4219-LICKUOSA-92060213216.pdf

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Uniwersytet Warszawski

Orodek Studiw Amerykaskich

Julian Horodyski

Nr albumu: 324727

Love Uncut The Question of Authorship of Raymond Carvers What We

Talk About When We Talk About Love

Praca licencjacka

na kierunku kulturoznawstwo

w zakresie studia amerykanistyczne kulturoznawstwo USA

Praca wykonana pod kierunkiem

Dr Grzegorza Kocia

Orodek Studiw Amerykaskich

Warszawa, wrzesie 2014

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Owiadczenie kierujcego prac

Owiadczam, e niniejsza praca zostaa przygotowana pod moim kierunkiem i stwierdzam, e spenia ona warunki do przedstawienia jej w postpowaniu o nadanie tytuu zawodowego.

Data Podpis kierujcego prac

Owiadczenie autora (autorw) pracy

wiadom odpowiedzialnoci prawnej owiadczam, e niniejsza praca dyplomowa zostaa napisana przeze mnie samodzielnie i nie zawiera treci uzyskanych w sposb niezgodny z obowizujcymi przepisami. Owiadczam rwnie, e przedstawiona praca nie bya wczeniej przedmiotem procedur zwizanych z uzyskaniem tytuu zawodowego w wyszej uczelni. Owiadczam ponadto, e niniejsza wersja pracy jest identyczna z zaczon wersj elektroniczn.

Data Podpis autora (autorw) pracy

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Streszczenie

Kwestia autorstwa What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Raymonda Carvera

Praca przedstawia i analizuje rnice midzy dwiema wersjami zbioru opowiada What We

Talk About When We Talk About Love Raymonda Carvera, oryginaln wersj autorsk i

wersj zredagowan przez Gordona Lisha, ktra zostaa opublikowana i przyniosa autorowi

znaczny rozgos. W roku 1998, dziesi lat po mierci pisarza, dziennikarz The New York

Times D.T. Max opublikowa swoje obserwacje na temat rnic midzy tekstami zbiorw i

napi pomidzy pisarzem a redaktorem dziki odkryciu teczki z odrcznie poprawionymi

przez Lisha oryginaami opowiada oraz prywatn korespondencj Carvera i Lisha, ktr

Lish przekaza Lilly Library na Uniwersytecie Indiana. Analiza wykazuje, e to wanie z

powodu naniesie redaktorskich Gordona Lisha w tym zbiorze Carver zyska opini

minimalisty, co byo wbrew intencjom pisarza. Ingerencja Gordona Lisha jest szczeglnie

wyrana w opowiadaniu What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (lub

Beginners w wersji oryginalnej), ktre Carver traktowa szczeglnie osobicie i ktre w obu

zbiorach jest opowiadaniem tytuowym. Jego analiza ukazuje dysonans pomidzy intencjami

pisarza i redaktora oraz sposb, w jaki wpywaj one na odbir opowiadania.

Sowa kluczowe

minimalizm, realizm, kwestia autorstwa, relacja pomidzy autorem a redaktorem

Dziedzina pracy (kody wg programu Sokrates-Erasmus)

08900, inne humanistyczne

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 5

2. Analysis .............................................................................................................................................. 11

Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................... 21

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Introduction

Raymond Carver (1938-1988), an acknowledged American short story author, was one

of the leading voices of the American prose of 1980s. In August 1998, ten years after his

death, D.T. Maxs article The Carver Chronicles was published in The New York Times.1

D.T. Max is a journalist and essayist, who wrote for The New York Times Book Review at the

time. The article has been of fundamental importance for a critique of Carver ever since. It

laid bare Carvers relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish, and unveiled the existence of the

original, unedited version of Carvers landmark short-story collection What We Talk About

When We Talk About Love of 1981. Lish himself had arranged for the papers to find their

place in the Lilly Library at Indiana University in 1991, but Carvers second wife, Tess

Gallagher, who also was the literary executor of the estate of the late author, successfully

prevented critics from reaching the archives and publishing the results of any research. As a

result, before the Lilly collection went public scholars had only had Carvers published works

to draw conclusions from.

The style that Carver used in his works was not consistent and had one particular piece

of work that stood out. What We Talk About, the first of the two collections published by

Alfred A. Knopf, was the most significant switch to the famous pared-down style for which

Carver received so much praise. It was an anomaly standing out from his body of work.

