"Distance" (1975)

All the stories in the Raymond Carver collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love are now available (in the Library of America collection) in the versions that Carver originally submitted to editor Gordon Lish for publication. Carver's title for the collection was Beginners and the differences in the various story versions clarify the extent to which Lish made changes. Even that long lovely mysteriously chatty title, which I always took as pure Carver, evidently came from Lish. As a general rule I am taking the versions Carver used in his last, best-of collection, Where I'm Calling From, as his final word on Lish's edits. In the case of "Distance," for example, Carver reworked it some, but essentially reverted to the version he submitted originally. It's nearly twice as long as the one in What We Talk About. I am basically with Carver on this one although I have also discovered that's not the case with every story. Lish always added improvements in his edits even if he didn't always improve a story on balance. The original "Distance" had details that should have stayed. In many ways, starting with these titles, it appears to be Lish who brought some of the brash, confident tone I have always associated with Carver. Indeed, Lish has boasted that he made Carver—certainly he had a lot to do with the Carver who staged such a grand entrance into American literature as the new avatar of short story fiction with What We Talk About. Carver the "minimalist" was largely Carver as edited by Lish. Maybe writers and editors collaborate a bit like comic book pencil and pen illustrators—an inker can often change the work of the main star, the penciller, radically. In "Distance," a father tells his grown daughter a story of when she was a baby. The raw, unedited Carver is both more plodding and earnest than Lish's final but in many ways plodding and earnest is the more suitable tone. as the first-person narrator father struggles to understand the 20-odd years that have passed and all the things since the events of the story. Note that I'm not attempting any close line readings in these side-by-sides. I'm only reading them consecutively for general impressions. Lish's cuts and changes make this story more intuitive and lively, as his edits often did. Instead of the admittedly inert "Distance," Lish gave his version a title that feels 100% more Carver, "Everything Stuck to Him." But in the end it is actually a story of deep melancholy, which works much better than the funny early marriage anecdote Lish turned it into.

Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From (Library of America)