONS! A VICTIM I SAY!!
I'm not a big one on authorial intent but in this case there is clear evidence that there are two versions: the ones heavily edited and the ones Carver restored. (And there is evidence of Carver's wishes being ignored.)
I'm in favor of publishing the alternative version (at least in the Library of America collection because I think it's important to have those available to Carver readers. It would alwo be fascinating to compare the two. I seriously doubt that the unedited version will replace the first version as the definitive text.
Books that are important to readers and scholars sometimes warrant this kind of publication of multiple versions. There are many reasons why a text is heavily influenced by an editor. Sometimes it is a collaboration as with the famous case of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound's editing of The Waste Land. Sometimes the editor censors it as with T. S. Eliot's bowdlerized version of Djuna Barnes' Nightwood (done in order to get it published and/or out of personal squeamishness). The editing of Emily Dickinson's poems is a scholarly school unto itself.
I still have one lingering question, though. How "unedited" is it really going to be? Is this going to be the Tess Gallager's version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love?/Beginners And thus begins a new scholarly industry…
@paulrevere: Um, you originated the word "victim" on this post, and I picked it up from you--on purpose! Maybe you should stick to alerting us about the British and their orgasms. I don't say the unpublished versions are better. I say we don't know until we read them.
Hey, does anyone remember the mini-scandal in which Lish wrote his own jacket copy praising himself and was caught out and embarrassed? I would love to reread that about now.
@MissPants: I know this is much too serious a comment, but pulling out your eyelashes is an obessive compulsive disorder--it doesn't mean you're crazy. Of course, she could be crazy, but the eyelash thing doesn't make it so.
@paulrevere: You know, ALL CAPS makes victims of us all. Nobody wins in an internet fight. It's a slap-fest between severely disabled kids.
@paulrevere: You have a remarkable faith in the skills and intentions and achievements of editors.
That was Um sarcasm. Some here in this box make it sound as if Carver was robbed in the night of his stories and has forever paid the price for their defilement! The? British? And? Their? Orgasms? Yeah, we won't know if "Saw 4" Sucks Ass Either until we've paid $20 and are halfway through the popcorn.
EVERYONE IS A VICTIM AND STILL NO ONE READS BOOKS. But we'll just ~never know!!~ Like, whatever happened to the Smurfs. We Just Don't Know.
I wish every author in America got molested by Raymond Carver's editor. Would we were all so lucky. That dude ate turkey sandwiches and crapped out Mercedes.