Stephen King's review of Raymond Carver's biography and Collected Stories is a hell of a thing. I am generally of the school that says you separate the art from the artist, but reading this piece made me more than a little uneasy.
Stephen King's review of Raymond Carver's biography and Collected Stories is a hell of a thing. I am generally of the school that says you separate the art from the artist, but reading this piece made me more than a little uneasy.
Christ, ever since King got sober he never misses an opportunity to write about alcoholism and all its accouterment.
King was a little pennywise but pound foolish in this review.
Peter Straub's 'Ghost Story' was a TERRIBLE movie.
Why uneasy, B? I mean, Carver's sundry and varied assholeries don't appear to have been that enormous, compared with lots of other artists'.
The Gordon Lish stuff is fascinating, though. Interesting that while he gutted some of Carver's work and took far greater editorial liberties than was probably proper, from an empirical standpoint it worked. Until we can visit a parallel universe in which those stories were presented unedited, we'll never know whether Lish's revisions were essential to Carver's becoming a recognizable name.
Yes. I once read a critic who said something like: great writers are rarely great people or even very nice. The Gish edits? Would I have ever known of Carver just on John Gardner's say so? I still haven't finished October Light.
There was an interesting New York article on this (I think!?) a few months ago... I may be wrong...
New YorkER.
Yes, it was two years ago, believe it or not. I thought it was pretty comprehensive. It's been rehashed since then a few times but it's never not interesting.
Here's the article.
They also published the original version of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" along with Gordon Lish's edits on their website.
Indiana University has a Carver collection with original manuscripts, but you have to be approved to get in. Another writer and I are planning to propose a day or two to look them over, in part to think more on the question of Lish's edits and their impact. This will be some day when we don't have thirty other pressing things to do, so maybe it will never happen.
Really, King is the last one who should bitch about heavy-handed editing. Nearly every one of his books could be half as long and not lose a thing.
Cheever and Carver being awful alky buddies together at Iowa, now that could be an awesome novel.
It'd be great with a cameo from a raging, drunk Richard Yates.
er, "of," not "from."
No, no -- I think you had it the first time. Or maybe "by." But I don't think "of."
Oh god, I was just folding laundry 4 hours later and the thought struck me - "by"! I ran to my computer and was glad to see someone other than me had cared enough to weigh in.
It will be awesome, with a special guest appearance by the harbinger of doom, Richard Simmons.
There you go, I edited it for you.