Wow, it’s been five years since the New Yorker magazine published the original editing job Gordon Lish did on Raymond Carver’s short story, “Beginners.”
You may or may not have heard about the fracas surrounding that publication. And even if you’ve read some of Carver’s work, you might not recognize this particular short story.
That’s because, although it was Carver’s big story—the title of which was given to the story collection that made Carver’s name—it wasn’t Carver’s title.
Lish is the one who named it “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
Now, I’m not a huge fan of Carver’s work, and not only because this particular story is the story of an argument about whether or not battering is ‘love.’ All of us who’ve worked at Battered Women’s Shelters already know the answer to that one, so reading an argument about it is a lot like listening to smokers argue about whether or not cigarette-smoking is dangerous to your health because, after all, the Tobacco Institute says it’s not.
Yeah. Not really debatable anymore, guys.
However, it is true that Lish did an enormous amount in his Line Editing to tighten, focus, and illuminate the power inside Carver’s story.
Let’s look at the very first sentence:
My friend Mel
HerbMcGinnis, a cardiologist,was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.
Okay, aside from the random altering of the character’s name—which is complete nonsense—what did Lish do?
-
Lish removed the distracting information
The defining term ‘a cardiologist’ is completely unnecessary to that first sentence and,through being unnecessary, detracts from its power. How? By distracting the reader from the point.
The point is that Herb/Mel was talking.
All stories should be written in exactly the right words and no others. This means all unnecessary words—words that do not lead inevitably to the point—should be cut.
Ruthlessly. Mercilessly. With eyes closed if that’s the only way.
But cut.
-
Lish saw the remote connection inside the distracting information
And this is a really fascinating thing.
If the point of the first sentence is that the main character is talking, then what should we do about that interesting-but-distracting detail, the fact that he’s a cardiologist?
Specific details are almost always gold. The question is:
- does this detail add to or detract from the point of the story?
As it happens, cardiology doesn’t have anything to do with the point of the story. The story’s about battering, not cardiology. The only aspect of cardiology even remotely connected to the point of the story is that both love and cardiology have to do with the heart (although cardiology actually has the greater claim—the seat of emotions resides in the brain).
But it’s still an interesting piece of telling detail. And that remote connection does exist.
So Lish kept it. In fact, he actually gave it its own sentence in order to highlight it. Then. . .
-
Lish gave the information meaning
The way he did this was to add a tiny bit of exposition that, in context, appears to be a non sequitur.
Non sequitur is incredibly intriguing stuff. Fiction itself, if constructed properly, can be based nearly entirely on what appears on the surface to be non sequitur.
In this case, what gives the sentence meaning is the juxtaposition of the information “cardiologist” with the rather surprising news that being a cardiologist gives you “the right.”
The right to what?
Apparently the right to talk.
But it can’t be that simple! We all know lots of people who have the right to talk who aren’t anything even remotely like a cardiologist.
What could Lish possibly mean by “the right”?
Suddenly Lish has us thinking. He has us thinking and guessing and—most important of all—curious about where he’s going. So we keep reading.
Bingo for Gordon Lish!
And that curiosity leads us (without any prodding by the writer) to epiphany about the remote connection between:
- cardiology
- what we talk about when we talk about love
(hint: it’s not medical school)
Remember what that remote connection is?
Does your own epiphany tell you why it matters to readers?
UPDATE: By the way, I’ve been reminded that I talked about the whole concept of Line-Editing in more depth last year on my Editor’s FAQ.
Crap!
Line Editing is a whole other level, isn’t it? I was looking forward to getting through the Developmental Edit stage, thinking at last my BOOK would be almost finished. Now I’m worried about every SENTENCE. And there so many of them.
Suddenly I hate all of them. Every single one.
I’m going out for a beer. Or a long walk, or see a movie or something.
🙂
I like how you preface your comment with, “Crap!”
Yes, Line Editing is a whole other world of crazy-making. Remember the very first numbered blog post I wrote about “!07 Things You Should Know About Being Published“? How the night before your book is published it’s going to open itself and rearrange all the words to make you look like a complete idiot?
You thought I was kidding about that, didn’t you? I would have if I hadn’t lived through it myself.
But you’ve been through Line Editing with me before, Jeffrey. You know how it’s done.
This is so funny because I was planning to write a post about this in the near future! I was truly amazed at how much Lish did to this story. Thanks so much for such an insightful post!
Yeah, Suzannah, Lish did a lot with the story, and he did a lot to the story.
In the early part it’s really quite beautiful, how he streamlined and clarified the language, smoothing Carver’s clunky bits and replacing awkward turns of phrase with perfect illumination. Lish was an artist.
Then the martinis must have kicked in, because he suddenly lost his head and cut the whole last third of the story right out, eliminating Carver’s entire angle on what he wanted to say.
That was just a tiny bit. . .draconian.
I can totally see why Carver’s wife said, when he signed off on that edit, “You’re prostituting yourself to get into The New Yorker.”
I’d have felt the same way.
Yes, he must’ve felt, at least somewhat, that he was selling out. When I saw ‘Beginners’ in the New Yorker, I just remember feeling so relieved about the minor changes a couple of editors had made to my short stories before publishing them (such as changing the title, reorganizing a passage, or questioning the clarity of a sentence). It’s inspiring for emerging writers to be reminded that even the masters were edited…sometimes heavily!
Oh, Suzannah, everyone’s edited.
Well, they used to be.
It’s kind of an industry secret, the role editors have played in creating the writing voices of the greats. Robert Gottlieb commented once, “The stories about which we hear complaints that they should have been edited better are usually the ones that have been edited the most.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first two novels are really the most appalling tripe. His editor—the later-famous Maxwell Perkins—was very new at his job when he took Fitzgerald on. He later became one of the great editors of the twentieth century, even though Fitzgerald never became a deeper or more intelligent person.
There was a time early on in my writing life when I read Ray Carver, and I also therefore read, with some interest, that original New Yorker article. As time has passed, I find myself less and less interested in Ray Carver’s stories (though I do still like a number of his poems), but I find Carver’s fiction far more readable than Gordon Lish’s, which is mannered and precious. As an editor, Gordon Lish is extraordinarily heavy-handed, and the arbitrary swapping of names in your example above compendiates this perfectly.
I do agree that taking out “a cardiologist” and making it into a separate sentence strengthens the beginning. Gordon Lish fleshed it out in a more effective manner — Mel is a cardiologist and so he has the right to talk about love and the human heart — but as Auden once pointed out, a poem (or story) can be written in a multitude of different ways, all of which may be good OR bad.