what a carve-up, now and then

...or: what are we talking about when we talk about Raymond Carver?

It seems I've missed something, though the name "Lish" does sound familiar; maybe it's just one of the many things Ms Baroque has heard over the years and simply - er - paid no attention to. (It's why I'm not a gossip columnist; I'm forever wailing, "why doesn;t anybody ever tell me anything?" only to be told that they did, I just didn't notice.) However, according to Morgan Meis in The Smart Set, for many years "the Carver/Lish problem has lingered at the corner of the collective literary conscience like a dirty secret." The "problem" is the massive extent to which Gordon Lish, Carver's editor at Knopf, made Carver's works his own.

It does seem, according to this article, that Lish (it's coming back to me now) was not only responsible for some of the stylistic tics we most associate with Carver ("he says, "she says"). He took passages out, he added passages, he pared and pared until, as Meis says, "The stories are a revelation in pecks and silences. Stripped down, punchy sentences did just that: They punched your guts out. The human landscape of his stories was so rich for being so bare. It seems impossible that literature can be this honest, this true. But there it is." This was the genius of Ray Carver, the laconic, shy, the man who never dared think of himself that way, for whom those final, drink-free years were famously "gravy" - or was it?

Now, this is all very interesting. There is clearly an issue here beyond a mere Carver/Lish set-to. Rumours are rife, in the tiny corner of the poetry world which I inhabit, of poets stripped almost bare in the editor's zeal for an ever-more-perfect text. I've heard of poems over a page long cut to only a few lines, though that could be apocryphal. Do most writers mind when this happens? Is there just enough consultation, collaboration, implication, that they feel it was somehow done with their consent (if not total approval)? Do they feel sullied by it? Do they feel it's not their work, or that they are somehow frauds? Or do they not really mind? After all, it's their name on the title page. Has Carver's wife (now widow) Tess Gallagher, herself a poet of note, ever been edited in that way?

It might not be such a deal, in other words, except that Carver himself felt uncomfortable about it; and so, we now find, does Tess Gallagher. She is now republishing his stories from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, only in their original, unedited form. She is un-Lishing them, as it were, upon the world.

Well, it got me thinking, so I took - the first thing that sprang to mind - the facsimile manuscript of The Waste Land with me into the bath (where I'm told it now looks very Pseud's-Corner-like, sitting there on the side) , to remind myself of the extent to which Pound had shaped that poem. What you see is rearrangement of sections, a very boring & discursive first section taken out (by Eliot), and lots of gentle stripping, as of layers of wallpaper. Pound took out the line, early on, in relation to Phlebas the Phoenician, "these are pearls that were his eyes," and pointed out lots of lines where the cadence (as he put it; excellent word, why have we forgotten it?) came straight out of "Prufrock." There are even marginal notes from Eliot's first wife, Vivien.

In other words, what we see is not one editor putting his own stamp on another person's work - though of course Pound is all for the short, sharp shock, and he does strike through some of Eliot's more egregious sonorities - but the poet, the trusted advisor, and the poet's wife, all having a good hard look at an ambitious piece of work. Pound and Eliot were in any case busy setting up a mutual advantage society, and I mean that in a nice way, writing about one another's work and helping each other get on to an extent almost unbelievable in post-millennial London. Eliot had no problem at all with the process or ("il miglior fabbro") with the result.

In other words, not much use to the present conundrum. But I'm wondering if Carver's "non-writerly" persona, and I'm stabbing in the dark here, got all tied up with his natural diffidence, and he brought scruples to bear that wouldn't normally matter i]to someone more, say, cynically career-minded? Or did Lish really do something to him?

More analagous might be the case of John Clare, an unsuccessful farm labourer who wrote poems under haystacks when he was supposed to be working - wrote them in a language of his own, a rural, "uneducated" language that was then smoothed out and totally re-punctuated by his publisher, John Taylor (also, by the way, Keats' publisher). Clare used dialect terms, onomatopoeia and unconventional phrasing to create vivid, intensely emotional poems, which were then smoothed out, rendered "polite" and touted around London as the work of a so-called near-illiterate.

This seems not to dissimilar from the "naif" marketing Carver was given. Look at the photo above: the rough-hewn man of the people, gussied up in a carefully rough-hewn jumper and posed rather slickly against some rough-hewn shingles... if you look at his pose, it seems almost impossible. His arm is so far back, on the edge of that chair, and his head is so low down on his neck - no one would sit that way! They wanted him to look darkly and handsomely mysterious yet rough-hewn. (Oh, and he does.) But the thing is, he was also a serious, professional-minded writer.

Jonathan Bate has recently done a lot to redress this view of Clare with his marvellous biography and a new edition of the poems, taking them back to Clare's original intention, with minimal, sensible editing for clarity and consistency in punctuation. They are, of course, pretty rough-hewn - but artfully, deliberately so - and are far more beautiful than the ones that Taylor edited.

Interestingly, Clare's final work was never published at all till the twentieth century. The fashionable world had tired of him. And though we may want to thank Taylor for publishing Clare in the first place, the lionisation - the being hailed and taken up, like a pet, and then dropped - had an extremely ill effect on Clare's already perilous mental health (though much of his strongest work was written inside the asylum, where he was, if I'm correct, given much freedom and mainly not unhappy).

So where does this possibly competely spurious comparison, without dwelling too much on the feelings of Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher, bring us? I think it brings us to a place where it will be a huge critical advance to see Carver's original stories, and to decide whether Lish made them better, worse or just different. It will then be for future generations of readers and critics to make of it what they will.