Radical in its minimalist, redolent-of-Hemingway aspirations, What We Talk About was very

successful and at the same time the first (and later the only) example of such an extremely

abbreviated style among Carvers writings. The amount of critical acclaim instantly earned

1 D.T. Max, The Carver Chronicles, The New York Times 9 August 1998,

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/09/magazine/the-carver-chronicles.html

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Carver the label of a minimalist. After the publication of What We Talk About in 1981 Carver

returns with Cathedral (1983) and Where Im Calling From (1988) on which Gordon Lish

had less influence. The title story of Cathedral was published six months after What We

Talk About. In their Prolegomena to Any Future Carver Studies, William L. Stull and

Maureen P. Carroll claim that as readers immediately grasped and Carver subsequently

corroborated, in style and substance this spiritually inflected story was the polar opposite of

the bleak and bare-boned fictions in the book he had published less than six months earlier.2

Carver tried to reveal his true vision, and in an attempt to reverse the outcome of Lishs

intervention he went on to publish the unedited versions of the What We Talk About stories.

According to Stull and Carroll, Carvers change of direction veered into a stunning reversal

of field when, in the spring/summer 1982 issue of Ploughshares, he published A Small,

Good Thing, a vastly longer and more hopeful version of The Bath from What We Talk

About.3 Both collections which followed also come back to a more expansive style of

writing.

It certainly appears that what later happened to the manuscripts was a part of Carvers

plan, which Gallagher took up after his death. The Lilly archives contained not only

manuscripts, but also the whole correspondence between Carver and Lish concerning What

We Talk About. Carvers letters get more and more desperate as he realizes the extent of his

work that Lish had eradicated in his edits.4 Their brotherly relationship naturally deteriorated,

and Carver kept his later work away from Lish, this much discredited his jovial editor patron,

as we may call him, since he seemed to have known what was better for his alcoholic friend

Raymond, though Carver, in their correspondence, insisted on stopping the publication under

2 William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll, Prolegomena to Any Future Carver Studies, in Journal of the Short

Story in English, 46, 13-17. 3 Ibid.

4 Raymond Carver, Note on Texts in Collected Stories, ed. William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll, (New York:

Library Of America, 2009), 990. This is the source for all the letters exchanged between Carver and Lish.

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the threat of losing sanity. I will expand the motif of their exchange of letters later on in my

work while discussing Carvers biography.

When Lish published What We Talk About When We Talk About Love through Alfred

A. Knopf publishing house, he actually published his own edited version. Consequently the

manuscripts of the stories that D.T. Max found at the library were drastically marked with the

amendments of the editor. The journalist notes that Lishs black felt-tip markings sometimes

obliterate the original textCarol, story ends here, he would note for the benefit of the

typist. D.T. Max calculated the amount of deletion from the original texts that Carver handed

Lish, and he came up with a shocking figure of 55%.

But it was not just shortening that Lish had done. He had also rewritten 13 out of 17

original story endings, which implies alterations far more serious than just making the stories

more concise by physically shortening them. Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit is the most extreme

example; it had been cut by 78%. The ending that had been most distinctly altered is the one

from The Bath, where a couple waits for their son to wake up from a coma. Carver makes

the couple find solace through the generosity of another person, Lish leaves nothing of any

resemblance to an emotional absolution and ultimately the reader is left wondering only

whether the kid makes it or not. The bottom line has to be that Carver and his editor worked

with two dramatically different mindsets and that the two versions of the same story

ultimately read as two completely different pieces. The work in which Lishs editing was the

most fully-fledged and is most fit for analysis is Beginners, a story which in its edited

version is the title story of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. By

examining of the unedited version, first published in the December 2007 issue of The New

Yorker, I will try to explore all of the areas of original Carver prose that have been affected by

ruthless editing. The analysis will show how far this story, considered to be one of Carvers

finest, diverges from his original authorial intent.

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Raymond Carvers success and approval had not been secure before What We Talk

About When We Talk About Love. After all he was hardly ever destined for success. He came

from a working-class family. Son to an alcoholic sawmill worker and a waitress, born in

1938, he married at the age of 19. Maryann Burke was his high school girlfriend and became

his wife. By the time Carver was 20, their second child, Vance, had been born. While

struggling to make a living, Raymond tried to nourish his passion for writing. The moment

where Gordon Lish starts to play an important role in Carvers life is during the 1970s. That

time was particularly tough for Carver the time of heavy drinking and financial problems.

