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Saturday, October 20, 2007

Raymond Carver's widow (International Herald Tribune)

Raymond Carver's widow seeks to publish unedited stories
By Motoko Rich
Published: October 18, 2007

Tess Gallagher, the widow of Raymond Carver, one of the most celebrated American short-story writers of the 20th century, is spearheading an effort to publish a volume of 17 original Carver stories whose highly edited versions were published in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," his breakout 1981 book.

Largely as a result of that collection, which became a literary sensation, Carver was credited with popularizing a minimalist style. But many of his fans have been aware of reports that Gordon Lish, Carver's first editor at Alfred A. Knopf, had heavily edited, and in many cases radically cut, the stories before publication to hone the author's voice. At the time, Carver begged Lish to stop production of the book. But Knopf went ahead and published it, to much critical acclaim.

Gallagher, who is also a novelist and poet, wants to see the original stories published as a volume called "Beginners," the title that Carver gave to the story that became the title story in "What We Talk About."

"I just think it's so important for Ray's book, which has been a kind of secret, to appear," Gallagher said by telephone from her home in Port Angeles, Washington State But, she added, "I would never want to take 'What We Talk About' out of publication." Those versions of the stories, she said, "are now part of the history."

Gallagher's plan has created controversy. Carver's later editor, Gary Fisketjon of Knopf, which holds the copyright to "What We Talk About," is deeply opposed to the idea.

"I would rather dig my friend Ray Carver out of the ground," he said. "I don't understand what Tess's interest in doing this is except to rewrite history. I am appalled by it."

Carver, who died in 1988 at 50, had tried to set the record straight himself. He restored and republished five of the stories from "What We Talk About" in magazines or later collections. In "Where I'm Calling From," a volume of new and selected stories that Fisketjon helped edit and that was published the year Carver died, three of the stories that had appeared in "What We Talk About" — "So Much Water So Close to Home," "The Bath" (retitled "A Small, Good Thing") and "Distance" — appeared in restored form. But Carver also included four other stories from "What We Talk About" in the versions edited by Lish.

"When we put together 'Where I'm Calling From,' these were the stories that he handpicked from his work to live in posterity in the versions that he wanted them to live in," Fisketjon said. "If that is not the end of the story, I don't know what that would be."

Amanda Urban, the agent for Carver's literary estate, said she had previously spoken with Knopf about publishing the restored stories. Knopf declined and wrote Urban and Gallagher, telling them that if they tried to publish with another house, Knopf would consider it an illegal, competitive edition. Since then Gallagher has hired the agent Andrew Wylie, who said he now represented Carver's literary estate.

In a statement a Knopf spokesman, Paul Bogaards, said the publisher, Sonny Mehta, "has not made a decision" about whether now to publish "Beginners." Bogaards added, "We have spoken to counsel and are considering all of our options."

Some scholars have long questioned whether Carver's published work was authentically his. For the past 25 years, William L. Stull, an English professor at the University of Hartford, and his wife, Maureen Carroll, adjunct professor of English and humanities at Hartford, have been working to reconstruct original versions of Carver's stories.

After Lish sold his papers to the Lilly Library of Indiana University in 1991, Stull and Carroll began examining the manuscript of 17 stories that they say Carver delivered to Lish in 1980. Stull and Carroll said in a written statement that the manuscript "completes the restoration that Raymond Carver began — a restoration cut short by his too-early death."

In 1998 an article published in The New York Times Magazine by D. T. Max, then a contributing editor at The Paris Review, investigated Lish's longstanding claims that he had played a large role in creating Raymond Carver. Max reviewed Lish's papers at the Lilly Library and discovered that he had made dramatic cuts, changed titles and rewritten endings of the stories in "What We Talk About."
"For better or worse," Max concluded, "Lish was in there."

(Page 2 of 2)
Also in the Lilly Library is a seven-page letter, dated July 8, 1980, which Carver wrote to Lish as he readied "What We Talk About" for the printing presses. In it Carver pleaded with Lish, "Please do the necessary things to stop production of the book."

Carver acknowledged in the letter that Lish had "made so many of the stories in this collection better, far better than they were before." But because several people — including Gallagher and the writers Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Geoffrey Wolff and Donald Hall — had already seen some of the stories in their earlier versions, Carver wondered, "How can I explain to these fellows when I see them, as I will see them, what happened to the story in the meantime, after its book publication?"

Carver, who had recently met Gallagher (he later divorced his first wife, Maryann Burk) and stopped drinking, wrote: "If the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story, that's how closely, God Forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and mental well-being." He then detailed what he wanted restored.
Lish disregarded Carver's plea and published the edited stories. Writing in The Washington Post, Doris Betts praised Carver's "verbal skill, the distilled pungency, the laser focus of his implacable vision." Michael Wood, writing in The Times Book Review, said "his writing is full of edges and silences, haunted by things not said, not even to be guessed at."

Gallagher said the critics hadn't read the real Carver. "Ray really resisted this whole thing of being dubbed a minimalist," she said. She added that those who viewed Carver's later stories as more expansive than his early work, simply never knew that he had always been expansive.
Reached by telephone, Lish said he was "very skeptical about anyone having what you describe as the original manuscripts," he said, adding "The Carver matter is a dead letter with me."
Wylie has already spoken with Max Rudin, publisher of the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher, about including the restored stories in what would be characterized as an authoritative edition of Carver's collected works. Rudin said Library of America must get permission from Knopf to do so. He wants to print "the last authorially revised version" of each story, a few of which would come from "Beginners," and publish the full text of "What We Talk About" as a "historical document."

"There are always going to be readers who will feel that Gordon Lish did Raymond Carver a favor," Rudin said, "or at least worked the kind of editorial magic that he was supposed to, and others who disagree, who will feel that Lish hijacked the stories, cutting and shaping them to serve his own, not Carver's, vision."

Wylie has also started talking to Carver's original publishers in several countries, including France, Germany and Japan. "So far everybody I've spoken to wants to publish," he said. At least one of those foreign publishers, Olivier Cohen, publisher of Éditions de l'Olivier in France, said he would reserve judgment until seeing the manuscript.

Unlike Fisketjon, Cohen said he was not opposed to publishing the originals. But, he said, "you have to think twice before publishing material which the writer has not validated."

Gallagher said she simply wanted to restore Carver's legacy. "I'm just looking forward to the time when some wonderful reader doesn't rush up to me and say, 'Did Gordon Lish write all of Raymond Carver's stories?' " she said.

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