Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest.Immanuel Kant. Preface to the Second Edition, The Critique of Pure Reason (1787) Ever since the tenth anniversary of the death of Raymond Carver (1938-1988) scholars and general readers have been uneasily aware of what has come to b..

Carroll, Maureen P.

Stull, William L.

OpenEdition

 Journal of the Short Story in English
Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 
46 | Spring 2006
Special issue: Raymond Carver
Prolegomena to Any Future Carver Studies
William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/482
ISSN: 1969-6108
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Presses universitaires d'Angers
Printed version
Date of publication: 1 March 2006
Number of pages: 13-17
ISSN: 0294-04442
 
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Prolegomena to Any Future Carver
Studies
William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll
Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the
movements of the heavenly bodies on the
supposition that they all revolved round the
spectator, he tried whether he might not have
better success if he made the spectator to revolve
and the stars to remain at rest.
Immanuel Kant. Preface to the Second Edition, The
Critique of Pure Reason (1787)
1 Ever since the tenth anniversary of the death of Raymond Carver (1938-1988) scholars
and general readers have been uneasily aware of what has come to be known as the
Carver  controversy.  This  controversy  was  precipitated  on  9  August  1998  when  the
journalist D. T. Max published in the New York Times Magazine an exposé entitled “The
Carver Chronicles” that called into question Raymond Carver’s authorship of many of his
most celebrated stories.
2 The principal actor claiming to have played Francis Bacon, Lord Strange, or some other
masked nobleman to Carver’s low-rent Shakespeare was none other than the dead man’s
estranged friend and former editor, Gordon Lish. First in his capacity as “Captain Fiction”
at Esquire magazine during the wonder years of the 1970s and later as a trendsetting
senior editor at the New York publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf, Lish was for twenty
years the kingmaker of American fiction. During the 1980s he published and promoted
the young royalty of what the East Coast media regarded as the reigning literary dynasty
of  a decade of  diminished expectations,  the so-called minimalists,  among them Mary
Robison, Amy Hempel, and (the early) David Leavitt.
3 The arch-minimalist, according to reviewers and journalists who coined the term and
retailed it ceaselessly, was Raymond Carver. Throughout the 1970s Gordon Lish published
Carver’s work in Esquire, promoted it to agents and editors in New York, and against all
odds persuaded McGraw-Hill,  a  textbook firm,  to publish Carver’s  first  book of  short
Prolegomena to Any Future Carver Studies
Journal of the Short Story in English, 46 | Spring 2006
1
stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? in 1976. The following year proved to be a turning
point for each man. In 1977 Carver succeeded in his arduous struggle to give up alcohol,
and Lish parted ways with Esquire and landed a position at Knopf. That same year saw the
publication of Carver’s second collection of short fiction, Furious Seasons and Other Stories,
by Capra, a small press in California with no ties to Lish.
4   It was not until several years later that Carver and Lish reconnected as writer and editor.
The product of their reunion was the book that cut the pattern for minimalist fiction.
This was Carver’s third short-story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
(1981). Edited by Lish and published by Knopf, it was celebrated by Michael Wood on the
front page of the New York Times Book Review on 26 April 1981. Reviews, overwhelmingly
positive, followed in newspapers and magazines across the United States, with no one
capturing the book’s astringent bite better than Donald Newlove in the Saturday Review of
the same month: “Seventeen tales of Hopelessville, its marriages and alcoholic wreckage,
told in a prose as sparingly clear as a fifth of iced Smirnoff.”
5 Just about everyone liked the quarter-inch-thick book and counted it the measure of the
author’s scope and scale; just about everyone, that is, except Raymond Carver and the
handful of writers who had read his original manuscript. The first story Carver published
after What We Talk About was “Cathedral” in the September 1981 issue of the Atlantic. As
readers  immediately  grasped  and  Carver  subsequently  corroborated,  in  style  and
substance this spiritually inflected story was the polar opposite of the bleak and bare-
boned fictions in the book he had published less than six months earlier. Carver’s change
of direction veered into a stunning reversal of field when, in the spring/summer 1982
issue of  Ploughshares, he  published “A Small,  Good Thing,”  a  vastly  longer  and more
hopeful  version  of  “The  Bath”  in  What  We  Talk  About.  Further  evidence  of  Carver’s
dissatisfaction with his minimalist book emerged in Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, a small-
press miscellany published by Capra in the spring of 1983. Fires contained fuller versions
