Beginners
By Raymond Carver
Jonathan Cape £16.99, 212 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

Raymond Carver’s breakthrough came in 1981 with the publication of his second collection of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Critics admired his terse snapshots of crumbling relationships, alcoholism and damaged lives in blue-collar America. They hailed him as the leader of a new literary subgenre, “dirty realism”.

Yet whose success was it? Although Carver was lionised as the voice of working-class America, his editor Gordon Lish, at Alfred A Knopf, deserved much of the credit. Lish was instrumental in the development of Carver’s laconic early style, which, by the time of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, had been whittled down to basics. “The doctor came in. He shook hands with the man. The woman got up from the chair.”

This minimalism was thanks to Lish, not Carver. At the time, the author was distraught at Lish’s alterations to his manuscript, now published in its pre-edited form under Carver’s original title Beginners. The title was Lish’s choice. The editor also altered characters’ names, changed the endings to stories, cut much of the text and took a hammer to the prose after he was finished with the scissors. There were even rumours that Lish ghosted the book.

Compare Beginners with What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and the aggressiveness of Lish’s interventions becomes clear. In a story Carver called “Want to See Something?” the narrator, a woman waking up in the middle of the night, goes to the window to gaze at the moon: “It was a white moon and covered with scars, easy enough to imagine a face there – eye sockets, nose, even the lips.” Lish’s version, retitled “I Can See the Smallest Things”, was hard-boiled: “It was a white moon and covered with scars. Any damn fool could imagine a face there.” Read the two versions and another face comes to mind – Carver’s, stinging, as if the “damn fool” were a slap directed at him.

For his next book, 1983’s Cathedral, Carver used his new fame to muzzle his editor, insisting that Lish’s work be limited to correcting punctuation and spelling. Carver died of lung cancer in 1988; now Beginners posthumously fulfils his wish to republish his stories in full. The 75-year-old Lish has not commented. Carver readers are apprehensive. What if the de-Lished stories read badly? What if the editor was the true star, not the author?

Lish clearly improved the stories. His edit is crisper, even at a minor level. “I tried to wake Cliff. He was passed out” (Lish’s version) is punchier than Carver’s “I tried to wake Cliff, but he was passed out.” Beginners’ lapses into melodrama were rightly guillotined by Lish. In one of Carver’s best-known stories, a baker makes a birthday cake for a boy in hospital after a hit-and-run incident. Lish’s take is savagely truncated but it is tighter, less maudlin and the ending is more suggestive than Carver’s original.

Yet Beginners also casts Lish’s editing in an unfavourable light. Some plots were meddled with insensitively. Carver’s lyricism and sense of place received short shrift. He was also a poet, and there is a vivid precision in Beginners’ descriptions of the Pacific Northwest landscapes where most of the stories are set. Domestic despair and acts of violence unfold against a backdrop of natural beauty as well as in dingy motels and dead-end small towns. This richness is missing from Lish’s edited versions.

Lish seemed to believe that tough, unsparing prose was the only suitable register for Carver’s blue-collar world. Yet Carver’s writings, for all their bleakness, hinge on moments of apprehension and epiphany. The stories in Beginners rarely end happily but Carver’s style, more expansive than Lish wanted, at least raises the possibility of self-realisation. It has a tragic dimension that the editor erased.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the FT’s pop music critic