I Was a Teenage Carverian

I've procrastinated enough regarding the latest round of Carver/Lish revelations.

So much so that the New Yorker has helpfully printed a reader's letter that more-or-less encapsulates my feelings about the matter.  Thank you, Mr. Keith Mikolavich of Oakland, CA:

...Sometimes writers need editors to protect them from themselves.  It seems that Carver needed Lish, and then needed to break away to forge expansive stories like "Errand" and "Blackbird Pie," which, alongside his earlier, minimalist pieces, reveal his continual growth as one of the great American practitioners of the short story.

Now, I find myself a little indifferent this go-around, after being fairly scandalized when I first read "The Carver Chronicles" as a young Carver acolyte.  Carver's objections to Lish's edits, though deeply felt and meant, I'm sure, seem more than a little maudlin almost a decade after the initial reveal.  And I couldn't care less about Lish's occasionally ruthless cutting, although the instances of the old sorcerer literally injecting his writing into Carver's stories, where much of it remains, word-for-word, to this day, still strikes me as very unseemly.  Reading the restored "Beginnings" (aka "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love") makes it clear that early Carver left to his own devices tended to plod about and tell too much, though why Lish's "deadpan last lines" were often accepted verbatim and not reworked is baffling. 

(The temptation to perform some amateur psychology here is great, but suffice to say that Carver's greenness, his admiration of and gratitude towards Lish, probably granted the latter enough sway to occasionally ghostwrite, at least at first.)

But here's where we are with all this:

Now Tess Gallagher is hoping to re-publish all the stories in Carver's second book in what she believes is their "true, original" form. The story published here, "Beginners," was the submitted draft of a story that Lish cut by more than a third and retitled "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." Gallagher is eager for people to read "Beginners." And yet Lish's work helped transform a more conventional story into an exemplar of an astringent and original aesthetic—the aesthetic that helped win Carver his initial following. "I see what it is that you've done, what you've pulled out of it," Carver wrote to Lish about "Beginners" in his long, aggrieved letter, "and I'm awed and astonished, startled even, with your insights." Carver may well have regretted, to some degree, the way a number of his stories appeared in "What We Talk About," and, in the compendium "Where I'm Calling From," which appeared a few months before he died, he republished three stories in their "original" form. But most of the stories, including this one, he republished as Lish had edited them.

"An editorial relationship is a private one, and nobody can see it fully and completely," Gary Fisketjon, an editor who helped Carver make the selections for "Where I'm Calling From," said recently. "Clearly, there was a catastrophic breakdown here that's interesting but ultimately unknowable." What can be known is that, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, Carver's relationship with Lish was at an end. Lish told D. T. Max, "I don't like talking about the Carver period, because of my sustained sense of his betrayal, and because it seems bad form to discuss this." Gallagher, for her part, thought that Lish had been claiming too much credit for Carver's achievements.

I can't object to the stories in question being re-published in their "true, original" form, but I'm hoping that the emphasis falls on original rather than true.  In other words, re-publishing is fine insofar as the people behind it realize that what they're putting out is going to be mostly of scholarly interest and probably will not serve to change any minds.  We've already been exposed to Carver with and without Lish--and to some early Carver stories "restored" to their more expansive versions--and a fair number of readers, myself included, prefer the later, Lish-less Carver of "Cathedral," "Blackbird Pie," and "Errand" to the so-called minimalist Carver guided (and in some cases, partially composed) by Lish.  There's already plenty of Carver's output upon which to form a strong opinion.

Not that an of-scholarly-interest or serious-fans-only edition of Carver is a bad thing; in fact, I've been wondering why the publishing world doesn't explore this expanded-remastered niche in the same way the recording industry does.

For example, I've been listening to some old John Cale CD reissues, which come with extra tracks ranging from rough demo versions of songs to fully realized alternate versions of album tracks to b-side/cover-version curiosities.  This stuff is obviously aimed at a specific audience--listeners who could stand to hear more John Cale but might not be motived enough to chase down bootlegs--as would be a restored Carver edition.  So why not include in a literary reissue alternate versions of stories, sketches, deleted scenes, and so forth?* 

What seems like more of a selling point for a reissued version of Infinite Jest: an introduction from Dave Eggers or the stuff that DFW left on the cutting room floor?  Or a selection of Wallace's notes from the period, perhaps?  (And, yes, I admit to a general bias against Eggers, but I'm trying to maintain an objective, amateur scholar's perspective on this.)

True, some authors wouldn't want this stuff to see this light of day--wouldn't want the rough versions and supplementary material to cloud the impression of the final version--but I have a hard time believing that the intended audience for such expanded books wouldn't take the sketches, notes, and outtakes for what they are.  After all, when I hear John Cale doot-doot-dooting his way through an early version of "Graham Greene" in place of actual lyrics, I know that I'm experiencing a stepping stone on the way to the final version, albeit one that very well could shine an interesting light on how the song came to be.  (At worst, you're getting crap and filler, but it's often worth wading through for the one or two gems therein.)

In literature, I believe expanded versions could well de- and re-mystify books--that is, readers would be able to delve into the actual human effort behind the pages--the grinding, nuts and bolts stuff, which, among other things, might well include correspondence between author and editor and thereby expose how collaborative/combative is the editing process.

But much of the mystery would remain, as the supplementary/secondary material can only partially answer the question How was it done?

In the case of Carver/Lish, we can review the slashed and scribbled upon manuscripts, but those are still just the vestiges of the central mystery of Carver, which is located in the unlikely resilience of the man himself:

Gravy

No other word will do. For that's what it was. Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it, up to and including when he was told about,
well, some things that were breaking down and
building up inside his head. "Don't weep for me,"
he said to his friends. "I'm a lucky man.
I've had ten years longer than I or anyone
expected. Pure gravy. And don't forget it."

Yes.

*    *    *    *    *

(*One model might be the Norton Critical Editions, although what I'm imagining would have a more contemporary focus--the Infinite Jest reissue would be a perfect example--and less strictly "critical" background material than you'd find in a NCE.)

Comments

[Mike]

I agree with you wholeheartedly with your idea of reissuing books in expanded format, ala Infinite Jest's 10th Anniversary edition. However, and this is a minor point, I worry about the fact that, while such materials may be worth the price of admission, you're almost almost guaranteed to have to pay a substantial price for them. Nothing frustrates me more than to see books priced well beyond what they should be. Case in point, the new translation of War and Peace. Sure, it's a new translation, but how many copies and editions of it are out there? Surely, older material repackaged shouldn't command new material prices. It's the same thing with the cd reissues. Some of them are interesting, but are they really worth the price because they include a second disc? I don't think so.

[REllis]

I can't disagree too much with you, here, though I am less interested in the messy false-start stuff, myself. I hate all that extraneous crap on DVDs, too.

That Norton edition stuff: do we really need an explanation of every single 19th century reference? Eeg.

Then again, I'm not a scholar.

Hey, Mike: it's not like book pricing has *anything* to do with the value of the book's contents. A novel that took a writer ten years to write costs just the same as one knocked out in six months. Like any other commodity, it's priced by what us fools will pay.