of  three  more  stories  in  What  We  Talk  About:  “So  Much  Water  So  Close  to  Home,”
“Everything Stuck to Him” (titled “Distance”),  and “Mr.  Coffee and Mr.  Fixit”  (titled
“Where Is Everyone?”). For anyone who had missed the evidence in magazines and small-
press publications, Carver’s transformation from postmodern minimalist to humanistic
realist in the manner of Chekhov and Cheever was confirmed by his next major-press
book, Cathedral. Published by Knopf in September 1983, it featured “Cathedral” as its title
story and “A Small, Good Thing” as its center of gravity. A book more different from What
We Talk About When We Talk About Love is difficult to imagine.
6 What accounts for the striking turnabout in Raymond Carver’s fiction between 1981 and
1983? The answer to this question resolves the Carver controversy and establishes an
authoritative textual foundation for future Carver studies.
7 In the opening sentence of “The Carver Chronicles” D. T. Max asserts that rumors about
Lish’s influence on Carver’s fiction had circulated well before 1998. “For much of the past
20 years,” Max writes, “Gordon Lish, an editor at Esquire and then at Alfred A. Knopf who
has now retired,  has been quietly telling friends that he played a crucial  role in the
creation of  the early short  stories  of  Raymond Carver.” On the basis  of  this  hearsay
evidence, and abetted by Lish’s caustic ad hominem remarks about Carver’s ingratitude
and “mediocrity,” Max builds a conspiracy theory worthy of  a Kennedy-assassination
buff. He suggests that nearly every significant person in Carver’s life had a hand in the
making of his work and deserves or claims partial credit for it. His first wife, Maryann
Burk, inspired it; his second wife, the writer Tess Gallagher, contributed key lines to it;
Prolegomena to Any Future Carver Studies
Journal of the Short Story in English, 46 | Spring 2006
2
above all, his editorial Rumpelstiltskin, Gordon Lish, spun Carver’s mediocre straw into
marketable gold.
8 Where, in the lurid light of the Carver controversy, do Carver studies stand? For the
scholar as for the general reader, questions about the substance, form, and intentionality
of Carver’s work are so fundamental as to be ontological in nature. Who was Raymond
Carver and what did he write? To what degree do the stories attributed to him represent
his  original  writing,  his  editor’s  alterations  for  publication  purposes,  or  Carver’s
unconstrained intentions with respect to stories published in multiple versions?
9 Lish’s postmortem claim that he effectively created Raymond Carver can be tested only
by rigorous textual analysis. The requisite materials for such an undertaking are available
in libraries and archival collections as well as in the little magazines, chapbooks, and
small-press books in which Carver published his writing throughout his lifetime. Carver’s
manuscripts of his stories that were heavily line-edited by Lish and published in Will You
Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) are
preserved among the voluminous  Gordon Lish papers  in  the Lilly  Library of  Indiana
University. So too are the Carver manuscripts for Cathedral (1983), where Lish’s far lighter
line-editing is seldom reflected in the published book. Also preserved are Carver’s many
letters to Lish, beginning in 1969 and breaking off abruptly in the spring of 1983, a few
months before the publication of Cathedral. To examine this evidence systematically and
reach empirically and rationally supported conclusions requires long-term research.
10 More important, it requires a fundamental reformulation of the research question. For
Max  and  the  popular  press,  the  Carver  controversy  is  about  Lish.  How  did  the
sophisticated New York editor put genius into the writings of  a mediocrity from the
boondocks of the Pacific Northwest? For scholars, the Carver controversy must be about
Carver. What did Raymond Carver write, and what is the relationship of that writing to
the various publications that bear his name? For future Carver studies, this restatement
of the question is analogous to the epistemological Copernican revolution that Immanuel
Kant effected in the realm of philosophy, and it is from Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future
Metaphysics that we adapt our title. In the Prolegomena (1783) as in the Critique of Pure
Reason (1781) Kant redirected the attention of philosophers from the objects of knowledge
to the preconditions of knowing. Future Carver studies, insofar as they address the issues
raised by the Carver controversy, must redirect their attention from the editor to the
writer. What did Raymond Carver write?
***
11 Locating, verifying, and making available what Carver wrote has been the focus of our
research for some twenty years. The results of this inquiry have been published in half a
dozen books, including No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings (1991), All of Us: The Collected
Poems (1996), Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose (2000), and most
recently Tell  It  All (poems, plays,  and recollections,  2005).  In response to “The Carver
Chronicles” we made extended research trips to the Lilly Library in 1999 and 2000 to
examine the Carver manuscripts preserved among Lish’s papers. Our goal was to recover
