I was traveling when my friend BK wrote and asked me if I had seen the New Yorker piece about Gordon Lish’s editing of Raymond Carver’s stories. That winter fiction issue hadn’t arrived by the time we left (you have to allow the postman time to read your magazines) so it was news to me. But BK was my first and best editor; she knew I liked Carver and that I had the same occasional misgivings about editing that all writers do. (Also her husband Charlie had actually studied with Carver and swore I was the spitting image of the man; her subject line was “Well, I still think he looks like you,” though my wife disagrees.)

I read the piece upon my return last week. Some of the controversy was familiar to me: that Carver’s widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, wanted to reprint all of her late husband’s stories in their unedited, pre-Lish fashion; and that Lish, in turn, felt offended and betrayed by the whole contretemps. As the fiction editor at Esquire in the seventies, he gave Carver entree to the world of high class magazine publishing and it was his editing of his first two collections (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) that put them on the literary map.

Now it seems that Lish’s hand may have been what made those early pieces “Carveresque”; that spare laconic style was imposed on him, to a large degree, by an editor who definitely thought less was more. And that as he gained confidence (helped in part by his sobriety, to say nothing of the critical acclaim What We Talk About received) he demanded less redaction and even reprinted one of his better known stories (A Small Good Thing) the way he wrote it in his third collection, Cathedral. I always thought the later “true” version was baggier and more sentimental. But it is Gallagher’s contention, backed up by a collection of letters Carver sent to Lish, that the heavy cutting of his prose was anguishing for him, to the point that he begged Lish to help cancel the publication of his second book.

Anguish, of course, is relative. Writing is anguishing, for many good writers anyway, and being edited is an alogether different kind of torture. Even when it’s good for you. Which is the question the Gish-Carver relationship raises: not just did he make the writer’s stories better but did he make them truer to the writer’s intentions? Is the “minimalist” style (a word Carver hated) the true Carver? (And then there’s the anguish of the alcoholic; reading Carver’s freakout letter was painful for me, because that life-or-death sense of melodrama seems awfully close and personal.)

Now the New Yorker has published, online at least, the edited version of Carver’s story “Beginners” with all of Lish’s cuts and additions clearly marked. The edited version became the title story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” The editor removed forty percent of the writer’s prose, including a whole backstory about an old couple who were nearly killed in a car accident, and several final moments of drunken epiphany experienced by the narrator. You can’t really say that Lish has altered the feeling, or meaning, of Carver’s story but he certainly gets you there quicker. I’ll leave it for you to decide if that’s a good thing.