Lish had helped Carver in many ways before What We Talk About, mainly publishing his

work in the Esquire magazine and helping him publish his very first collection Will You

Please Be Quiet, Please? in 1976. In 1977 Lish left his job at Esquire and started working at

Alfred A. Knopf. In the same year Carver stops drinking and soon leaves his wife Maryann.

Carvers new life begins when he meets the poet Tess Gallagher and hands the What

We Talk About manuscript to Lish in May of 1980. Although Carver had seen the manuscript

as ready for publishing, nevertheless he wrote Lish not to worry about taking a pencil to the

stories if [he] can make them better.5 The editor took the pencil to them all right and sent

Carver back the edited collection five weeks later. Carver and Gallagher had holiday plans

going on, so Carver, in a supposed hurry, responded that it was all looking fine. At this

moment in the story it is not known whether Carver had read the revised versions. It appears

he had not though, because when in July Lish sent him what he saw as the final versions of

What We Talk About the writers response was dramatic. He read the collection through the

night of July 7 and in the morning of July 8 wrote a lengthy emotional letter to Lish telling

him to please do the necessary things to stop the production of the book. Lish was by that

time in power of publishing the work, because Carver has already signed the contract with the

5 Letter from May 10, 1980.

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publisher. Carver deeply believed that the first version was better, but was also aware of the

consequences of Lishs extreme editing that he saw in a work signed with his name. Some of

the stories have already been published in their original form and Carver was afraid that the

ones in the edited collection were going to be discovered in their radically different form. But

that is not the last of it Carver, later in the letter of July 8th writes that theyre [stories] so

intimately hooked with my getting well, recovering, gaining back some little self-esteem and

feeling of worth as a writer and a human being. This is, I believe, the foundation of the

original Carver vision of the stories, rescued and restored to their original state from under

Lishs marker (the edited manuscript was the only existing copy of Carvers collection) by

William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll, transcribed and published in 2009 in the Library of

America complete edition of Carvers prose and poetry. Carver was still looking at all three

versions of the collection while the production of the book was already in motion. He wrote

Lish two more letters, first proposing minor changes and removing Mr. Coffee and Mr.

Fixit story from the collection. Significantly, that was the story which triggered the lines

about his emotional connection to the stories in the previous letter. In the second letter he

mostly agreed to the second edit by Lish, but continued to insist on dropping the story in

question. In the spring of 1983 Carver will republish, among others, the unedited version of

Mr Coffee and Mr Fixit in his Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories collection published by a small

publishing firm, without any connection to Lish.

The final version of What We Talk About did not incorporate any of changes that

Carver insisted on. In the 1998 article by D. T. Max, Lish explains that [his] sense of it was

that there was a letter and that [he] just went ahead. Such response proves Lishs paternal

approach not only to Carvers prose, but to Carver as a person as well. Maybe the letters had

come too late to change anything; maybe Carver had had a nervous breakdown and was

acting in panic; surely Lish seemed to think that he knew what was best for Carver as a writer

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and what was necessary to make him successful. Lish had far abused his power over Carver,

and the following analysis of the story Beginners will, I hope, show the whole measure of

the edit--the edit that served Lishs minimalist vision, and not the humanist-realist vision that

Carver strived for in the original and that was so congruent with his personal life.

Beginners6, the story which Lish named What We Talk About When We Talk

About Love, was the one which Carver referred to as too close right now in his July 8

letter aiming to stop the production of the book. It is the time of Carvers new life which he

began after giving up drinking and starting a relationship with Tess Gallagher. In the same

July 8 letter he says:

Now much of this has to do with my sobriety and with my new-found (and fragile, I

see) mental health and well-being. Ill tell you the truth, my very sanity is on the line

here. I dont want to sound melodramatic here, but Ive come back from the grave here

to start writing stories once more. As I think you may know, Id given up entirely,

thrown it in and was looking forward to dying, that release. But I kept thinking, Ill

wait until after the election to kill myself, or wait until after this or that happened,

usually something down the road a ways, but it was never far from my mind in those

dark days, not all that long ago.

