Raymond Carver, Syracuse, New York. (1984)

(Bob Adelman)

In the summer of 1980, after reading the edited manuscript of his second collection, the great American short-story writer Raymond Carver sent a pained letter to his editor, Gordon Lish. Although Lish, while working at Esquire magazine, had made Carver’s name by publishing much of his early work, the author was stunned to discover that his friend, now a book editor at Knopf, had cut his manuscript by more than 50%. A recovering alcoholic, Carver begged Lish to scrap the project, claiming that his “very sanity [was] on the line” if publication were to proceed.

Lish would not budge. The resulting book, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, was published with his drastic edits. Carver did not lose his sanity, however. Instead, he became famous, earning an ecstatic front-page review from the New York Times Book Review, and freedom from a hardscrabble life. But the damage had been done to their relationship. In the years leading up to Carver’s premature death from lung cancer in 1988, Lish would have no influence on the career he had helped fashion.

Recent revelations about the extent of Lish’s editing have threatened to damage Carver’s reputation as the most important short-story writer of the past 30 years, his matter-of-fact style influencing auth- ors as diverse as Tobias Wolff and Jay McInerney. As with William Golding and Charles Monteith, or F Scott Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins, the apparent disclosure of a deeply ­collaborative relationship between author and editor challenged the whole notion of great writing being the result of lonely genius. Now, editors William L Stull and Maureen P Carroll, working with the blessing of Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, have attempted to set the record straight, “restoring” the original manuscript from beneath the thick canopy of Lish’s pen and publishing it under the title of Beg-inners. The goal is to establish that Carver was the victim of editorial meddling who would have soared higher even sooner if not for Lish.

The truth, however, is somewhat more complicated than the simple tale of a Svengalian editor taking advantage of a brittle author. In contrasting the Beginners manuscript with the published volume, it grows clear that Lish often had good reason to wield his red biro. Several of the 17 stories Carver submitted for publication benefit from radical reduction. The story Carver called Want to See Something? (but Lish published as I Could See the Smallest Things) is a cumbersome piece whose memorable image of poisoned slugs is diminished by the inclusion of a subplot involving an albino child. Lish rightly excised this ham-fisted ana-logy, and the story came into its own.

Similarly, Pie, which Lish renamed A Serious Talk, ends with a spasm of marital violence that feels at odds with the comic mayhem wreaked earlier by its alcoholic narrator. Lish changes the ending to include a petty theft that perfectly encapsulates the story’s dramatic trajectory. To his credit, even Carver admitted that the edit was “inspired and wonderful”.

Despite these improvements, Lish’s editorial bravado often does cross the line into a disquieting infringement. In two of the stories, Lish changes the names of several characters to no obvious effect. ­Perhaps he thought that transforming Kate into Melody would better evoke a working-class milieu, though there is a real arrogance in anyone telling America’s premier dirty realist how babies are named in the nation’s trailer parks. In Gazebo, Lish whimsically changes a hotel room number from 22 to 11, as if a 50% reduction will somehow defray printing costs. Elsewhere in the story, he adds the phrase “with a stick” to Carver’s “You couldn’t beat it”, an addition that would tempt many writers to set about their editors with a similar implement.

In the story The Fling, whose title Lish unwisely changes to Sacks, a smug narrator uses the word “sordid” to describe his father’s confession of marital infidelity. Lish cuts this in the edited manuscript, a seemingly small change that nevertheless sets the tone for his later demolition of the story’s emotional foundation. And in the story that was to give the title to both collections, Lish almost completely removes an important subplot involving an old couple, thereby depriving the writing of its emotional resonance.

All of which leaves the question of why Lish did it. The answer appears to be literary taste. Lish, while an editor at Esquire, was one of the great champions of the laconic, unsentimental “minimalist” style that was to dominate the American short story in the 1970s. From Carver’s first significant publication (by Lish) in 1971, the author was the foremost practitioner of this brutalism, seen to stunning effect in his first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976). By the time Carver submitted his second collection, however, he was breaking out of minimalism’s constraints to work in a richer, more emotive manner. Lish’s edits were simply the efforts of the master trying to keep the prize student from leaving the fold. Carver’s two subsequent collections, Cathedral (1983) and Elephant (1988), were both produced without any editorial help at all. They ­contain his best work, and prove beyond a doubt that his genius was very much his own. Lish may have helped put Carver on the map of the American short story, but the writer made himself its capital city.

Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in A Small, Good Thing, one of the stories in Beginners that Carver was to “restore” in his lifetime. Carver’s original tale of the unexpected communion between an aggrieved young couple and a lonely baker is a perfectly executed work of almost unbearable feeling and insight. But Lish, editing ferociously, cut it by almost 80%, creating The Bath, a fragmentary piece that contains none of its source’s emotional power. The result might be a shining example of literary minimalism, but it is not what we want to read about when we read Raymond Carver.

Beginners by Raymond Carver

Cape £16.99 pp224