entitlement

I thought the editing, especially in the first version, was brilliant, as I said. The stories I can’t let go of in their entirety are these. “Community Center” (If It Please You) and “The Bath” (A Small Good Thing) and I’d want some more of the old couple, Anna and Henry Gates, in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (Beginners).

I would not want “Mr. Fixit” (Where Is Everyone) in the book in its present state. The story “Distance” should not have its title changed to “Everything Stuck to Him.” Nor the little piece “Mine” to “Popular Mechanics.” “Dummy” should keep its title. “A Serious Talk” is fine for “Pie.” I think “Want to See Something” is fine, is better than “I could See the Smallest Things”…

Raymond Carver in a letter to his editor and friend Gordon Lish, concerning Lish’s edit of Carver’s book of short stories originally published in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, as cited in the 24 & 31 December 2007 issue of the New Yorker.

Letters to an Editor reads like heartbreak.

Carver’s widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, intends (maybe already has? It’s late and I can’t find my reference…) to republish the book of short stories as Raymond Carver originally intended them.

The New Yorker published Beginners in the same issue – this is the original What We Talk About… as Carver originally intended it, prior to Lish’s edits. Even more telling: The online publication of “Beginner’s”, Edited, a blow by blow account of Lish’s clear cut of Carver's work.

speaking of raymond carver

LATE FRAGMENT
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

— Raymond Carver

Found in the December 2006 issue of The Sun Magazine, in Instead of Dying by Tess Gallagher, about her final years with Carver.

In the piece Gallagher gave intimations of the actions that she's now taking -- and really shaking up a few folks by doing so -- to restore Carver's original intention behind the short stories that were published -- heavily edited -- in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The book, if it comes to pass, will be published as Beginners.

Plenty of folks are hoping it won't come to pass -- the New York Times reported on the controversy yesterday in The Real Carter: Expansive or Minimal?


(And two points to mrtn, who saw right through the set up.)