My Weekly Book

Fascinating article in today’s Independent about the relationship between author, editor and author’s estate. The author in question is the American short story writer and poet Raymond Carver, and the question about the author the extent to which he was responsible for composing his own work:

Critics in uproar as Raymond Carver returns from grave

…in 1998, a literary journalist called D T Max went through Carver’s papers, which had been sold to the Lilly Library at Indiana University, and discovered that his early stories had been heavily edited by Gordon Lish, a towering figure at Knopf known in the industry as Captain Fiction.

Max reported that Lish’s black felt-tip markings “sometimes obliterate the original text”. Of the 13 stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Max found that Lish had cut about half the original words and rewritten 10 of the endings.

The spare, nuanced style that emerged from this editing became Carver’s trademark, although some of his later stories, which were not edited by Lish, were lusher and fuller.

Carver’s correspondence shows that he was not only unhappy but on the verge of despair over Lish’s changes. “Please, Gordon, for God’s sake help me in this and try to understand,” he wrote in a 1980 letter.

“My very sanity is on the line here… I feel it, that if the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story.” Read full story here…

Read a Raymond Carver story here.

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