Carver was very intimately attached to his work done after that turning point. Due to the fact

that the stories he wrote were a form of self-therapy, it seems almost as if he had written the

new, healthy Carver down in the manuscript and Lish was the one who attempted to destroy

his new image. In a textual analysis of the edited version of Beginners and the original

manuscript, I will try to discover Carvers intent, prove the emotional charge and how the

story conveys Carvers very private coming to senses after the years of alcoholic struggle.

The analysis will compare the two texts-- What We Talk When We Talk About Love, the

6 Lish named the WWTA collection after his edited title of the story "Beginners, which in 2009 naturally

became the title story for the Carvers manuscript version.

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story which Lish edited and published in 1981, and Beginners, the version without Lishs

corrections, published in 2009. I will look at how Gordon Lish, through his editing,

transformed Carvers vision into his own.

Analysis

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Beginners share the same

core, which is a story of two couples sitting around a table, drinking gin, and recalling their

old loves. In the edited version, we have Nick and Laura, who are guests at Mel (Mel being

the counterpart of Herb in "Beginners") and Terris house. Nick and Laura are in love, and

have been for a year and a half. Youre still gaga over each other yet,7 says Terri. The story

is first-person narration told by Nick. The two couples are drinking gin and looking forward

to going out to dine. First, they discuss Ed (Carl), Terris ex-lover, who appears to Mel as

nothing short of crazy. Terri defends Ed and says that she was sure that what was between

them was love. Mel gets snooty and, in order to teach Terri what truly is, tells the story of an

old couple, whom he treated one time at the hospital (Mel is a cardiologist). The couple

survived a near-fatal car accident and stayed at the hospital for a long time, motionless,

covered in bandages. Mel saw that the man was very upset about something, and asked him

about it. Here comes the punchline of Mels story the man was depressed because he could

not see his wife for such a long time. Mel concludes the story with a sonorous line, namely

do you see what Im saying?8 Then the conversation segues to Mels first wife, whom he

declares to have truly loved but whom now he hates. He even goes as far as to fantasize of

killing her, dressing up as a beekeeper and letting a hive of bees inside her house, since she is

7 Carver, Beginners in Collected Stories, 931.

8 Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in Collected Stories, 320.

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allergic to bee sting. She refused to divorce Mel, and lives with a boyfriend and Mels kids.

Mel of course supports her, the kids and the guy. The story ends the moment the gin does

and the two couples sit around the table in the dark and in silence. Lishs edited version

begins (the font in bold stands for Lishs additions; deleted lines are Carvers):

My friend Mel Herb McGinnis, a cardiologist, was talking. Mel McGinnis is a

cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right. The four of us were sitting

around his kitchen table drinking gin. It was Saturday afternoon9

From the very beginning, Lish makes the audience add a feature to Nick, the narrator. The

ironic second line doubts that Nick and Mel are good friends; at least Nick has his own, quite

mean, opinion on Mel that he keeps to himself. Second deletion in the paragraph marks Lishs

style of editing by getting rid of such small elements of describing the situation, he begins to

move the event of the story to a universal dimension. A prime example of that strategy occurs

just after the second paragraph in the text:

Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel Herb loved her so much he

tried to kill her. Herb laughed after she said this. He made a face. Terri looked at him.

Then Terri she said, He beat me up one night, the last night we lived together. He

dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, all the while

saying, I love you, dont you see? I love you, you bitch. He went on dragging me

around the living room. My ,my head kept knocking on things. Terri She looked

around the table at us and then looked at her hands on her glass. What do you do with

love like that? she said. She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes,

and brown hair that hung down her back. She liked necklaces made of turquoise, and

long pendant earrings. She was fifteen years younger than Herb, had suffered periods

of anorexia, and during the late sixties, before shed gone to nursing school, had been

9Carver, Beginners 927, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love 310 in Collected Stories.

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a dropout, a street person as she put it. Herb sometimes called her, affectionately, his

hippie.10

Here Lish does all he can to cut the dialogue to its bare bone. Consequently the passage is

devoid of any possible emotional bond between the reader and the characters. Here Lish

achieves it by, first, removing the descriptions of Mels facial expressions and finally, by

deleting the long sentence presenting Terris background. Lishs edit freezes the motion of the

scene. While Carver fully animates its characters and the event, Lish leaves only the bare

contours of what is happening. Carver struggles for motion while the narration of the edited

version develops similarly to an attempt of reconstructing the event from a photograph. It

feels dramatically more colloquial than Carvers expansive style. The edit, cut to the

marrow, as Carver calls it in the interview for The Paris Review,11 compels the reader to fill

in the blanks created by Lish. This strategy works well. The reader is granted a certain

freedom in creating the dimensions in which the characters exist. However, the chance to

participate in the fictional world comes at a cost--within the text there often appears a sense of

void, which in turn makes room for desolation and emotional distance. And this was not

Carvers intention at all.

