Word: carvers
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...life of struggle. For years, the couple moved constantly, taking whatever jobs they could find while trying to cobble together degrees at one school after another. In Sklenicka's book, Maryann emerges as an admirable if flawed anchor in her husband's life. Companion, breadwinner, fierce believer in Carver's genius, she was also a classic enabler who sank into alcoholism just as he did, though he sank deeper. Over the years, Carver and Maryann, with their two wary children in tow, would suffer just about every indignity that drunkenness confers, including his blackouts, her boozy flirtations, two bankruptcies...
Apart from his wife, the pivotal figure in Carver's adult life was Gordon Lish, an influential fiction editor at Esquire magazine who later became a power in book publishing. In 1970, when Carver was 32, Lish gave him his first crucial exposure in Esquire--but at a price. He revised Carver's manuscripts extensively, cutting out whole pages, changing titles, expelling lyrical passages and moments of uplift. The result was a set of stories more terse and elliptical than the originals, more "minimalist," which was how Carver's early style came to be known...
...Carver had very mixed feelings about all that, especially when he saw the heavy changes Lish made to What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver's second volume of stories, published in 1981. At the last minute he even pleaded with Lish to withdraw the book, then relented, possibly because he felt that Lish was still the gatekeeper at fame's door. But Carver may also have sensed, and maybe even feared, that the darker register Lish summoned from those stories made his voice more distinctive and would secure his reputation--which it did. Before long, honors...
Also, by the late '70s, Carver and his wife had sobered up. When their brains cleared, the marriage dissolved, though not bitterly. You might say they had loved each other to a draw. Carver met and eventually married the poet Tess Gallagher, who would see him through his last, highly productive years before his death in 1988 from lung cancer. These are the years of his crowning achievement, Cathedral, a magnificent story collection with greater emotional range than his earlier published work. Lish edited that book too, but lightly. By then Carver was too big to be revised by anybody...
...secure position in American letters was confirmed recently with the publication of Carver: Collected Stories, a new volume in the canonizing Library of America series. It includes both the published version of What We Talk About, as edited by Lish, and Carver's original version. That's an unusual decision but an illuminating one. It's never a bad thing to have more of Carver. There's not that much of him to begin with, but what there is, is choice...