the words that Raymond Carver had written from beneath the editorial alterations made
by Gordon Lish. We initially focused on the stories that Carver gave to Lish for the book
that  became What  We  Talk  About  When  We  Talk  About  Love.  It  was  challenging  work,
involving decipherment, transcription, and collation. It was also exciting work in that it
Prolegomena to Any Future Carver Studies
Journal of the Short Story in English, 46 | Spring 2006
3
quickly  overturned erroneous  assumptions  that  underlie  nearly  all  past  and  present
studies  of  Carver’s  writings,  including one of  the earliest,  William L.  Stull’s  “Beyond
Hopelessville: Another Side of Raymond Carver” in the winter 1985 issue of Philological
Quarterly.
12 Versions of signature stories such as “So Much Water So Close to Home” and “A Small,
Good Thing” that were assumed to be Carver’s later expansions of his earlier minimal
stories were discovered to be restorations of texts that Carver had written long before
submitting them to Lish for publication by Knopf. In effect, stories written by the “more
generous” Carver of Cathedral (1983) antedated the “minimalistic” Carver of What We Talk
About  When We  Talk  About  Love (1981).  Although Carver,  a  twice-bankrupt  recovering
alcoholic, had acquiesced to Lish’s radical editing of the stories in What We Talk About, he
had done so under protest and with shame. Moreover, Carver had signed a book contract
with Knopf before reading Lish’s edits,  and this obligation compounded his legal and
financial predicament. In the end he was persuaded to let the truncated book go forward,
but  the bond of  trust  between writer  and editor  was severed.  Immediately after  the
publication of What We Talk About Carver began restoring his stories to their original
forms. When Lish sought to exert editorial control over Cathedral, Carver forbade him to
do so and thereby brought their friendship to a bitter but artistically liberating end.
13 A first step toward settling the Carver controversy – and toward putting future Carver
studies on a solid footing – will be the publication of Beginners: The Original Version of What
We Talk About When We Talk About Love. That book is now complete, and it will make its
first appearance, likely in 2007, in Japanese translation by the internationally acclaimed
novelist Haruki Murakami, a longtime literary comrade of Raymond Carver. Editions in
English and other languages will follow.
14 The  Copernican  revolution  in  Carver  studies  has  begun.  Preliminary  examination  of
manuscripts and magazine publications suggests, in addition, that there is an original
Raymond Carver book to be extricated from the Lish-edited Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
There  are  also  unpublished  letters,  notebooks,  and  related  archival  materials  to  be
brought to light.
15 Writing is an act of discovery, Raymond Carver often said. When his original writings
reach their audience, reading too will be an act of discovery. The Copernican revolution
in Carver  studies  will  replace  the  vagaries  of  the  Carver  controversy  with verifiable
evidence.  With a new world of  material  to be explored,  the future of  Carver studies
promises to be a renaissance.
AUTHORS
WILLIAM L. STULL
William L Stull and Maureen P. Carroll are research partners on the faculty of the University of
Hartford in West Hartford, Connecticut. Their publications on Raymond Carver include 
Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography (1993), All of Us: The Collected Poems (1996), Il mestiere di
Prolegomena to Any Future Carver Studies
Journal of the Short Story in English, 46 | Spring 2006
4
scrivere (with Riccardo Duranti, 1997), Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Prose (2000),
and Tell It All (2005). Their current project on Carver, based on five years of archival research, is 
Beginners: The Original Version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (forthcoming in
Japanese translation by Haruki Murakami). They have also written on the poetry and fiction of
Tess Gallagher, and their essay “Two Darings” served as the introduction to her book Soul
Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray (2000).
MAUREEN P. CARROLL
William L Stull and Maureen P. Carroll are research partners on the faculty of the University of
Hartford in West Hartford, Connecticut. Their publications on Raymond Carver include 
Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography (1993), All of Us: The Collected Poems (1996), Il mestiere di
scrivere (with Riccardo Duranti, 1997), Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Prose (2000),
and Tell It All (2005). Their current project on Carver, based on five years of archival research, is 
Beginners: The Original Version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (forthcoming in
Japanese translation by Haruki Murakami). They have also written on the poetry and fiction of
Tess Gallagher, and their essay “Two Darings” served as the introduction to her book Soul
Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray (2000).
Prolegomena to Any Future Carver Studies
Journal of the Short Story in English, 46 | Spring 2006
5


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