From all the characters of the original and edited versions, Mel (Herb) is perhaps the

one who Lish focuses on the most. His Mel uses the word fuck as many as 7 times

throughout the whole story, while Carvers Herb does not use it even once in the whole thirty-

three-page Beginners. Mel, when told about going to a restaurant afterwards, reacts:

I like food, Mel said. If I had it to do all over again, Id be a chef, you know?

Right, Terri? Mel said. Its called the Library Terri said. You havent eaten there

yet, have you? she said, and Laura and I shook our heads. Its some place. They say

Its a part of a new chain, but its not like a chain, if you know what I mean. They

10

Ibid. 11

Raymond Carver, Interview with Raymond Carver, The Art of Fiction No. 76., interview by Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee, The Paris Review, No. 88, summer 1983.

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actually have bookshelves in there with real books on them. You can browse around

after dinner and take a book out and bring it back the next time you come to eat. You

wont believe the food. And Herbs reading Ivanhoe! He took it out when we were

there last week. He just signed a card. Like in a real library.12

I like Ivanhoe, Herb said. Ivanhoes great. If I had it to do over again, Id study

literature. Right not Im having an identity crisis. Right, Terri? Herb said. He

laughed. He fingered twirled the ice in his glass. Ive been having an identity crisis

for years.13

Herbs ambition to study literature, if only he could do it again, becomes Mels wish to be a

chef. Identity crisis, too, though doubled by Carver, is deleted twice by Lish. This

repetitiveness in the dialogue appears to me not only as means to animate the story, but also

as an attempt to present a characteristic alcoholic palaver. Herb tries to tell us that he is

having a difficult time while Mel does not care. Carver however, in the interview for The

Paris Review, says that the What We Talk About When We Talk About Love collection is a

very self-reflexive effort:

The stories in What We Talk About are different to an extent. For one thing, it's a

much more self-conscious book in the sense of how intentional every move was, how

calculated. I pushed and pulled and worked with those stories before they went into

the book to an extent I'd never done with any other stories. When the book was put

together and in the hands of my publisher, I didn't write anything at all for six months.

And then the first story I wrote was Cathedral, which I feel is totally different in

conception and execution from any stories that have come before. I suppose it reflects

a change in my life as much as it does in my way of writing. When I wrote

Cathedral I experienced this rush and I felt, This is what it's all about, this is the

12

Carver, Beginners 936, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love 317, in Collected Stories. 13

Ibid.

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reason we do this. It was different than the stories that had come before. There was an

opening up when I wrote the story. I knew I'd gone as far the other way as I could or

wanted to go, cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone. Any farther

in that direction and I'd be at a dead endwriting stuff and publishing stuff I wouldn't

want to read myself, and that's the truth. In a review of the last book, somebody called

me a minimalist writer. The reviewer meant it as a compliment. But I didn't like it.

There's something about minimalist that smacks of smallness of vision and

execution that I don't like. But all of the stories in the new book, the one called

Cathedral, were written within an eighteen-month period; and in every one of them I

feel this difference.14

Carver employs a conscious diplomacy; he does not speak openly about Lishs severe

interventions in his stories in order to avoid controversy, and at the same time speaks heartily,

almost saying you ought to try Cathedral about his later work. He does not appreciate being

called a minimalist and claims that a tag like this imposes a certain lack, or possibly even an

emotional disability of a kind. For one thing, I believe that one is unable to conceive a

minimalist work like the Carver stories edited by Lish in a direct process of creation. I see it

as a mode of writing that comes only as a result of repetitive editing and very conscious, post-

productive process of sublimation. This is the reason why Carver silently rebelled against his

editors efforts. In an interview which followed the 2009 publication of Carvers Collected

Stories Tess Gallagher is asked if Carver might have avoided the minimalist label if What

We Talk About had been originally published in a version closer to the manuscript. This is

what she responds:

I believe so. Ray resisted that label adamantly. I cant count the number of times I

was in his presence in public and heard him attempt to correct the record, saying he

14

Raymond Carver, Interview with Raymond Carver, The Art of Fiction No. 76., interview by Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee, The Paris Review, No. 88, summer 1983.

