Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish: When Is Editing Excessive?

[Walter Cummins]

The dispute over the benefit of the editorial cuts and changes Gordon Lish made to drafts of many Raymond Carver short stories before they were published reminds me of Ezra Pound's substantial deletions to T.S. Eliot’s original version of “The Waste Land.” Pound reduced the original manuscript, which was about 800 lines long, to approximately half its size. The final published version of "The Waste Land" is 434 lines. Eliot thanked Pound and gave him credit for improving the poem. Carver eventually turned against Lish and made his originals public so that readers could compare and judge the versions.

The two men had been friends, with Lish a strong advocate for Carver, especially when he was fiction editor of Esquire and when Carver’s stories began appearing in the 1980s, and in the opinion of many revitalized the American short story through what was considered Carver’s minimalist style. When Lish sold his personal papers to the Lilly Library in the 1990s, researchers could compare the Carver and Lish-edited—and published—versions of a number of famous stories. Carver had chosen to republish the “extended” versions of some stories in his later collections to show his vision for the work.

Kim Herzinger defines literary minimalism in terms of “equanimity of surface, ‘ordinary’ subjects, recalcitrant narrators and deadpan narratives, slightness of story, and characters who don’t think out loud” and “spareness and cleanness.”  Lish also saw a bleakness in the Carver stories, making cuts to emphasize that effect, even changing titles and endings, as well as deleting upbeat statements and paragraphs. Lish gave new titles to more than half of the stories of What We Talk collection, including that of one of Carver’s most famous stories— “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Carver’s original title had been “Beginners,” but Lish’s new title became that of an entire collection.

Lish also tightened sentences, changed vocabulary, redid rhythms on a stylistic level. More significant is his focus on toughness, the removal of any indications of Carver’s sympathy for characters. That's probably what bothered Carver most when he included extended versions of Lish-edited stories in later collections. Lish had become more aggressive in his editing as the years of their relationship went on, most likely the reason Carver rebelled.

The overriding question for those of us who write stories and longer fictions is when editing helps us fulfill our work and when it turns a draft into someone else’s vision. That’s an issue for anyone who participates in writing groups and workshops and who just shows drafts to friends.

From my personal experience, I’m convinced that every writer needs an editor. For one thing, as a writer when we reread our work we get a combination of what we actually did and what we think we did. A good editor can only react to what we did and catch points where we deceived ourselves. 

Writing initial drafts is a solitary act, but revision is often a collective activity. Even those of us who edit the work of others need someone to do the same for us. Many writers also teach, as Carver did at times during his career. The best teachers and editors grasp what the writer hopes to achieve and helps guide them to realizing that. The limited teachers want others to write like them, the story they would have turned out about the same material. Pound helped Eliot fulfill “The Wasteland.” Lish helped Carver achieve success with his stories, to the point where those stories became models for many others. But it reached a point where Carver thought he had given up control of his vision as a writer.