English Companion Ning Group

Carver was Hemingway (most of whose fiction is located abroad) transposed to the blue-collar American margins, populated by men and women who seldom think about the world beyond – a land of bad marriages, cramped living rooms, truculent children, and unharnessed addictions of the old-fashioned sort.

But what is the real thing? In the original manuscript of “Why Don’t You Dance?”, before Lish’s blue pencil descended, the girl's sympathetic words to the yard sale vendor, “You must be desperate or something”, are not uttered while the pair are dancing. The sentence is adapted from an earlier remark she makes to her boyfriend when they first inspect the items for sale. “They must be desperate or something.” The vendor has yet to make an entrance. It was Lish who changed the words and placed them in her mouth as she “pushed her face into the man’s shoulder”, making it the emotional high point of the narrative.

As with other restored or revised texts – in this case, unrevised – the appearance of Beginners prompts some awkward questions. Does the emergence of the “real” stories undermine the reality that the most Carveresque of Carver’s books has had for almost thirty years in the minds of readers? Characters who appear sane turn out to have been mad originally. Characters who smoke didn’t do so in 1980, on their entry into the world. They are the children of Raymond Carver, but their identities were altered by the midwife, Gordon Lish.