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was not now and never had been a minimalist. The term was invented to describe

What We Talk About , and it was not a compliment. It did no justice to the stories in

Rays earlier books, nor to the books that followed.15

Carvers self-reflexive intent crystallizes in the character of Herb (Mel) and this is precisely

what Lish erases. Lish, effectively, killed the authorship of Carver and, paradoxically, this

is one of the reasons for Carvers popularity in the 1980s. Lish intuitively felt the direction in

where the critical taste evolved. Without much doubt, one could say that it was thanks to his

editor that Carver could later drive a beige Mercedes and live in a suburban house.16

Lish continues to shape Mel as a more and more shallow character by endowing him

with such details as vulgar language, but his changes to the old-couple story that Mel and

Herb tell are of even more importance. Pages 939 to 943 of the manuscript from Collected

Stories had been deleted in their entirety, four whole pages containing elaborate details,

background, and movement of the story. All the details which made Mel (Herb) appear to the

reader as being truly attached to the story of love that he had witnessed. Lish squeezes these

pages into a single paragraph.

"[. . .] I mean, the accident was one thing, but it wasnt everything. Id get up to

his mouth-hole, you know, and hed say no, it wasnt the accident exactly but it

was because he couldnt see her through his eye-holes. He said that was what was

making him feel so bad. Can you imagine? Im telling you, the mans heart was

breaking because he couldnt turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife.

Mel looked around the table and shook his head at what he was going to

say.

15

Tess Gallagher, William L. Stull, Maureen P. Carroll, The Library of America Interviews Tess Gallagher, William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll about Raymond Carver. Interview by Library of America. 16

Raymond Carver, Interview with Raymond Carver, The Art of Fiction No. 76., interview by Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee, The Paris Review, No. 88, summer 1983.

17

I mean, it was killing the old fart just because he couldnt look at the

fucking woman.

We all looked at Mel.

Do you see what Im saying?17

Here, after this sonorous punchline, the thread of the old couple dies. Both Herbs and Mels

stories are parts of their discussion of Ed (Carl), Terris ex-lover. Carl tried to commit suicide

twice, only to succeed the second time, and even then suffering for three days, because the

bullet with which he shot himself in the head did not kill him instantly. Carl also used to

harass Mel and Terri and even threatened to kill her. Mels bottom line on that character is

that he was a mentally sick person and he denies Terri the love they had. In order to show

Terri, Nick and Laura what he perceived as love he tells them the story of the couple. Lishs

couple has no names, while in Beginners the reader makes acquaintance to Anna and Henry

Gates. After claiming that the source of Henrys grief was that he could not see his wife,

Carver proceeds with account of the story Herb heard from the old man. Carvers old couple

got married in 1927 and that they had been together ever since, except for two occasions, first

time when Annas mother died and the second when her sister died. They lived on a small

ranch and throughout the late 1920s and 1930s they were there all alone, for their children had

not been born yet. Herb was interested what could they do for entertainment, and Henry

replied that they would play music from a gramophone and dance.

Some nights itd be snowing, and itd be so still outside you could hear the snow

falling. Its true, Doc, he said, you can do that. Sometimes you can hear the snow

falling. If youre quiet and your mind is clear and youre at peace with yourself and all

things, you can lay in the dark and hear it snow. You try it sometimes, he said.18

17

Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in Collected Stories, 320 18

Carver, Beginners in Collected Stories, 941

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Telling the story, Herb once more appears to the reader as a character undergoing difficult

emotional changes in life. An uplifting assertion follows when Nick asks if the couple was

doing well and Herb replies that he just got a card that came from Henry and that everything

was alright. Herbs sensitive confession leads me to a conclusion that he is troubled because

he feels love, yet he does not truly realize how and why it works. Herb most surely could not

hear the snow falling when he went to sleep, but he is definitely looking for solace, for some

relief which love like the one from Henrys story could give him. The expansive version of

the old couple story that Carver hands us through Herbs narration is a highly emotional and

sincere confession which makes the reader aware of the protagonists mental state. In the

edited version Lishs Mel leaves it all out.

