The letter is an incredible document, a missive from a man both indebted and imperilled, unsteady, spewing. 'I'll tell you the truth, my very sanity is on the line here.' There were three stories in particular that were so cut back that he felt he could not live with them, whether or not they were objectively better: 'Even though they may be closer to works of art than the original,' he wrote, 'they're still apt to cause my demise.'

He pleaded incipient insanity as a way of asserting authorial control: 'Now much of this has to do with my sobriety and with my new-found (and fragile, I see) mental health and wellbeing,' he wrote to Lish. The collection meant a great deal to him. This new collection, which he titled Beginners, was the first he had written since he thought he'd never write again – the first since he'd been sober, the first since he'd left his wife, the first since he'd met Tess Gallagher, already a well-known poet at the time and the woman with whom he was to spend the rest of his days. As Carver put it in the letter of 8 July: 'You've given me some degree of immortality already.'īut now Carver was desperate. Lish had edited Carver's first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and together they had composed a taut new voice full of left-field desire and hopeless dread. His characters worked in diners and motels they had amputated limbs and their families had left them, with or without furniture their working lives, their cropped, half-understood thoughts had not been seen in fiction. Lish's own fiction – he wrote stories and novels – is compact, antic and self-reflexive, with titles such as Wouldn't A Title Just Make It Worse?.Ĭarver was about as far from this world – both in content and style – as it was possible to be. He went on to give writing workshops at which he managed, by all accounts, to be gnomic, crushing and inspiring in relatively equal measure. (They had met in Palo Alto, when Carver was, as his wife later put it, a 'practising alcoholic' working at a textbook publisher's.) Lish later became an editor at Knopf and championed many other writers whose styles were unlike Carver's – Don DeLillo, for instance, and Richard Ford. The pair had worked together for years – Lish, a dashing, influential literary figure once known as Captain Fiction, had published Carver's first stories in Esquire magazine.

Please hear me… I've looked at it from every side, I've compared both versions of the manuscripts… until my eyes are nearly to fall out of my head.' The trouble was, Lish's version was so far from what Carver had sent him that Carver felt it was unrecognisable. 'Dearest Gordon,' it began, 'I've got to pull out of this one.

The complete works of raymond carver