Ms Baroque writes belatedly - and interestingly - about Tess Gallagher's intention to re-issue Raymond Carver's stories with Gordon Lish's editorial changes reversed.
Me too - belatedly, I mean. I think for us authors that news last week was too close to home for simple feelings and ready opinions. Well, it was for me at any rate, as I've done that very thing myself: reissued a book with the structure I'd been forced to abandon reinstated.
Editors, oh editors. (I can say these things, having been one.) Such power do they wield; with such delicacy and respect for an author's intentions do some wield it, with such disregard for this last do others wade in and consequently, in effect, substitute their own rewrites.
Like Gallagher, I'm pretty sure I made the right decision in undoing the editing - well, 99% sure anyway. But there's always that 1%, and all this speculation that the prose style for which Carver is so loved is not the one he intended, it's enough to make an author's blood run cold.
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3 comments:
Oh, this is a thorny issue! Sorry, let me edit that to get rid of the cliché: Oh, gosh, this is such a rice pudding of an issue! I have screamed in frustration at the surgery of editors ... my newspaper articles that have been turned on their heads ... but I've also said to myself, "Not bad, that's what I wanted to say." It's always nice to see both versions ... to compare and see who did what. Sometimes I think we'd be quite horrified! lol
All the evidence seems to be that Carver was happy and grateful for quite a bit of Lish's editing. It seems as if Carver often had the sense that we all do sometimes: that we're not quite being able to hit the nail on the head of what we want to say.
My experience is that many editing-type readers (editors, agents, tutors) will be right about what doesn't work. What's much rarer is to be given suggestions that are right for the book and help you to find your own way to solve the problems you both recognise. You only get those from someone who really hears the book in the same way that you do. Then it can be wonderful, like someone peeling the gauze cladding off your work.
It'll certainly be interesting to compare the versions of Carver, especially since the Lished versions have in themselves been a huge influence on how we all read and think about short fiction, and therefore, presumably, how we'll read and think about the de-Lished Carver.
Emma
Yes, we can only judge when we see the de-Lished versions.
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