Both stories describe Herbs (Mels) immediate need to call his family. He wants to

talk to the kids, but he does not want to talk to his ex-wife, Marjorie, with whom the kids are

staying. Finally he abandons the thought and says that sometimes he feels like letting a bee

hive out on her, her being allergic. Carver makes a joke out of it:

Shame on you, Herb, thats awful, Laura said and laughed until her eyes welled. Awful

funny, Terri said. We all laughed. We laughed and laughed.19

Lish, in his edit, makes Mel sound serious about the idea of killing the woman. The final

section that follows is when Lishs version ends, four pages short of Carvers. The party was

about to go to a restaurant to eat, but:

I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyones heart. I could hear the

human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room

went dark.20

What Lish proposes, or even imposes here, is a type of a theatrical ending. The room goes

dark, as if a curtain had been drawn, and the characters sit, motionless, captured in their

19

Carver, Beginners 944, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love 321 in Collected Stories. 20

Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love 322 in Collected Stories.

19

drunken intent of going out. This ending is a hopeless one both couples are stuck within the

house, their stories unfinished, fading out with neither regret nor absolution. Carvers ending

is much more elaborate. After the gin is gone and Mel goes to have a shower, Terri confesses

to Laura and Nick:

Lately hes been talking about suicide again. Especially when hes been drinking.

Sometimes I think hes too vulnerable. He doesnt have any defenses.21

Terri starts to cry and Nick stands by the window and contemplates:

I thought unreasonably that it was too bad the McGinnises no longer kept horses. I

wanted to imagine horses rushing through those fields in the near dark, or even just

standing quietly with their heads in opposite directions near the fence. I stood at the

window and waited. I knew I had to keep still a while longer, keep my eyes out there,

outside the house as long as there was something left to see.22

With this ending, Terri explains the reasons for Mels expansive, emotional story of the old

couple and his mental state, connected with alcohol. Nick stands in opposition to Mels

depression. He knows that whatever happens to him, he needs to keep going and care for the

love that he has for Laura, though he says:

I had the feeling something was going to happen, it was in the slowness of the

shadows and the light, and that whatever it was might take me with it. I didnt want

that to happen.

Such contrast could also be adequately applied to Carvers life. Mel could perhaps represent

the old Carver troubled with alcohol while Nick could stand for the new, loving and

responsible Carver, who defeated his past demons and has been granted a new, clean slate of

love that he just began to explore carefully. Mel says that it seems to me were just rank

21

Carver, Beginners in Collected Stories, 945-946. 22

Carver, Beginners in Collected Stories, 947.

20

beginners at love23, but through the character of Nick Carver is bound to succeed, and is

looking to it with hope.

What the reader could see as Carvers attempt to build a spectrum of characters that

would reflect his personal metamorphoses in Beginners, in What We Talk About When

We Talk About Love is entirely gone. Despite his intentions, Lish changed the gist of the

story so much that Carver did not care for the story as he did for Beginners. In the original,

unedited manuscript Carvers successfully tells a polyphonic, multi-dimensional story which

is deeply involving for the reader. In Beginners, Carver contained an emotional string to

his personal experience without making it feel naive or superficial. By his excessive editing

Gordon Lish consciously erased Carvers reflection the reflection which constitutes the true

heart of the story.

23

Carver, Beginners 932, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love 315 in Collected Stories.

21

Bibliography

Carver, Raymond, Collected Stories. Edited by William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll. New

York: Library of America, 2009.

Carver, Raymond. Interview with Raymond Carver, The Art of Fiction No. 76. Interview

by Mona Simpson and Lewis Buzbee. The Paris Review. No. 88 Summer 1983.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3059/the-art-of-fiction-no-76-raymond-carver

Gallagher, Tess, Stull, L. William, Carroll, Maureen P. The Library of American Interviews

Tess Gallagher, William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll about Raymond Carver. Interview

by Library of America.

https://www.loa.org/images/pdf/LOA_interview_Gallagher_Stull_Carroll_on_Carver.pdf

Max, D.T. The Carver Chronicles. The New York Times. 9 August 1998.

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/09/magazine/the-carver-chronicles.html

Stull, William L. and Carroll, Maureen P., Prolegomena to Any Future Carver Studies.

Journal of the Short Story in English, 46 | Spring 2006. http://jsse.revues.org/48a